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DickersonSnuffbox
23rd February 2005, 20:31
Greetings-

Someone recommended me to these forums after I voiced my opinion of internet forums simply as an outlet for mental-masturbation sessions.

I'm not too heavy on theory, for most of the vocabulary and idealistic approach is too thick for my short attention span. But I do have a firm grasp on the underlying principals of each economic, social, and governmental systems.

What I am interested in is immediate and practical practices an individual or group can perform/take on to improve the social well-being or quality of life of their community, therefore, themselves.


I have been working on several projects over the past several months within my own community and online, and hope to throw my work ethic into full gear once spring break hits.


I intend to use these forums for several things:

1- Feedback on thoughts I have about social functions such as economics, government, and collectives.

2- Recruitment for projects on the internet, in video-games, and for real life. Finding like-minded people who are fed-up with classical education and have no desire to obtain a job simply for the sake of money. In short, people who want to have small, but real, impacts on society.

3- This may be one of the more arrogant reasons, please forgive me.

All I've ever seen on previous forums is an exaggerated focus and attention on debate and theory and little effort towards completing cooperative projects; all the potential energy and resources those people possessed going towards micro-defining broad social concepts such as anarchy.

Not a single forum shared a group goal or direction and every one of them lacked a mission statement or charter, (or at least the intention of fulfilling it).

From all appearances my memories of middle school student government displayed more organization and ability to achieve in a single month than many of these activist forums that I have seen do in a year. And it is these people who claim they are attempting to bring about social change? I didn't know whether to laugh, throw up, or cry. (I'm glad I'm finally able to vent it all right in this post. ;)

-----anyways-----
What I hope to accomplish at some point is shift people's debate/argument/discussion oriented focus to a more practical, efficient, and successful paradigm. One that resembles the coders' efforts on developing open source projects that everyone benefits from.

Where a single person may come, look through an index of project summaries, choose one, join the group and immediately be able to contribute.

I believe that if we could form a functioning think-tank project planner, and effective execution through a collective effort, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think we could just as well form a functioning think-tank collective in the real world.

-----large low cost living quarters for everyone who wants to work on the various business and non-profit ideas that we come up with-----

That being said, this is the first post I have written, and the first post that I have read. I don't assume to know what this group is about I was just stating the current trends of the other sites I've visited.

Thanks for having me aboard- I'm looking forward to my future participation on these boards.

DickersonSnuffbox
23rd February 2005, 20:50
I visited a house a couple months ago with 7 entrepreneurs living in it. They had designed and installed an oil-waste heater. A spa in town was donating their used sesame oil to them rather then having to pay for its disposal. They’ve used it as heating for the last three years and haven’t paid a single cent to the energy company. They also share three diesel cars which they run on a vegetable/bio-diesel mix that they themselves manufacture from donated materials. They bought the house in a shitty part of town (probably for under twenty grand) and split the mortgage between them. ( I think they each pay less than $60 a month.) They all possess vocational skills such as: automotive, carpentry, welding, cooking, and electrical skill as well (which were used to make great improvements on their house).

I could see similar places working on an equal or larger scale for people interested on individual or group projects.

I could also see how if they had more land they would be able to build a large greenhouse that could provide them with fresh, organic, (nutritional) food year round that would supplement some of their store-bought consumption.

In addition to the waste-oil heating system, solar panels and a wind turbine could be installed to provide them with electricity.

I stopped by more recently with them and they informed me they were in the process of buying/making a waste-oil engine they were going to (combined with batteries and a dc/ac converter) power their house with.

-----One of the projects I'd like to take on, with the help of volunteers from here and some real-life friends, is to create a library of instructional manuals that describe step-by-step ways to achieve various things, such as the low-cost entrepreneurial collectives described above-----

bunk
23rd February 2005, 21:19
Very intresting and progressive. Although there is a lot of debate and theory discussion on this board there are lot's of ideas on putting ideas into practice and so on.
What country do you live in? US?

DickersonSnuffbox
23rd February 2005, 21:44
yeah -> Iowa, United States