Local Politics

CSN has its global network Philobiz aspect, but then comes "on the ground" and "in your face" in the sense of needing to deal with what's in front of you.

In my town, people are out with clip boards seeking signatures, hoping to get Oregon law amended to where a casino might open where the old dog track used to be.

In the meantime, Oregon's education system is starting to go down thetubes in its present format. Liberal moms are out picketing in favor of a casino where the dog track used to be, things have gotten so bad. Are they on strike in Gresham already? [ link ]

The argument is the jobs and tax revenue it generates will go to serve the local area.

Most these clip boarders won't have a lot of time for my stump speech or marketing rap.  There's no setting up for PowerPoint on the street corner (not easily).

However, they all know what Oregon Lottery is, and know that if all the people using it could make the money follow their preferences (what's know as "exerting one's will"), then the school system might be in less trouble.

If players could earmark their contributions down to the school...  what a concept.  On the ground, we'd need real statistics.  A political gold mine.  Good thing we're friends with DemocracyLab (here in Portland -- FNB too).

That's the short blurb of what CSN seeks to provide a community, a circuitry, an infrastructure, for channeling funds voluntarily, on a philanthropic basis, with a pump primed by local merchants and their sponsorships.  Religious institutions, NGOs, are more often recipients than sponsors, though charities do support other charities in this world, no question.

Customers get a slice of company net profits, as if shareholders for a day (as consumers, why not?) and when they win big, they get to give big (commensurately, might not be that much in absolute terms -- but even pennies add up big time).

"Church bingo" is the shortest tag line, but assumes a fair amount of background.  Catholics get it faster.

Anyway, it's pretty clear that the spread of this business plan represents friction in the everyday casino industry.  Indian Gaming takes a new turn and yada yada.

More Geometric Reveries

TAILOR-MADE (Tokimonsta remix) Daedelus with Milosh
from Victor Acevedo on Vimeo.


MY DRUM LOOP IS STUCK IN MOLASSES - Shlohmo (2:30 edit)
from Victor Acevedo on Vimeo.

 
ANDREW - Jonwayne (3:11)
from Victor Acevedo on Vimeo.

Happy Leap Day

I'm somewhat surprised how little is made of Leap Day.  Why isn't it a big festival day, every four years (caveats apply)?

I'm booked in to US Pycon this month, coming a little late but in time for the main keynotes.  I've been learning a lot about charitable giving and Internet infrastructure as a member of the PSF (Python Software Foundation).

CSN is about providing infrastructure similar to video poker run by the Oregon State, except the player is expecting to donate winnings, normally considered losings, to worthy programs.  Winnings for self may be a part of some games as well, as may one be a recipient of others' directed winnings, perhaps ear-marked for some purpose. 

Yes, the rules could get complex, but then it's a game we're already playing, simply formalized with new infrastructure and software (and games).

In the physics namespace, it's about energy transformation, information theory, and value added.  You have the energy that drives your day, and the work that you do with that energy. 

These concepts trace back to early GST writings in personal workspace 284 (like a time-share) in the early 1980s -- is how it worked out in my case. 

Given the Noosphere, it'll have come to others in other ways.

Some of these concepts matured into First Person Physics, which got the attention of Dr. Bob Fuller, a man of much experience, including in Burma.  I follow his progress on CareCalendar these days, following a serious medical event.

I'm booked into Philadelphia tomorrow.  I don't know how that will go, but I do expect to make some valuable headway.  Watching the AFSC do its business, contributing here and there, is another way I observe philanthropy in action.

I've had recent visits will all my officers except Jody.  The financials aren't that complicated yet, when it comes to real properties on the ground.  Cyberia doesn't require much of a footprint, when it comes to testing ideas.  More servers in the cloud are but a finger snap away.

I have a new bio on-line.

Lighting Check

:: humma hedron ::
(koski collection)

Screen Test

David Koski just returned from a grueling work assignment in Illinois -- lots of car troubles, hospital for burns (scalding liquid).

Now he's back at his geometry again, contributing his abilities based on years of practice. This is his first screen cast of vZome in action, via the free Screencast-o-matic service.

Here's a longer tutorial.

Playing It Forward

The criticism I get the most is "isn't it heartless and cruel to make a worthy cause dependent on income from games of chance? Why not just give them the money directly?"

Despite the economy of abundance we sketch as a backdrop, with the sun giving enough, in principle, to finance our surf, there's still the matter of triage and opportunity cost. The cost of whatever I'm doing now is whatever I'm not doing -- a tautology, and therefore more properly the business of philosophy than economics, but we can discuss that some other time.

Remember: the games tend to be didactic, in the sense of encouraging thought, though not necessarily about the worthy cause at the receiving end (someone in need of dialysis?), your wins redound to your benefit on your karma profile, nor need this funnel / tube be considered, ever, a sole means of garnering support.

Reach beyond CSN, by all means.

And finally: yes, there's a kind of Darwinian process in that some games won't attract loyal players and/or players with skill, and nor will the causes connected to them. This may be for a host of reasons. It's not my job to predict every corner case that might arise.

Remember: some people are philosophically opposed, on principle, to this or that. A chief benefit of playing it forward is getting to designate, even if only in the sense of a ballpark. If you don't want such-and-such a "charity" to be piggy-backing, taking advantage of your talents and skills, then here's a way to dodge those tentacles, to be free of those shackles. Drop charities. Turn your back. Adopt others. You have a lot of choice in the matter.

CSN puts you in the driver's seat. Manage your own karma profile.

Speaking of tautologies, it's easy to map this model to life itself. You're playing world game 24/7 and your playing has ripple effects that may benefit various projects and initiatives to some degree.

Others may study your profile to figure out what you're up to. Some may learn from your role modeling -- another way to have ripple effects.

Others may work to counter your biases, for example by attending to causes you seem to have no patience for, or which seem to rank low on your totem pole.

You might be a member of a team wherein the players have their individual biases yet, overall, the whole is greater than the some of its parts and lots of bases get covered.

Nirel looked like Mary Poppins tonight.

More Market Research

I don't usually review ISEPP talks in this blog, but Gabe Zichermann's talk was too apropos to CSN work to log elsewhere. Tara and I parked quite a view blocks away in a downpour, plus I'd forgotten my raincoat so showed up wet in my dark suit coat and bright orange T (with a collar -- a reunion relic).

Gabe is quite hip in the pre-hipster sense of "tuned in" (also pre-hippie), and carried his audience pretty effortlessly through his presentation. Folks had no trouble following. He included a long excerpt from Storage Wars, a televised game based on the auctioning and purchase of storage units. In this case, I'd say the game serves a legitimizing function in that people empathize with the back end vulture culture that preys on lapsed units. Reminds me of Six Feet Under in some ways, another deftly edited TV series.

During the dinner, I wanted to run by our business model: vendor profits prime the pump, with contributions to player-selected targets commensurate with performance (heroics rewarded), self profiling ("what type of philanthropist am I?"). He encouraged us to use Twitter for this purpose and I will do so later.

Tara asked about military applications and whether gamification could lead to the breeding of an especially cowardly subspecies of drone nazi, a kind of subhuman (paraphrase). Gabe acknowledged that militaries had been using gamification for dark purposes since forever and yes, he shares her concerns. Tara has grown up around Quakers and is interviewing for Earlham College tomorrow, so you can see where our household might not be especially enamored of keeping a devolved idiocracy in a controlling capacity where outward weapons are concerned.

Gabe cracked an Occupy joke or two, knowing Portland was friendly to this global blowback operation. He also knew we're too elitist about coffee to think of Starbucks as inner circle. Having studied this market, I welcome the influx of coffee drinkers Starbucks provides, plus I'm not against Starbucks adopting a few game kiosks, with our without the CSN imprimatur (just remember, you saw it here first). We could use some of that muscle to get past Oregon Lottery zealots who cannot abide the competition. That would take some of the pressure off the reservations to host all the parking (plus some of our best game studios can only be reached by bicycle, or electric ATV -- approach quietly please, serious studying ahead).