Thanks, co-ops sound very ideal towards a sharing. Though sounds further in time a lot like any organizations where things starts off with a membership with one-person-one-vote then you get an administrative board elected. And it becomes an oligarchy of sorts.
Like what happened with the New Pioneer Food Coop in Iowa City. Now a few high-paid administrator/store-managers working at the board level over the membership, high priced food, and a lot of lowly-paid working-poor employees to pay for the administrator managers. Same thing for this Heartland 'Cooperative' that just built this massive multi-million dollar facility for the simple business of unloading and re-loading grain on to a monopoly-owned rail-line here with slim chance of pay-back. Small group of manager-class running it. Pretty evidently a project that an administrative-team put together for itself aside from the membership understanding the economics of it so far as pay-back. The membership proly would have been better off with that capital returned in dividend. But of course there is no job in that for the manager-class. Seems co-ops often just go the route of corporations anyway. ..Good for a few people at the top once it gets going. Sort of like the Standing Committee over communist China. Or, the TM movement now. -Buck, a meditator member in a meditating community in Fairfield, Iowa ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <jason_green2@...> wrote : Buck, you will getter a good understanding from this link below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative In a cooperative entity, you have only one vote no matter how many shares you own. This is one essential difference form corporate entity. Their goal is minimal profits. Though, there are some cooperative entities that are non-profit and yet do business. --- <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Thanks, really interesting thoughtful posts. These are secular cooperatives you mention? Where people live together communally? Shared-goods other than just the business? Housing? Meals? Health Insurance/care? The aged? Non-spiritual? What keeps them together other than their business model? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <jason_green2@...> wrote : 'State Communism' was tried and it failed miserably for a number of reasons. It was too simplistic and childish. No balance between the individual and the collective. First of all, a distinction should be made between 'essential goods' and 'non-essential goods'. Secondly, the success of cooperative entities like Mondragon cooperative in Spain and Amul cooperative in india proves that 'non-state socialism' is as effective as 'non-state capitalism'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_Group The fact that these 'cooperative entities' are able to compete with 'corporate entities', and exist with them side by side, even do business with each other, proves that there is space for both approaches. Non-state socialism can exist along with non-state capitalism. --- <noozguru@...> wrote : "Communism is an interesting idea that has never been tried." "What some people think are communist countries are family businesses. North Korea as an example." On 03/25/2015 04:45 AM, jason_green2@... mailto:jason_green2@... [FairfieldLife] wrote: Maintain a distinction between 'generating wealth' and 'making money'. Pro-market capitalism generates wealth. Pro-business capitalism only makes money for a few. "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery" ~ Winston Churchill "Under communism, there is no incentive to supply people with anything they need or want, including safety." ~ George Reisman, (Capitalism : A Treatise on Economics 1996). "The trouble is with socialism, which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy. Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to examine and evaluate their ideas, and because they are pathologically unwilling to consider the opinions of others, and most of all, because socialism is a mindset that regards the individual -- and his rights -- as insignificant, compared to whatever the socialist believes the group needs, terrible, terrible things happen when socialists acquire power." ~ L. Neil Smith, "Cambodian Road Trip", 15 March 2009) "Communism has sometimes succeeded as a scavenger, but never as a leader. It has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both." ~ John F. Kennedy, (Speech at NATO Headquarters, Naples Italy, 2 July 1963) "Socialism...must have a dictatorship, it will not work without it." ~ Mao Zedong, (Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–57) "I think all the great religions of the world - Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and Communism -- both untrue and harmful." ~ Bertrand Russell, (My Religious Reminiscences, 1957) "Communism is a doctrine bred of poverty, hatred and strife. Its spread can only be arrested by diminishing the area of poverty and hatred." ~ Bertrand Russell, (Portraits From Memory And Other Essays 1956) "Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home says, 'No man should have so much.' The capitalist, seeing the same thing says, 'All men should have as much.' " – Phelps Adams "Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it, and hell where they already have it." ~ Ronald Reagan "How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin." ~ Ronald Reagan "Communism is like Prohibition, it's a good idea but it won't work" – Will Rogers "For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion." – Alexander Solzhenitsyn "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff." – Frank Zappa "Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool." ~ George Bernard Shaw --- <noozguru@...> mailto:noozguru@... wrote : Well I guess then you don't know the tech industry which I've worked with for years and continue to work with. Yes it is about money. Do you own stocks? On 03/24/2015 12:26 PM, jason_green2@... mailto:jason_green2@... [FairfieldLife] wrote: No, it's not just about money. It's about our survival as a species. It's also about competition, the Russians and the Chinese are not going to stay static. To calculate the folding structure of a single protein would take one billion years, for all the super-computers on earth combined, right now. A quantum computer would do that in a few minutes time. Communism has no moral compass either. It breeds sloth, incompetency, inefficiency, kills merit, encourages mediocrity, sloppiness etc etc. I am sure you wouldn't like to live in those old commie countries. It is inevitable that we eventualy go off this planet. It's the only way that we can survive as a specie. Many cosmic disasters have hit earth and will continue to do so. We merging with AI is the next step in evolution. --- <noozguru@...> mailto:noozguru@... wrote : Blame capitalism. It's all about the money. All the tech companies care about is making money because if they don't then their stock will fall and the stockholders will complain. So there is no moral compass asking what is the long term effects of the project they are working on. We could probably just stop or slow where we are with technology and be fine for the next several hundred years. On 03/24/2015 11:04 AM, jr_esq@... mailto:jr_esq@... [FairfieldLife] wrote: He agrees with Hawking and others that AI is not good for humans. Steve Wozniak: The Future of AI Is 'Scary and Very Bad for People' Steve Wozniak: The Future of AI Is 'Scary and Very Bad... "Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that... View on www.yahoo.com Preview by Yahoo
