Paxus's blog

“Is this the first time Willow has been to Goodwill?” Bochie asked excitedly after last night Pizza Club.

Of course he has been a myriad times before, especially in Cville where we oft get him cheap clothes.  But Louisa Goodwill has cheap jewelry and funny hats.  Willow tried to get me to wear this one, but it was quite a bit too small.  So he donned it as well and even smiled for the photo.

Willow did buy a cheap pendant which he has been wearing since then.

After you have been accepted at Twin Oaks and you make your way thru the waiting list you arrive and become a provisional member.  Provisionals have almost all the rights of full members (tho they dont have the medical and dental coverage the full members have) and at the end of their 6 month provisional period they have a poll.  In the 14 years i have been here, we have dozens of these polls, only two people have gotten rejected at their provisional to full member poll.  One was a charming gal from Portugal who was claiming she was working 70 hours a week in the hammocks shop and no one had seen her there.  The other was a depressed German guy, whose lover had died and who was hoping to marry here to be able to stay in the country and with us.  Otherwise, we have been regularly embracing of anyone who has been accepted becoming a full member.  Full members have the functional equivalent of tenure.

During my time here we have always had some number of provisional members a year ago we had at one point 18 people at a new member dinner.  Next month we will have none.

No provisional members means we have not let a new person in for the last half year.  We have had a number of former members return.    In the short term this is problematic, but if it persists it could become one.

In a typical month we loose 1 to 2 members, but we have had very few typical months of these types in the last half year.  Perhaps the place has become paradise while we were not paying attention.

i leave Amanda’s place in Gloucester and blitz down the east coast after Thxgvg and crash at Feonix and Steves.  The lazy, busy, sexy, funny, precocious manner which slice a Saturday up is a micro-epic not to be missed.

the only menu in the place and it has no prices on it

i am appreciative of Steve’s doomed efforts to teach me about cuisine and culture.  They took me into this super authentic Salvadorian restaurant near the Georgia St metro in Death City.  It had tilled walls that the waiter was proud of, because when he was 9, he tilled some of the walls that he pointed out to us.  It is a family restaurant, the owners live across the street.  Now the waiter is 19.  He agrees that the total lack of posters or art on three of the 4 walls has perhaps a minimalist effect and that maybe (after ten years only one small poster of money) he will spice it up.  Steve is ranting about how you get the best cuisine out in the suburbs, tho he is pleased with this restaurant.  And like the Italian who is speaking louder and faster to me in hopes i will spontaneously understand the language – Steve hopes that by describing discerning taste to me, it will somehow take hold.

I am more likely to learn Italian this way.

Unsurprisingly, a recent report shows that nuclear power is less popular in all 9 countries surveyed in 2005, except the UK.

Thought the average of these 23K cross country participants is not politically important, it is still worth nothing that the above countries (plus Spain, China and Pakistan) are 69% in favor of not building new reactors – not including the 9% who are uncertain.

Understandably, most people are reluctant to ask questions where the answer is likely “no”.  Even if it is a small question.  Yet at the heart of many types of networking, especially digital networking, is asking lots of people for something that almost all of them will say “no” to.

Was a time when i was trying to decide between memetic tree house festivals and next generation social networks.   Tragically, i choose the former.   One of the cool folx who i met working broadly the later was Kasper.  Kasper’s Facebook page describes him briefly as Mostly Vegan, Hitchhiker, Polyglot, Wikimaniac, social web consultant. Kasper is a digital nomad.  In a parallel reality we are working together.

Google plus noticably missing

My son has a very eclectic education.  Spot teaches him how to design magic decks.  Hawina teaches him history and science.  Sky works with Willow on math stuff.  I teach him critical thinking via an elaborate fantasy role playing game.  His formalized homeschooling at CHEC in Cville is currently anthropology and strategy and tactics.  When i sat down with him the other day and asked him where he wanted things to be going with his education i was surprised by his answers.

non-conventional thinking

He said he was interested in learning Hindu and Sanskrit.  Now he did spend a little time studying Latin with Hawina and learned a handful of words, but then lost interest in it after getting some of the background for Harry Potter spells.  And my guess is Hindu is hard and Sanskrit (being a quite dead language) is even harder.  And if he wants to move this way, we will at least take steps to see if we can accommodate him.

Willow said he wanted to learn computer hacking.  He currently plays games where he creates creatures and civilization, but hacking feels several steps up from this.  If anyone has a good intro to hacking curriculum, please feel encouraged to pass it on.

He also wanted to learn a martial art that does not require a weapon.  His early experience was in short stick, which he liked at the time, but now feels he wants something he can do with just his body.  This is perhaps the most accessible of his recent requests.

He also said he was interested in architecture, which of course thrilled his grandmother on my side, because my dad was an architect, so we will get him a little drafting table with a built in right angle to facilitate drawing straight lines.

Super Meme Construction Kit!

What is a super meme? A super meme is a self-replicating idea that is so powerful and popular that once it is identified and expressed it transforms society. Examples of super memes include: Christianity, Communism, Darwinism, Islam, the sexual revolution and 12 step programs. Super memes are also called irresistible ideas.

Why a super meme design group? The prevailing collection of super memes have failed us as a culture, they have not produced societies that value fairness, sustainability, peace. The design of a super meme is complex work; it involves identifying principles and hooks that are attractive to many listeners and encourages behavior that propagates the meme. Successful memes have a positive feedback mechanism, thus growing the influence of the idea and improving their chances for spreading with every step.  A super meme design group would work to craft memes which we felt would shift culture and consciousness in a sustainable and fair direction.

What are super meme design principles? Some design principles which we find appealing include:

One of the more contentious issues in many communities is pets.  How many can we have? Where can they go?  What happens when they tromp thru someone’s garden?  Twin Oaks has two types of pets in our universe.  There are dogs and cats – both of which have waiting lists, which move fairly slowly.  And then there are all other animals, which if you can fit them in your room, have no other restrictions.

The other day a horse showed up.

[ Picture soon to be here]

On my birthday in 1974, the Messmer Plan to shift France to nuclear power was born.  The first Arab Oil embargo in 1973 had hit France especially hard and PM Messmer decided without public or parliamentary debate that nuclear was the future for France, despite 4000 scientists signing a petition opposed to this choice.  In the following 15 years, France built all but 2 of it’s current 58 operating reactors.

If you fight reactors anywhere, you hear a lot about the “French Model”, nearly identical reactors built by the same firm providing most of the electricity for that country and much of Europe.  What you dont hear about is that EdF, the company which built those reactors was the most indebted company in the world for decades and repeatedly bailed out by the French government.  You dont often hear that the power from these reactors has often been sold at below cost its to neighboring countries.  And that the French have stalled both transparency around electricity prices and deregulation in the EU to protect its money losing nuclear industry.

The translation of the Czech month name November is “Falling Leaves“.  Curiously in warmer Croatia the same month name goes to October.  So at the beginning of the month i was thinking of things in a falling theme and sadly i was having a new intimacy unravel badly and what was clearly falling for me was my expectations of what was possible (oh, yes there are lots of personal things i dont blog about).  What i have written about in the most recent past have been my predictive month name choices, but this is actually a smaller fraction of the months i name.

Shal, who is an active hammocks general managers has been out sick for the last couple of weeks.  This has helped me drop my expectations about the amount of my “regular” work i am going to get done.  After commenting in two different groups 2 days ago how much i loved and missed labor assigning, my co-teacher at Pegasus School, Bochie got deathly ill and asked me if i would fill in for him as a labor assigner.  And with this my expectations of calling back customers and setting up this new satellite hammock shop dropped even further as the huge job of labor assigning gobbled up my day.

Back in the 1990?s, some of my brothers geeker fans figured out how to spin the meter on the Time Magazine “Person of the Year”  poll and put him in third place.  So for a while the poll read:

1. Jesus Christ
2.  Adolph Hitler
3. John Flansburgh

I was impressed that Christ made it to the list, given he was not even born in this millenium and of course surprised that Hilters followers had, however briefly managed to get his name so far up  - at least he was the right century.  My mother made a screen shot of this listing and saved it.

This year Time Magazine is learning from its past mistakes and it is no longer accepting write-in ballots (back when my brother was on the poll, anyone could be suggested -  obviously). Instead, Time has chosen the 34 candidates and you can vote “Yes” or “No” on them.

And the current leader, much to my glee is “the 99%” with 46K votes, nearly 10K more than some soccer player i have never heard of who was number 2.  And similarly the most “no” votes went to the 1%

But much more interesting is the places that were held by Anonymous.  Third from the top (after this soccer player) and 7th from the top of “no’s” list, right after the 99% (clearly the 1% is paying people to vote against their own best interests).

One of the least popular, most effective and most clearly behaviorist policies in this community has been re-instated: Linking making hammocks goals to quota.  This is how it works.  Every week the RPM (Ropes Product Management) decides what our weekly production goals are.  If we make these goals all is wonderful.  If we exceed them (as we did last week) we carry over the buffer into the next week to make it easier to make our subsequent goal.  If we fail to make them our weekly labor quota increase 1.4 hours a week (or 0.2 hours per day).  Our current quota is 42 hours a week.  We have had quota linked to production goals for 4 weeks now and so far we have made it every week.  And almost every week RPM is increasing the production goals, which have gone from 100/week to 130/week over the last month.  We plan to level out production at 165 hammocks/week in early December.

Last year RPM was reluctant to re-establish this link between production goals and quota.  We did not want to punish the community and we tried for some months to entice people to come into the hammock shop with treats and events and by setting up hammocks dates with people that they like.  Unlike our tofu production which is on an assembly line, which pushes hard and runs long, hammocks making is relaxed work, which you can do when ever you like, for as long or as short as you like and no one is breathing down your neck to go faster.  Incentives failed.  After a couple of months of trying to give communards carrots to get them to work, we broke out the stick – linking goals to quota.  We failed to make goals about 5 times last year.  Quota went up, people came into the shop and made hammocks and got us back on track.

i love Herman Cain.  He is the perfect caricature of the “anyone can grow up to be president” nonsense that the Republicans love to advance, so they can pretend that the race for the White House it meritocratic.  Dont be fooled.

In the last few days Cain has managed to offend both vegetarians and the intelligence of anyone who cares about US foreign policy.  One would think while the topic was pizza’s, the pizza company former CEO would be on safe ground.  Again you would be wrong.  Cain’s quote “A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.” Is just politically stupid, you will not convince many people to vote for you by advocating a heavily meat laden  pizza.  And you will alienate both vegetarians and people who think pizza toppings have little to do with masculinity (which turns out the be a large group).  He is clearly winging it, he is having fun as a candidate.  This makes him entertaining, but not a real contender.

In the 2000 presidential elections one of my favorite political cartoons was about George W. Bush’s international experience.  It showed an International House of Pancakes.  Similarly, Cain was asked about Obama’s actions around Libya.  At first Cain asked the interviewer basically for hints about Obama’s position. “President Obama supported the uprising, correct?” You really think when it comes to the national debates, Obama is going to look bad next to this guy?  The rest of his answer was even more pathetic:

Abigail and I have bought matching silver rings as a symbol of our devotion to each other And we are firmly committed to having ownership of these rings be a positive experience, despite both of our tendencies to loose objects like these. So what does “design for failure” mean in this case? It means because we are confident that we will loose them, our agreement is to craft a celebration for immediately after it happens. To make it a light festive burden, we are specifying as little as possible about it now. All we currently know is the first time we see each other after either of us looses a ring, we will have an awesome celebration. Perhaps this will promote reckless behavior (which given the rings were $20 for 2 is not so terrible), more likely it will heighten the prospect for generosity.

We have bought rings before. Abigail was interested in a wedding ring and her primary partner understandably thought this was frivolous, since they were not getting married. I, on the other hand, jumped at the opportunity to get her a ring of anytype and while we were at Ganas on Staten Island I bought her a $4 wooden ring.

The important part is not the rings, but the design for failure meme. i would counsel you ponder unalterable tricky behaviors of your own and design a self awareness reward for experiencing it and being at peace with your failures.

“[C]lever disguise you’re wearing – white face in Harlem, good thinking, Bond.” was the line which got a rise out of me in the 007 film Live and Let Die.

i have a somewhat similar feeling crashing this academic feminist conference which has perhaps two thousand participants, fewer than a handful are male.

The content is amazing, not necessarily in an accessible way.  The first theater piece we went to linked European surrealist painting, with Cello playing, with a discussion of Sylvia Plath’s body of work and body in suicide, and the inference that the death of a long time beagle pet induced a non-identifiable cyst on her left ovary which the reader did not want removed.  Abigail pointed out that for a piece that was all about the body, the reader/actors desperately needed to be more animated.

And Abigail’s critique does not stop there.  There are hundreds of participants, almost all of whom fly from across the land and stay in this high end, center city hotel, which hosts this event, which has a hundred page program of events.  From an Eco-feminist perspective – this top down, distractedly academic and theoretical, large ecological footprint event feels a voyage in the wrong direction.

When i walked out of the Pine and Peachtree streets Occupy Atlanta overnight space (they re-pitch tents in Woodruff park until 11 PM each day) a panhandler approached me.  I declined.

Which thru me into a bit of an intellectual tumble about my relationship with people asking for money.  Why am i declining this guy.  Sometimes i do give money to people who are requesting it.  Soon after there was a woman singing at the top of the MARTA entrance, she had a beautiful voice and it was easy to give her some change.

And i realized i dont even completely understand my own thinking on this topic.  It is easy to embrace “you cant solve this problem, so you dont have to do anything” mindsets.  But structural hopelessness has never been my bag.

Many years back my lover Beth from Greenpeace used to bring a pocket full of quarters to work everyday and she would give one to everyone who asked her for money.  She said it totally transformed her relationship with the street people.  She had small conversations with her regulars, who were by-in-large respectful, appreciative and surprisingly clever and funny.  She considered it a type of tax for using the streets which were their homes.

Perhaps i should just start carrying more quarters and being more generous with them.

Occupy Atlanta

“You have two choices” Kate said to me with a rare level of agitation “You can either stop complaining about the corruption in Ohio or you can come campaign with me in Cincinnati.” It was not much of a choice, in the fall of 2004 the rampant election abuse in Ohio was enough to get an anarchist into party politics. I knew I could not shut up about it, so we went to Cincinnati and worked for almost a week for several different campaign efforts: Acorn, the Unions (SEIU and friends), for the Kerry Campaign directly and for Election Protection.  

At the Kerry HQ and I got elevated in a few hours to the lead person working on this corrupted mostly paper database of prospective voter contacts. At one point the highest level functionary from the office came in, clearly harried and unhappy about the unresolved state of the database. I spoke with him and the person who had been working on the database for months. When the director asked me what I would do, I suggested a pretty radical plan which dumped the largest part of the contaminated data, recognizing that there was no longer time to do anything with the whole list. There was an intense quiet moment and the director told the database manager “Do what he is proposing”

What struck me about this was the difference between this situation and the other groups SEIU, Acorn and Voter Protection that we worked for on election day. In those groups you could only do the lowest level direct contact work and paper scuffling. The Kerry organization was some combination of open enough and chaotic enough to make it be possible for me to influence it. The others were not.

My pro-nuke friends are fond of telling me how many nuclear reactors are under construction in China (About 25).  What they are less interested in reporting is that China is becoming a world leader in all energy production sources and this year will exceed the US in total installed solar power systems.

What is important in this report is not which country is taking the lead, but why.  Massive solar cell production has lead to unexpectedly fast drops in the price of photovoltaic cells, so this installed amount (which is greater than the amount of nuclear power installed this year) is unexpectedly large.

So solar costs are dropping, nuclear costs are increasing and the centrally controlled Chinese are being more cost conscious then the corrupt capitalists.

The job of running a hyper village is a rigorous one. Pretty much anyone who is willing to can take on an organizing or managerial responsibility.  There is a tremendous quantity of logistics and administrative work to keep this full service commune functioning. We have dozens of buildings in need of repair. There are half a dozen businesses which could all use more guidance and support.  Most weeks a 8 to 10 visitors some of whom want to live with us who have questions about how we do things and if their personal situation can be merged into ours. Add to this endless pocket dramas about romance, children, housing and other personal topics which frequent our little village and there is enough going on to hold almost anyones attention.

And as I have mentioned we are full. It is something like 3 years now we have had a waiting list (tho it has certainly thinned at points, it has never vanished in this time) and this means on top of the above described condition, we also have a space shortage and fewer degrees of freedom to relocate members when someone moves out. Pop Gang to the rescue!

Pop Gang is a group of members who are pulled from various community bodies (the planners, the membership team, recruiting, the room assignor and a member at large) to discuss things which can be done to make our crowded situation better. While this body is technically advisory, without any executive power in its collective state – what my experience of it is, is that when the Pop Gang agrees on a policy direction, the members take it back to their respective executive groups and make the change happen.

We just use first names at the commune and while the tradition pre-dates me, i certainly understand it.  And it creates some small troubles.  One of which is that if you show up as a member with the same name as another member, the expectation is you will change your name.  Caroline did it instantly and effortlessly, choosing a middle name she had always liked.  Others struggle to find something which feels comfortable after never having been called anything else their whole lives.

Yet others, throw the choice to the community and initiate a naming party process.  Since my readers seem excited about things community, i thought i would venture into this collective self-description a bit more.  The way it works with a naming party is that you decide that you want to change names and you put up a clip board on our O & I board (for Opinions and Information) with a request for suggestions.  Creative and less so communards and other people with opinions make suggestions on what you might be called.

Typically, this will draw between 30 and 60 suggestions.  Then when the night (because they mostly seem to happen at night) of your naming party shows up, the facilitator (which is with some regularity me) will write up all these names with marker on long sheets of newsprint paper.  These are almost always in the hammocks shop so people can make labor credits while doing this fun activity.  You as the person who might have this name, gets first crack at eliminating names which you simply know you wont choose.  “Viv’s deep dark secret” will almost always get nixed at this point as will “E. Schuyler Flansburgh” if it has somehow managed to make the list.  “Styrofoam” and “Moon Unit” are other examples of commune names which typically dont make it passed this first step.