Robin,
> Is it really the job of the Canonizer to go beyond the canonization process and work to get everyone everything they want? I can see that as a perfectly legitimate ideal for an individual to hold, but surely the job of the Canonizer is canonization? I make this point because being apparently over-ambitious is one of the many things that could put people off, especially business people, who are mostly very wary of any idealism other than market fundamentalism, because they think it might distort the market.
I definitely see your concern here. I think I'm just not expressing things properly, so need to know how to say things better so it doesn't portray things inaccurately.
A personal value of mine is to think that mankind will some day, technologically, find a cure for aging and stuff and make themselves immortal. But just because I believe that, doesn't mean I go around wasting my time on futile things we're obviously still a long way from being able to accomplish. There are clearly a lot of people still dying of AIDS and hunger, and we've got to work on things like that as a higher priority first. But still, just the idea that these kinds of amazing things are a possibility, even if only in the distant and currently not relevant future, has an effect on the way one lives there life (and the way an organization operates.)
I think charitable organizations should always be grass roots based, not forced from above by governments. The biggest problem with that is grass roots based organizations have a hard time being managed and organized. I see the Canonizer as a possible solution to this. It will allow people that want to do similar kinds of charity work to work together much more cooperatively and effectively. So if you have a quantitatively measured huge group of people willing to donate, together, known sums of capital, the canonizer will effectively be directing how that capital will be used. So will not, getting people with aids what they want, a cure like this, and things like that be classified in the purpose of the Canonizer? Of course, right now, that is very irrelevant and even meaningless, as far as our daily plans and immediate tactics go. But it is those kinds of long term goals that helps drive me and gives much more meaning to trying to get this RAID disk, and so on, to work.
Also, another very long term goal of mine, is to get something like the Canonizer, perhaps on $100 per laptop like systems, into very poor countries, and countries like Iraq, North Korea, and so on. Everyone knows what the individual war mongering kings, presidents, ayatollahs, military leaders and prophets want, but is anyone asking the entrepreneurial 20 somethings of those countries what they want? Everyone in the US, knows what president bush and our talking head pundits wants, but nobody has the slightest clue what the Iraqi people want. Isn't there something hugely immoral about things like that? I bet IF the people of the US had a way to really concisely and quantitatively know what the people of Iraqi wanted, there would be nothing that could stand in the way of the US people helping these Iraqi people get precisely that.
Right now, there is a terrible self destructive situation in Iraq. Any Iraq stepping up to cooperate with the US, even if they don't like the US, is seen as a traitor. What we need, is some way to get help to such people willing to step up, that isn't "biased" as all such "military" help is today. My dream is to have people donate charitable capital controlled by the Canonizer, and then have capital 100% controlled and directed by the Iraqi people, or whoever based on a selected canonizer, with no influence whatsoever from the people providing the capital.
I think the charity work being done by the likes of Bill Gates is great, but he is obviously deciding how all the money is spent. And to me, that is the immoral part. There should be some way to get money to the people at the bottom, that is completely under their control. Do they want a cure for aids? Or do they just want a sewer system and set of schools in their town that works much more immediately, then they can work on AIDS?
And even, immediately, the idea of getting everyone what they want effects everything we do here. The whole structure of the Canonizer system is designed so that everyone can get what they want, no matter how diverse their POV, into the system. Trying to find creative ways to get it all for everyone should be our fundamental driving ideology, I think.
So help me know how to say these kinds of things in ways that still indicates that, for the time being, they don't have much to do with what we are working on now or our immediate short term goals. Isn't all this kind of market "distortion" what really drives (or should really drive) all economics and commercial ventures?
Thanks,
Brent Allsop