Capitalism makes Wealth an OP stat

[jakimfett]

With a small group of individuals controlling the majority of the wealth in our solar systems, the Wealth stat becomes a heavy tool wielded without consideration for harm by individuals and organizations who are willing to sacrifice the well-being and health and lives of others in exchange for more zeros in their digital coinpurse.

I've heard that communism and/or socialism might be good options for fixing this unbalanced problem. That's a long term fix tho.

[jakimfett]

Here's how I think we should proceed:

• Eliminate tax and debt for anyone making less than double a living wage.
• Eliminate tax and debt for anyone owning less than the average assets for the county/burough/zipcode/etc.
• Add a 2% tax for each additional living wage earned above double.
• Cap the tax at 90-98% so that the diminishing returns don't completely restrict upward motion due to skill or luck.

The tax applies to all areas (real estate, food, fuel, transportation, lodging, etc, paid via vendor markup to base prices) and is also assessed against assets such as investments, as well as having exceptions for medical or life needs.

Corporate profits should be taxed similarly, based on an assessment of assets and budgets and with tax breaks for corporations that pay their employees well and provide healthcare and other such beneficial things.

[woozalia]

I like to categorize solutions in terms of what I've been calling "stages of change". I think what you're talking about above are stage 1, things that could be accomplished logistically if given control of sufficient resources.

Given that, all four of your proposals fall within the range of changes I would find acceptable or beneficial. Point 1 especially seems like a fundamentally good idea, presuming that we continue to need taxation as a means of funding the commons.

There are some things I could add that would be compatible with your list, and probably some things that would go beyond it.

Compatible items:

5. No individual should own more than one habitable building (the one they live in). All other property should be cooperatively managed. (I'm leaning towards the idea that no real estate at all should be privately owned but that you have strongly-enforced additional rights with regard to your home.)

6. Housing should be a right. Even if nothing is done towards Capitalism makes Wealth an OP stat #1, there could be a rule that if you build something habitable and it remains vacant for more than a certain amount of time, you can't refuse an occupancy rental offer regardless of how low. (Real-estate developers make way too much money; this would force them to share a bit, or at least not to be so eager to buy up old homesteads or cut down forests.)

7. Healthcare should be free. (This should go without saying, but it probably should be said anyway since we're writing these things down.)

8. Universal citizen dividend, designed as a living wage.

9. No more asset protection for for-profit corporations -- only nonprofits and co-ops.

10. All corporations over a certain size should be co-operatively owned.

(I've probably got a lot more that I just can't think of at the moment.)

Taking a significantly different fork, I could go into my plans to slowly transform society by reclaiming the economy (this plan is intended to cover all three stages of change).

[jakimfett]

@woozalia I think I'm going to try to apply a hotfix to this particular problem.

I'm forming literal gay space communism.

Assorted Tech supports:

Audacious Space Pirates, an open source aerospace engineering company, with intent to achieve orbit in 2019.

As Acting Captain of A.S.P., I'm launching an IndieGoGo campaign for extra funding once I get the rest of the paperwork shuffled.

The pitch is basically:

Fund (or stop by one of our locations and donate time, resources, or knowledge/expertise) Audacious Space Pirates, and we'll develop and release modular, ethical, sustainable tech as we pursue a reliable method of orbital delivery and an emergency communication network for activists.

I am currently finishing up the last bits of getting the Audacious Space Pirates set up as their own legal entity, and then we officially declare it a funding drive for an open source moonshot.

Assorted Tech is now a legal entity in the state of Oregon, and I'm creating Audacious Space Pirates as the operating business name of the irregular.team group project I started to implement my designs for the DarkPi project.

My team is building the DarkPi.
Then we want to put it into orbit.
Then we want you to help us put more of them into orbit.
And when we can all connect freely on the network, we work towards getting human sized payloads into orbit.

We develop medical tech and housing units here in Portland, with the short term goal of helping improve local health awareness and community participation in homelessness mitigation.

As we iterate and refine the housing side of the project, we (the space agency) add additional staff to fork the housing designs into development of sustainably sourced orbital-safe microhousing, and a team building a scalable polyhedron based framework for orbital manufacturing.
We recycle stuff here in Portland, build each thing carefully, by hand, and then send them into orbit as manufactured parts for moon exploration via remote partially automated mining robots.

After analysis of commonly found moon materials, we identify the most resource-effecient way to produce lunar housing for a mining and transport site, and we start using the found materials to create habitat in one or more of the lagrangian point(s) between the earth and the moon.

Meanwhile, down here on earth in Portland, we turn cargo containers into housing for employees, and start asking people to donate Raspberry Pi computers for a project to create self-regulating indoor greenhouses and bioreactors for both food and environmental safety factors, eg recycling oxygen and human waste.

We need a way to recycle everything.

The development of housing is looking at an interlocking framework of plating for the outer area of each housing group, assembled out of recycled metal and minerals pressed into stackable, interlockable bricks by an inconel plated reinforced hydraulic press, and plans to use PLA-based sustainably produced plastic as the internal seals and supports.

If we are able to fully develop this into a releasable form, anyone can do this, anywhere, starting with tools available online.

We can, together, do more research and planning than we can alone, and within the next few months we will have a sustainably sourced and recycled place that can house humans in safety here in Portland, even before we ever think about having to loft a prototype into orbit.

We can end homelessness as a side effect of making the path to orbital living possible.

As a mechanical engineer, I studied industrial automation controls.
As a software engineer, I studied distributed microservices and graceful failover of distributed systems.

And, as an activist, I see a way to use the energy found in biodiesel and hydrogen to get us into orbit using non-resource-discarding orbital delivery vehicles, meaning we aren't wasting thousands of dollars on a launch, we just refuel from our reserves of biofuel and try again.

My cousin's family makes biodiesel.
I know how to work with it safely.

I also know how to use FreeCAD to make printable models, and I'm starting with a small quadcopter powered off a 4 cylinder diesel engine.
My design is a high-rotor, low engine design, and is gravity balanced, with manual controls and pneumatics for computer adjustments and autopilot, courtesy of a microcontroller and a Raspberry Pi based microserver.

Once I start finding height or weight restrictions in the quadcopter physics, I will augment the design with a gyrocopter upgrade for forward momentum, using first a turboprop, and then using hydrogen thrusters.

The goal is to gain enough forward momentum to escape the the gravity well.
Then, we establish communications architecture in orbit, share it with first responders as a "last option" communication protocol, and then push on to further objectives.

This is a marathon.
We have to escape this planet.
The money holders and political elite are literally killing us with their indifference, and my friends keep getting harassed and mocked just for existing and taking up space.

Earth orbital velocity is 11.186 km/s
Turboprop speed record is 870 km/h, or 0.241667 km/s
We can close that gap, sustainably.

In the process of moving forward, I (@jakimfett) and we (@AudaciousSpacePirates) will fail a lot at some things, and some plans will change.

But this is happening.
I've found generous people, and I've got 18 months of funding for myself, personally, already confirmed and signed on.
I have more than enough resources to keep my team of people working part time now that my housing woes are over.

We're going to get a payload into low earth orbit.

The IndieGoGo is to help accelerate the development and fund extra side-trails of useful or interesting tech, like a shoe sorting machine.

And, If they did it before with slide rules and military tech, we can figure out how to do it again, today.

Assorted Tech and Audacious Space Pirates is doing focused research into:

• ion propulsion technology and remote robotics, to prepare for a successful orbital delivery.
• solar cells and Maser/Laser energy transmission tech for use in siphoning (essentially free) power from orbit.
• Faraday cages and other shielding for the computer cores and communication module cores.
• materials recycling modules with hardpoints for attaching belt feeds or shredders, so that materials can be reduced to "bricks" when found, without need for storage in bins.

(The TinFerno metal smelter has an Amazon wishlist, if you want to see what materials we're (currently) researching for yourself.

Here's some of the bits we're thinking about doing, in no particular order:

• Livestream portions of the ongoing development.
• Sell prototypes on Etsy.
• Release the 3d models on Thingverse, so you can test the prototypes too.
• Monthly/Quarterly public disclosure of funding gained and spent.
• Open invitation for contributions to our code via GitHub.
• Release a Kerbal Space Program mod with our tech available to test, with realistic pricing for campaign mode.
• Provide local news sources with feeds from our telemetry when we attempt a launch.
• Partner with livestreamers to do Q&A sessions.
• Keep a wiki knowledgebase available online and distributed, in case of disaster.
• Partner with local after-school programs for engineering interns and volunteers.
• Co-develop medical technology with local clinics to assist with long term health of our employees and neighborhoods.
• Actively provide relief for anyone fleeing disaster and wishing to start a new life.
• Forming a company approved neo-steampunk-space-pirate-themed thespian group for local events.
• Meditation and self care app.
• Providing free public housing (using sections of the employee housing overflow areas) for transient housing programs.
• ???
• non-profit.

That last one is sorta important.

This idea is backed by a business plan that I've shared portions of with several individuals, but the end goal is precisely zero profit, but an increase over time in owned and accessible resources and assets.

At the end of each quarter (at a minimum 4x per calendar year), we provide anything we have extra to employees in various forms.
Extra financial resources are made available to employees who need their "emergency fund" Simple Banking card refilled (default $128 balance).

Computer and mobile phone equipment is similarly offered to employees in need.

(we hope to soon provide tech support clinics in partnership with FreeGeek and the Portland Linux User Group, but I'm still working on making that one happen, so don't hold your breath.)

Am currently doing paperwork with OnPoint banking, and once that is done, I'll be able to run payroll.

Once I can run payroll, I will be working closely with my team to get documentation and involvement details online, so that you, yes you the reader of these words, can get involved in space exploration in 2018.

[woozalia]

1. DarkPi action item: DarkPi should probably be a project, here or in the eventual OpenProject. (I don't have permissions to create it here.) Also, I didn't realize how long you'd been working on this element...
2. DarkPi technical issue: long-range wifi covers on the order of kilometers. LEO starts around 200km at a bare minimum (the Iridium network orbits at around 781km and omg this is a fabulous diagram; I didn't even realize you could animate SVGs).
3. General action item: There should probably be a budget somewhere -- what is needed in order to achieve various stages of the project. Numbers can be more approximate the further in the future they are.

I have lots of little questions around current status items mentioned here, but those are probably best asked elsewhere.

[jakimfett]

1. Yup, that's a thing, as soon as I have the OpenProject instance up, DarkPi and functions.sh are the first two things getting added.

2. This one is complicated.
   a) About that 200km distance. Long range wifi is the connection method from the base station to nearby phones/laptops/etc, and to certain of the "backbone" portions of the network. As the operating range is over 300km in certain applications, I'm not concerned about LEO I'm concerned about boosting the signal enough that it can be thrown across the void to the moon base...
   b) The orbital connections (from hardware node to hardware node, in LEO) will use the ZigBee protocal, which in xBee hardware is able to connect via a distance of 8km-10km in the open air, and when you do all your math before getting the hardware, is more than enough to keep a distributed network of minimum-uptime systems in sync and backed up.
   c) The design uses six raspberry pi computers, three on each side of a stiff hexagon "backplane" responsible for grounding and thermal sink for the entire microsat, and has an independent network for control/programming and working environment, I.E. there is total isolation between the two "sides" of the microsat hex. A microcontroller, (probably one of the Arduino and/or compatible hardware), will be used in low-power mode most of the time, and will be redundantly powered (solar+battery+supercapacitors) and fail as gracefully as possible, including being designed lightweight enough enough to burn up completely before reaching the ceiling of any occupied airspace in the event of an unplanned/emergency/uncontrolled de-orbit. When something isn't being used, the system automatically puts it into low power mode, and if it's not used soon, it shuts down completely. If the microsat isn't doing anything but relay data, it will be able to run for about thirty (±5) hours off the primary power banks, and another three (±1) hours without needing to recharge via the solar cells on the external surfaces of the disk.

3. Yes, agreed. I have a text file with some numbers in it, but I need to sort them into something resembling a system, and half of it is still on my corkboard on sticky notes and pieces of notebook paper. Lots of paperwork happening. I have the business banking accounts and payroll system fleshed out, and as soon as I finish anything that gives me the ability to make progress towards that goal of compensating everyone for March and April, I'll post an update here or in the Discord. Am currently trying to get confirmation of 20-ish hours of paid work for each of the other members of the team in April, in addition to the previously discussed amounts for February and March.
   a) Primarily, I'm trying to get OpenProject online so that I can start throwing these numbers and thoughts and prototype pictures and blueprints into something resembling remotely accessible, and then getting backups of the same working, tested, and set up to notify if there's a system failure.
   b) Secondarily, I'm trying to get an instance of Gogs online, as I plan to release the company financial data publicly, and having an "expenses corkboard" file in that repo wouldn't be a bad idea.
   c) To accomplish that, I need to finish transferring data off my one server, and pave it over with something secure-ish. Sysadmin-ing takes time. :-/

[SoniEx2]

Could someone build a "darkpi catcher"?

[woozalia]

2. So we're agreed that ground-orbit comm is a technical issue that remains to be tackled? Or do you have a plan and just didn't get to it? (In 2a you said LRWiFi is for ground distribution; in 2b you said ZigBee is for orbit-to-orbit; ground-to-orbit comm methodology has not been discussed that I can see.)

3. DarkPi technical query: Do available RPi units have the necessary temperature tolerance to survive the wide temp swings they'll encounter in orbit? (I'm assuming the network is fault-tolerant enough that we can afford a slow rate of loss over time due to hard radiation.)

[woozalia]

Re "darkpi catcher": this would probably have to be something that happens in orbit, since the only way to have something survive re-entry at orbital speeds is, basically, ablative material, which is heavy (therefore expensive). I can see some kind of orbit-based dead-tinysat-catcher being cost-effective eventually but probably not anytime soon.

[SoniEx2]

I mean like a darkpi MITMer, like an IMSI catcher but for darkpis?

[jakimfett]

@SoniEx2 exploits are a bit of a thing I've been thinking about, since the whole point of this is "what if the internet becomes, essentially, hostile?".

Sure, you can MITM it, but as the actual unit is designed to securely wiped if it detects (via a delightful array of current draw, unexpected movement, rotation, and magnetic field resonance sensors) something being tampered with, and everything is e2e encrypted, I am assuming people will try to do this, and we'll need to keep thinking of ways to prevent it from harming the network, layer after layer of protections.

No computer is secure.
People are easier to hack, though.

@woozalia
2) Ground based comms will be the usual 2.4ghz wireless communication.
a) Each wall-wart node will have an auxiliary slot for the long range wifi mesh network.

b) If and when we get into low earth orbit, the wiki section I linked to has a 300+km LRWiFi connection transmitting and receiving, so we can at the very least learn from that and research ways to duplicate or improve on their antenna configuration. Once we can achieve low earth orbit, we can just start adding connections at higher altitudes until we have enough to cover the planet and get email from the moon.

c) We're planning to give the actual microsats some gyro and wobble motors (in addition to the movement/tilt/acceleration sensors, so the microsat will be able to point an antenna (at a location or another microsat) and hold it stable for when a higher bandwidth connection is necessary or scheduled.

d) The LRWiFi wikipedia page lists several other long distance networks that break the standard slightly, so aren't technically LRWiFi networks, but several of them have the possibility of being cost effective for our purposes.

e) The xBee stuff is all for short range syncing and key exchange, whenever two nodes are close enough spatially to swap deltas. Think of it as a 'command and control' network and encryption public key directory, with a distributed system of trust based on an ongoing remote audit of the system binaries and running processes.

Suggestion:
Start thinking about it (the DarkPi) as a data locker or system core for lugging around while exploration happens on the moon and other nearby objects, or the payload of a modular orbital microsat for offworld 'cold storage' of important data, or a way to always have a really low ping time to your command line work environment.

[SoniEx2]

What would happen if someone launched hundreds of thousands of malicious darkpi nodes?

[jakimfett]

@SoniEx2 they can participate in the network, but they can't really do anything, since between e2e encryption, multipath tcp and the file storage algorithm always moving blocks of data, there's no data except a file hash, and no relevant metadata.

[SoniEx2]

ok.

do discovery keys match encryption keys? or are discovery keys derived from encryption keys?

are files encrypted (and signed)? you say "file hash" but how does that work?

(those questions are really two parts of the same question, but you seem to imply e2ee and file storage are separate parts of the system...)

for full-duplex communication, do you have a fixed number of hops? do you take the shortest path? or do you take a random path? given that this will run over a space mesh, it's quite reasonable to think of it taking random paths rather than fixed number of hops or shortest path. I can't think of any easy way to execute an attack on such a system, besides launching thousands of malicious nodes. (since you can't otherwise be sure you're on the right path.) this probably means there's something I'm missing, but I really want this to work.

[Reddawg99]

Lets try and avoid a "Atlas Shrugged" type situation though. I think all current ideas of a "economy" need to be thrown out and we need to get some people working on a more sustainable system, as they have been reporting for years that all economies in their current state/configuration are completely unsustainable. (And will likely result in a global depression killing hundreds of millions in less than 75 years)

[jakimfett]

@SoniEx2 not sure what you mean by "discovery key". The current paradigm uses public/private keypairs for encryption, which means public keys are broadcast by each node, and each user has a public key, so any node can talk to any user securely, and the same goes for inter-node comms.

Files are encrypted and signed by the user. The blocks of data are sync'd with wherever is nearest, and then distributed to long term storage structures as time and bandwidth permits.

A file hash is, currently, just part of the index for "where are the encrypted block(s)", and uses the sha256sum function to generate the hash.

The user, who originally created the file with their private key, attempts to access their (non-local) file, and their user account tells the backend system "I need blocks asdfjhas and saadsjsadkl and slksvialkjcclaif". The backend retrieves those blocks, the user's key decrypts them, and now the user can access their file(s).

As far as routing algorithms, it depends on the user setting. The default is to plot a best-fit path between the user and the system, and from the system to the data. But because the system is designed around caching, it means that some portions of a file may be close, and others may be far. The goal is a p2p system very similar to the way torrents currently work (using a resource hash instead of a URI/Magnet link/.torrent/etc, and doing verification of data based on other copies before it's presented to the user as "their data"), but designed around encryption of all data, both in transit and in place.

It literally doesn't matter how many malicious nodes you launch.
As long as a single copy of the data exists somewhere, the end user could care less who is actually serving the file...and because of active validation of the file against the hash, the end user's system, all systems in the network, and the root node of the distributed system would have to all be compromised, and even then, it's unlikely to work because until the data is decrypted, changing anything associated with it just results in a file that doesn't validate properly, and so is dropped from the local system and never even shows up in the user's accessible files.

The local system will continue trying to get a validate-able file (which was signed by the user when they created it) until either the timeout is hit (set by the node admin), the user hits "cancel" on loading the file, or the node goes completely offline.

---

@Reddawg99 I'm in agreement that the current system is broken. However, change has to come incrementally, or people get overwhelmed and panic. That's why I'm suggesting that the hotfix for this involves using modern engineering to bootstrap a small group of individuals into an independent effort that operates under communistic principles, intentional kindness, and a willingness to prioritize long term survival over quarterly profit.

[SoniEx2]

Tracking is the main threat model in this capitalistic world.