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Optimizing APC for Drupal
APC is the Alternative PHP Cache, an opcode cache for PHP, or as its developers describe it: "APC is a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code." If your eyes just glazed over or you can't make sense of that last quote, you may now walk away.
Beyond Quid Pro Quo
Gift economies come in many forms, but usually what we mean by a “gift” is when quid is less tied to quo. Clearly, this is a matter of degree as there are many possible social contracts around gifts.
For gift economies to function properly a certain degree of familiarity and intimacy must exist among the participants. For instance, very few parents keep accounts on how many breakfasts they have given their children with the expectation of equal reciprocity. For parents, caring for their children is its own reward, and we think poorly of parents when this stops being the case.
When you are dealing with people who aren’t as close to you, the quid pro quo game comes more into play. Imagine, for example, two tribes coming together to trade. Each tribe operates with a gift economy inside its membrane, but when trading outside the membrane, there is an expectation of equal reciprocity in trade.
Until the industrial revolution, the majority of economic interactions were in the gift economy. Money has, of course, been around for thousands of years, but most of what people needed was satisfied through the gift economy on the village level. Think barn-raisings, shared child-care, borrowing tools, etc. Only when goods were needed from outside the community did the quid pro quo money game come into play.
Now, we can wax nostalgic about bygone eras, but there are good reasons why this all ended. The biggest reason is that this social architecture has not been able to scale. When a person lives in an urban environment, they tend to lack intimacy and familiarity with most people around them. In place of this intimacy, we make monetary exchanges. It must also be noted that a rich and impressive human culture has been built around quid pro quo social architecture.
However, while the gift economy has not yet been feasible on a large scale, on a small scale, it is actually far more efficient. Imagine how much wealth would be lost if you began to charge your children for breakfast. When and how would that debt be paid off?
What would happen if the gift economy could scale? Would it possibly serve as a far more efficient way to allocate goods and resources? What would it mean to actually live in the much talked about global village?
Quid Pro Quo as a pioneer species
A pioneer species is a species that shows up on new or recently disturbed land. They are quick to arrive, and they create the conditions for other species to thrive. As other species arrive, these pioneers are quickly outcompeted. Pioneer plants will leave their seeds in the soil for when the next disturbance occurs. This kind of succession ecology has worked extremely well for our biosphere.
I would contend that the quid pro quo social contract is a pioneer species in the social realm. Imagine you are meeting someone for the first time. Early interactions with this person are most likely in the quid pro quo space. Perhaps you try to talk for no more than half of the time. Perhaps you alternate who pays for the meals you eat out together. Perhaps you trade a ride to the airport for a day of dog sitting. In all cases, quid pro quo is used because you aren’t familiar with the person yet. As you become more familiar with each other, the ride to the airport probably doesn’t have strings attached, the meals become less formally tracked, and conversation may ebb and flow more naturally. Quid pro quo created the conditions for the other more advanced social contracts to emerge.
So how can we create the conditions for the global gift economy to emerge? What are your thoughts?
The End of Money book one of top 15 “most shareable” of 2009
My latest book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization has been rated one of the top 15 SHAREABLE books of 2009. It shares this list with some very good company. Have a look. “Shareable is a nonprofit online magazine that tells the story of sharing.” The guys who run it have some pretty impressive credentials.
Banks Starving Business While Monetizing Government Debt
As usual, credit (money) is being lavished on the parasitic elements of the economy while the productive sector is being starved. A report from James Turk’s Free Gold Money Report draws upon a Wall Street Journal article (Lending Falls at Epic Pace) which includes two charts that make that plain. Here they are below along with a couple quotes. –t.h.g.
What Are Banks Doing with Their Depositors’ Money?“So if the banks are not making loans, what are they doing with depositor money?
Well, they are still lending, but not to businesses and consumers. They are lending to the federal government.
Banks don’t lend directly to the federal government of course, but buying US government paper accomplishes the same thing in the end.”
“Instead of depositor money being used to stimulate economic activity in the private sector by lending to businesses and consumers, the banks are helping to fund the growing federal deficits. This re-allocation of resources has a negative long-term impact on the economy. Depositor money is not being used for productive purposes like building manufacturing plants and making other investments that will create jobs and grow the economy. It is being spent by the government, which consumes in the present and does not invest for the future.”
The Bailout Scam in Simple Language
The following is an allegorical story that has been circulating recently. I don’t know who wrote it or where it originally came from, but it does a pretty good job of explaining the scam of the recent banking/finance bailout. –t.h.g.
Econ 101 Heidi’s Bar
Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).
Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit
By providing her customers’ freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s gross sales volume increases massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.
At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded on international security markets. Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.
One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi’s bar. He so informs Heidi.
Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since, Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.
Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the banks liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.
The suppliers of Heidi’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.
Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-billion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from their cronies in Government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Heidi’s bar.
Now, do you understand?
I must correct that final statement. The funds required for the bailout are mostly obtained, not from taxes, but are CREATED by the government and the banking system as new massive government debts are monetized. This is the classic inflation of the money supply, i.e., debasement of the currency.–t.h.g.
Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows: David Reilly
The most amazing thing about this story is that it appeared in Bloomberg, a mainstream financial news service. The second most amazing thing is that it acknowledges what critics of central banks (including the Federal Reserve) have been complaining about for decades.
Here are a couple tidbits from the article, with my comments in italics. — t.h.g.
Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all. Well, duh…
As Representative Marcy Kaptur told Geithner at the hearing: “A lot of people think that the president of the New York Fed works for the US government. But in fact you work for the private banks that elected you.” It is the bankers who have long dictated who would serve as Treasury Secretary, and most who have held that post had been top level bankers.
Yet when unelected and unaccountable agencies pick banking winners while trying to end-run Congress, even as taxpayers are forced to lend, spend and guarantee about $8 trillion to prop up the financial system, our collective blood should boil. Indeed, but then what? The corrupt global system of money, banking and finance cannot be reformed. It needs to be transcended. My book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, describes effective action that can be taken by individuals, businesses, governments, and NGOs to achieve that outcome.
Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows: David Reilly
Read the full article here…
Ron Paul’s Straight Talk About Central Banks and the Greece Bailout
The government of Greece is only the latest entity to stagger under the ever-increasing global load of debt. Virtually everyone (individuals, companies, and governments) is caught in the usury trap. Only the members of the banking cartel who create the debt-based money in every country of the world (and their cronies) are exempt. They are our creditors.
In his latest four-minute update, Congressman Ron Paul again explains the real purpose of central banks (like the Federal Reserve), the way in which they collude to steal wealth from the people, and the ultimate disaster that is on the horizon. — t.h.g.
The Time of the Chrysallis?
As I sit sweltering here in Malaysia (and before this, in Thailand) observing the busyness, the massive amounts of construction, the noisy moving to and fro, the widening extremes of opulence and degradation, the scramble of people to earn or save a few pennies to buy a piece of the good life, I often feel despair about the human condition. But, as I’ve said in my books and presentations, it is clear that civilization is experiencing a multi-dimensional mega-crisis which must lead to a thorough social, economic, and political restructuring. I liken it to the process of metamorphosis from the caterpillar to the butterfly. My soul yearns for peace and quiet, fellowship, and positive engagement in the metamorphic process.
Where to find it? How to proceed? These are the vexing questions of the moment.
Over the past three years my nomadic lifestyle has provided numerous adventures of discovery in many parts of Asia. I think my time in Asia has given me a pretty good sense of the developmental trends and the conditions that ordinary people here must contend with. The apparent lull in the breakdown process over the past few months should not cause us to become complacent but should be taken as an opportunity to prepare ourselves and to intensify our efforts to build a better world.
The global economy, like the caterpillar must at some point stop growing. That point seems now to have been reached. If you have not seen it, the post by Darryl Schoon, Davos: The Bomb Shelter, clearly expresses my own views that the current financial crisis is unprecedented and “the crisis will end in a complete breakdown of the banker’s system of credit and debt…”
The next phase, the chrysalis phase, requires that we take the accumulated resources that are at our disposal and use them to create the new butterfly economy. It is not easy to ascertain how that process will proceed, what the specific challenges will be, or how we might best negotiate what Robert Theobald called, The Rapids of Change. Carolyn Baker’s book, Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilzation’s Collapse, may help us in that regard. Major portions of the book can be read for free at books.google.com.
Each of us now needs to ask, “Where shall I spin my personal cocoon, where is my cohort community, and how can I help the emergence of a new, sustainable, more harmonious world.
Is 2010 the year for Linux on the Desktop?
It is for me! I have finally made the leap -- on a test basis anyway. I sat down and took a long, hard look at what my laptop needs are, and felt pretty good that they could be met with the open source tools. In the midst of hemming and hawing over whether or not to commit some time to installing & getting used to a new operating system, the deal breaker happened: Ironically, it was in the form of receiving an .xslx file which made my vintage copy of MS Office choke. I read an article confirming that the latest version of OpenOffice can work with the new-fashi
Econometrics.org - Portal to econometrics, economisc statistics, mathematical theory and economic theory
Agile Modeling (AM) Home Page: Effective Practices for Modeling and Documentation
New Economy, New Wealth
Friend, collaborator and currency visionary Art Brock has posted a new prezi outlining his take on the economic shifts currently taking place, and the shifts that need to take place for our economies to support humankind, rather than the other way around.
I implore you to drop what you are doing and step through this presentation.
Ron Paul Bill Seeks to End Legal Tender and Taxes on Coins
Congressman Ron Paul has introduced a bill in Congress that would really break the logjam of monopolized money and economic depression. This article from Coin News gives the highlights.
Here’s one significant quote:
“There is nothing in the Constitution that grants the Congress the power to enact legal tender laws. We, the Congress, have the power to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, but not to declare a legal tender. Yet, there is a section of US Code, 31 USC 5103, that purports to establish US coins and currency, including Federal Reserve notes, as legal tender.”
UnReasonable Crowd Sourcing Marketplace Opens
The social innovators who founded the UnReasonable Institute have unveiled the next step of the their model, the funding marketplace. The UnReasonable Institute is a novel incubator for social benefit organizations. Potential fellows were just screened down to 35 finalists, who have been posted in a market place. In order to attend the 10-week fellowship program in Boulder this summer, finalists must raise their tuition — $6,500 — in the marketplace.
Building on crowdfunding concepts best exemplified by Kickstarter, UnReasonable believes this approach will reveal the most active, creative and resourceful entrepreneurs, while also integrating the kind decentralized funding that we need to seed the next generation of social entrepreneurs and sustainable ventures.
Four projects are already funded over $1,000, and two are 25% of their way to the $6,500 goal. A few of our favorites include:
- Light Up Malawi — a project to get the whole country off the grid and on to renewable energy.
- Rickshaw Bank — a project to help bike-based rickshaw pullers to earn their own rickshaw, and become stable businesses.
- Swayam — a project creating equity-based education, removing the financial costs of education in India.
- Cogknit Semantics — a project that uses a hardware and software integration to speed learning in India.
- Uber Housing — a project that provides low-cost temporary shelter for refugees.
Which one will inspire your support?
Is the Real Revenue in Printing Money and Trading Sheep? - ReadWriteStart
The Story of Growth as it Truly Is
If you still believe in the growth economy, watch this:
