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Michigan Governor Wants 'Open Source' Economic Model
An anonymous reader writes "Incoming Michigan governor Rick Synder spoke in Kalamazoo, MI today and says he wants to use an 'open-source economic development model' to help repair the battered down state. Perhaps during his time as president of Gateway he saw a benefit to the open source model, but can it really be successfully applied as an economic model?"
I know editors don't actually Read the Fine Article, but this one is about Kalamazoo. Only later does he mention "Open Source".
Maybe what he means by "open source" economic model is that he wants state workers to work for free.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
The problem is the open source license being used. Lots of government bodies use a license similar to the BSD license where "taking without giving back" is perfectly acceptable which is what big business does most of the time.
Now, we can have a lot of pointless dickering about whether the term "Open Source" is being abused. But more importantly, those ideas in themselves sound fine to me. I doubt they'll be enough to solve Michigan's huge problems, but that's another matter.
...Detroit will win the desktop.
P.S. The pablum in the link sounds like the same top-down development efforts that have been pissing tax dollars down rat holes and floating chinese debt for decades.
Open-source economics?
Where there is like a publicly known theory behind economic decisions? Like Adam Smiths or Karl Marxs books or something?
hardly an economic model. Go see silvio gesell for that .
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The venerable Richard Stallman was given complete control of the Kalamazoo government today at which point he announced that -- in order to battle pollution -- the oak leaf will replace the dollar bill inside city limits and the city council's podium will now have timeslices of 15 ms handed out to members (or 'threads' as the new law worded it) that will be violently and forcefully switched out by very strong bailiffs (or 'schedulers'). All city buildings are to be rebuilt in glass to improve the ability to see what goes on inside and very expensive, cancer causing X-ray devices will be issued to citizens so that at any point in time they can check any government official to verify first hand that the official in question is not a member of the lizard people elite that rule the United Kingdom.
After cracking a very strange grin, RMS promised the people they would experience open source in new and profound ways starting today.
My work here is dung.
Real open source would be making it a right to work state and getting rid of union control. Real open source would be to get rid of the government control and let people figure things out. What he seems to be proposing is nothing more than leveraging best practices.
Open source has a lot of excellent qualities, but applying it to finance may not be good. What is needed is a "Constitutional" model whereby all the rules are known in advance, solidified, and very difficult to change. This will keep opportunists from changing the rules to help them gain, financially. Even if all the rules are not perfect, being able to plan on them creates an environment of stability. The US financial model is not as stable as it was, because those unwilling to make difficult calls have chosen to simply print more money as a way of masking the problem and hoping it will go away. Now, business is trying to keep up with these non-sensical debt fetishes by the Fed decision makers. When we can get our leaders to calm down, survey the situation, and make slow and calculated changes according to established norms, then things will get better. If the Michigan Gov wants to make things better, then it is best to *not* try an use all the power that the office allows; rather restraint is more prudent.
An official 13% unemployment rate, which means something north of 17% real unemployment. Crashing property values and utterly blighted urban areas. That's what it takes to get voters to finally shed the leftists and elect people who are willing to spend some time thinking about what must be done to achieve some level of prosperity.
The only saving grace that state has had is a constitutional requirement, established by adults long ago, to balance the budget; at least they can attempt to recover without stupid amounts of debt. Hopefully the new boss will still be in power when all the 'unfunded' public sector union bennies finally come due; a big haircut is needed and it would be great if the powers that be failed to kowtow.
Dear MI, keep it up another 10 years to prove this isn't a fluke and I'll move back. Till then, rot in hell.
It's called the "free market." Michigan should try it.
The taxpayers might be able to help out if they can see exactly where their money is being pissed away.
No sig today...
His use of "Open source" seems so loose as to be nearly pointless to try to comment on in the context of the software concept of the same name. If nothing else(and there are a variety of somethings else), his proposal involves diffirent areas looking at one another's activities and initiating what works. That may well be a good idea; but calling it "open source" seems to imply that those activities would otherwise be proprietary. Unless he is about to inagurate the 'Pan-Michigan mutual abolition of all forms of intellectual property', which I very strongly doubt, the stuff he is talking about is just broad-brush development ideas that have never been proprietary, and for which there is no current or expected near-future support in law for making proprietary. It's basically just a platitude. You might as well describe somebody recommending that you use a mutually-understood natural language to communicate with others as "advocating an open-source phoneme model"...
That said, the basically irrelevant Michigan thing aside, we actually know reasonably well where OSS works and where it doesn't. We can even get a pretty decent idea of which flavors of "open source" will crop up in which areas.
First, of course, the unit cost of reproduction has to be negligible. Second, and related to the first, free riders must not be a serious issue(this doesn't mean that they have to not exist, and they generally do; but it means that they have to cost little or nothing, and something must motivate some percentage of users not to free-ride). If the first doesn't hold, the second generally has a hard time holding. If the first does hold, the second can still fail to hold; but in successful OSS scenarios it does hold.
You have the GPL, and its close associates: tends to apply to software, occasionally to texts, schematics, etc., things where #1 definitely holds. #2's applicability is provided by a mixture of ideological altruists and the fact that 'share-alike' is legally prescribed. While it was designed with ideological purposes in mind, this gives it unexpected utility for the production of what are, essentially, informal development consortia.
LGPL, and similar, fall between GPL and BSD. Typically applied to the same class as GPL and BSD; but derives its resistance to free riders more from economics than from ideologues of either camp.
BSD and similar tend to apply to the same class of things as GPL, for reasons of #1; but obtain contributions from potential free-riders much more heavily from (a sometimes vehemently different set of) ideological actors.
CC:Noncommercial, and similar, tend to apply to non-capital-intensive cultural objects. People are typically willing to share these with other people(and, pragmatically, recognize that other people are unlikely to pay enough to be worth collecting for them); but are suspicious of, and unwilling to allow, their appropriation by commercial interests(who both rub people the wrong way emotionally, and are recognized as having a much higher willingness to pay).
I am utterly surprised nobody screamed "commie!" yet, considering this is mostly an American forum. I mean "sharing resources" and "planning the economy", even if on a small scale ? I honestly hope he'll have enough support to do it, but I have my doubts, considering all the fears surrounding anything remotely related to socialism in your country. IMO it is a good idea and people might actually benefit from it.
He is just dropping buzzwords:
"Snyder mentioned a concept called "open-source economic development." He said the state is going to look at every region and see which area is the best at a certain practice and ask if the community is willing to share it with the rest of the state."
More accurately he is just repackaging *traditional* republican arguments (which may or may not resemble some contemporary republicans). Basically the idea is that rather than have some central authority decide upon a solution let lower level authorities address the issue so that we essentially have multiple experiments running in parallel to see what approaches work best. Some republicans and libertarians will further argue that such local approaches also leverage the fact that one problem may have multiple causes and one cause may dominate in one area while a different cause dominates a different area, leading to larger scale one-size-fits-all approaches often favored by central authorities being less efficient.
Let conservatives call this one thing and let liberals call this something else, whatever its called maybe we'll get more effective government if the idea is actually put into practice.
and did that 'constitutional' model help ANY of the bullshit we have experienced in the last decade ? ranging from soldiers shooting at students to monsanto killing entire agriculture ? AND on top of it, these being called freedom and economic prosperity ?
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
despite the distribution of income has become worse than the disparage in between medieval serf, and baron in middle ages. (33% serf, 33% church, 33% lord).
excuse me, but you seem to come off sounding like a right wing nutjob. using the word 'constitution' to excuse all kinds of bullshit.
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of course, that is if you take open source as 'the strongest dominates', and the distribution and sharing of wealth as something that comes of worse than middle ages
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
in middle ages, 33% of the produce from land went to serfs, 33% to church, 33% to lord. that was the law and was observed everywhere more or less.
currently, top 5% of america gets 72% of everything, whereas bottom 85% gets only 15%. that is BEYOND medieval.
not to mention that alan greenspan, the foremost priest of that church have come up in front of senate committee and confessed that 'free market' did not work, openly, and clearly, saying he was wrong. yet, here you are, selling it to us again.
excuse me, but you are selling bullshit. sell it elsewhere.
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scroll the thread and see the 'free' market zealots still trying to assert that there has never been a 'free' market on the face of the world up till now. in the brief episode in late 1800s where there was such a condition, almost all of the american asses nearly ended up being owned by 10 individuals (not even corporations). they got their assess off vanderbilt et al, thanks to theodore roosevelt. but, they hate him, because, well, they dont know shit actually.
40% or so of them are hopeless. so brainwashed in their belief in the 'invisible hand' of the market (which is something not only nonexistent, but also never worked), no less than a radical zealot in middle east is brainwashed in his/her holy crusade. two sides of a spectrum, no different than the other.
proposing anything otherwise, makes them berserk.
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it would be nice to see government funded software open sourced and shared amongst governments. Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, all lobby against this because they like to get hired to implement similar stuff in each town, But even if they started small and non-critical like library systems they might finally see how cheaper it would be to share and customize from there. Yes the first implementers would have to foot most of the bill but they could then hire out some of those developers to help others bring the software online and end up being the experts for the kit. Probably cover costs over time as more and more towns hire these programmers to support them along with keeping them around to keep their own system improving.
Maybe looking at what town or town departments are running the best and spreading that will start the idea of also sharing the software.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Exactly what is an "open-source economics development model"?
the most intolerant bunch of people on earth - americans. not even able to bear opposing ideas. the difference is that, their radicalism, zealotry comes when 'free market' is challenged. thats their religion.
i gave statistics, i gave numbers, ACTUAL data, i gave history, yet, some moron still modded it down. why ?
religion. nothing else. the difference in between someone in middle east and the american zealotry is the suicide bomb.
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Open source is a fine notion in many things. However we are seeing our government looking like a deer frozen in the headlights with no clue of which way to turn. One reality is that we can never hope to have labor compete with foreign labor. There are so many workers in nations like China that labor simply can not get paid the way Americans do. We also now have huge problems in competing with designs and technologies from several nations. A general lack of education is hurting America bad. We also can't fix that as the schooling in other nations is brutal and Americans won't treat their young that way. Foreign kids tend to be aware that either unusual excellence in performance in schools or grinding poverty are the only two paths they can get.
Then there is the uber killer. Technology is only about eliminating human labor. Every day more and more people are displaced and devalued by technology. Decent jobs will become more and more rare. That also can not be changed. So we could all jump off a cliff or come to understand the real problem. We must issue good pay to people who do not work. That money earns tax dollars fast enough to more than compensate for the gift. And guess what. The people will spend that money in the businesses that they wish to support. That is a form of democratic action and businesses that are liked by the public will thrive. The government will thrive on the money earned. Now the odd part is that the poor are the best people to get nice checks. They are not savings oriented. Give a poor man a thousand dollars and it gets spent fast. That is a thrill for businesses. Give a rich man money and he will tend to secure it and it will not help either business or labor much at all.
What I am pointing at is the only hope for America to survive as a nation rests upon us burying the traditional, conservative economic values in a deep cave forever. Promoting conservative values is a very direct attack upon the survival of our nation. It is a form of treason. Marx had it half right. the better message would have been from each nothing and to each everything. The spender is the joy of civilization. Requiring the spenders to come up with the cash is the real problem.
What if the government actually didn't take on debt? What if the government actually had a policy of saving 25% of any budget surplus and returning the rest as a tax refund? What if the government actually had its own private cash reserves with which to do non-deficit spending and lower the need to have discretionary funds in the budget in any given year? What if those cash reserves were stored in local banks that gave out loans in good times? What if the government tried to actually cut out unnecessary spending?
If a private household did the equivalents of those things, it'd be quite well off within several years. After 30-40 years, the parents would have their home firmly paid off and would be able to fold their mortgage payment into their savings and retirement funds.
I'm only 27, but my grandmother remembers when the federal government actually used to be the one doing for the world what China does for us. How the mighty have fallen.
asking whether a local community is willing to share something with the rest of the state is nowhere near anything republican.
Communities, both republican and democrat, have shared ideas, plans and processes with others for quite a long time. It makes the local politicians look like leaders beyond their current jurisdiction, perhaps preparing them for higher office.
There is often no option but to share, many budgets and plans are subject to review in a public forum. It is somewhat FOSS'ish in that you can see the "source".
you should reread the parent you replied to. there is no relevance in between the two. in republican (ayn rand) mindset, everything is left to private parties, then the strongest of which decide what happens. the decisionmaker here, is not the strongest private party, in this model.
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you should reread the parent you replied to. there is no relevance in between the two. in republican (ayn rand) mindset, everything is left to private parties, then the strongest of which decide what happens. the decisionmaker here, is not the strongest private party, in this model.
You are gratuitously and erroneously redefining republicans. You are off in tin foil hat territory with the Ayn Rand thing. I think your balaclava is a little too tight or you've inhaled too many molotov cocktail fumes in a poorly ventilated basement. :-)
Where were you last year? Many republicans often said the states have different ideas on how to address health care and that we should let these different "experiments" go forward to see what works and what does not rather than redesign the entire system at the federal level. Regardless of whether this was a good idea or not it does prove you to be thoroughly misinformed regarding republicans and decentralized government based approaches.
and did that 'constitutional' model help ANY of the bullshit we have experienced in the last decade ?
Perhaps the problem was that the constitutional model was not being followed.
I believe that all software produced by the US government has no copyright protection in the USA and is effectively public domain. This doesn't apply to the work of contractors though.
A nerd in the governors' mansion. A nerd in the White House. Brings a tear to my eye, I tell you, it really does. I'll be able to tell my grandchildren that I was there when the last great barrier of social inequality for Nerd Americans was breached.
He's a Republican. His idea of "open source" is to remove all regulations on business, all taxes on business and hope that something good comes from it. Assuming we don't die from the pollution first.....
youre posting as anonymous coward.
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'freedom' is the illusion. there is no freedom to a system that allows the strong to dominate the weak, be it economical or political. not to mention that, economic power eventually reflects as political power.
ALL of them americans complain about corrupt government, yet, they refuse to take what corrupts it head on ; as long as there are private interests who are allowed to amass boundless economic resources, they WILL use it to dominate everyone. there has never been a case in history of the world, in which economic power was not used to dominate others.
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The first thing to keep in mind is that Economy != Government. A free market is like the bazaar. A command economy is like the cathedral.
The comment by the governor is indeed interesting, on several levels....I hope some who read this might take it seriously, and develop this thread further -- in the best tradition of the web. Aside from the usual inane comments by all the propeller-heads out there, I actually follow economic policy fairly closely, and see reason for optimism in the good governor's comments. I work half-time as a programmer at research institute at CU-Boulder (ibg.colorado.edu), but I also teach environmental economics part-time at a local community college (frontrange.edu). I've read all I can the last eight years or so, and especially since the financial meltdown of 2008, keenly following if any politicians are going to have the guts to start reforming the economy so that it's policy goals are truly for the health and well being of people, instead of how the economy has been steadily restructured over the last 130 years or so: it's an economy structured for the health and well being of corporations. This is not the rant of some conspiracy theorist; it is the naked truth, as anyone familiar with the issue knows. I could name a host of authors and excellent books, but let me just recommend the one currently at the top of my reading list: 13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and Jame Kwak. The US government was essentially held hostage by the largest 13 banks (rather, bank-like companies, since some of them do not operate like conventional banks at all), who bailed them -- with your taxpayer dollars. And the tragedy of it is: this _will_ happen again. It is almost inevitable, say Johnson and Kwak, given the lessons of recent history, and the selfish, greedy and blind nature of the soulless bastards that run these companies.
Why wouldn't software created by contractors and paid for with public money for a public project not fall under the same 'no copyright protection' clause?
I wonder if anyone has asked their local government office for copies of some of their software and what the response has been? My guess is that they're told it can't be released due to public safety concerns.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
in republican, which is just another term for ayn randian, everything is left to the private parties to decide.
I think you missed his use of the qualifier "traditional", and I'm not sure if leaving the "r" in lower case was intentional. Modern Republicans are almost all big-government pushers, they just tend to push warfare first and welfare second (see Bush II wars and medicare prescription bill).
Randians (Rational Objectivists)are nothing like modern Republicans, and have little in common with traditional, pre-neocon, lowercase republicans. Perhaps you are mistaking the current wave of GOP Republican Constitution-reading for something sincere (it isn't), or have an incomplete view of Rational Objectivism, or some combination of the two.
If you want proof of GOP Republicans being aligned against Rational Objectivism, look at the GOP's treatment of Ron Paul (who is not a strict Rational Objectivist as far as I know, but adheres to the same political policies). He was barred from presidential debates despite strong showings in the primaries, was not allowed to have his delegates' votes counted at the last convention, and has only now finally been allowed the chair of the Monetary Policy committee despite being senior enough he should have had it a decade ago (which is mostly to placate the more hardcore small-government constituents in the Republican party).
this is noise to keep your eye off the real problem that faces america and the world. this is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
the fundamental problem is that money **is** debt. debt **is** money. if you society wants money, IT MUST TAKE ON DEBT TO DO IT!
BY DEFINITION!
this means that if you have $1,000,000 bank credits, some people are paying annual interest on the money - year after year after year for as long as you have that money.
oh, the kicker? credit (money is debt!) is controlled by a private cartel of international bankers with almost no public over sight.
let me draw a casino analogy.
debt casino (private banking cartel, enforced by corporate sponsored government officials) requires all players (citizens) to borrow chips in order to play. the interest rate is 5% per hour.
who ends up with almost all the money over time?
guess what? our monetary system operates the same way as the casino, except the terms of the debt our different. the end result is the same, except it takes about 100 years to systematically asset strip society instead of a day or two.
youtube:
1. the secret of oz
2. renaissance 2.0 (damon vrabel)
3. the creature from jekyll island
i also recommend the automatic earth, maqrket-ticker.org and nathan's economic edge blogs.
other than that, get self sufficient, get out of debt and hold on tight - when this debt based monster blows, it is going to be epic!
oh, and the more insightful people will ask - why hasn't anyone made this clear to me before and then start to question the power structures around them and they are manipulated to benefit the people behind this systematic societal asset stripping mechanism.
**coins are not debt money. federal reserve notes (car notes, house notes, you get the idea) and bank credit are debt backed, interest money.
research the sustainability of exponential functions.
money is a liability to society (we pay debt) and a credit to BIG POOLS OF CAPITAL.
can you sense america being systematically gutted while BIG POOLS OF CAPITAL increase their stranglehold on the nation's institutions?
i didnt miss the qualifier 'traditional'. because there is no 'traditional' in this. i dont see any actual difference in between republicans, randians, neocons, even libertarians. details do not matter, the basis matters - they all have the delusion that if you just let everything be, things work out somehow. they propose this in economy, the thing that runs EVERYthing, because all the resources are in that economy, but, when they are asked why we shouldnt implement the same 'free market' systems in military, police, judiciary too, they fell silent. they cant provide any acceptable response to that, they know it, yet they still keep pushing what they cannot trust in these fields of life, in economics.
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details do not matter
Little things like the obvious expansion of government under Reagan and Bush II (which was consistently and vocally opposed by Ron Paul) are details which do not matter? Don't expect to ignore reality and not get called out on it here. If you can't be troubled to understand what's going on, rather than use your preconceived notions as a source of knowledge, you are unlikely to have anything worth saying.
Will communities be willing to share their abilities ...
Of course not, It's ridiculous to even consider. Imagine trying to get some random group of people to tackle any large project for free, like say, writing an OS...
Clearly, expecting people to work together for the common good is a ridiculous pipe dream. None but the selfish and greedy ever accomplished anything of value. Greed is good, the only good.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I was thinking what open-source models could be successfully applied to government.
One thing I think might really work would be a Bugzilla-like "problem management system" open to all.
People submit problems, discuss them, suggest solutions, vote for or against them, combine duplicates, suggest, discuss and correct laws that would fix them.
A ready patch would be in form of a bill to be passed by the parliament into law.
In many countries, getting a set number of signatures under a ready project of a law will get it under voting in a parliament. But first, it requires informed, trained people to write the bill, then organizing a signature-collecting campaign. This would streamline the system - a new law evolves as the need and suggestions arise, it is corrected many times and gains public attention if it's worthwhile. And if it is good enough, people will "vote for the bug" and get it eventually passed.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
no, they dont matter. government's size is not what matters, its the situation in the economic spectrum of life, that matters. who runs and rules the economy, what are the rules there. these are what matters. government may increase in size, become 10 times its own size, and yet still not be encompassing a few percent of the economy. it may totally blanket 1-2 sectors, yet hundreds of sectors may be dominated by private cartels. the government may be doing huge spending to prop up the army, yet the private sector may be controlling the economy.
what is left to be in the economy, and whether it is left as a dog eat dog world, is what matters. and in that respect, all right wing in america are the same in their very basis. they are delusional to think that if you just let things be, it turns out ok. yet, when they are queried whether we should leave army, judiciary, law, enforcement to private sector, they shut up.
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Fuck yeah! I've been dreaming about this!
Open source will lead the amazing transparency in the way the Govt. there works. You'll pay people to moderate and then regular citizens who also have great fucking ideas can post to the wiki.
Transparency, Adaptability, and Real Time Progress.
Still, Go Buckeyes!
* 40 industrial machines for agriculture: Open Source Ecology: http://openfarmtech.org
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)