SynergyItself.com
The box
I would like to offer you an opportunity to be a part of promoting a new product line including a 1x1x2 foot furniture storage device that you see pictured below in wood that we need to duplicate in plastic. Admittedly, plastic runs against the desire for a more natural world, but in these tight economic times low price wins out. My sister when she looked at my grand new design said, I’m sorry it just looks like a box to me. My sister is pretty smart and selling the box obviously is going to offer a challenge. Our first goal is to create a cult classic for sale at head shops and other counter culture locations. To achieve the ideal of just the right amount of the right stuff, which is in part a cost effective lifestyle, requires products meet a variety of needs not easily imagined by today’s style driven consumer. The target market is going to be people on a budget plus these boxes must look more like furniture than similar products at Wal-Mart, if these boxes are really going to make it into people’s living rooms and bedrooms. It will take some convincing to suggest that a person replace his current furniture with the box and the other space-saving easily moved furniture. So creating a presence on YouTube and other Internet information sites will be vital to selling the vision and expanding the product line. Also I will travel around and lecture on this all-important subject.
I have been living out of my box design for years. The advantage of these furniture boxes is their stackable nature which makes for a very effective use of space. When it comes to moving it’s very easy because you are already packed. This is not a stand-alone product; developing small storage units and other furniture for sitting on as well as bed frames is also part of the plan that makes this line of products special. I am very willing to work with you, minimizing my compensation relative to profits. Saving the world is usually not part of a business strategy but people are voting for change with their money today, we want to stay in business we need to get on board!
Voting for Hope and Change
Meaning, I hope Obama will fix it so I don’t have to change
No matter what we want from life, what we all need is to expand our minds so that we can make better use of the time we have. Whether we are looking for new intellectual horizons or whether we call our quest spiritual, truth is truth. Progress occurs when we make it past yet another one of life’s illusions and take action to live our new reality. While our society struggles with its illusions concerning poverty we wait with some concern to see how deeply our economy fails, when in fact we could instead be benefiting from all our technological discoveries is the easiest thing we could do. You may not understand engineering but you know from thousands of math and science classes that all things can be measured. You know, therefore. at any level of technology there can be only one system that can be proven to be the most cost effective system that still produces a high quality of life. Cost effective means it is cheaper than what you are doing now so it’s free. It takes less time so it’s easer. Just as you have seen a thousand times over again only one racer can cross any finish line in first place. Its your money and your time that is being wasted, the only real question is how good could our lives be if we simply did things efficiently and why until now have we not bothered to ask the only question worth asking, which is what is the best deal possible on food transportation and housing?
Simply putting to best use the most cost effective machines must mathematically produce maximum progress but in our continuing state of mental confusion maybe rational behavior is impossible. You are allowed with in our paradigm to progress to some degree but for maximum progress you will be labeled a radical because a fair and easy lifestyle will require some changes. So the swing voter’s came through and the pro-business and pro-war republicans are voted out. Yay! for Obama! But wait a minute, he is still taking money from the taxpayers who are making less then $10 dollar an hour who are dying from lack of health insurance and giving it to the millionaires, while increasing troop levels in Afghanistan, so where did that big change go?
Technically it may be conservable to take effective advantage of technology, but that is just not what we do around here. What we would all rather do is to follow our prejudice or in other words except the training we all have had in the past and except things the way they are. Our ego longs for the acceptance and we imagine we will get if we look and smell right like the right sort of people do. Its more comfortable to stay safely inside the fold of the rich and infamous where you get to feel like a real a team player, a winner on the winning team supporting power the know quantity. We all want to be good Americans, a person with the right stuff, driving a Chevy and eating some apple pie.
The big change is in effect an unthinkable thought right now. However no one knows the future so to say no one will ever go for the a big change and achieve a cost effective lifestyle is nonsense. For now it might be fun to experiment with thinking a thought that few people are capable of considering right now. It will be hard to believe because others never see to understand and go for the big change because they haven’t as of yet and it will cause fear because you are entering the unknown but I promise you mearly reading this article will not result in the thought police making you take the long walk off the short peer. You might even grow a little for having participated in this experiment in considering an alternate reality. Whether we are talking about ending bigotry or a scientific breakthrough or a spiritual leap of faith or enlightenment the big step forward begins deep in new territories in unexplored parts of our mind.
I am not talking about making at token gesture the classic liberal easing his conscience by performing the so called act of “making a difference.” I am talking about invoking the 90/10 rule and going after the big tamale! So you recycle a few beer cans… how quaint. The fact is if you could effectively take a completely radical possession by namely helping individuals cut costs 90% that would be a big swipe at 90% of all of our problems one person at a time thus generating liberty and justice and a more sustainable future. But by taking the usual liberal possession and joining one of the millions of other causes you would marginalize yourself by comparison.
In business there is principle that is true a large portion of the time, which is, that 90% of your business comes from 10% of your customers. Similarly I have found that a 90% drop in costs could stem form consumers going into business and becoming their own suppliers. Coops in the past have never been much different then conventional business just the ownership is different so they accomplish little. If we are going after the big gain we need to pay attention to where that 90% waste lives with in our current systems and decisively eliminate it. If corporations will not supply efficiency then it falls on us to find the most effective way to move veggies on to our plates, to connect us to stores and work and to put a roof over our heads. If I am right and we can gain 90% by shifting how we spend then this means that all other sources of problems from politics, to big brother, to crime, to war, only amount to being 10% of the problem or you could also say most bad outcomes are mealy symptoms of how we spend our money. I lived in intentional communities in seven different states where alternative food transportation and housing systems were in use in small limited ways but enough to see the potential. The antidote to spending is a self-help formula to reform how we act in other words how we spend our money.
If our own money and future doesn’t matter to us then how much less important is the environment or the fate of the poor or whatever war is going on or anything else for that matter. Unfortunately individuals simply have no financial structure in place to even allow the government to come in and support them in a way that can cut future costs there by improving the economy over the long term.
Right now what concerns me is the future. In effect my parents succeeded based on 25 cents a gallon gas, and $5000 homes that they could turn around sell for $250,000 thousand dollars as well as $2000-dollar cars. The day s of cheap resources is long over with so what hope do our grand kids have if they have to pay a ten times as much for resources while competing with increasingly well educated workers in the global economy who only make a few dollars a day, as well as having to compete with that robots and computers that are taking over our jobs. What if they cannot make the cut into some professional circle? While those circles get smaller as computers and robots reduce the number of even the most complicated jobs. Only a cost effective America can compete in the global economy and achieve a sane safe and reasonable world.
I guess I expect a lot more then most people when I think of freedom. I expect freedom from noise where I live in a gated community surrounded by a green zone such as a tree farm. I expect to be able to go for a walk in nature like on the trails in Yosemite and or in garden settings like Barchard gardens in Canada and queens town New Zealand away from nose of traffic. I like to feel safe but most importantly I like to see that our children are free from danger and abuse in a very small neighborhood school. Once you have allowed you child to be assaulted the rest of her life is partly ruined. For me at least no amount of money or toys is worth giving up nature safety and freedom or allowing a child’s life to be ruined. The good news in America at least there is lot of cheap land and lots of creative people with less cultural boundaries to cross to make the jump to a cost effect lifestyle. Also is it gets easer every day at least in the sense that technology is getting better so when we finally decide to live a cost effective and safe lifestyle it will be like a dam bursting and all the pent up freedom will suddenly be available for all because all the necessary changes are less expensive then what you are doing now so infect they are free of chare and are easer as well because you spend less time working to pay for them.
As a generalization big groups loose efficiency despite the economy of scale and tend to increasingly focus on the benefit on the group existence the bigger they get at the expense of the customer the employees the world at large and sometimes even at the expense of owners. Smaller local groups can be more responsive to individual needs and meet those needs quicker. One example is how centralized coal-fired electricity turns less that half of the coal into something useful while most of the energy released in the process is wasted and trued into pollution. By contrast a natural gas fired micro turbine located in or very near the neighborhood would allow the waste heat from the process of generating electricity to heat homes. The shorter the distance from the power plant to the home allows for less power lose. Having a micro turbine would allow the opportunity for taking neighborhood waste and creating methane to burn in the turbine. Complicated western methane digesters are often not cost effective at the moment even when serving large diaries but in china there are millions simple methane digesters at work right now. In the country you must have a septic tank any way you might as well add aerobic bacteria and capture the methane coming out of it. Cheap electricity makes a ground sink heat pump more efficient and grabbing heat from green houses more viable. Now you can start to see why most visionaries have always focused on community when trying to produce a better world. Well of course some sort of community is inevitable so really we can do one of two things. We can have a high cost of living community and keep most people out of the freedom loop, which works fine till our family has a setback. The other possibility is we can have efficient gated communities that offer us optional cost effective services that make our home a ideal place to retire where we don’t need expensive cars utilities and food so our retirement money will stretch giving most people break including our selves.
I am told what I am sharing with you is hard to understand. I must there for fabricate an example which is not really possible. That is we are all different, we all like and need different things but here it is. A person making $10 an hour in what I will call a network neighborhood in the country may well be able do to eat, go to the store have a home and by using efficient systems they might get the same value from life as if they made a $100 an hour meeting their needs in the city. Is that true? In a way we are comparing apples and oranges. My ideal of quality of life is to live in a country neighborhood with many of the benefits of living in the city. It’s a completely different lifestyle. Also it is quit possible and even desirable to network city neighborhoods as well but of course city real estate is expensive and the infrastructure that I think needs to be improved is already in place making changes less profitable but of course you are closer to the better paying jobs so it will eventually be well worth the expense to retrofit existing city neighborhoods as well.
A very basic consideration when networking neighborhoods is finding the ideal size to make each neighborhood. Repeated experimentation at companies like Gortex and 3m suggest a single manufacturing plant should not exceed 300 people or the plaint starts to loose profitability. By putting a 300 person or so limit on each neighborhood or lets say 50 homes limit per gated community that creates a small there for more potentially transparent system based on a core group of neighborhood personal creating a comfortable feel to each neighborhood. Any more size and you get that bigger organization feeling; you know that “you can not fight city hall” feeling. To cut food and other costs you need at least one community based physical structure. Typically community structures are called community centers.
The goal is for different network neighborhoods to connect efforts to achieve the economy of scale in specific projects like ordering food from a wholesaler to get the best possible deals. I would hope that legal agreements would be in place in each neighborhood that would nail down what people can expect in term of priorities from each neighborhood organization. However I would also hope that in the case when a individual in a neighborhood felt they were not getting a fair deal from the majority in their own neighborhood then they would have recourse to a court of sorts comprised of surrounding network neighborhoods which could intervene on behalf of finding a fair resolution between the individual and his neighborhood. The neighborhood needs to be able to ask any one to leave who cannot live in harmony with their neighborhood but if they do so more than fair restitution must be made for moving expenses and loss of home. This is what I fondly refer to as trading big brother for little brother. That is life is not necessarily fair any group can be mean spirited but it is better to be forced out of a neighborhood and have to move across town then it is to allow the hoe land security to become all power full and be forced to more out of the country.
Transportation the some day fantasy is for cost effective personal size scared cars to run on slightly elevated rails or maybe cars will eventually drive them selves roads with wheels that drop down and run on rails creating low cost cab services. However for now the most affordable transportation system that would work quite well is to have a shuttle system that takes you from the community center in your neighborhood directly a few of the nearby big box in town. The point is that are not many stops that you really need to go to on a regular bases. The costs involved in keeping a late model car is more then what most people spend shopping at the store so shopping around is not really that cost effective any way and with the shopping service shopping around may be possible any way with out wasting your time doing the shopping.
The primary vehicle for moving people could be based on a full size pick up truck with 4-door cab in front and 4 private compartments on the back half of the truck. These trucks will have the standard back seats that today’s trucks offer supplying space for 4 or 5 people who don’t mind riding together in the cab. The 8-foot bed will be converted into 4 air-conditioned private compartments made to supply seating for 2 people in each compartment and moveable wall to join to compartments for groups of people traveling together. You rent a compartment in the transport that leaves at lets say 1 pm and ride to town and arrive at the local big box store at 1:30 you have an hour to shop and then return to the compartment that is parked in the parking lot. After you shop you can return to have a seat in the air-conditioned compartment. Then takes you back home at 2:30. You enjoy complete privacy cruse the Internet write emails or read a book with very little wasted time. By appointment people can ride nonstop from neighborhood community center to the near by big box store and or civic plaza. Once the shoppers have been dropped off passengers can switch to another vehicle and can make trips to doctor’s offices or other special trips can be made. Also a shopping service can bring back things from the store and car rental can be available in the neighborhood for when the shuttle is not sufficient to meet your needs. In the neighborhood some houses might have garages cars and paved roads some people may choose to live a part of the neighborhood that is free of any traffic apart for some sort of small scale transport system the drops of packages and picks up laundry. Inside the 50 home neighborhoods a another system can move people meals laundry and packages around the neighborhood.
Food 50 cents worth of rice in the field is $10 a pound in the restraint and most of that cost is perpetration cost. Naturally many people will cook for them selves. As I see it there are three basic markets for food that is fast or dele food second economy meals served at meal times ordered in advanced and grommet food custom ordered from individual venders. With food preparation is the big cost and the big opportunity to save by local processing cooked from scratch with one level of market up and reusable packaging and less expensive labor that dose not need personal cars who own their own apartment and enjoy low cost food as well. Coop buying power can cut costs for economy meals but I would suggest carrying no more then say 250 different bulk food selections to keep it simple. Let the store carry the processed food in a big variety that is what they do best. Green houses are not cheap but they can pay for them selves in three ways. First instead of a leach fields green houses water plant for underneath just as the whole earth community earth ships do here in Taos. Second heat pumps grab the ambient heat in spring and fall and to heat homes. Third of course they produce food. Group buying plus a small staff can produce simple economy meals and independent venders and produce gourmet meals while the deli can turn out meals between meals. Food can be delivered to homes or eaten as the community center dele and restaurant. The more people use the systems the more network neighborhoods that work together the more choices the lower the prices with bigger buying power.
Housing as far as I am aware is there is not really any reliable dramatic way to cut the cost per square foot of a home. With networking there are 3 obvious opportunities to cut housing costs. 5 different homes can take advantage of the heat coming from one green house, and a wood chip fired chip furnace while also sharing a septic tank that produces methane. Second by building some homes with soundproof wall and floors that can be subdivided into apartments that can be shared. And third is a matter of making better use of space with furniture that makes better use of space. With shared transport you need a smaller or even no garage. With shared food systems you need a smaller kitchen. With shared laundry you need no personal washer and dryer. With a community center pool hot tub exercise room and with shared housing for your guests you can have a smaller privately owned home. There are a number of possibilities to share utilities and cut street work costs. From my experience there is a lot to gain and yes probably there is some loss as well with shared resources but it is just a mutterer of your priorities as to weather this idea would work for you. Sharing resources can dramatically cut your costs allow you to save and eventual you can own one of every thing you want, I have seen people throw away good appliances and spend hundreds if of dollars to get the right color appliance to have the model numbers match on their washer and dryers machine God only knows what matters to some people and that is find if you can afford it. Again I am look out for those who are short of cash or have better things to do then spend their money just so they can have one of every thing.
I am not trying to tell you what your house should look like have a ten car garage and 5 laundry rooms if you like. The important thing to remember is the fact is the working people; the ones who take care to offer to work on gardens and food systems around where you live, which you may or may not want to use, can have access to an affordable lifestyle. Not every one is cut out to be a doctor or lawyer some one has to do the work and they deserve a living.
I do want you to look at your own health and see how the big difference between the rich and the poor is killing you. In one of the most reveling talks I have ever heard is by Dr. Stephen Bezruchka “on health and wealth” alternative radio.org as he compares the health of countries who take care of every one like Japan and Europe compared to America., Here in the USA we allow the poor to end up with out health care homeless and staving. What a country we have with such leading humanitarians like Arnold Schortwneger trying to eliminate welfare while not razing taxes on millionaires like him self not by one penny. Of course less welfare means more crime more costs more death and suffering but that’s mostly in the ghetto far from where Arnold lives. While the difference in income between the rich and poor is growing here in the good old USA. What we as a society utterly fail to realize is, as we so, so shall we reap, that is every ones health is actually diminished as poverty unemployment and the corresponding crime escalates. We are utterly in denial over our own very real sense of guilt as people in our own extended family are struggling to pay the rent as we buy our new big screen TVs. We think it doesn’t bother us but there is a reason America is the sickest industrial country on earth even though we spend more money on health care then the rest of the planet combined.
In the east one name for the spiritual goal of life is sometimes referred to as liberation. In America the spiritual goal is to keep up appearances or in other words we are absolute slaves to the expectations of others. A wall street journal writer who goes around interviewing the rich finds they all have the same opinion that is if I only have twice as much then I would have enough. We live in a kind of mental poverty right down to that last billionaire. I am telling you until we can stop chasing a hallucination in which we some how achieve the unachievable approval of others and start pursuing something real like a cost effective lifestyle all our problems can do is get worse.
Instead we are running up those debts. There can be no economic recession or depression with out debt. From the consumer side of the equation one way to describe why we fall for and are consumed by every trap the bank and industry sets is we are in our own minds “entitled” to every thing we see on TV. Some say we love money but no one who runs a negative balance on their credit card can be said to love money rather we love the appearance of what money can buy. So here it is, this is the one and only formula for creating freedom and it has never in the entire history of the world easer to achieve. The way to have money is to cut costs increases efficiency and gain access to the market place in order to produce a profit. You invest that profit by buying better tools (not toys) in order to cut furture costs and increase efficiency to produce more profit and this cycle is the one and only cycle that produces progress which is one and the same with the goal called freedom.
I say that it has never been easer because ever minute of every day more information and more effect tools are available to increase ever bit of efficiency and cut every cost in order to increase profits progress and freedom but here is the catch no one can achieve maximum synergy by them selves. Home power, mother new and consumers guide cannot help you make piece with your neighbors in order to produce maximum progress and freedom. To work with others you must abandon the agendas of the left and right and consider what Buddha referred to as the middle way. Virtually all who are rich incorporate or at least cooperates so must any one who wants to get ahead. Only people who can effectively network with are the people living closest to them can be said to be efficient.
Albert H. Lange
4037 NDCBU
Taos, NM 87571
(575) 737-0437
synergy87571@yahoo.com
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