Common Purpose
Slides on the common purpose of fulfilment without harm
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Core Values and a secular God
Slides for the workshop on Core Values and a secular God: A practical course in core values for a meaningful world
Today's Scenario?
"If 1 percent of the population own 90% of all the productive capital and land, and most labour to produce goods and services is done by robots and AI agents then how can the capitalist system work in distributing goods and services across the whole population? Again, how can the 99% of the population gain the goods and services they need to survive if they do not have capital and their labour isn't required in the market?" Gemini 2025-06-18 The scenario you've described, where a tiny fraction of the population owns most of the productive capital and land, and robots/AI perform most labor, presents a profound challenge to the traditional capitalist system's ability to distribute goods and services across the whole population. Here's a breakdown of the issues and potential solutions discussed in economic and futuristic thought: The Core Problem: Lack of Income for the 99% In a traditional capitalist system, income is primarily derived from two sources: Labor: ...
The freedom to be who you are
Interesting little article by Arthur C. Brooks on ' The Link Between Self-Reliance and Well-Being: Individualism is about having the freedom to be who you are '. Here's a short quote: "As a general rule, researchers find that individualism in a country strongly predicts the average level of well-being, even when correcting for life expectancy, access to food and water, and other variables." Ben Wallace Author The Common Purpose LinkedIn - http://nz.linkedin.com/in/benwallace13
Optimal Kanban
It's difficult to find something brief on how to run Kanban efficiently and effectively, so here it is: (I Googled around optimising Kanban sites, collated it and made it more concise): The goal: efficiency transparency continuous improvement shared leadership The process: As a team, set up a Kanban board with To Do, Doing, and Done, and add the tasks for each project on Post-its. Each task should have an estimated time requirement (less than 2 days or break it up) and a team member doing it. Following the initial longer meeting, schedule shorter regular Kanban meetings with the team. Meet daily or every other day in front of the board. Keep the meetings brief (15 minutes should be enough). A moderator, often the project manager or a product manager, facilitates the meeting. The moderator guides the team through the tasks on the board getting a status update for each from the relevant team member. The moderator clarifies what prevents moving a specific task to Done. If ...
'Inheritors of the Earth' Quotations
The subtitle to ' Inheritors of the Earth ', by Chris D Thomas (2018), is 'How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction'. This is a really interesting piece of work. One of the essential points is that biological diversity is increasing regionally even while it is declining globally. This is due to the massively increased migration of species between regions as a result of human migration and trade. And in the longer term - if we preserve a mix of habitats, and assist species endangered in their current habitat to migrate to places where they can thrive - the outlook is for global biodiversity to increase markedly due to greatly increased evolutionary activity, activity that has already started as a result of our far more interconnected, and warmer, world. Here are some salient quotes: "There is no correct state of nature." p19 "Huge numbers of species are thriving in the human-altered world, and we may even be stimulating a mass diversification of new ...