New Age Pyramids

About: circular key of the trigrams & hexagrams

M 2010-07-03 08:11:58 [item 13993]

There is no hope of financial reform until Congress & the Executive branch get their own houses in order. The public must be able to drill down from a pie chart or some other graphical representation of the budget, expenditures & balance sheet of the U.S. Treasury & in non-accounting, real world names & descriptions know where the money went & what for.

Bills must be passed in a way that they are fully explicit in their financial impacts. Bills must be single purpose not bundles of slush funds to get politicians elected.

The latter points to one of the most egregious practices of government. The purpose of representative government is to handle the most pressing matters of the people which require collective action & investment. Such must not be purposed for politician job security. Just because you can get a bill passed only because you give everyone in the room part of a slush fund & ensure their reelection, another ends justifies the means argument, does not mean that you have done anything good for the people & in most cases you have just wasted more taxpayer money. Compromise & negotiation must always have the people's interests & America's as its highest purpose. Governments can't build bridges nor drill oil wells - they can only hire private enterprise to do such tasks. Taxes buy such tasks with weakened money which has been devalued by the cost of the overhead of governments. Those who falsify the unemployment statistics by saying that some people have given up looking for jobs & therefore not part of the unemployed should join the ranks of the unemployed!

I am adding the following idea to the mix. I believe that the primary reason that the politicians are not connecting with the people is that they are isolated and removed from the people & taxpayers they serve. Literally, they do not KNOW everyone they represent. Some simple math follows:

The population of the US is < 400,000,000
a tree of people each of whom knew 12 other people & those people knew 12 other people etc on down the line would only have to grow to a depth less than 8 to cover the entire population. i.e. 12 to the 8th power is 429,981,696. Other numbers can be calculated. Trees of only 6 people would have to rise to a depth of less than 12.
Another way to say that is that your political power could be 8 degrees of separation from the elected representatives.

While you may feel isolated now, you could be more connected & have your representatives more responsive.

Actually the formula is more like a pyramid club. You have to add one to the formula for yourself in: sum 12^n, n=1 to 8 , i.e.

which is enough to cover the US population. That means you only have to use 8 circles to do the job.
If you find knowing 12 people too hard then perhaps your inner circle might be only 7 people then

, 10 circles deep,which is slightly over the US population. You can experiment more with the links given above. A circle of only two people which models the binary picture in the about link for the item would be about 28 deep as

but concentric circles 27 deep is given by ~~~~~~~~

~~~~

which is less than the US population of

~~~

The point is to look at the numbers of exact representation & then move in the direction of creating something that works better than the stuff of the politics we have now. Apparently wolfram's jpegs only last a little while so I have to scrape the results & store them as jpegs.

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Mark de LA says

For those of you who may not appreciate what can be done with a circle of twelve, you might ponder DaVinci's Last Supper here !

Mark de LA says

seth 2010-07-14 09:25:40 14086

This was not unlike some of the ideas discussed in group kabal which came from the late William Loughborough ... it's a good idea. But i'm not sure how it works in practice or that it would improve on the current stupidity. As you move up the pyramid of power you will get further away from the base. Those who are representing you will always be in a different environment from the people they represent.

The links you provided for Loughborough don't provide anything remotely related to what I am talking about. Perhaps he said things related in the cabal meetings.

Seth says

C says

seth 2010-07-14 09:10:04 14086

i count 13 sitting at the last supper table.

That's the plus one algorithm - they are not all at the same level.

C says

seth 2010-07-14 09:25:40 14086

This is just the numbers part. Nothing said that the power resides in the top or the bottom of the pyramid. Might not even be a pyramid. I am thinking possibly of a facebook or cellphone app. Foaf says that there needs at most be 6 relationships. I want to tease out both what to do with it & how to arrange or gather people to it. Nobody said we needed hierarchical political parties. I like the freeform notion of the tea parties. More later ......

Mark de LA says

Perhaps it is worthwhile to discuss whom you might like in inner circle & what their qualities might be. I was somewhat inspired by this book where in the author, facing terminal cancer, chose some of his male friends & charged them with the responsibility of being father to his daughters if he should die. I watched a couple of shows he was on & he seemed genuine. The ideas transcend the religious context it was provided in. It is an interesting thought. Other possibilities, before politics, would be the Masonic five points of fellowship discussed elsewhere 3936 : Loyal, Active, Worthy, Descreet, & Aspire. I point them out not for any occult reasoning, but without them, spoken or otherwise, any organization is likely to fall apart. I don't particularly care if the people I choose think like me, but I would ask that they hold freedom & the Golden Rule very high in their list of values. This idea transcends politics to the extent that we who would chose to do so could collectively and individually accomplish more than the current government & perhaps even in a less expensive way. What shall we do if current governments go bankrupt or become impossible to deal with?

Seth says

M 2010-07-14 11:51:59 14086

seth 2010-07-14 09:25:40 14086

The links you provided for Loughborough don't provide anything remotely related to what I am talking about. Perhaps he said things related in the cabal meetings.

Yep this was part of his "rap" and i don't know if it was ever documented. It's interesting to note that where it is related to politics, it may be similar to the Communist party committees ... i am not sure about that. I have yet to see any scheme where ad-hoc committees transmit political muscle to the point of actually getting something done such that the will of the grass roots committees are not lost in the must needs pyramiding. Have you?

Me i favor the way this happens the open souce technical arena: anyone can step forward and actually implement anything and those who do, specify the rules. What thrives and survives becomes what works and becomes a defacto standard. Frequently very open discussion by stakes holders precedes implementation. I wish the political arena would find some way of informing itself from the technical arena.

Mark de LA says

PJ-II was an interesting experiment. The notions I remember:

Lead, Follow or Get out of the way
If you want something done you have to do it yourself
A Little Huckleberry Finn - whitwashing the fence (Solstice celebrations etc)
Anyone could lead a meeting - some better than others (You & I)
Some people are better at dealing with external governments than others like the landlord, the city, the fire department & the police.
....

The main point would be to get the government out of the way. In the Gulf, lots of volunteers showed up to clean up the oil & lots of reporters wanted to document it, but were forbidden to do it because the government had to appear to be in charge. The larger the government grows the larger this problem will become. I think that men of good will will eventually do the right things & choose to coordinate their efforts (just as in the open source community). The notion of Open Source Government just springs to mind!! OTOH, you want to remove the word government out of the equation.

Mark de LA says

We both grew up in a family circle of 9. Nine circles of 9 is:

which is greater than the US Population for a while.

Mark de LA says

M 2010-07-16 09:40:36 14086

M 2010-07-16 09:17:10 14086

And to round out the numbers, perhaps 12 circles of 10 is ~ the US NATIONAL BUDGET DEFICIT so far this year:

Sorry, most people don't know what a budget deficit is. -

A budget deficit occurs when an entity spends more money than it takes in.[1] The opposite of a budget deficit is a budget surplus.

So by these numbers it will take more than a trillion people (using the circle of circles model) to pay it off at a $1 each. Obviously when you have only 312 million & considerably fewer tax payers it will shove the circles closer to the center with a higher amount each.

Wikipedia: ... As of 2007, there are about 138 million taxpayers in the United States.[5]

... so as the circles condense each must pick up more of the tab.

is approx 8051.53 each taxpayer.

That means that somewhere between the inner 8 to 9 circles will be the ones to pay or it will be exported to the next generation to pay off the interest.

........

Mark de LA says

As a scary motivation read this blog (all of it!):

TWS - the blog: ... The regulatory and administrative bodies will be spewing regulations faster than BP spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and with as damaging an effect on the business environment as the oil spill has had on the natural environment. Legal experts estimate that the good senator’s finreg bill will require eleven different regulatory agencies to write 243 new rules, with the Securities and Exchange Commission accounting for 95 of them. Many of these rules will run more than 100 pages; all will be drafted far from the annoying glare of public scrutiny. A job creation scheme for lawyers, lobbyists, and bureaucrats – not for the American people writ large.

...

Basically, the out of control Congress has been passing 2000+ page laws leaving the details for later since if they were passed in the open & complete they would never pass. As a WTF, for example, the stimulus bill apparently has a requirement to track in a universal medical records database the BMI, an obesity measure, of everyone in the country by 2014. The new healthcare czar who was recently appointed without congressional oversight, who believes in rationing, could possibly use this statistic to refuse you healthcare in the future. With congress doing business in this style, unelected regulators will be controlling aspects of our lives that have nothing to do with the Constitutional limits imposed on government by the founders; your freedoms are at stake.

Mark de LA says

seth 2010-07-17 05:34:43 14086

What is the significance of the regularity of these pyramid formulas? Why impose a numeric regularity on circles of friends? Would not these circles naturally spread out with each one of them being a different number .... a circle of 5 ... connected to a circle of 8 ... connected to a circle or 12 ... to a circle of 5 ... etc ... ??

You are right, this is mostly an amusement on my part to try to grok the large numbers. I could have used some other kind of pyramid. In fact a person might belong to many different circles naturally. It is one of the ideas that drives MLM (multi level marketing) or chain letters. It is a suggestion for an upper bound on the numbers. As with 9027 it's hard to imagine numbers in the billions & trillions. I am about done doing it for now.

Mark de LA says

The notion of an adhocracy showed up today.

Wikipedia: ... Adhocracy is a type of organization being antonymous to bureaucracy. The term was first popularized in 1970 by Alvin Toffler [1], and has since become often used in the theory of management of organizations (particularly online organizations), further developed by academics such as Henry Mintzberg

...

Mark de LA says

A picture of the above may crisp it up!

Mark de LA says

This is probably equally apropos to Sticky Cyber Molecules (SCM) as well as the interaction of groups of which this item is a part. Perhaps, in the former explaining why the molecules are sticky.

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex

New Age Pyramids

About: circular key of the trigrams & hexagrams

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