[p2p-research] thinking about leapfrogging

[Josef Davies-Coates]

2008/10/5 M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net>:
> - if you stick to p2p and local small scale, you may be sitting on the
>  greatest titanium (or gallium, since it's about semiconductors) mine
>  in the world, and still it wouldn't do you any good, because to make
>  useful and usable stuff out of raw Gallium you'd need a whole
>  state-of-the-art factory like the Fab36 quoted in the article. The
>  day when it will be possible to cook an Athlon multi-core CPU like
>  cookies, in a kitchen oven from raw materials, I'll be the first to
>  cheer, any basic research of that kind has my blessing, but until
>  that day it doesn't make sense to ignore the limits.


Most people I know who are p2p advocates (including me) get around
this by assuming that it is totally within the realms of reality that
(before we can print anything, if we ever can) a large co-operative
venture (perhaps between small local p2p producers) could actually get
a state-of-the-art factory like the Fab36 quoted in the article.

We might not agree with the tax system that generates funds huge gov't
projects (for much of it is utter madness) but there is nothing about
reality that stops large communities of people mutually agreeing to
pool money/capital/time/resources on a similar scale.

Mondragon might not be as p2p as some would like:
http://www.mcc.es/ing/estructura/estructura.html
http://www.mcc.es/ing/quienessomos/modelo/index.html

but they are 7th largest business group in Spain and have their own
Universitys etc:
http://www.mcc.es/ing/forminves/fi.html

In 2007 the Co-operative Group in the UK had an annual turnover of
£9.4bn and 87,000 employees serving around 10 million customers a week
through food, healthcare, travel, funeral care and financial services.

These examples might not be pure p2p, but there are very much closely
aligned and demonstrate to me (in the same way linux and wikipedia do)
the scalability of co-operation :)

But since I'm tired and I think I'm replying to off-list cc's and wiki
posts I've not seen I may have completely missed the point. In which
case, apologies in advance :)

Josef.

-- 
Josef Davies-Coates
07974 88 88 95
http://uniteddiversity.com
Together We Have Everything