Lev Lafayette's journal

The Earthworker Cooperative, a community-led cooperative, has a debenture system being offered to members - it retains its democratic system of ownership and management, but also allows for members to effectively invest with returns. I've decided to put a few thousand dollars of my savings into this loan scheme and am very interested in exploring the possibility for other cooperative ventures. There is, of course, a good variety of non-capitalist organisational models which are often overlooked from the standard for-profit company; incorporated associations, co-operatives, research agencies, statutory authorities, etc - and as this example shows, they have a variety of ways of raising necessary funds to further their aims.

Speaking of non-profit research agencies, spent a good portion of the last week preparing training material for multiple courses that I'll be running for the University of Sydney later in the near future. Three course books, about 15,000 words a piece, with a fair bit of material derived from previous courses but tailored for the specific software that will be utilised. From what I understand I'll be taking two trips (end of January and March), and somewhere in between that a three-day session at La Trobe University in early February and a three-day session at the University of Western Australia. In less exciting news, we're in the final stage of the review of project management procedures and tools which, in a delicious act of recursion, was a project which I managed in its own right. The procedures a lot more watertight than what we've had previously, mainly following the PRINCE2 framework for governance. The tools section has been left somewhat more varied, which I'm less happy with.

Thursday night was what will probably be the second last session of The Great Pendragon Campaign which dealt primarily with the increasingly strained relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere. Current plans for the next game will be The Laundry Files, which will be a very different style and subject matter. Probably worth mentioning that, following three years or so of recreating this story, on February 1st I'll be giving an address on the subject at the Melbourne Unitarian Church, entitled: The Once And Future King : Mythology and Motivation from the Arthurian Legends.

Had a non-cheesequest event today with ser_pounce and hathhalla, so named as ser_pounce, our maître de fromage, is possibly allergic to lactose! I did however make a safe goat's cheesecake with a berry coulis. We played Hoax, another superb game from that old company, Eon Products, and then Six Billion, whom I once organised a demonstration session with the designer - an excellent if a little complex. We watched the second season of Morel Orel and in the evening caseopaya and I watched Uli Lommel's version of The Raven, a comically bad horror film (but which a reviewer generated a brilliantly appropriate poem)

There has been some elections in Australia recently, in South Australia and Tasmania. In the former, the Labor government has been returned for a third term, albeit with a significant swing against the government. As a result it seems that the Rann government has lost only two seats, despite only receiving 48.5% of TPP - how? Because the swing was non-uniform. In safe Labor seats it was, on average, over 10%, and even in marginal Liberal seats it was almost 9%, but in marginal Labor seats it was a mere 1.6%. In Tasmania, it looks like a hung parliament with a massive 12% swing against the sitting Labor government (split 7% to the Liberals, 4% Greens, 1% other). With their multi-member, proportional representation system counting is still going, but looks like Labor 10, Liberal 9, Greens 4, and independent Andrew Wilkie picking up 1. Sitting Premier David Bartlett is a bloody idiot who is seems prepared to give up government rather than deal with the Greens. So whilst Labor seems to have been returned in both states, it should be a clarion call for other state parties to get their act together and, in particular, work closely with the rising power of the Greens.

On Saturday went to a Socialist Party educational meeting, the sort of thing I hadn't been to for years. It was pretty much orthodox Marxism, and I really should have expected that. As a post/ex-Marxist trouble-maker, I initiated a bit of debate by proposing pragmatisim against materialism in the first session, pointed out the economic calculation problem in the second, and following Luxemburg's dialectic contra-Lenin's "vanguard party" approach in the third. It was particularly interesting that as a nominally Trotskyist party, the Socialist Party seemed unaware that Trotsky supported market relations over all-encompassing plans: Economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations., he wrote. The following day the chief member of the Melbourne branch and Yarra City Councillor, Steve Jolly, was (purely coincidentally) speaking at the Melbourne Unitarian Church about those experiences and the social problems of that area. I took the opportunity to raise with him the idea of the social and economic superiority of site rating for rates, rather than capital improved or net annual value - he has asked me to correspond further on that issue.

On a completely non-related topic many years ago I used to own an Alpha Micro AM-100, passed on from jamesmcparlane. It was a pride and joy for many years being the first computer that I personally owned (yes, I started with a multiuser minicomputer - fate really). I used its version of Pascal to hand in my assignments for Principles of Computer Science (heh, now Java-based) - on paper, as the Control Data 14" metal platter "Hawk" drives would be somewhat inappropriate. Anyway, all this history because some clever puppy has brought out an Alpha Micro Operating System emulator along with scans of plenty of old manuals. It's been quite fun playing around with this emulator, although I do wish I still had my old programs! Such is the joy of "computer archeology".