Rural Innovation

Rural area innovation depends upon the local context. Best areas of innovation meet local needs concerning land ownership, water supply, waste removal and recycling, available natural resources, supplies, local sales markets, transportation, remote sales markets, storage, vendor services available and needed, the labor market, the capital market, banking, and a myriad more.

Wisconsin Farm

The humans of a rural geographic polygon hold interests in common. Consider the application of the cooperative business model within a rural area. The book “Newland 2084” covers the application of co-operatives to human problems like solving poverty.

Why choose the co-operative business model? It offers many advantages and capabilities.

1. Money and money management. The co-operative business model is the best way to handle money and money management. Every member gets a vote on money matters overseen by the treasurer. The money flow is made transparent to the members which reduces the risk of corruption
2. Time and time management. There is cooperative business to be done that demands human time. The pool of available human time is the cooperatives greatest resource and it needs to be managed well. The time accounting records are made transparent to the members which encourages honesty and fairness.
3. Facilities and equipment. The co-operative may provide shared facilities and equipment to its members. Financing of facilities and equipment becomes a shared responsibility.
4. Supplies and products. Co-operative members must decide on and manage suppliers and vendors. Products must be delivered to market and sold to customers.
5. Social media expertise helps in handling procurement, sales, public relations, and fund raising activities.

In all of these areas and more, the social community that emerges in a co-operative demonstrates to all concerned that nobody has to go it alone.

Carbon Gasification

Big picture goals for human civilization upon earth include how we handle carbon. How much carbon do we bring to the earth’s surface? Where do we stash carbon when it is not in the atmosphere? These are decent questions. Intellectual spins to the contrary the truth is simple to understand.

To remove CO2 from the atmosphere plant trees. BTU is the measure of energy. The USA uses about 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy from carbon resources every year. The best place to sequester excess carbon is in plastic. Gather up CO2 and feed it to methanogen bacteria. Produce methane. 

If you want to do the most that you can for a rural area, it would be to install carbon gasification capabilities for breaking carbon sources down  into individual carbon atoms and then recombining them into fuels, polymers, and plastics. The ash remaining from the final carbon extraction process is fine grained ash useful in ceramics and cement.

Build a carbon gasification campus for a community of 12,000 humans. Produce product dimethyl ether DME and watch the boutique cooperative industries that will emerge around polymers. Local community supplies of sticky polymers to glue stuff together and create beautiful composites. DME burns as clean diesel. As the final form of the carbon atom flow onto the earth’s surface consider the value of plastics to USA society.

Besides is utility value, plastic serves as the ultimate sequestration sink of carbon. The carbon is easily recovered by using gasification back to DME. This creates a local community closed cycle carbon flow system.

Back to planet earth and what is innovative in rural areas. Get some skilled idea people together in a co-operative. Put them to the task of imagining a rural area connected to the internet with local idea people, innovators and entrepreneurs, figuring out how to build a boutique plastics industry around the polymer and plastic output of carbon gasification and participation in the DME economy.

Jobs To Survive

Quora question and my answer.

Imagine a world where no one has to have a job to comfortably survive. What activities would we invent to infuse our lives with meaning and structure?

In a future utopian world, where no one has to have a job to comfortably survive, is ambiguous in the phrase “no one has to have a job” which implies a choice of whether or not jobs exist and one can have one. The word “comfortable” would be measured in whose estimation? According to what criteria?

Clearly some number of humans have to work at jobs in order to make sure the undesirable jobs get done and, more important, to make sure dangerous and risky work like mining be done by the remote control of an experienced operator. Cops have to break up domestic conflicts. People get sick and need surgery. There is critical work that must be done. Spreadsheet estimates place the amount of human time consumed by essential of education, health care, and elder care services to be one third of the time available. The remaining two thirds is for everything else.

Entrepreneurs would still have ideas and want to build businesses to fill time and make money. Does money even need to exist? Maybe all we need to keep track of is human time. Your value to society of one hour of your time is one hour times your value multiplier, based on education, experience and age. People are going to entertain one another. Plays need to be written. Movies will still need to be made. Producers create products for which consumers will pay money.

Life will change with each passing generation. There will always be new fads to enthrall us. We will live in a world of plastic objects printed by 3D printers. We do this today. We will make composite materials many times stronger than steel. The amount of carbon brought to the earth’s surface is immaterial provided, the carbon is sequestered in plastic. Putting carbon into the atmosphere has its side effects. Therefore the future will be in polymers, plastics, composites, and high quality ash from carbon gasification.

If those who live in those utopian days have the free time implicit is the question. What they will the do to fill their allotted time of life with very much what we would do if we had more time and we didn’t have to work for wages to pay the bills.

1. Personal health and happiness
2. Family, friends, and meeting new people
3. Education
4. Producing and consuming works of art
5. Lowering the hassle factor of life
6. Volunteering for community, national, and international public service
7. Making enough money to travel to far away places to make great movies and photographs for internet slide shows.
8. Have a travel blog that has a following and earns lots of income

If money needs to exist then people can borrow enough money to meet minimalist basic needs, education, and medical needs at 0% interest. The loan is paid it back through a lifetime of work. I wrote about this idea in “Newland 2084”. The book elaborates on the premise that people arrange themselves into cooperatives where they aggregate skills, premises, equipment, materials and go into business. One member one vote. Compensate people for time. Divide profits fairly.