Under debate

And a real-live-person DTD is critical to ensure that anyone who participates in an extremely offensive production process (or is clearly responsible for spreading something like SARS and contributing to a major crisis now affecting all humans) can be excluded across all of a buyer's purchasing decisions, regardless of what facade companies or front groups are in use for them to hide behind. A small number of individuals tend to be involved in decisions that lead to Indonesian rainforest devastation, or similar problems in Brazil and Congo. These people must be identified and very reliably targetted so that their participation becomes poisonous to any commercial effort anywhere in the world, and others get the message that they will economically suffer if their name is linked in any way to ecologically devastating activity.

Whoa. Hold your horses.

If your going to start pinpointing people out you have to be totally sure the information is correct otherwise you're going to end up spending more time in courtrooms then sleeping.
- Yup. But this is all the more reason to make sure that you truly have a reliable way to attach all information about a person, to one object, so that mistaken identity does not occur. Liability is less of an issue than you think, there are many who will volunteer to go bankrupt to destroy someone else's reputation, typically students who are about to go bankrupt anyway to avoid student loans. This is financial equivalent of suicide bombing and it is becoming more popular. There are even (quiet) seminars in how to do it! - X
- When NGOs name someone, probably, they have done this research already. Since they are targetted often for lawsuits, they are more careful about it than us.-X
If you want to create the mother of all boycotts, you should figure out how to boycott capital, not people. It's utopia but we're trying to figure out if it's possible. see Research.
- Naive. I think it's not possible: Capital doesn't think. Capital doesn't feel. Capital can simply ooze around to do something else with itself. A body of capital is just too amorphous and fungible to attack. It's the people that must be targetted - certainly the sociopathic ones - because they have bodies they cannot so easily escape consequences. Which is most of the point. - X

Let me explain:

Company X is doing some evil
Find out who are the owners of X and what companies X is doing business with
Find out the owners' other holdings
Aggregate the boycott to those other companies too (wishful thinking: and let the owners know why their stock is plunging)
Iterate steps 3. and 4. untill you're picking berries, mushrooms, roots and hunting game with wooden spears ;)

--Juxo 13:08 Apr 14, 2003 (EEST)

- LOL! Very good algorithm, there should be a page just on that! But usually it is managers, not owners, who control companies, owners rarely know or use the tools they have in different countries to find out. w:John Kenneth Galbraith is now writing a book on how managers take the power from owners. w:Peter Drucker said it decades ago. w:Ralph Nader talks about it a lot. Financial privacy laws in bank havens make 'find the owners' and 'find other holdings' nearly impossible. Then communicating 'why stock is plunging' is difficult and subject to spin. Very likely this will produce far too many effects that disadvantage owners, and activists, and government, and not enough that disadvantage brokers, or managers, who are the real scum to be targetted, who make the actual decisions. If we want to talk about primitive justice, then, for every dead chimp roasted over a fire in Africa because of someone managing from a desk in Europe, why not roast their dog on their front lawn? Then sharpen the knife as you look at their kid. There must be some iterative feedback that strikes direct to the body, creates fear, or else - nothing. - X

Evil is not a rational decision. It is usually just a banal avoidance of the truth that adds up. To make people feel truth requires more than just 'why' - X

X is saying that to expose "Evil" acts by companies we need markup specialised to describe "Evil" acts:

this requires EvilML

No it doesn't. It requires well known commentators, and campaigners that stick more-or-less with m:TIPAESA principles

Yes but... (also realize that "Issue" can be expanded into say Ecoregion/HarmBeingDone/ActivityDoingThatHarm" and then Position taken on how to end it - so "I" can expand)... and more important how we use the information:

) Start a boycott on the company doing the harmful things and it's associates (Importer, Advertisement agency... whatever you can think of)

How many *seconds* can I do it in? If it takes *minutes* then that's not good enough, since a new company can be started in minutes.

) Send them feedback telling you'll pull out of the boycott the second they stop doing what is annoying you

Irrelevant. They are too stupid to understand the issue or they would not be doing it to begin with. One does not try to change company behavior. One has to wipe companies out of existence with no chance to recover, so fast that any competitor realizes they must behave perfectly, or also be wiped out. No mercy, no negotiating. The purpose of a boycott is to destroy a company or a regime.

You cannot take bad people and make them good people by negotiation or force. Once a company exists its DNA is set, it can only be replaced not "fixed". Like any other lower animal...

) Start an endorsment on it's companies providing replacement products for the evil company's products

Here there is room for negotiation. And more complex transaction than just "don't buy", it could be a number (of cents more you pay for a tolerable product), or it could actually direct you to anothe product that is a best price/morality tradeoff. Then you are talking about more than a binary destroy/not outcome.

and the infrastructure to transport their information to consumers. Then it's up to the consumers to communicate their feelings to producers with words or wallets or both.

Still requires my personal morality, idea of "evil", to be expressed in XML so that things I consider evil can turn on "green light" or "red light" on the shelf. The fact that I considered but did not buy from that seller can be communicated directly, or later with details, or never. Up to me. But I am not reading or writing an essay for every single purchase. I want to pre-load preferences and never see things that don't satisfy requirements online, and on the shelf, I want just the "OK/not" (i.e. "buyable/EVIL") signal.

Well. Either you have to choose some authority you trust (let me take a wild guess: Greenpeace) and let them decide on this matter or you can browse all available information and make decisions yourself.

No, no one can possibly "browse all available information" except for a few very major purchases, and even if the do that the information comes from some source. No reason why Greenpeace or some other organization committed to total transparency (see their "Open Campaigning" model, state of the art) cannot make it easy to simply see how their recommedations are made, and adjust some parameters to arrive at your own.

Once you've been through all the information and made some evaluation of the product in case you'd propably like markup that allows you to become the authority for other people that choose to trust you instead of using their time to go through all the information.

Yes, sure, for instance, I would focus on the Great Ape issue out of all Greenpeace campaigns, and be so good at that that this would make me the only one worth negotiating with when time came for companies doing nasty things to apes were brought to their knees. That would make me "ambassador for the apes". Someone else would do it for dolphins, for Hawaii, for fresh water used by poor mothers in Africa, etc., whatever scope they could handle. It is all about this capacity to trust and be trusted, that is "social capital". And yes it creates hierarchies, but only by the effort of becoming nearly perfect on that one question of how best to protect that otyhpe of life.

Really, we all do this anyway when we trust our mother, or our grocer, or any local supplier. See w:Slow Food for best examples.

Hey 142.177.X.X, I'll get back to you and our sysop might buy you a McFlurry of your choice when:

A) You've managed to create the following article in Wikipedia: w:Formal method for evaluating and quantifying ethicality and morality of human actions

Done.

Hmmm. Care to do a product substitution on that Kit-Kat McFlurry to something not so capital intensive. (Small is beautiful and economic even if the ppl with buying power decide so) How about a cup of organic, fairly traded coffee?

and

B) Managed to keep it from appearing in w:Wikipedia:Votes for deletion for 59 seconds without resorting to DDoS

I counted one full minute (60 seconds), and then came here to tell you.

Other Trolls are also invited to attempt the above.

Yes please do! It is probably the most important subject in the world if we are going to have w:international law that works.

If someone succeeded in this it would advance our cause a lot. We would just have to code the algorithm, insert data and then wait for the computer to tell us who should we blame.

Or at least, scare that worst person into handing over all assets to a foundation to save poor scared monkeys from big bad abstractions.

Abstractions?

About m:person_DTD

I'm moving this stuff about m:person_DTD here, because Consumerium project needs to be pragmatic and sensible,

you are making it useless, not pragmatic, not sensible, by ignoring this and making it impossible to target people or groups who get away with horrors.

which in my mind means for one thing that we are not going to get 100% accurate information in the system most of the time.

you don't need it, balance of probability is fine in a weighted decision. if all I get out at the end is a 'buy or don't buy' or 'try substitute' decision then I don't even have to reveal the data involved.

The key to pulling this whole project off is that we have to convince people that we TRY to provide them reasonably reliable information and the possibility of disinformation is something that people should keep in mind, but not let it bother them too much. Otherwise we might just as well be trying to modify lottery machines to run nuclear power plants --Consumerium 20:15 Apr 25, 2003 (EEST)

this makes no sense to me at all - you stop disinformation by reducing the total number of data items you use and focusing strictly on those, making it easy to dispute what is said about those, NOT by having a lot of data. to focus on people more than processes reduces the data items and makes the whole process more reliable.

persons

m:person_DTD

This type of control-freakish markup is shunned by many wikipedians for understandable reasons, where as disinfopedians and some NGOs like it.

As for what I think is that this is way overkill for our purposes. Gender, Birthyear, Nationality, Employer, Profession and perhaps some contact info should be quite adequate for employees, campaigners and commentators. Anonymous Cowards can of course be dismissed as nobodys more easily then someone who has GnuPG or commercially signed identities. Consumers naturally can reveal as little or much about themselves as they wish. --Juxo 23:21 Apr 15, 2003 (EEST)

However much or how little you record about a person, it would be useful to make sure that the tag-names don't conflict with more general uses. For instance Nationality can mean Birthplace, it can mean Citizenship, it can mean Ethnicity. So Nationality is a bad tag name. Employer? Some people have many, or none. Profession? Not standard across all countries, better to record degrees and certifications, say as Credential. And all can be multiple. And how to remain Anonymous while still revealing credentials, so called Blind Credential is very important.

Good points above.

Identifying individual people unambiguously is more controversial, a two-edged sword. Some activists like Amnesty and Greenpeace do it often, for what they consider clear moral purposes. Other projects like Wikipedia have less clear purposes and thus less excuse for "outing" or "shaming". This is not an easy issue for consumerium:

On the one hand certain individuals like person X and person Y are engaged in a vast number of unpopular activities, and many would choose to have nothing to do with an enterprise that they profited from. Being sure that the activity is associated with them is impossible without some clear way of identifying individuals and their interests - there is danger that innocents will be targetted if identification is not clear. On the other hand, there is reason to fear "witchhunts" and "dossiers" on ordinary individuals, and automation of person-tracking and identification certainly makes this easier.

However, some means of standardizing references to persons seems to be underway in some projects, e.g. wikipedia, anyway. Consumerium may not be able to igore them. There are also reasons to identify "noble" individuals for merit or recognition, e.g. disinfopedia's naming of reliable sources e.g. James Speth. This can be important to validate information to be used in buying decisions, e.g. as the 'authority' in TIPAESA structures.