Talk:Life exchange

A life exchange is like a stock exchange in that buying 'shares' in it is accepting some risk to some life, that you consider worth paying to protect - just as shareholders accept some risk to money when they buy into a company.

Buy? Shares? Who sells them? Where can I buy them?

Right now you do it by donating, and you get maybe prestige for that. Separate from that you can bet on it by buying derivative products based on insurance portfolios, that can be made easier...

Derivatives on insurance porfolios? I understand all the words but I've never seen this type of instrument. (We're a bit behind in this capitalist game here in Finland. eg. We just got our first real-estate lease-back offerings here.) Care to explain? What kind of derivatives you mean. Reverse (lever) instruments (mmm... sell futures that is I think) on wicked evil stock portfolio X is an interesting idea, that's crossed my mind. That would yield gains to the campaigner if one would make a really killer boycott and bought into betting the stocks will fall. Is this what you mean?

Yes.

Shares and options and futures and other instruments can be created to mirror the various risks to life that campaigns are trying to protect. To buy in to a campaign, you can either buy a share in the campaign (which is a bet that the campaign will increase the value of the life affected by the activity that the campaign targets, which you consider worth doing for itself - like a tradeable donation) or in some derivative of the campaign (like a fixed deadline at which point the success of the campaign in raising the value of some life will be assessed and you will be paid some premium for predicting that rise).

Premium? Premium from what? Where does the money come from? What does a campaign have to do with money? Campaigns are about opinions and facts to convince other people that the opinion is constructive.

In my experience that takes at least seed funds to get things done on a schedule. Premium can be paid by those betting on the rise, see w:prediction market, e.g. [1]. This is well understood territory now. US government even using it as part of w:Total Information Awareness. So they consider this more reliable than paying billions for spying and satellites.

A combination of the two approaches makes donations and bets on the success of the campaign work together more closely, and provides accurate feedback on probability of success: betters don't care if the campaign succeeds so their bets tell you objectively what the odds are to see if you are impressing or scaring anyone with the campaign; shareholders do care if the campaign succeeds because they get prestige and possibly a payoff of some kind out of it.

Prestige. Perhaps, but it's more about putting our heads together and figuring out how to slow down or stop negative cycles and accelerate positive ones.

I'd say it's more about does the red light or the green light go on, when you swipe the products on your supermarket shelf or boyfriend's cupboard? That is the point of the Greenpeace link, - which *is* about bar codes being used to decide if you approve of something, as I said.

So, betting on/against campaigns reveals price of life, buying shares in them increases price of life that the campaign is pointing out the bad effects to.

Is this english?

Better: "Betting on or against campaigns reveals the prevailing price of life. Profits from this betting are rewards for guessing it accurately. Buying shares in campaigns gives them the funds to increase price of certain life forms - by bidding for them if they are for sale, or by giving them access to some resources, or pointing out to those harming them that they are doing so."

But what does it mean to accept a risk to life, or increase the value of life? These concepts are used in insurance and economics all the time and are not even controversial. When you buy an insurance policy, for instance, that means an insurance company has accepted some risk to your quality of life or duration of life. If you get hurt or die, the value of your loved ones in the economy goes down, because they do not have access to your labour or love any more - they have to buy things to replace it - therefore they get paid something. The insurance company has kept their value and quality of life higher than it would be.

Well that is a pretty gloomy statement. Love is not a commodity. "The only way to get real love for your money is to buy a puppy." (old polish proverb). I hear there are good bucks in the assasination business. Ever consider that for a living?

See w:assassination market and w:assassin. Well covered territory and the best explained example of this logic:

Price of life is more difficult to explain, but it comes from the fact that many decisions are based on budgets and limits. There is not infinite money to pay for ambulances, road safety, crime prevention, medical research, bridge building, so, at some point a decision is made that "5 minutes ambulance response time is enough" or "20 tons of bridge gross tonnage is enough" or "10% of doctors' time spent on medical ethics training is enough". That means that the person who lives in 4 minutes but dies in 5, who drives the 21-ton truck over the bridge, and would have been saved if the doctor had spent 11% of his or her time learning not to deal out drugs that the drug company suggested, now are dead. Their life was valued deliberately lower so that others could be saved by spending the time or money somewhere else.

There are people living in places where there are no roads, bridges, ambulances or pharmacies. 5 minutes is a good response time IMHO.

Sure but someone has to decide that, and whoever says it will not be 4 minutes has cost a certain number of lives, presumably, to spend that same money to save them elsewhere. Every professional decision implies putting price on life - auto design decisions are good examples. No one likes to admit it of course! Military does it kind of honestly, how much for the plane, how much for the pilot, etc..

There is a lot of research on how these prices are set on individuals, whole ecologies (like the rainforest), the whole planet (one study by w:Robert Costanza showed that the Earth provided 1995$US33Trillion in services to humans every year, thus it must have a value in the quadrillions of dollars), and how changing certain decisions changes that price of life for everyone.

Ok. I believe this but did he research how much of this GGP comes from renewable and unrenewable resources? That would be an interesting fact.

Not really, the w:natural capital theory says it doesn't matter as much as people used to think. Mostly because substitutes are found for anything that is unrenewable. Focus should be on ecology risk. See Talk:GGP for sources.

Interesting research into ecological aspects of production can be found at http://www.factor10-institute.org/MIPSlong.htm MIPS stands for Material Input Per Service Unit. Friedrch Schmidt-Bleek has written some interesting books about it. His view is that energy is not a issue but material displacement is.

Energy and material are two of four big issues [2] here.

But this price is never the same worldwide. The International Panel on Climate Change calculated that in the developing world a human life was worth only 1/15 in cash what it was worth in the developed world - this was used to calculate numbers in the Kyoto Protocol. So there is official sanctions on how to do this calculation in some circumstances.

Climate change and price of human life? Post a link please.

Lots of great stuff [3] <-- 'value of life' campaign especially detailed arguments and responses by climate change scientists.

But even if you think globally you must act locally. When you buy tuna in the grocery store, if you will pay even an extra penny for tuna that is "dolphin - safe" then you have raised the price of a dolphin life by quite a bit. It becomes more profitable to go dolphin-safe and charge you that extra penny, than to kill dolphins and charge you a penny less. Life exchanges would let you bet that the price of dolphin life is going up not down, and profit from that. If a lot of people bet that it is staying the same or going down, then, that will be noticed by campaigners. Then they can start a campaign to raise it, and those who bet it will stay down (while there was no campaign) can shift bets into the shares the campaign, which is a bet on its success, and contributes to success.

Profit?? Otherwise I agree.

Profit is fine in green economics systems, debt is the worst problem. It is not a bad thing to reward those saving life or giving you accurate prediction - this lets them do more of it. It is a bad thing to demand that someone who has failed to make something work now have to "try harder" to pay back the money lost. Religions hate debt for good reason, they have no problem with profit. If there is no profit motive (higher price to save dolphins thus more profit for selling better turn) why should it work? You are trying to fit in a commercial buying and selling system, so, profit has to exist in *some* form.

The same logic lets you buy an acre of rainforest, or give money to educate a child, both of these increase the price the economy puts on that life halfway across the world.

Buying things to preserve them? hmm...

Seems to be the standard. Presumably buying choices express morality, thisis just the bluntest way to say it. See [4] for best detailed arguments on this. Human capital can have a price too, if this is right.

Some economists think that commodities and products are both bad ideas, that everything is services, and that all exchanges will be life exchanges in the future. In this world, you will basically bet obstacles out of your way that prevent you from having the quality of life you want for yourself and life that you care about. You will bet that the money you made by giving up some time of your life, can create more than that much time in the life of those you care about. The movie w:Pay It Forward was about exactly this kind of idea, and is highly recommended for those who want to deeply understand life exchange.

hmm...

Hmm. This is a bit radical and I don't fully understand it, propably a Troll.

What sysops do not understand is always a troll, by definition. See this

[5]

I have to digest this for a little while. I've read that the human body would be worth a buck or two if it were sold as atoms,

That's "commodity" level. It's worth way more if sold as living organs on eBay. But that is a "product" way of calculating, not really right either. All ways of looking at life other than as services is "gross" probably. ;-D

but let's not get into that ... it'll just disgust people, which is rarely constructive. Juxo 19:46 Apr 14, 2003 (EEST)

142.177.X.X please get a username. Don't be worried about the cookies. Your operator can propably track you, have you cookie or not.

Sorry, I don't do usernames, I consider them counter-productive. I'll answer you concerns above, and it's up to you to decide if this is what you meant by "trading" campaigns (your term not mine). If not, no big deal, you can use the research your own way. But I don't see how you are going to govern a process of purchase-relevant information if you don't have some kind of governance for discussion that is not just 'I do not get it therefore it is a troll'. You may like to review some of the more rational writing about governing wikis, e.g.

[6] [7], [8].

I read the diff on this and it's slowly starting to make sense. Campaigners don't get any money, they get a chance to convince people to use their purchasing power in a constructive and less harmful way, whereas companies that are quicker to adapt to the needs and desires of the (information enhanced) marketplace grab profits.

Yes, exactly, the smarter companies will haunt this wiki and will run ads emphasizing their acceptability. See discussion of "brand, flag and label" issue at w:intellectual capital (really quite useful for terminology). The company that goes "organic" or "vegan" or "kosher" beats those that don't to the market. So this is about having perhaps up to six billion such labels (one per person!)

But beyond that, people can bet on the success of these companies and the failure of those that ignore the w:moral purchasing issue. If you are directy involved in that, e.g. by running somehing like Ideosphere or HSX, you can get the information before anyo else, and encourage the most experienced PR people to feed you free data - in return for which they get prestige, and each other's money (selling bets to each other like any derivative market).

e.g. If using textiles (which make up 8% of GGP) produced in dignified work places suddenly became highly fashionable, then those manufacturers who have invested in making their factory a nice place to work in would cash-in on the rising demand. Juxo 22:49 Apr 14, 2003 (EEST)

Right, exactly. Also, those who invested in those manufacturers win, and those who "shorted" sweatshops using some instruments you can run in coordination with prediction markets, or regular brokers, also win. The more ways to focus information and scrutiny, the more people who have an interest in the new life-protecting or life-advancing product line. In the past labels like "union made" or "organic" or "vegan" have caught on in exctly this way.

You catch on fast! Soon you will not be a sysop but a full-fledged troll!

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This is closely related to the bet issues being discussed at Talk:The Consumerium Exchange - one might say there is TCE and the LE here...