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To: marek_wojna who wrote (70675)	10/25/2008 7:48:22 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Marek, "Grand Control" is a good name for what ails the planet. When I was a child, we had a children's book, "Tweedles Be Brave" about a tribe of monkeys in a forest with a king who wore a crown. I forget the details but one day all the monkeys realized they didn't need a king to be the boss and order them all around and they just played happily each doing what they wanted to do. The king was sad that he was no longer the Big Boss. There are copies for sale still, for $hundreds! I should have kept my trove of comics and such like. Humans do go through sociological cycles so I expect that we'll be back to the doom days again soon enough. WWI, WWII have been done. People will come up with a good idea to have WWIII, though it will be like me being in favour of child torture, meaning I wasn't, but what they do ends up causing WWIII through the Law of Unintended Consequences. My Qi, or maybe Zenbu would be a better name, is not just an imaginary ethereal thing. It is going to be as real as the nose on your face and gold in your pocket [not that you have gold in your pocket necessarily]. It's just that I haven't quite finished the invention process. Yes, Qi is in use in various forms but I mean a very specific form of cold hard fully fungible cash. Mqurice

To: marek_wojna who wrote (70675)	10/25/2008 10:01:10 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 74559

Re Grand Control, I forgot to mention a good example of the principle of Qi in action. In about 1987, a BP Oil colleague in Antwerp [Charles Willoughby] told me about his days at BP Chemicals at Baglan Bay factory. It was a big new place and there were hordes of staff and 3 canteens. To ensure the canteens were not over-loaded management organized a carefully planned roster for each, with people told which one to go to and when. After the system failed to work, with one suffering queues and another under-used, at different times, they decided the plan didn't work and they just left it to everyone to go where they wanted when they wanted. Pretty quickly, everyone was happily using the canteens with no queues or problems. Individuals rapidly figured out when and where would work best for themselves and spread the load. People, being creatures of habit, soon had the place humming with no Grand Control. The central planners could get real jobs. Much the same principle can be applied in many situations. Price discovery is a vital area in which Grand Controllers just love to get involved because they love money and control, but that's about the most useless situation for them. Pricing is a matter of large numbers and individual circumstances at every transaction. No individual, even if armed with supersonic computers and PhD mathematical modelers can do as good a job as individuals representing their own interests. Mqurice