The feudal period yielded to The Enlightenment.

It had to.

Also, I love the attached image. I think it's an unmanned supply capsule for the space station?

Dear DK,

Cheers!

Mieke

Dear DK,

Thanks for the insight and great work, perfect timing as always, more thoughts later. I think we need to change the way the game is played.

This story I just finished writing may be relevant:

▐Flawed game reveals shocking revelation!▐

I invented a new board game; it actually uses a small computer program in conjunction with the board, cash and player pieces. Our intention was to put the computed part on a small hand held device that would allow it to be played without requiring a computer. The game was designed based on a real life model and after we started playing it the very unexpected happened the game had a hidden flaw we never would have anticipated.

When I was young I played both the game of Monopoly and Life, we would play for hours, I liked them but realized they were by themselves incomplete. So I created “The Game of Money” which could be described as a combination of the board games Life and Monopoly.

Thanks to technology we were able to compliment the game with a way to do interest calculations and track transactions and produce random “life” events both beneficial and detrimental. If the players had to do all the calculations the game would have been more like a job and just like in reality all left brained work should be done by computers.

The game starts out with the players rolling dice to see what roles they would play. One player gets to be the Banker; the other players become property owners and get a service role like doctor, plumber, energy producer, farmer, insurance agent etc. What we did not realize is that the initial dice roles determined the winner of the game. So at the start of the game everyone except the banker owns property, there is a small amount of undeveloped property controlled by the government. Just like in real life the Central Bank controls the symbol for value exchange and creates money out of nothing, it is simply an accounting entry in the game computer, yet still a valid service. Just like in real life the banker charges interest on the use of the symbol. Services are paid for in game cash, green backs and large transactions are done electronically just like in real life.

So in the beginning of the game all the property owners must put up some property as collateral and the Banker loans them money to be able to play the game. The other players trade services and try to develop their land and the land owned by the government which becomes available as a result of legislation events.

The winner of the game is to first to own all the property and have everyone paying you rent. The first thing we ran into when playing is that it took on average 16 hours of game play to finish a game.

The second problem was that after playing it 12 times an unchanging pattern emerged much to our dismay, the Banker always won the game. At first we could not figure out why this would be. What good is a game if whoever gets to play banker wins? What was also interesting it that if we kept playing the game past the point where one player owned all the tangible assets.

So we analyzed the transactions and what we found is that initially the banker loans all the players an amount of $10,000 each and the players put up the property they own as collateral. The players each must pay back 10% interest each time they circle the board and pass the “New Beginning” space which is like “GO” in Monopoly. Each trip around the board represents a year in the player’s life and there are actually 365 squares.

The problem with the game design is that the Banker never actually creates the dollars needed to pay back the interest. The Banker only provides the amount of the principle to the players and this is the only money that is put into circulation. What happens is the players need to pay back more money than they have in their combined possession. For example 10 players combined have 100,000.00 but need to pay back 110,000.00.

This is where the real fun of the game starts! If we do the math it is impossible for the all the players, to pay back the interest owed to the bank So they start competing with each other fighting over the available money sort of like musical chairs. So when the music stops and principle and interest is due invariably one of the players comes up short and loses their collateral (their property). The game doesn’t end there though because the banker can loan them money to buy back their property putting them further into debt. After about 16 hours the bank owns the deed on all board property and all the players are all deep in debt. We found though that if we continued playing the banker eventually loses as well because of a transactional mess and hyper inflation. So the Banker in reality starts out with nothing and ends up with everything.

The most unsettling thing is the game is modeled after real life and that is why it was a disturbing revelation.

We are still thinking that we may still sell the first edition game as a practical joke. We wonder how long it will take people to figure out the banker always wins!

The good news is that we figured out a solution to make the game work we replaced the intangible backed currency units with tangible asset backed multiple currency type units, one of them based on energy. The new problem is that none of the players have been able to win after playing the game over 102 hours it may have become a never ending game with no winners or losers, like in Infinite Play the Movie. I wonder how long people will play the second edition game before they realize that nobody can win which is the same as saying everyone wins because they are playing for the fun of play, not to win.

Interesting concept, Richard Thomas. However, missing the inclusion new players throughout the course of the game (our kids).

Try the game again adding new players all the while. I'd be curious to see its outcome.

Even funnier, have a random trigger (a certain roll or something) called Death.

My guess would be is that as long as the rate of growth of the number of players is always increasing, everyone wins.

Observations..

A third giant red spot has recently appeared on Jupiter. A second one appeared in 2006. The first is thought to have been there for 300 years.

The general opinion is that the third red spot’s presence is caused by a series of intense climate changes in Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere.

A powerful, five-month-long storm continues to rage on Saturn, making it the planet's longest continuously observed tempest. Scientists suspect the storm ultimately draws its amazing power – producing lightning bolts 10,000 times as strong as those on Earth – from the planet's own internal heat.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Forecasters said Saturday that at least a dozen tornadoes spun across western and central Kansas a day earlier, destroying numerous homes, downing trees and injuring several people.

The National Weather Service in Dodge City said there were at least 10 twisters that touched down in central Kansas, while the Goodland office reported seven or eight in the western part of the state.

Meanwhile in Colorado, where a large tornado devastated the northern farm town of Windsor, residents were expected to return to their homes in an area of town that officials had earlier deemed unsafe following Thursday's twister.

Natural gas leaks and the threat of explosions had kept hundreds of residents from their homes on Friday.

Officials were meeting with residents to plan their return, incident management team spokesman Dan Hatlestad said. "With no power, it may be an unpleasant place to live, but it's up to the homeowners," Hatlestad said.

The tornado, with wind speeds between 111 mph to 165 mph, tore through a 35-mile stretch of northern Colorado, killing one person and injuring dozens. It tipped 15 rail cars off the tracks in Windsor, about 70 miles north of Denver.

Snow after 90 degree weather?

Wild weather blasts Southern California
LOS ANGELES — A new round of stormy weather Friday sent mud oozing down some Sierra Madre streets and covered some mountain communities with blankets of snow. Lightning flashed across the Mojave Desert and rain was falling in many areas, making for a rare, soggy start to a Memorial Day weekend in Southern California.
Mountains and foothills recorded 1 to 2 inches of rain since Thursday and it was falling heavily at times Friday, said Stuart Seto, a weather specialist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

Snow was reported down to the 5,000-foot level in the mountains but "it's a very wet snow," he said.

Some 2 inches of snow frosted trees in Wrightwood, a ski resort east of Los Angeles, where just last week the temperature hit 90 degrees.

Thought: The wisdom is that similar concurrent phenomena often share a causative factor.

The world’s climate is and the world’s economic systems have become complex dynamic systems, which mean we are talking deterministic chaos especially since the two are connected. This means that we can only predict the near term; mid and long term prediction become impossible and that is based on the science of chaos. Although some argue it is not a science.

This changes the game of risk analysis. We can no longer predict mid to long term risk and quantify it. So perhaps rather than predicting events, we need to analyze and predict the response to and the effect of an event as being certain to occur.

Since we cannot predict mid or short term, we must then predict the ability to adapt and overcome so we can measure things like resilience, vulnerability, preparation.

Such that it used to be we could predict the chances of a certain number of houses being hit by a tornado or hurricane. The question of “if” becomes a question of “when”.

I could see a future where insurance costs are so high for the old infrastructure that it is cost justified to rebuild it. There could even be an assessment for energy inefficient infrastructure increasing the vulnerability of the “whole” infrastructure and taxing it as such.

Dana, well I suppose debt could be passed on to the new players.

That was actually a sample of "This disruptive change is amplified by anytime, anywhere communications".

I might also add "realizations" and "evolution of thought" and most impactful are those of the collective sort.

Kudos to the collective effort by scientists to put the Phoenix on Mars, what I find most interesting is that is the opening of the lander's parachute 6.5 seconds later than anticipated. This ultimately caused Phoenix to touch down about 25 kilometres eastward of its expected destination, at a site near the outer edge of its projected landing ellipse.

While this leaves engineers with a puzzle to solve about why the chute deployed late, it is not expected to affect the science that Phoenix will return.

What I wonder is if the causative factor of the late chute deployment. From a new consciousness perspective was this a result of non-linear consciousness on purpose effect in order to fulfill intention. Linear consciousness oblivious to certain data sets and calculations or knowing that non-linear consciousness (perhaps what we might call unconsciousness) had privy to, which somehow caused an unconsciously driven adjustment to land it in the perfect spot to fulfill our conscious intent.

As for death..

In a game the players do not die, playing pieces are removed from the board. The loss of a playing piece can be dramatic, yet only within the bounds of that specific finite game, the player persists to play another game and does not expire from the realm of the infinite game, the never-ending story from which is born all stories with a beginning and an end.