Today's theme: 'Is anyone alive out there?' and 'Let's do something big and world-changing together.'

It reminds me of the scene at the end of Titanic when the one lifeboat goes back looking for people in the water. And it reminds me of a link my brother posted on facebook with 'Badass of the Week' or something, about a guy in Japan who used scuba equipment to go around looking for survivors in the water and the wreckage. (Seemed like an SLE type, but I could be mistaken. Just a guess.)

I washed my McDonald's uniform yesterday. As a result, I have spread the sjw residues all over the clothing. I need to wash it several more times and rinse it a few more times, but I didn't have time to do that yesterday, as I was doing this in the hour or so before work. So now I am in a St. John's Wort-induced mania.

The mania feels like this: 'Let's do something big and world-changing together.' They're having me contact fellow sufferers of electronic harassment (although I only wrote to one person so far) who live in the United States. I need to find more blogs and websites written in a writing style that I like. There are lots of sites written in a style that I don't like much. I might include those eventually too, but I want to focus on people who I feel I can get along with more easily in the beginning. The feeling is that sometime in the future I want to do something with these people.

I wrote my bookkeeping resume and emailed it to myself, because I need to open it at the library and send it to the printer there. I have a printer here at home, but it has some problems and doesn't work very well, and every time I try to use it, I spend a few hours fighting with the printer instead of just printing and getting done with it. It's too much of a hassle so I will use the library printer. So anyway, I did my bookkeeping resume and cover letter. And 'they' started talking to me, in the past couple days, about the idea of starting a business.

Why haven't I started a business before? I've wanted to start my own business. At first, I wanted to start a business without borrowing money. Then, I wanted to start a business illegally, without letting the government know about it, doing a 'gray market' business (I think I got that phrase from FSK's Guide To Reality when I was reading his blog - I haven't read any other people's blogs in a long time because I stopped using my newsreader when I had a technical problem with it). Gray market = similar to the black market, but it's the kind of stuff that isn't a major crime, such as babysitting or lawn mowing without reporting your income to the government.

'They' were asking me today and yesterday, what if I started a business that did not meet those criteria? What if I started a business, following all the legal rules, reporting my income to the IRS, doing all the government paperwork, paying property tax on a piece of land, building a physical factory, and all that?

We were imagining a factory where they stop working when there is no work to do. We do not make products when no one wants to buy. We do not pay our employees when we are sitting around not working. We do not pay property taxes or rent. And I was imagining that this was not on the land. It was on the water, or under the water, or under the ground, or in the air, or in space, or in Antarctica. Someplace where nobody ever goes.

This was all because of the question, 'Why do businesses go bankrupt?' There are unavoidable expenses that go on and on even when you're not making any profit. Your factory sits there on the piece of land, and you have to keep paying property tax or rent (same thing). Because of the culture, and the laws, we view our jobs as permanent jobs with an hourly wage just for showing up, and so, even if there is no work to do, our employees must be constantly paid, or laid off. We cannot respond to high and low levels of business easily, as there is a forty-hour limit on the work week, and if you work them more than 40 hours, then you must pay employees 1-1/2 times their usual hourly wage. I would want to violate all of those laws.

I was imagining also a temporary factory where the workers bring their own machines, set them down, use them, and then take them home when they're done. The machines and the factory can go anywhere and don't have to sit in one building paying property tax.

(All of this would make someone think I was an intuitive in socionics. But this is not my normal default state of mind. It's a temporary state viewed as playfulness.)

So, being uncomfortable with the laws and reluctant to follow them - that is one big reason why I haven't started my own legal business yet. I believe that the laws are the main reason why businesses go bankrupt. And the economic forces, also, which are caused by the banking system - that is what causes large numbers of businesses to go bankrupt all at one time. It's complicated, and that's why I've been reading about it for many years now. I can't sum up everything I've read in one sentence.

I did something silly yesterday at work. (*Oops, during re-read, I noticed that I never finished telling the story of what I did at work. It was silly because I screwed up my math, and my simulations kept going bankrupt over and over, as I would gradually use up all of my money, until I realized that I was using the wrong number in my calculations. It's too long to explain now as I have to go to work.*) It was a slow time and I got out my notepad and started writing something. I was trying to imagine an extremely oversimplified model of borrowing money, making and selling something, getting profits, and paying the money back. I was also fantasizing about a video game, similar to Roller Coaster Tycoon or any other simulation game, except it would be REAL BOOKKEEPING. Bookkeeping IS a video game. It's fun, it's enjoyable, and it uses the same sort of mental processes used by people playing games. The video game would teach you how to do double-entry bookkeeping. The more people who know how to do it, the better off we are. It is such an easy thing and it only requires the most basic math skills. You could teach double entry bookkeeping to a 12 year old, I'm sure. It might require algebra, but you could set it up so that young people would be able to do it without algebra, especially if it was in the form of a video game. I imagined that the video game could have different scenarios where you start a business in different countries with different laws and then see whether the business succeeds or fails. It would have realistic simulations of government-induced economic collapses (an entire decade where nobody can afford to buy your product and everyone is out on the streets looking for work). And these government-induced collapses would happen every few years, so your business would have to plan ahead and anticipate those collapses in order to survive the longest. You would have to assume that a government-induced collapse would occur every two or three years, in order for your business to survive.

Then, of course, there could be the imaginary country, and there's a name for this country, but I can't remember what it is, and it's when libertarians or anarchists or whoever - Ruritania? Yeah, I think that's it. Either that or Utopia. You can imagine this hypothetical country where they have the best possible economic system and banking system and a free market money supply, and you can start one of your businesses there.

But the video game must use REAL double-entry bookkeeping. That won't be boring at all. Kids and adults will LOVE learning how to do real-world double-entry bookkeeping in this video game. It's just as much fun as Roller Coaster Tycoon and all the other simulation games. I would do this. It makes you feel powerful, like you could go out and start a real business in the real world. That's why the simulation would have as many realistic laws as possible, to act like you're really living in this country and have to obey the government and anticipate the frequent collapses caused by money supply manipulation. It wouldn't be an 'ideal' scenario - just the opposite. It would have all the hassles and problems that you would have in the real world, and the more we can simulate real laws to follow, the better the video game will be.

The game goes to harder and harder levels as you gradually learn the skills of bookkeeping and the concepts of profit and loss and everything else. In the beginning it's simple, and it becomes more advanced. Eventually, you'll be working with a big spreadsheet with unreadable gibberish on it that you wouldn't have understood in the beginning. I swear this game would be so much fun.

...I have to get ready for work now.