Schedules

That talk behind the screens about schedules made me wonder if a world could work with no schedules. Here's my thoughts on how it would work.

All businesses are open all the time. Employees call in and ask if there is work to be done, and if so, they go in. They leave when they feel like it. It is not uncommon for unskilled workers to have a multitude of jobs that they go to. If you need to go to the grocery store, you go. It's kind of a crap shoot on whether or not anyone will be there to service you, but because of the relaxed schedule, there usually is. All employees are also on call. If you get called to go to work, you can go in or not. If you go in, you work until you feel like leaving. You are paid for your time however, and more work means more pay. However, if you feel that you need some time off work, you don't go in. You cannot be fired for not going to work, however you do have bills to pay.

Emergency service workers (police, fire, etc.) are on call and must report when called.

Everything is done on a first come first served basis. If you need to go to court, you are given a notice that you need to go. You then have 5 days to go in. You go in when you go in, and you are treated first come first served.

Housing is done like motel rooms. You pay for the room in advance and are given notice when your payment is about to run out. If you choose to stay there, you pay in advance for more time to stay. Instead of paying a set amount, you pay for the amount of time you wish to stay there. If you want to stay for a week, you pay for a week. If you then want to stay, you pay for however long you want to stay. If you're evicted, you are given a refund for the amount of time you had left to stay. For this reason, you cannot get behind on your bills. Your utilities are paid in advance for how much you use. If you pay 400 credits, you have electricity until the money runs out. It is then shut off. If you leave the residence, you notify the utility company. You are either given a refund, or your credits are transfered to your new place of residence for the service.

There is no such thing as having good credit or bad credit. Either you pay in advance or you don't. If your bills are not paid in advance, you don't get the service, end of discussion.

Garbage collection is done through communal dumpsters. When they are full, you notify the garbage company. Someone then comes and empties it.

Deliveries are done by drivers showing up when they show up and leaving the trailer. It is then out of his hands. Because of the rotating schedules, people unload it when there are people there to unload it. The driver then goes and gets a new trailer. He takes it where it needs to go and leaves it.

Payment for work is done by credit systems. If you work 20 hours, you get paid for 20 hours. You have 20 hours worth of credit to use. If you work for 1 hour, you have 1 hour of credit to use. Therefore, there is no such thing as payday.

You sleep when you're tired and wake up when you wake up. Clocks don't exist, except to record how long you were at a certain place.

There is no good time or bad time to go anywhere, or to call anyone. Either they are available or they aren't.

Schooling is done by amount of courses completed. Students show up when they show up. Teachers show up when they show up. You wouldn't have one teacher for a class, but might have several teachers. When you have completed the work for that course, you are given course credit for it. Kindergarten through 12th grade is completed when it gets completed. Some people complete the course work in 6 years, some people complete it in 20. If you decide that you don't want to go to school, you don't go. However, better, higher paying jobs are assigned to people with higher education.

If you need surgery done, you go in to the hospital. First come first served. Emergency surgery is done by whatever doctor is available or on call at that time.

So basically, you work when you want to, and as long as your bills stay paid in advance, they don't ask how you paid it.

I see a few problems with this. Not many, just a few:

1: Pay. "20 hour-credits for 20 hours work" plus "higher paying jobs for higher education" = ...? What? What I mean is, how exactly do you want this to work? If some people's work is worth more than others - which more or less has to be true or there's no incentive to learn work-related skills - then there has to be a monetary system, even if it is just "credits," and different places offering different rates for the same work in order to keep it competitive. (Well, I could go work at Whole Foods and make 20 cred an hour, but I think I'll go to K-Mart instead - they only pay 16 credits an hour but the work is easier...)

2: Handling payment. You would need something like a credstick or a credit card on which to load all your money, and time-clocks to pay you, which would then need to be regulated. (This becomes a lot of nitpicky details though.)

I think emergency services should be required to always have X people ready for immediate response, though if you want to go home, all you have to do is make sure you contact someone who is on-call and they show up and get ready before you leave. Otherwise, when 502 Proxy Apartments gets attacked by the local gang, there may not be a swat team with immediate access to riot gear available.

And you'd have some form of schedule related to ambient light if that's not fixed, because a good many things are hard to do at night. Therefore, either the sun should be fixed, or some form of lighting should come up as the sun goes down.

Also, what do you do about people who are round-the-clock professional types, or people who do things that involve significant practice between performances?

On the first one, I'm looking at people like soldiers and military types, who are basically always on the clock.

On the second, I'm looking at people like professional athletes and musicians, who spend orders of magnitude more hours practicing than they do actually performing.

I was thinking that in a world like this, there would be no holidays. Holidays are scheduled after all.

Sporting events and concerts probably wouldn't exist as they would have to be scheduled as well.

Good point about emergency services keeping a certain number of people on duty at all times. Not sure how that would work.

I mentioned this to my aunt, and her thoughts were how would you get to see a specialist in his field? A specialist doctor for instance. You would have to go when they were available. Call and ask, and if they want to see you, they see you.

As far as unskilled labor, I could imagine people just calling in at random and asking if they can work at a certain place. If you decide you want to work that day, you can just call someone and say "I want to work there, do you have any openings?" If they do, you go in. They give you a 20 minute tutorial on the job and you start working. Paid when you leave for the time you were there.

The military would probably be the only thing with any semblance of a schedule, as I can't think of how you could get around that.

Skilled labor like construction workers would work when and where they wanted. If you were working on building the Empire State Building yesterday you might be working on building the Sears Tower tomorrow. You call someone, I'm thinking a centralized hub, and they send you to where the workers are needed.

Buses and subways would run pretty much like they do now, around the clock. The driver has to finish at least one full circuit of the route before they can knock off for the day. Mass transit wouldn't be reliable when they get there, but that's OK, because you don't have to be reliable about getting somewhere either.

Long distance transit (planes, trains etc.) You show up, pick your destination, and get on the plane. When the plane is full or at least to a certain capacity, it takes off. If it gets to the destination and the airport is too full to allow them to land, it gets rerouted to the nearest airport capable of taking the flight. I don't imagine there could be many non-stop long distance flights. I also imagine planes would be smaller. There wouldn't be 200 seating capacity planes, but it would be more like smaller 20 person planes that could take off at a moment's notice.

I also see the people being pretty nomadic. If you don't like the neighborhood, you don't have to live there. If you can afford to pay for a week's housing somewhere else, and they have open spaces, you can move there. I think very few people would actually own their homes.

I imagine there would be very few homeless people. The only reason for you to not be able to work is if you were physically unable to work. Someone like MJ who is a severe asthmatic but (obviously) has good typing skills, could get work as a data entry worker.

Again, pick on MJ, he says the reason why he can't do what I do is because he has to run people around town. Under this system, if you need MJ to run you around town, you have to be ready to go when he is. If you're not ready when MJ is ready to take you, well, tough.

Small businesses (family owned restaurants, mom and pop grocery stores, etc) They're open when they're open. There is no advantage to being open at the same time every day, as people might show up at all hours. The only advantage would be being open as long and as often as possible. You call and an automated system tells you if they're open. They might be closed when you get there, but they were open when you called!!!! You don't need reservations. You show up. Either they have space to seat you or they don't.

I think this whole idea would require the people to evolve past diurnal/nocturnal tendencies. It would be a world without any hustle. Many jobs wouldn't get done proper, because people tend to do just enough to get by.

It would also leave lots of jobs undone, because there would be little motivation to do them. If you could just go somewhere else if you didn't like the job, people would flock to the jobs that require the least effort to do, but can be done for the longest amount of time, so they cheat the pay-by-time system.

The only possible way I could see this whole thing work was if the world had always been like that. If the people didn't know how to break the system, or that they even could, they wouldn't. But, imagine if someone Versed into this world and was not used to the system. It would break down like a plague spreads.

I don't know, maybe I'm just being too pessimistic.

Ya know, I hadn't thought about it like that, but I did think of a solution to that problem before you brought it up.

Since everything works on supply and demand and first come first served, prices and pay rates would also fluctuate. You might start the day working at 6 credits an hour, and end being paid 20 credits an hour. Or vice versa. Easy jobs would be lower paid because they would always be filled. They would fluctuate the pay scale in order to attract workers when they were needed.

Jobs that NOBODY wants (cleaning portable toilets, etc) would be always available and always have a high pay rate. If you want to work, the only available job might be cleaning the port-a-potties, but someone would do it simply because they needed money.

The really nice thing though is that you wouldn't be dreading going to work on Monday. If you want to work you can work. Your motivation to work would be if you wanted a place to stay and food to eat. You don't work, you don't eat, that's just the way it is.

And as far as what caused the people to be like this, even the planet does it. The planet speeds up and slows down its orbit and rotational cycle completely at random. A year might be 400 days this year and 123 days the next year. The sun might be up 3 hours and down for 30 or up for 26 hours and down for 2. It's completely random. Therefore, time is measured by very small increments. Not more than a minute.

For this reason, streetlights are on constantly. You never know when the sun will set.

That would destroy the planet. You would have no growing seasons, no migration patterns, etc. Even if the planet didn't rip itself apart or disrupt its own gravity from all the acceleration changes (which are caused by what? A binary star system, maybe...) you would still never see a really settled society that way.

That would destroy the planet. You would have no growing seasons, no migration patterns, etc........you would still never see a really settled society that way.

You're exactly right, Osevens. That's the whole point. No schedules. You grow food when it gets warm. You don't know long you've got, so you try not to waste any time. Therefore, people are hard working for the most part. You don't know how long you're going to stay somewhere, so you gotta be ready to do what you have to do.

Animals migrate when it starts to get cold. Maybe the cold only lasts for a week (this time) so they migrate again. Maybe the cold lasts for several months (next time), so the animals stay migrated longer.

You've also got to consider that the temperatures around the world are not constant. It's summertime in Australia when it is wintertime here. Humans migrate too. Some people would have stayed behind along the way to establish settlements, but they wouldn't abandon old habits. No schedules. This nomadic trend continues into whatever time period you want to put it in. Hence, very few people own their own homes, most apartments are more like motels, and people work where and when they want to.

Thanks, you just helped me figure out some stuff I was confused on.

This is also how they get the undesirable jobs done. You just know there's some guy out there that enjoys cleaning port-a-potties. If worse comes to worse, eventually that guy will show up. And think about it. Someone would do it eventually just to get it done, ya know? That's not really something you want left undone very long.......

Alternatly, the plant could be rotationally locked by tidal forces and have a thermally superconductive opaque upper atmosphere, so that there are no seasons and no diurnal cycles.

Random mutations among the plants that alter their growing lengths unpredictably are caused by somthing or other. It doesn't actually matter, except that it is affected by local magic/tech bias.

Also, emergency services probably have the rule that you don't get to leave if you leaving drops the ready group below a given number.

Good points.

Something else I was thinking about. The planet doesn't spin on one axis, it spins on every axis. Also, it doesn't orbit the sun the way we think, its orbit goes all over the place. More like an electron in orbit around the nucleus of an atom. There are several stars close enough that their gravity affects the planet's orbit, but not so much that it could make the entire planet uninhabitable. However, there have been breif "Ice Ages" and periods where most of the planet was in drought.

Sometimes the planet's orbit and rotation even reverse direction, so you never even know what direction the sun will rise from when it does come up.

This would explain the complete randomness of days, nights, years, etc.

I was wondering. Do you think this could be combined with the DayWalker Zombie world? The zombies are nomadic as well. The unspoken goal is to stay ahead of them. Settlements where there are humans (which there would be) are under constant attack from the zombies. The situation is also somewhat worsened by the fact that since you never know when the sun is going to set, you don't know what kind of a charge the zombies are going to get, or how long they're going run down their batteries. Humans watch for signs that it is going to get dark. When it starts getting dark, they seek shelter. Sometimes it stays dark long enough that the zombies start falling asleep. However, sometimes the sun goes down and comes right back up 10 minutes later. The humans hate it when that happens, because they wasted their time seeking shelter for nothing, and now the zombies are going to be even more greatly charged when the sun goes down again.

No.

Just. Don't.

Yeah, I didn't think that would work. Might be something I would run just as a friendly game though. A good GE roll would be a short day and a long night (zombies aren't as highly charged and have time to wear out) a bad GE roll would be a long day and an even longer night (Heavily charged zombies that are going to be fast and strong for a looooong time) a REALLY bad GE roll would be a succession of long days and short nights (zombies that charge but don't wear out) But yeah, you're right. It would be too complicated.

Ya know what else? The orbit of this planet, the way I'm describing it, is how the orbit of our planet should be if evolutionary theory is right. The universe is pretty ordered for something that supposedly came out of complete chaos with no intelligent mind behind it.

Because of the screwy rotation and orbit, it's next to impossible to tell directions. The magnetic north pole on our world is caused by it being at the top of the rotational spin. On this planet, there would be no magnetic north pole. At best, compasses would spin wildly in a circle. Also, since the orbit is constantly changing, there would be no way to get a fixed location from stars. Therefore, there would be no North Star. Another reason for the nomadic behavior.

I see a lot more problems than some of those responding, but rather than read all the responses I'm going to start with my own.

All businesses are open all the time. Employees call in and ask if there is work to be done, and if so, they go in. They leave when they feel like it.

There are a lot of businesses for which this is entirely unworkable. Let us take just one: a restaurant.

The restaurant needs someone to cook, or it has no food to serve; it needs a waiter, too, or no one can serve the food. The waiter can triple as host/hostess/maitre d' and cashier, assuming we both train and trust all of our wait staff to those tasks. It needs at least one more person, someone who will bus tables and wash dishes and pots. The cook cannot do all of these jobs, as cooking requires most of his attention in anything greater than a short-order stand. A fry chef could do in a hamburger stand, or a hot dog vendor, but if you want more food than that your cook must be able to concentrate on cooking, and not on what's happening in the dining area. Asking the waiter also to bus tables is not impossible, but if you add washing dishes and such that's going to be impossible--the waiter has to be attentive in the dining room, and cannot be caught in the kitchen. The cook cannot keep up on the dishes and pots and pans and do the cooking. In such a restaurant, there are minimally three jobs that need to be staffed at all times.

On the other hand, if it's two in the morning and you don't have a heavy overnight crowd, you need only one waiter and one bus boy; but you absolutely must have them. If the cook and the busboy show up, but there's no waiter, then there is no work for the cook or the busboy and the restaurant has to close its doors and send them home. If the cook decides abruptly to leave at three, then the waiter and the busboy can't do much more than clean up and settle checks, and then they have to leave as well. Calling backup at three in the morning is not really an option in the minds of most employees, and you have to figure that it will take at least an hour to find someone and get them awake, dressed, and working--an hour in which you are effectively closed. That means the employees have to be "sent home" for an hour--but you need them back when you get your cook, and you've no guarantee that they will come back.

In a place like Walmart, you could in theory rely on the fact that at least a few people will come to work for every essential position. You will have at least one or two cashiers, at least one or two stockboys, at least one or two sales helpers, at least one or two low-level managers. For some jobs, people will be scrambling for the good time slots--and there might be some degree to which people with experience/seniority will push for time guarantees, for example, saying that they will only come in from nine to five on Monday if they can be guaranteed that they will be allowed to work that shift for five days straight. People who are good at their jobs will be able to get those kinds of guarantees, and that means that other people will be pushed to the undesirable timeslots because there won't be enough work during the good times. But overall, you can count on their being at least a few people willing to work every time slot for each job, and on that basis you can keep your business operating. However, most businesses are much more like the restaurant. In order for the restaurant to function, it will need to hire more people than it can pay, because it will need to have that extra cook, that extra waitress, and that extra busboy, who are their in the building doing nothing but waiting in case the one who is already working chooses to leave. So the restaurant is paying two people for each job in a time slot in which it needs only one, and so has to raise prices on the food in order to pay its extra employees.

If you need to go to court, you are given a notice that you need to go. You then have 5 days to go in. You go in when you go in, and you are treated first come first served.

This oversimplifies the concept of needing to go to court.

Assuming you need to appear in court on criminal charges, the prosecutor is going to have to have your paperwork, and is going to have to have some idea concerning the details of your case when you arrive. You've got the court running 24/7 and prosecutors coming and going as they like (which already means that you're paying a lot more to run the courts--instead of one local prosecutor you've got probably six or seven to guarantee coverage around the clock, and you're doing the same thing with judges), and now these prosecutors have to be familiar with every case that might come through the door in the next five days. That's not going to be very simple. We can simplify it by telling you what day to be there, and you have to be there on that day, because that's the day on which the prosecutor who knows your case is going to be there--but then, he's made an appointment with you, and now he has to be there.

And that ignores the complications of civil court proceedings, which are already a nighmare. I'll give you an anecdote. A friend of mine leased some equipment to an organization. They kept it for several months, and then returned it, and never paid for it. (He should have gotten paid up front, you will say; but then, it was a more complicated situation. They were going to hire him to install equipment similar to but better than what they were leasing from him, provided they could get the financing to do so. The contract stated that if they paid him to install the permanent system they owed him nothing for the temporary system, but if they did not go forward with the installation of the permanent system they owed him a weekly rental on the temporary equipment.) He did everything he could think to do to get them to pay what they owed, and finally filed suit against them.

To settle a civil case, you have to have the person filing the suit and the person against whom the suit is filed, as well as their attorneys if they have attorneys, plus the judge, all present at the same time. After all, these people have to talk about it with each other. They have to do so in a very structured format that attempts to ensure that everyone is heard on everything that is relevant, but it really comes down to talking about it and getting the judge to decide who owes what to whom. However, twice my friend showed up in court on the appointed day and time and was told after his arrival that the defendant had requested a postponement for reasons that the court considered valid, and so he would have to come back another time.

Court is just one of those circumstances in which it is necessary for several specific individuals to be present at the right time to settle the matter. Even in criminal cases, there are often witnesses who need to attend, so that they can say what they witnessed. We cannot conduct a case of any magnitude without making arrangements for several people to be there at the same time--and thus we have the concept of appointments, that you have to be there at a particular time because that's when I will be available to meet with you.

Housing is done like motel rooms. You pay for the room in advance and are given notice when your payment is about to run out. If you choose to stay there, you pay in advance for more time to stay. Instead of paying a set amount, you pay for the amount of time you wish to stay there.

I admit that the idea of pre-paying my utilities has often appealed to me; but then, life has taught me that I cannot always pay for heat or electricity when I most need it, and the ability to catch up later is one of the things that keeps me alive and in a home. But quite apart from this, there are other problems.

Prepaying for your gas is like prepaying for your gasoline, so let's use that as an analogy. Let us suppose that I can go to my local gas station and tell them that I want to buy a thousand gallons of gasoline, but I want them to hold it for me and give it to me as I need it. How much do I pay? Now, if a hundred customers each pre-paid for a thousand gallons of gasoline, and the gas station was to attempt to store it all there, then that would require them to have a hundred thousand gallons of storage tanks on site just to manage the gasoline we want them to hold. That's not how it's going to work. They're going to sell the gasoline they have and replace it--with gasoline they buy as they need it. But the price of gasoline is going to change. Thus one of two things has to happen for this to work: I am locking myself into the price of gasoline at the moment I bought it, or I am subjecting myself to the vagaries of the market by handing over my money for an unpredictable quantity of gasoline as the price fluctuates. That is, right now gasoline here has fallen below $2 a gallon; a few months ago it was twice that. I might have thought, a few months ago, that it would be a good time to give them $4000 for 1000 gallons of gasoline, to be collected as I need it. The price has fallen. Does that mean that I am locked into my $4 per gallon gasoline, and the gas station is raking in the profit, or does it mean that when I gave the station $4000 I actually bought much more gasoline than I anticipated? Note that it could have gone, and in fact did go, the other way--that I could have paid $2000 for a thousand gallons of gasoline and then the gas station would be losing money every time they gave me that gas that was costing them nearly twice as much. I'll note that pre-paid cell phone service pretends that you are buying minutes when you are really buy credit--putting money on deposit with the phone company against which you will be charged for each call at whatever the rate is at the moment you make that call. You might think you bought a hundred minutes, but it might turn out to be only fifty, or considerably more, depending on the rates and the rate changes.

All of which comes back to your housing arrangement. If I decide to pay for a year, I give the owner say three thousand six hundred fifty dollars to cover the year at ten dollars a day. Next month, because of his expenses, he raises the rate to fifteen dollars a day. Did I just lose a third of my remaining days because they each cost half again as much, or does the fact that I prepaid for those days lock him into that price? Or can he decide tomorrow that the price per day for my room is now three thousand six hundred forty dollars, so I'd better pack my things unless I want to pay for tomorrow?

Or are you going to claim that the people who own the land and capital can't change their prices when they want to? That brings them into focus here. You're going to pay your rent based on the number of days you intend to stay. Who are you paying? Does someone own this property? How did they come to own it? Did they pay cash on the barrel for it, because only extremely wealthy people can own property, and those extremely wealthy people can charge the rest of us whatever they wish for us to use it? Or did ordinary people take out mortgages to buy places to live? If they did the latter, how does your plan impact them? If they can't pay the mortgage, do they still own part of the home (what we call equity)? Or does the bank get to keep the whole thing? The bank does not want to be joint owner of my house if I'm not going to pay what I owe them; if they own part of it and I stop buying their share from them, they'll sell their share to someone else--and that someone else might want to live in their share of the house. The solution would be that I can't own the house, I can only rent it--but that pushes us back to the question of who can own it, who does own it, who am I paying to rent it, and how much control do they have over the price from day to day, week to week, year to year?

There is no such thing as having good credit or bad credit.

This is just blatant nonsense. Everyone has good or bad credit. There are friends of mine who could come to me and ask to borrow five bucks until Friday to whom I would say no, because I've loaned them five bucks until Friday before and never saw it again. That's bad credit. If I think you can't or won't repay me, I might give you money, but I certainly won't lend it to you. That creates an untenable problem in our ongoing relationship, that you owe me money you can't pay.

We have a very complex system in our country for complete strangers to decide whether you have good or bad credit. We have that in part because there are so many of us that the people who lend money or extend credit can't easily compare notes. Were it not for those credit ratings, someone could go from bank to bank borrowing a few hundred dollars (and what's a few hundred dollars?) each week, never paying back a dime, and keep going until he died. The credit reporting services in essence are me telling one friend not to lend money to another, because the other friend has a bad track record for paying back loans, only on a much grander scale.

Of course, you've already apparently decided that only rich people own property. That probably also applies to cars, although if you're going to lease a car you're probably also going to have to put down a substantial deposit on it, so that if you wreck it it's paid for. That sort of undoes the point of leasing it, doesn't it?

Deliveries are done by drivers showing up when they show up and leaving the trailer. It is then out of his hands. Because of the rotating schedules, people unload it when there are people there to unload it. The driver then goes and gets a new trailer. He takes it where it needs to go and leaves it.

Who owns the trailer?

Oops, you've overlooked that part about the capital again. Let's say that I own the trailer. Some driver was paid to take the trailer from me to you. You now have my trailer. Presumably we've agreed that you're going to pay me, oh let's say five dollars to have that trailer for a day. But you don't know whether you can have that trailer unloaded in a day, because you don't know whether you'll have people to unload it. It might be a month before you can unload it, if you have a lot of trailers and a shortage of people. That's five dollars a day I could be making renting my trailer to someone else--one hundred fifty dollars for the use of my trailer. But you can't pay for the use of my trailer up front, because you don't know how long you need to keep it. Either you give me five bucks and the promise that my driver can take the trailer tomorrow and dump anything that's still on it wherever I tell him to dump it, or you pay me one hundred fifty bucks with the same promise in thirty days, or I extend credit to you and allow that you can keep the trailer for as many days as it takes you to unload it, and you will in the end pay me five bucks a day for keeping my trailer.

Oh, and then there's that blasted driver problem. The day you've unloaded the truck I have to have a driver there to pick it up. I can't possibly pre-plan for that, because I don't know when it will be. But every day that my trailer is sitting on your parking lot, I'm losing five bucks--and probably more than that, because you're probably now charging me three bucks a day for taking up space on your lot. So I need drivers who will be where I tell them to be when I tell them to be there, and I need something more than a phone call the day the trailer is empty: I need to know what day I can pick up my trailer, and I need to know that the driver I send to get it is going to work that day.

And that means workers have to be reliable: they have to be where their employers need them when they are needed there.

And that means we're right back to schedules as the only way to make things work efficiently.

Students show up when they show up. Teachers show up when they show up. You wouldn't have one teacher for a class, but might have several teachers.

I think this badly misunderstands the concept of teaching. There is a need for continuity in all education. The teacher has to know what the student has already learned, or the teacher cannot add to it effectively. Different teachers will approach subjects in different sequences. Team teaching is not easy, and in most team teaching situations most of the teachers are present to hear what the others actually teach (and what the students ask) to maintain that continuity.

If you decide that you don't want to go to school, you don't go.

Please don't take this wrong: apparently you did not go to school enough to learn why you needed to go to school. There are a lot of reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with higher paying jobs.

One of the most fundamental is that the very foundation of democracy is based on the assumption that the voters are intelligent educated individuals. Early in American democracy many states had landowner requirements attached to the right to vote, that you had no right to make decisions about how the nation or the state was run if you weren't educated enough to make enough money to own your own home or business. It is assumed in the democratic system that you, the voter, have the ability to understand the issues and reach informed intelligent positions on them, that you can read what people have written and understand what people are saying. It is assumed that you are by this made independent, that you can think for yourself. People need to be taught how to think for themselves; it is one of the essential lessons in modern schools. Without it, you would just do what someone told you to do, and the people with the power to control your information sources would control your vote. Your right to vote is thus predicated on your education.

More fundamentally, perhaps, there are a number of very important lessons you should have learned in school. Oddly, you appear to be creating a world in which none of these lessons matter; but here are a few of the essentials:

• Sometimes you have to be somewhere even if you do not wish to be there.
• Sometimes you have to do things you do not want to do.
• Sometimes you have to do things the way someone else wants them done, even if you think you know a better way to do them.
• You have to get along with people you don't like; sometimes you have to cooperate and work together with them.
• There are perfectly good people in the world who disagree with you; they are not idiots and they are not evil, and you need to get along with them.
• There is more to know in this world than anyone can know, and you don't know all of it--but hopefully you have some sense of how much there is to know and how to learn what you want to know.

Those are the most important things you learn in school. Saying that you don't have to go if you don't want to go is saying that it doesn't matter if society collapses because no one knows how to work with other people.

If you need surgery done, you go in to the hospital. First come first served. Emergency surgery is done by whatever doctor is available or on call at that time.

Well, that's how emergency surgery is done already. But let's talk about non-emergent services. Let's suppose I need a hernioraphy--not an emergency surgical procedure, but one that is necessary to repair a potentially life-threatening ongoing condition. Before I arrive for surgery, the surgeon is going to want to examine me and make some decisions about how to do this. Will a teflon screen do the job, or do we need to do a lot more stitching? How much of my internal organs are already through the breach in my abdominal wall, and how urgent does this make it, and how complicated will it be to get things back in place? I need to meet with the surgeon who is going to do the surgery some time before the surgery so that the surgeon can prepare for it; and that means that the surgeon and I, at least, have to agree that we will both be at the hospital at a particular time to do it. That's an appointment. Meanwhile, we also need to have an anaesthesiologist--another doctor, and I will need to meet with him to be certain that he knows if I am allergic to any medication he might use or have any conditions about which he ought to be aware. My asthma, for example, means he will need to have medicine on hand if my bronchial tubes begin to spasm. That means, too, that when I make the appointment with my surgeon, I need also to make an appointment with my anaesthesiologist. Further, my surgeon might greatly prefer to work with an assistant surgeon, a scrub nurse, and a circulating nurse all of whom who already know her techniques and expectations in the operating room. They'll also need access to the room--the hospital only has so many rooms for surgeries, and there is great demand for them. So if I get there at eight in the morning and I'm the fifteenth person to take a number, it might be five in the afternoon before the room becomes available, and all those people have to be there at that time in order for us to do this.

In short, John, the devil is in the details, and in your details he runs rampant and destroys the world. I can imagine an imaginary world in which people live the way you suggest, but whether it has technology as advanced as blacksmithing is doubtful.

As far as unskilled labor, I could imagine people just calling in at random and asking if they can work at a certain place. If you decide you want to work that day, you can just call someone and say "I want to work there, do you have any openings?" If they do, you go in.

If you're talking about unskilled labor on the order of migrant farm workers, that's already how it works.

If you're talking about "unskilled" labor in the sense of cashiers, stockboys, warehouse workers, drivers, sales help, counter staff, fry cooks, sandwich makers, and bulk of the jobs in the retail trades (probably the majority of jobs in our service economy), you've got a couple of other complications. One is the "method" problem, that even though all of these jobs are "unskilled" you still have to learn them. I might be very good working as sales help at Rite Aid, but that doesn't mean I can do anything at all to help a confused customer in Acme, because I just don't know enough about where things are and what is stocked and how things work at Acme. No one would call that "skilled labor", but the fact is you have to learn the job, and a twenty-minute briefing is not going to be enough prep even assuming you have someone available twenty-four hours a day who can do that briefing.

The other problem is the "trust" problem. Even Walmart does background checks on potential employees, and tries to screen out people who are going to steal from them. If you call up and say you want to work in my warehouse this afternoon, I either trust you or I watch you--and either way I've no guarantee that you're not going to cart out ten thousand dollars worth of flat screen televisions, video game consoles, computer peripherals, digital cameras, and other consumer electronics and vanish never to be seen by me again. Having regular employees means I already know a fair amount about them and can find them if they try something like that, and I have done at least enough screening to trust that most of the people working for me are not going to steal from me on that scale.

Skilled labor like construction workers would work when and where they wanted. If you were working on building the Empire State Building yesterday you might be working on building the Sears Tower tomorrow. You call someone, I'm thinking a centralized hub, and they send you to where the workers are needed.

That's already done. They call that Union Work. You go to the union hall, and if you've got seniority you get first crack at the work that's available, and if you don't you only work if there's a high demand for people who do what you do, and otherwise you sit around the union hall not making any money and paying for the privilege. Oh, it shouldn't be based on seniority, should it? Well, if there weren't rules, the rule would be that the guy who handles the calls sends the people he likes to the good jobs and lets the people he doesn't like sit in the union hall until they give up and stop coming.

Small businesses (family owned restaurants, mom and pop grocery stores, etc) They're open when they're open. There is no advantage to being open at the same time every day, as people might show up at all hours.

I'm reminded of The Egg Platter in Clifton (or maybe it's right outside). It's not a diner; it's a breakfaster. It's really strange when you're not used to it: it serves only breakfast food, and is closed from three in the afternoon until ten at night.

The point is that a small business must cultivate a regular clientelle, and to do that the business itself must be reliable. When I want breakfast out I pick a restaurant that I know will be open, and I go there. If the place I picked was closed, I am less likely to pick it next time, unless I perceive that I picked it at a time when it is regularly closed. Thus I would tell a friend that I would drive a hundred miles to meet him in the middle at The Egg Platter if I knew we were going to be there around midnight, but not if we were going to be there at dinner time--I would pick the diner on Route 17 in Paramus instead, because I know that they are always open. But if I found that they were sometimes closed when I drove a hundred miles to meet someone there, I would start looking for somewhere that was going to be open when I got there, and that diner would lose my business. It would probably also lose the business of a lot of other people who drove not as far but from at least a couple towns away because they expected it to be open and it wasn't. These people would probably go to Tiffany's in 17 in Ramsey, an extra fifteen miles up 17 but reliably open in the middle of the night.

Reliability is itself a selling point, something that brings in business. I buy my gas at the Wawa in part because I know it will be open whenever I get there, and I am often getting there at three or four in the morning.

It would also leave lots of jobs undone, because there would be little motivation to do them. If you could just go somewhere else if you didn't like the job, people would flock to the jobs that require the least effort to do, but can be done for the longest amount of time, so they cheat the pay-by-time system.

I hope that John did not really mean that all jobs paid the same, an hour of credit for an hour of work. He already said that going to school would qualify you for the better paying jobs, so he's using his time/credit system in a way that allows you to be paid more for some jobs than others.

Which means that it would work the way it does in our world. School custodians get paid more than schoolteachers in the public school system, because no one wants to be the custodian. New York City garbage collectors get paid more than their police force (or did at one time) for the same reason. If jobs needed to be done and no one wanted to do them, the pay for those jobs would increase to attract the workers. That's capitalism, of course, but it works as long as the system itself doesn't involve controls that prevent that sort of incentive.

The planet doesn't spin on one axis, it spins on every axis.<?blockquote>Um--every axis? Are you aware that a sphere has an infinite number of axes? Every point on the surface forms a central axis in connection with the center of the sphere, but beyond that any two points on the surface can be the end points of an axis, and if the planet rotates around every axis then most of those rotations are, well, wobbly is about the only word I have for it.

Your astrophysics is really screwy, but I don't suppose it's "impossible" in a Multiverser sense--it just defies the known laws of physics, so you'd need a really screwy tech bias. I remember when I was a player character in a world called Valdron, months followed each other at random, according to which moon rose; but the world was flat, and everyone knew it, so there were no astrophyisics to consider. Any although the gods of that world were chaotic in the extreme, my lawful character once said, "Even in Valdron, the seasons are lawful."

Now, maybe no one grows crops, and all food is created by magic; but you're creating a world here in which technology is nonsense, and your trucks work by magic, and everyone is involved in work that is essentially magical, so most of what you perceive as real is a copy of what is real, made to look similar to our reality because those who exercise the power of creation choose it to be so.

--M. J. Young

What bias is growing plants? I could imagine that being under Bod (The plant IS alive, after all) Magical (God makes plants grow) or even Tech, depending upon how sophisticated the growing method was. Or is that the entire point, that it CAN fit under all of them?

As far as criminal justice. If you can reasonably prove that the person is guilty, vigilante justice is acceptable. The old Texas "He Needed Killin'" law that Eric is so fond of. For this reason, crime rates are generally very low. This is because, since the people are nomads for the most part, if the criminal isn't caught on the spot, the law usually can't touch him. He gets lost in the crowd. Therefore, there is very little criminal law to start with, that can't be handled on the spot. (Thanks, I was thinking about how to handle that!!)

The consequence of owning your own business is that you personally are responsible for how it runs. If no employees show up, if you think you can run it by yourself, have at it. In fact, lots of small businesses do this. The small amount of settlements are made up of small, tight knit groups, that are trying to figure out how to make the system work better. Perhaps that's even the objective. The verser can make the screwy orbit stop, through magical and/or psionic means.

Stores like Wal-Mart have very tight security. Because of the "He Needed Killin'" law, if store owners can reasonably prove that you're guilty, they can take action against you personally. And God only knows how many security cameras might have been trained on you right then. For this reason, crime rates are usually low. Besides, why steal it when you can work it off?

Most jobs are idiot proof for the most part "Boxes labeled 1 go in slots labeled 1" etc. Also, there is the practice that if you're shopping, you can work off your purchase as opposed to having the cash in hand. This is a viable option for lots of folks, so the stores tend to stay staffed. Same with every non-skilled idiot proof business. The Mom and Pop restaurant would say "Wash dishes for an hour, and you can eat free." If too many people take advantage of it, they can either wait in line, or try somewhere else. Again, this is a popular means of doing business, so restaurants tend to stay staffed.

I think you missed quite a bit of what I said about the nature of this world.

The nomadic tendencies of the people make following one very difficult. Fake identities are not difficult to manufacture. Often, only a positive fingerprint or even DNA sample is enough for a conviction after a certain amount of time.

Also, I imagine that most people would be Jack's of all Trades, a very generalist society, and that most adults would have 1@5 ability in most common places of work. They roll it at 1@3, and do it often enough that they are mid-level amateurs.

As far as school, assignments are given. Teachers are available for private and group tutoring. It's a crap shoot on which teacher is there, but all are qualified. Otherwise, you are given a book and a list of assignments, and sent out on your own. Groups do form to study together, so they get the social interaction needed. Even small children do this, with supervision from older people.

Medical is handled on the spot. If you go in and have problems, the doctor runs all the lab work and tests, and if you need surgery, it's done on the spot. Crap shoot on which doctor or doctors are involved, but all are qualified.

If it's something that they have to look at, you're charged for the tests, and it is your responsibility to decide to have the surgery or not. If they say "If could be cancer, or it could be a nasty case of the flu, let's run some tests and find out" It is your choice to decide whether or not to pursue treatment, and you are responsible for it. Otherwise, it is handled on the spot.

As far as trailers and what not, I imagined that being kind of a community thing. No one "owns" the trailers or the trucks, but everyone can use them. Sometimes they disappear, but enough are left behind that it compensates everything mostly. The person using it at that moment is responsible for its maintenance. Therefore, drivers generally have a 1@5 Basic Trailer Repair skill. Also, the driver has the option of unloading the truck himself, in exchange for merchandise or pay. Some do, some don't. Truck drivers have been known to hire homeless people to unload trucks for them. (An instructor at truck driving school said he did it on occasion) The driver gets paid to unload the truck, he gives the two homeless guys 25% each, and they all make out decently. (And yes, that's really how some truck drivers do it.)

If he wants to leave it, it is out of his hands. Store owners are ultimately responsible for that.

The Honor System can actually be made to work, if the incentives and consequences are great enough. There would be a big sign above the door of Wal-Mart. "One customer and/or employee is under constant surveillance at all times." There's 250 people in the building, so there's a very good chance that it isn't you. However, if it IS you, and you get caught, the owner is within his legal rights to blow your head off with a double barrel shotgun. I don't think too many crimes would happen with that kind of a justice system. Or maybe that's just a ruse, and there are no cameras. Or maybe that is a ruse, and there are really an average of 3 cameras for every person in the building. You would never know. The Honor System can be made to work.

What bias is growing plants?

Technically you can't "grow plants" in the sense you mean; they grow entirely on their own. All you can do is help the ones you want to grow where you want them to grow, and try to stop those you don't want to grow there. The skills you use to do that will determine the bias area.

Probably, though, there should be an agricultural package in the Tech bias area--things like 5@ irrigation skills would be included. The problem is that from our perspective irrigation is a given essential in primitive agriculture (the Egyptians used foot pumps to water the land around the Nile River, possibly as early as Moses) and yet absent from much that is primitive agriculture (Eastern American Indians had fertilization techniques but not, as far as I am aware, irrigation). In Orc Rising the agricultural communities of elves talk to their crops to encourage them to grow, and in so doing are actually communicating with the spirits of the plants (magic).

So the question concerning how you do agriculture really comes back to the question of how you do agriculture, "you" being the indigs in the world who actually do it.

If you can reasonably prove that the person is guilty, vigilante justice is acceptable.

Of course, this is a possible legal system, but it reminds me of C. S. Lewis' piece on The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment (see God in the Dock). He makes the point that for deterence to work the actual guilt of the accused is irrelevant--what matters is public opinion on the subject. If you fail to punish an innocent person the masses believe is guilty, you reinforce the belief that guilty can get away with murder; if you punish a guilty person that the masses believe is innocent, you create the belief that the system is unfair and it doesn't matter whether you're guilty or not.

You've got some of that in vigilantaism; you also have something darker: the feud. It goes down something like this:

Everyone knows that Jake shot Farmer Jacobs. They were seen fighting about Jake's supposed overdue pay in town the day before, and Jake always has that gun, threatened to kill him, and stormed off in a huff. So Charlie, Zeke, and Bill tracked down Jake the next day and hanged him.

Jim, though, knows that Jake didn't do it. Jake was all day with Jim trying to get those sheep to market fifty miles away, and would not have had any chance to be at the Jacob's place. So now Jim recognizes that Charlie, Zeke, and Bill are murderers. He enlists the aid of Joe and Arnie, and they catch those scoundrels and do for them as they did for poor Jake.

But Charlie's brother thinks that's unfair. After all, Charlie didn't murder anybody; he wouldn't. He was acting within the law by executing a murderer, and just because he got the wrong guy is no reason he should be killed for doing his lawful duty. Charlie's brother gathers up members of his family, along with members of Zeke's and Bill's families, and they go after Jim, Joe, and Arnie. We've got another hanging.

But now Jim, Joe, and Arnie have family who are upset. After all, there's no question that Charlie, Joe, and Zeke killed the wrong man, and that made them murderers; and so there is no question that Jim, Joe, and Arnie were right to execute them. That means that all of those people involved in the lync--er, the lawful execution--of Jim, Joe, and Arnie are now also murderers, and need to be collected and executed.

And so it snowballs, because everyone who "lawfully" executes the sentence on the guilty becomes the guilty for the next execution.

I recommend taking a good look at the Places to Go People to Be series Law and Enforcement in Imaginary Realms. It can be a big help in understanding and designing legal systems. It starts with The Source of Law explaining the various bases for the concept of law and justice, followed by The Course of Law discussing the nature of legal process from investigation to conviction, and finally The Force of Law talking about methods and systems of punishment.

Hmmm...this is problematic:

As far as trailers and what not, I imagined that being kind of a community thing. No one "owns" the trailers or the trucks, but everyone can use them.

Now, if trucks and trailers were the sort of things that sprang up in the woods and could be picked, that would almost be plausible--you would still have the idea that the person who harvested them would expect compensation for his effort. But since I don't see that kind of chaos happening here (it could, I suppose, but it would pretty much eliminate all semblance of the rest of your system, since the random appearance of consumer goods would eliminate the manufacturing to retail chain) we have to assume that someone built the trailer (and the truck), and that that someone expected to be paid to do it. That's not a problem as far as having factory workers be paid by factory owners; but who pays the factory owners? The guys who make the trailers don't need them to ship trailers. If some manufacturer also makes trailers, either he's going to make really cheap single-use models that will get where they're going and then be pretty much useless from there, or he's going to make something good enough that he expects to use it more than once. So this community ownership of trailers only really works if you've got a socialist system in which we have community ownership of everything--in which case Walmart becomes the warehouse from which I can help myself to anything I claim to need, and your entire financial system collapses.

You're also relying heavily on the deterence factor of vigilante justice; but as already mentioned, with deterence guilt is irrelevant, only the appearance of guilt matters. If people don't like the store owner because he's too strict about letting people shoplift, and so when the storeowner shoots the shoplifter whom he claims he saw shoplifting, the other customers say it's a lie, and the store owner becomes victim of his own brand of justice.

I've never been a fan of severely chaotic worlds; I like my worlds to make sense. However, this world will work for a lot of people--it just won't work for me.

--M. J. Young

As much as I would love to do this world, and I honestly think that I could make it believable too, I think it's going to be way too screwy for even me.

MJ, you remember how filthy my apartment was? You said that someone with an OCD would keep it neat as a pin. Well, a trait of psychosis is that they want the world around them to be in as much chaos as they are. This world would be close.

And the thing about the trucks and trailers being community property? A lot of things are community property. Cheap cars, bicycles, quite a lot of things, and most modes of private transportation.

"Well John, what would be the manufacturers reason for doing this?"

He has to keep his workers happy somehow right? He provides community equipment, makes life much more simple for his nomadic workers, and in turn, he has higher profits. Cheap cars don't need keys. The cars he sells (the high end cars) do need a key. And yes, the cars are that valuable that he can afford to do this. To actually own your own car? That's like The Ultimate Status Symbol. Especially since the car is about equal to a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. (Believe it or not, they cost about as much to build as a Ford, but sell for hundreds of times more money.)

I think that this world could work one of two ways. Either really high tech, or really low tech, but nothing in the middle. The Possible With Advanced Technology clause can cover a multitude of sins.

I kinda like some aspects of this. Not to say I'd want to live in it, though... It might make a nice "shell" of a world: traveler (could be verser, could be space traveler) arrives, sees this world and tries to figure out how it works. Turns out there's something going on underneath, something or someone controlling things for ill or even for (probably misguided) good.

"Mass transit wouldn't be reliable when they get there, but that's OK, because you don't have to be reliable about getting somewhere either."

There are places where this already works...

And workers showing up for work whenever they want to is how some businesses run. Taxi companies for instance. The drivers aren't paid by the company, they pay the company to lease the car. Therefore, they can show up to work any time they want to, and as long as they pay the lease on the cab, the cab company doesn't really give a hoot what they do with it. (Within reason, of course)