Hi all,
Is PERMANENT still an active organisation? My name is Carl Williams
and I'm starting up a new message board for SpaceDaily. A regular
visitor to our new boards named cygo has reported problems with the
pages over there. http://www.permanent.com I also noticed the contact
email addresses kantymir@... and david@... are
bouncing. Even the feedback form and guestbook appear disabled. I
hope it is still an active website as I have always admired their
proposals. Asteroid mining seems to me the first necessary step in
industrialising and eventually colonising deep space. Does anyone
here know what has happened? The last news item is dated april 2003.
I have a forum devoted to asteroids and comets called "Deep Impact'
and had hoped to discuss PERMANENT and its activities there. I
suppose the next step is to do a search on Mark Prado to see if I can
find an email address which works.

Kindest regards and best wishes,
Carl Williams
carl@...
http://www.spacemessageboard.com

To Carl and everyone on [ssi_list]:

I've piped up before with my interest to encourage advocacy and activism for
a stronger space program. I was a teenage "senior associate" of SSI before I
was the 18-year-old for U.S. President in 1984. (That may sound like a cute
non-sequitur, but the attention gained was industrial grade, national
attention. I was in many news outlets, and People magazine called me on the
matter.) Your teenage presidential candidate is now 36 years old,
politically working with the Tiananmen Square crowd after being founder of
the China Support Network (at 22, in 1989).

I want to invite any and all with interest here, to a discussion list of
practical_idealists@...

"Practical Idealism" is my general brand name of politics, and this has
always stood for a stronger space program, SPS systems, and clean energy. I
have noted that a non-fiction book by Ben Bova, "The High Road," influenced
my early political outlook.

Now, I want to offer a place (the [practical_idealists] list) where it will
be more appropriate for me to get political, or active for the causes of
Practical Idealism. That list will co-mingle people from the stronger space
movement, and the Chinese democracy movement. The latter are staunch,
anti-communist opponents of the Beijing regime.

Part of our discussion may be the fact that China plans to orbit a manned
mission this year, while the U.S. fleet is grounded. Americans may be
outraged, humiliated, and embarrased if "we can't get it up," and China
can -- paid for through the American trade deficit with China!!! ...(How
outrageous is that? Why would we give China a stronger space program than
ourselves?)... Later this year, when the Chinese manned flight happens, it
is a good time for BOTH causes to beat the drums. My Chinese friends want to
turn American public opinion against the Beijing regime anyway. There may be
an interesting time when both causes overlap, and an opportunity to leverage
the occasion and influence public policy.

You should send me a reply to john@... Then, with your email
address, I will be able to have the Topica system generate an email
invitation for you (when you reply to that, you are included for
[practical_idealists]). Send away if interested! Thank you! Best,

--John Kusumi

John,

Sign me up! I am interested in both politics and space.

Mark

John,

Sign me up! I am interested in both politics and space.

Mark

I had noticed the Archimedes Institute, which was on the PERMANENT
site, seemed to have disappeared a few weeks ago. Haven't heard
anything about what happened though. And the PERMANENT web pages have
been displaying really poorly in my web browser (Mozilla) for months.
The site definitely seems to be slowly decaying, which is
unfortunate.

Arthur Smith

Thanks Arthur. I haven't had any reply from Mark Prado yet. What a
shame. Looks like the site might have been abandoned. Hopefully its
just temporary.

--- In ssi_list@... "Arthur P. Smith"
> I had noticed the Archimedes Institute, which was on the PERMANENT
> site, seemed to have disappeared a few weeks ago. Haven't heard
> anything about what happened though. And the PERMANENT web pages
have
> been displaying really poorly in my web browser (Mozilla) for
months.
> The site definitely seems to be slowly decaying, which is
> unfortunate.
>
> Arthur Smith
>
> > Hi all,
> > Is PERMANENT still an active organisation? My name is Carl
Williams
> > and I'm starting up a new message board for SpaceDaily. A regular
> > visitor to our new boards named cygo has reported problems with
the
> > pages over there. http://www.permanent.com I also noticed the
contact
> > email addresses kantymir@... and david@... are
> > bouncing. Even the feedback form and guestbook appear disabled. I
> > hope it is still an active website as I have always admired their
> > proposals. Asteroid mining seems to me the first necessary step in
> > industrialising and eventually colonising deep space. Does anyone
> > here know what has happened? The last news item is dated april
2003.
> > I have a forum devoted to asteroids and comets called "Deep
Impact'
> > and had hoped to discuss PERMANENT and its activities there. I
> > suppose the next step is to do a search on Mark Prado to see if I
can

Hello, Mark Prado here, founder(1985)/CEO of PERMANENT at
www.permanent.com (PERMANENT = Projects to Employ Resources of
the Moon and Asteroids Near Earth in the Near TERM). One of our co-
webmasters forwarded the message to me, so let me update you.

Honestly, the website has not been a high priority (like SSI's website).
The main points and information are on the website, and technical
glitches have *not* stopped "serious" and committed people from
contacting us by email. Despite the heavy traffic to the website, there is
not corresponding heavy support. Precious little "support", in fact.

On the other hand, we've had massive problems with misleading
volunteers ("non-serious"), lack of book orders and precious few
donations, while on the other hand an endless stream of enthusiastic "at
the moment" volunteers proclaiming to want to do anything but the vast
majority of whom do nothing but consume our time then flake out when it
comes to actual implementation, just mousing on to the next lazy
reactionary message forum to jaw away on. The vast majority of
volunteers only waste our time. More on this later.

PERMANENT has learned the lesson that SSI did many years ago. You
get useful work mainly out of hired staff. In the 1980s, I was a bit more
idealistic and hopeful, but PERMANENT has learned the hard way. More
on this later in this message.

The problem is that hiring skilled Americans costs a lot of money, so we
must be very careful in order to remain sustainable. Suffice it to say that I
and the PERMANENT artist, Mr. Sam Fraser of New Zealand, are together
in Thailand developing "offshore labor" -- Chinese, Thais, Indians and
eventually Russians (incl. outside Russia mafia territory, imported here).
Things may be slow now with PERMANENT but they will pick up -- on
salary, in the absence of volunteer follow-thru. At that time, when we
have something substantial to bring to the table, we will start working with
SSI again. SSI, ACSR, SpaceDev, Bigelow and a few others are
organizations we look forward to working with in the future -- when we are
able to get useful work done. More on this later in this message.

About the website

We had been hosting the website on what was an excellent ISP in 1996
and paying premium prices. That ISP was sold around 2000 and
essentially cash-cowed, and by 2003 the performance was so poor that
we had to move the website, which is a *lot* of work. (Over the years,
nobody with the required unix skills and apparent reliability had
volunteered to do this *and* followed thru.)

At the end of June, we leased a dedicated linux server in Dallas. Not
cheap. We moved everything over, but have not had time to complete the
reinstallation of the programming and websites. However, with this new
server, there are periods in which there is packet loss and sometimes the
link goes down between cogentco.com and 800hosting.com If this
problem is not fixed by the ISP in another month or two, then we will move
it again (and pay the startup costs for moving the server still again, and
then the time to set up and test all the software) -- and anyone truly willing
to *commit* time to help set it up can contact us at [spam filter] info at
OffshoreLabor.com .

All our permanent.com mailboxes are overloaded with spam, having been
on the web since 1996. Our original webmaster, Mr. David Kantymir,
turned off his mailbox because of it. Even with a spam filter, mine at
mark@... is overloaded. Dave can be reached at [spam
spoof] dave at OffshoreLabor.com (or offshorelaboUr.com , either one).
We have a solution in mind for the permanent.com mailboxes but haven't
yet allocated, trained and started supervising the labor for it.

Few of our Western volunteers have the necessary ISP technical skills.
Most of the work is done from our office Thailand (secure telnet into
Dallas). We use our *good* volunteers carefully, saving their time, energy
and generous pocketbooks for when it counts.

About volunteers

Most volunteers are unreliable for anything other than time-consuming
messageboards which get nothing done, and when concrete projects
actual work to be done (anything from going to the library to get
photocopies of technical papers, making a small donation by ordering a
conference proceeding and shipping it to our library here, finding email
or paper mail addresses of journalists and philanthropic investors
(something I could do fairly quickly when I was stateside), research for
hardware design, etc., etc.), the vast majority of those who have been
talking very big on the messageboards either suddenly disappear or fail
to follow thru, with various excuses ... but they can be found on other
been the same way. We don't have time for this, the core people as a
group.

Volunteers must understand that when they waste our limited time, they
are doing harm to our goals. We are not an egotistical avant-garde club
pursuing high social status (nor do we strive to be top dogs).

Over all the years, the work and donations have come down to a couple
of dozen people (out of hundreds of volunteers), but as an organization
we do not overstress our resources, and we are very careful to allocate
them in ways that have a good chance of paying back and being
sustainable.

As we've always said, we aren't just looking for big donations. We
foremost want people to commit time and effort into implementing practical
steps. (There is a reason why reprogramming our messageboard on the
new PERMANENT website is a low priority.)

If you want to know why there aren't Al Queda volunteers blowing up
Americans all over America and the world, you will find out the answer if
you try running a volunteer organization. You can get all kinds of
emotional verbage, huge messageboards, etc. But try to get them to DO
something. That is why the 3-letter agencies foremost try to cut off the
money. However, it still doesn't cost much for an individual to do great
damage, which they can do independently without support from Al
Queda or anyone else, just homemade bombs from internet receipes, a
trip to the local gun shop, etc., and the 3-letter agencies aren't really that
good, I can tell you ... and was surprised for many years before 9/11 that
things didn't happen ... but am surprised no more, after running a
volunteer organization and having helped many other volunteer
organizations in the Washington, D.C., region (which, in my opinion,
became mostly newsletter and P.R. operations with very limited impact
due to budget limitations).

Non-profit is out. Business is in.

Business plan

We are open to big donations and investment, but we are foremost
pursuing our own offshore labor business plan on the side, and diverting
some of our profits and technical staff (minus English language
proficiency...).

Two of our offshore core competencies are website design and 3D
artwork/modelling/animations. We have asked others in our community to
outsource to us. Few have. Some have gone to our competitors (and
gotten poor quality work from our competitors). Some have told us
that "offshore labor" is evil and we should not give any opportunities to
people born outside the USA, as if there aren't good individuals around
the world and everyone is envious of America... So many illusions...

As a consultant and running my own businesses since 1987 (when I quit
my last fulltime job, in advanced planning in the Pentagon space program
in the D.C. area, another waste of time... government contractors...), I have
seen such a variety of businesses and individuals, including those on my
payroll and who I have , that I have little patience for big talkers. Or
government types.

We haven't gotten far since O'Neill's initial 1970s government funded
studies (which we could duplicate using offshore scientists for a fraction
the budget over a few months) and begging the government for a slice of
the pie at the cost of other entrenched interest groups. Plus, government
is inefficient -- slow and expensive compared to the Western private
sector. How can a government project be sustainable if govt won't sell
products and services ... etc., etc. But what gets me is the mentality of the
space contractors. They are mostly incompetent as regards private
sector business initiatives, just the taxpayer porkbarrel trough on their
radar screens.

On the other hand, I have immense respect for people like Robert
Bigelow, Jim Benson and others who have seen the world for what it is,
are channeling as much of the wealth as they can for space development
& colonization, and probably have little interest in what others say about it.

In contrast, there are people like Larry Ellison (Oracle) who wasted the
time of leading space development entrepreneurs as they essentially
entertained Ellison with space development concepts, but Ellison
eventually decided they were too expensive (a few tens of millions of
dollars), then turns around and quips that a $100 million expenditure on
a yacht for a 100 year old annual race to massage his ego to be among
the elite...

On the PERMANENT website, I had concrete things to donate to. A few
hundred bucks to translate the PERMANENT website into Russian and
Chinese. A hundred bucks for a conference proceedings to send to our
library. Etc. Those web pages get a lot of traffic but there are no such
donations.

I know quite a bit about some of those people and how some of them
routinely blow hundreds of dollars on wasteful things. It's classic human
issues... Yet, they usually try to maintain an image of intellectual class
whereby there is naturally an "emperor has no clothes" viewpoint which
they are mental-blocking out of their mind -- an attitude problem. Some of
them are in the ostentatious class around the local yokels but say they
can't budget much support for SSI and others. Again, they only want to
belong to the armchair intellectual debating club. Many are clueless
about getting anything really practical done, which is a concrete step to
getting us into space by utilizing space resources. They just drain time
and energy from those of us who are putting our money where our mouth
is.

Internet websites and space development are not "free". They require
commitments of time, effort and money on practical things.

We aren't dreamers, and we aren't looking for social status. We are
trying to get metal bent in space. Bending minds and pushing wet
noodles are not something we try any more.

It's a reality that the only way we will develop and colonize space
sustainably and at a reasonable rate is by the private sector, and that
means business. The most successful company will use Russians,
Indians and Chinese as much as possible (and, of course, Americans
with key skills). Forget politics, people are people around the world.
Forget the illusions, fears and stories about Chinese and others; we are
talking real ground truth, real people, with good brains, good education
and good reason, not socialistic welfare state voters. Go visit them
yourself and try to talk world politics and they will put some American
politicians and visitors in their place about their illusions and not able to
see past their own noses. Everyone learned a lot from the past century's
experiments in various economies/governments/centralized corruptions.
As for other arguments against offshore labor, it's usually just the same
old double standards, self-righteousness and raw "might makes right"
power assertions. Power corrupts.

The bottom line is that we can hire *good* people offshore on payroll to
do specific things. So can you. www.OffshoreLabor.com is us.

Let's not be racist or clueless idiots about petty issues, as we need to get
our species off the planet before biotech or nanotech destroys us.

If you want in, then do something practical for SSI or PERMANENT or
another good group.

If you disagree, then go ahead post something into the historical record
here on the web ... and which we will be looking back on 10 years from
now. We have lots of that in PERMANENT's backups ;-).

Opinions and politics don't matter much. What does is business and
power.

I don't have time to go back and edit this message to say things more
diplomatically, but if you want to know what's going on in PERMANENT,
this is pretty much *our* attitude and process.

All the best,
Mark Prado