GoHuman Blog

There are certain occasions which are imprinted on our memories so strongly that we never forget where we were when they happened. For me, some of the dates which stand out are when Pope John Paul II was shot, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded and the date Concorde came down in Paris. 9/11 goes without saying! There are good times too of course, such as the breaking through of the Berlin Wall, and that evening when I first met my wife-to-be (which can’t go without saying).

Today takes me back to December 3, 1984, driving my 1972 Chevy Nova back from seeing the governor of California at the cinema in the film Terminator. I turned on the radio to hear the news that at 10:00 AM California time, midnight in Bhopal, India, a pesticide production plant owned by Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical), suffered a release of large amounts of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas. To avoid too much detail here about a horrible tragedy, I will just summarize with some facts. More than 500,000 people were exposed. The death toll from hospital records is put at around 20,000 – and that’s not even considering the destroyed families, lives, resultant diseases and birth-defects.

The court cases continue to this day, as does the suffering. Go and do a simple search for yourselves. Put the one word “Bhopal” in a search engine. I have purposely not provided a link to any article here because it is impossible for one link I might choose to properly convey the price paid by the victims. They aren’t the only ones who have paid of course – Union Carbide has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars as a result, and no doubt their shareholders have felt that pain very severely.

It is somewhat stomach-churning that we can use the words “paid” and “pain” to describe both what the shareholders felt, as well as what the local population felt – and continues to feel.

I don’t know all the facts of course, and I’m not in a position to properly decide specific blame and compensation. But it is obvious even to the most casual observer what the main problem is.

Why would anyone build a pesticide plant in a developing country, in a highly-populated, poverty-ridden area?

I think we all know the answer. The main price of progress is always paid by those too poor and powerless to stand up for their interests. The rich and powerful pretty much do what they want, when they want, and use Jeremy Bentham’s argument of the Utilitarian economists (“the largest benefit for the largest number”) as their excuse.

And there we have it. Large institutions pursuing the financial bottom-line, assigning some complex financial calculation to lives and health – in which the lives and interests of the poor and powerless are assigned a very low value indeed.

Here at GoHuman, we believe a life, or someone’s health, cannot be assigned a price. We recognize the sad fact that the human aspect of business tends to decline as the size of a business grows. That is why we promote our services to support smaller businesses. Businesses where a relationship with customers and community are critical success factors. Businesses where reputation is placed above immediate profit.  Businesses that GoHuman because they are human.  Businesses like yours.

Have a look at GoHuman.com. We think you’ll like what you see!

Denise Hubbard of Port Townsend, WA is GoHuman.com Flip HD video camera winner #8!

An early pioneer of GoHuman.com in her area, Denise helped her community by bringing local businesses on board.

She said, “I have been watching GoHuman grow its little local networks with great excitement! I know that I use the Internet the way my parents & grandparents used the phone book and the ‘yellow pages’-so- the concept makes total sense to me. GoHuman has the added bonus of reviews from clients, something our generation demands & can access thanks to this technology. Yay 2009 & YAY GoHuman!
I feel proud to be a part of it so early on….
I look forward to getting rave reviews ”

Thanks for the support, Denise!

Hire Denise and Townsend Bay Property Management for professional property management services in Port Townsend, WA.

WIN your own Flip HD camera by posting a local service you provide or need!

Couldn’t help but share this article by James Altucher of Formula Capital who made minor headlines with his recommendation to legalize insider trading.

This comes in the wake of the demise of Galleon Group, a hedge fund whose head billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, was caught with a big hand in the insider trading cookie jar. This welcome clampdown on some of the real perpetrators, as opposed to the symbolic arrest and incarceration of Martha Stewart a few years back, is met with someone who should know better calling it a victimless crime.

I guess if the crime is not personal, meaning it’s committed against any and everyone indiscriminately, then those who are leveraging their positions of relative power and influence feel no one is really victimized.

Here at GoHuman.com we take a bit more of a holistic view of things. Our marketplace of local services is designed to be transparent, built from the bottom up, with shared ownership. We seek to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for insider information to even exist, much less be exploited by a privileged few at the top.

We hope you’ll catch the vision, spread the word, and help make this marketplace the wave of the future.

A recent Time Magazine cover article praised Twitter’s “game changing” nature – touting the brilliance of its simplicity, and the ecosystem built around it. It described a “home depot” of ways outsiders tweak the way tweets are created, reviewed and leveraged for a variety of purposes.

Another Time article, on facebook, discussed how divorce lawyers mine Social Media for personal information. When Susie shares on facebook that Bob bought her a necklace, Bob’s wife’s lawyer uses it in court. Or if his wife claims she can not work to increase her case for alimony, Bob’s lawyer uses Jane’s discussions on LinkedIn with potential employers.

The real news here isn’t technology, it’s the behavior of people. This may be an endless chicken and egg discussion, but it’s clear people are exercising less caution about sharing things – in writing – publicly. Facts previously hidden are coming to light more often.

In general, I find this to be a good thing. Our founding fathers established a balance of power which includes a Judicial branch – our legal system – for the sake of justice. The unveiling of facts, the sharing of secrets, enables justice to triumph, where, otherwise, the more savvy lawyer has carried the day – truth and facts be damned.

Will the growth of Social Media result in more truth? Can we handle the truth?

GoHuman.com’s advanced reputation model is designed to both catch and grow this wave, on our way to a more transparent, and therefore more effective, not to mention fair, marketplace.

Are you ready for transparency?

As we watch the fallout of Capitalism gone wild, and what it does to those who indulge their greed and lust for power, it’s important to remember that the little choices we make along the way are determinate of big choices we would make if we were in those positions.

In this light I read an interesting article in the May, 2009 Ode (the magazine for intelligent optimists). You have to love the tag-line, as the editors are aware that they are at risk of being called naive. You can check out the article “Getting to the Heart of Money” online.

Two choice examples used are an Israeli day care that implemented late fees and found parents were more motivated by common courtesy and perception than money, and volunteers collecting more for charities than those paid to canvas. Bruno Frey, economist at the University of Zurich maintains “People are much more altruistic than standard economics claims,” and lays down the following gauntlet: “The challenge is for economists to nurture this intrinsic motivation instead of crowding it out.”

At GoHuman.com we’re working to attract people to the vision of a better marketplace, that not only helps small businesses reduce marketing costs, improve branding, and grow their customer base, but ensures those who care about making things better are also rewarded for their contributions and the value they create.

We thank those of you who are already on board, and hope to continue this dialogue as a reality check on how we’re doing in maintaining this delicate balance. We view our members, customers, supporters and co-owners as mirrors that keep the operators honest, to ensure that the small choices we make today are in line with the philosophy of creating a transparent market that rewards all contributors in an equitable fashion, no matter when they joined or what positions they hold.

Let us know how we’re doing!

I love a good play on words.

GoHuman.com’s primary tagline is “change the way your world works”, highlighting our mission at an individual and a collective level.

In today’s blog I’m at it again, referring back to yesterday, where I quoted a respected investment newsletter using its own play on words about there being more labor than jobs.

We can change that. We can fix it.

As our leaders work to deal with the impact of the recent financial train wreck, we at GoHuman.com are launching a site we believe will empower you to help correct the problem from the bottom up.

GoHuman.com provides a fast, free way for you to find work that needs doing, and do it, or to hire someone to help you get something done that you need help with. And it does this efficiently and inexpensively, making projects large or small economically feasible. Many of the costs that do not contribute to the actual value of the service performed are removed from the equation. This can create more opportunity for valuable work to get done, kick-starting the micro economies we all participate in at the local level.

With lower marketing and advertising costs, for example, gohuman.com can connect you quickly and efficiently to the actual task that needs doing, making it easier for someone else to pay you a wage, or fee, in accordance with the time, materials and craftsmanship it will take you to perform the service, in a win/win arrangement.

This is but one of the ways in which gohuman.com can get America working again. As we grow our userbase in each local community the impact to the overall economy will increase – one job at a time.

So get vocal about local. Help us spread the word, and let’s get America working again.

Money and Markets features “The unbiased market commentary you won’t get from Wall Street”. The truth is, in the human sphere there is no such thing as a lack of bias. This is why the “Free Market” is a myth. The markets are guided, if not controlled, by powerful parties and biases. But I like the newsletter from moneyandmarkets because they do give you clear opinions of great value that you won’t get elsewhere. That’s why I subscribe to Martin D. Weiss’ newsletter. And the title of this blog is the headline of today’s featured article by Mike Larson. It’s definitely worth a read.

And, you can do something about it, even if you’re not in a position to take investment positions. All you need to do is click on share to spread the blog about our launch contest on Labor Day. GoHuman.com provides a means to get our economy moving again – by connecting real people with real people who have what each other needs, and get them busy working with each other in the local community, from within a Marketplace that is both integrated and sustainable.

This is different from the large, global institutions designed to aggregate value at the top, to be siphoned off by a few, while disenfranchising those at the bottom. Every so often this unbalanced, unsustainable approach, fueled by outsized greed and lust for power, results in an implosion. Sometimes such implosions result in the extinction of a species.

Think of the dinosaurs – and the T. Rex with monstrous jaws and tiny, useless arms. They devour, but they can not create value. Some of us are more like the Lemmings, who reproduce so quickly they create unsustainable communities that plummet to near extinction, or produce the famous cliff-jumping scenes.

The unbiased truth about this Labor Day is that there’s no lack of work that needs done – but today’s structures and systems are not sustainable, so companies are not opening up new positions. There are lots of openings in the GoHuman.com marketplace. Hang out your shingle and get to work

We hope you’ll join us – you CAN change the way your world works. Click share and help us spread the word!

They’re not yet extinct

Charity: water helps millions of people drink clean water. It’s amazing to hear the story of how something starting so small can inspire people to give so much. Find out how you can help.

On the surface I’m a typical white American male. Dig deeper and you’ll find that I was born in Canada and have lived in 7 countries. Some of my formative years were spent in Sweden, a “socialist” country bordering on the Soviet Union, during the Cold War years.

We didn’t follow regional basketball and baseball, we watched Sweden compete in Soccer and Hockey with countries that had opposing ideological, political, social and economic systems. My Swedish cousin used to joke that the Russian ships patrolling the Baltic borders were Keeping people from flooding into the “Worker’s Paradise”. I am fascinated by these differences, how they affect the individual, and the societies they produce.

Throughout history people have tried a variety of economic models, social systems and government structures, with mixed results. The Internet has enabled new experiments that leverage the “voice of the people” and democracy in new ways. In the US the Internet has played an increasing role in determining who can become a presidential candidate and, most recently, who gets elected.

I believe in the power of the individual, communities, and nations to achieve self determination, create change, and control their destiny. GoHuman.com addresses change up and down economic and power pyramids. It provides new ways of working and being compensated at the micro and macro level. It provides new ways of connecting, working and relating – one-on-one or in larger circles, in new, innovative, and positive ways. And I believe that as its adoption rate increases, it will produce real, lasting change.

GoHuman.com is not just “social networking”. It harnesses the power of the latest technology advancements of the human race, and pushes the envelope of integrating these into our daily lives, our economic philosophy, and our social structure. GoHuman.com has the power to improve the equality and dignity of individuals and communities across socio-economic boundaries, while celebrating their unique and cultural characteristics.

I believe in GoHuman.com’s primary tagline – that you can use it to change the way your world works. As John Lennon said in one of his most famous songs, “Imagine” “You might say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.”

Wade Fransson
GoHuman.com Co-Founder

Me and my gal

ICANN’s Chief Executive Rod Beckstrom has developed a model for how to value a network. Put simply: value is the total benefits minus costs. Whether online or off, you can quantify the cost-benefit of any transaction involving time and resources.

“Beckstrom says that network value should be a big concern for social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which all want to scale to massive numbers of users. Since users are typically concerned only about how much the network is worth to them, there can be an inflection point where suddenly each new user makes life harder for existing users.”

As we all face social networking fatigue due to an imbalance of value versus time consumed, we should look toward new alternatives in this space that do provide real-world value for the time invested. GoHuman.com is such a resource.