All things change. Here comes a big one.

Dear Propits users,

Thanks for being a part of the Propits experiment! We are now beginning the process of concluding this first chapter of Propits.

We have learned that the Propits idea works, and people are excited about it! We have also learned that like any new idea, it will take a dedicated sales and marketing effort to establish a sustainable foothold in the marketplace of ideas. While we seek a partner to support that effort, we have decided to gracefully shut down the service.

Effective immediately, credit cards will no longer be charged and all Prop rewards between users are settled. New user accounts cannot be created. Propits users have until 11 pm EST, February 5th, 2010, to claim any cash rewards using the Rewards tab in their account. Please note that depending on the volume of these requests, we may take up to 90 days to process them, but we will process them.

After February 5th, the website will be suspended. If you have a Propits button on your website, the code serving the button image on your website will cease to function by the end of February.

Propits has enjoyed 18 months of operation and a great deal of support from friends. We’ve outlasted several competitors and received attention from notables in venture capital and technology startup circles. We are certain that visionary economics will change the way people relate to money and open the door to a more fair and free future. We look forward to the next chapter of the Propits story! In the meantime, keep supporting the good things in the world however you can. Props to you!

Thomas and Kevin, Propits

An old way to look at money, made new again

Hi all. For the next few weeks we are going to be releasing a podcast episode, each one covering a different way of thinking about money. In this first one, we look at why that is valuable, the types of mental models of things that people have come up with in the past, and we look at the first in the series, an "Earthy" mentality to money, taken from what we might call the five-elements model. In the future we will be looking at some totally different models of how to interact with money, etc. We hope it's informative.

I would like to apologize up front for the audio levels/quality. We don't have our normal recording equipment at the moment, so it was all done on my crappy laptop mic. We hope to rectify this in the future. Have a listen, and as always, we love to hear from you guys!

To my homies at the LHC

The first day of snowboarding season was just a couple of days ago. We had a great time, remembered how to actually do it. I even managed to successfully catch some air off of a couple of kickers without killing myself. I would say that it was a successful first day.

One of the things that I remembered is that, when snowboarding, to speed up you have to do less. In other words, if you want to go faster, you have to relax your body more, and just let the board do what the board does. In other words, a snowboarder's natural state (rest state) is constant acceleration.

My question is, does that make snowboarders really, really big tachyons?

All dogs go to Propits

I love my dog. He's the first dog that I've had that is just an unabashed dog. A lot of pets that I've known have basically been human minds, trapped in four-legged bodies, but not Max. Max is just a big, fluffy, slobbery dumb dog. And I love him for it.

The great thing about Max is that he has two modes: asleep and happy. Everything makes him happy, and he loves to show it. He finds his favorite tennis ball and just freaks out. When you come home, he's all tail-wags and licks. He's just always happy, and never afraid to show it. He gets real, authentic pleasure from just acknowledging that something makes him happy, and I think that, on the whole, it makes his life better.

We want everyone's lives to be more like Max's (maybe without eating kibble every day). Happy for being happy. Glad to acknowledge that their life was made better by something that they ran into online. Wouldn't it be cool to go through your life excited to see everything? Excited to let them know? I think it would. That's why we built Propits.

Our very first DDOS

It's official. We've made it! We had our very first script-kiddy searching for exploits followed by a distributed denial of service! Go us!

Nothing is damaged. The would-be attackers are a bunch of ninnies. No data is compromised, etc. About the only thing that it means is that the site is down for a bit while our provider sorts it out.

To re-iterate, there are two pieces of good news. 1) We are big enough for jealous minds to want to put us down, and 2) They are just as incompetent as they are jealous.

Update: We are back online.

Counting down the minutes

There's a funny thing that happens in modern business. People show up for work at earlier and earlier hours every year. They stay later and later. And larger and larger portions of time spent at work is time spent staring at the clock, counting down until they can finally leave.

Of course, sitting around not doing work, waiting for you chance to go home, decreases productivity. So what do the companies do? Require people to stay even longer, or work from home in their off-hours (and if you work for salary, you don't get extra pay for that).

What. The. Hell.

How did it come to this? We all realize that the boss is one dude, right? I mean, he can't take all of us! Okay, so that's a bit extremist, but the idea still applies. If you put in your 8 hours and go home, why should you be afraid of losing your job? If things get so bad that you want to scream, and so instead of screaming you pick up and take the afternoon for yourself, why is that such a bad thing? Would your boss really prefer that you sit and boil and stew in your anger until you blow up at someone, or give yourself cancer?

The other day my boss said he wanted me to start checking my email from home in the evening so that I can be available to fix a problem if it comes up. I said no. My argument is that if there is a problem at 3 in the morning, no-one will care about it anyway, and anyone who does I don't want to do business with. My home life is separate from my work life, and I intend to keep it that way.

He tried to be all boss-like (talking about towing the company line, blah blah). I was resolute.

Want to know how many people died? None. How many servers burst into flames at the mere insinuation of having personal time? Zero. How many co-workers were effected? Zilch. How much money the company lost? Not a cent.

What are we working for? Are we working to fill every moment we aren't asleep? "But you have weekends off". Not if I start letting my employer dictate my off time to me, I don't. Not for long, anyway. Besides, if the only time I have is the weekends, that leaves 48 hours, minus sleep, to get every single chore done that I have around the house. 48 hours, minus sleep, to spend time with my loved-ones. 48 hours, minus sleep, out of 168.

What are you working for? Is what you're getting payed worth 72% of your adult life?

What is worth that much time? What could you spend every waking moment doing, and be happy as a clam? Why not do that? Why not be supported, and support others in the process,
for doing the only thing that makes any damned sense.

Propits. Live your life. Not your boss'.

Thugged out since cub scouts

I just heard a song that made me giggle. It's called "Thugged out Since Cub-Scouts", by CunninLynguists. It made me laugh a bit because I was in cub-scouts, and grew up in the ghetto. Although I wasn't "thugged out" so to speak, I could relate with a lot of the emotion of the song (even though I get the impression that they were never actually in cub-scouts).

The desire to express our personality, to exclaim who we are, and what we are about to anyone who will listen is actually very natural. We all do it in one way or another. In some cases (as with the gangsta' troop 859) it's overt. In other cases it's very subtle (what you wear, how you speak, etc). Everyone does it. Even the people who say they don't do it because they don't care what people think about them, are expressing that they are the sort of person who doesn't care what other people think of them. Sorry...

We all care what people think about us. We may not care what every person thinks of us, but we have opinions about other people's opinions of us at some level.

When it comes to economics, this is important. Only in recent years have people bothered to look into what they are calling "psycho-economics", or "behavioral economics"; the effect of the irrational mind on the economy. Up until now, if you can believe it, they thought that entire groups of people could be expressed with simple mathematical formula. That every human had an inherent "completely rational" side that took in all information and made the objectively best decision. It's like they never went outside.

The fact of the matter is, that everyone wants to be liked by someone else. And this desire drives us to do things that aren't perfectly rational like buying over-priced clothing, eating at un-healthy restaurants that are too expensive, driving in un-safe ways, listening to (and therefore supporting) certain types of music, etc. The list goes on and on. And if we are going to be reasonable, we can see how those actions impact real industry in one way or another.

So, what do you want to be known for? Why do you want people to like you, and who are those people? Is it working?

Sometimes it's hard to know. It's hard to know who you are communicating to with your words and actions. It's hard to know why you are doing it (our own real desires are sometimes hidden to us). It's hard to know if the message is getting out there.

Enter Propits.

Propits lets you put yourself out there in any way you like, and get real feedback (and a real piece of the irrational economy) for it. You can clarify who you are to others, who you are trying to be, and how well it is working.

What's your dream? What's your legacy? Are they the same?

Help us make the world better by giving people the power to really and truly support themselves and their loved-ones in doing whatever it is that is important in their lives. Help us help others clarify their dreams and visions, and become the people they want to become, whoever that might be.

Weather you were trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent, or if you just want people to think you were, get a button, and get to making the world around you better.