diff --git a/funder-site/index.html b/funder-site/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..30f7bd7 --- /dev/null +++ b/funder-site/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,612 @@ + + + + + +Project Ground Rules — a civic pilot for an unbuyable survival floor + + + + + + + +
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+ The idea + The pilot + The timeline + What could kill it + Get involved + Full detail ↗ +
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A proposal, openly unproven
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A society where money can't quietly decide who eats, who's heard, and who escapes consequences.

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Most systems pile three jobs onto one thing — money: it buys what you need, it keeps you alive, and it decides who holds power. This design pulls those jobs apart and builds walls between them. Then it proposes the smallest honest test of whether the walls hold.

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Honest status: no pilot evidence yet — that is exactly what the pilot is for.
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Five walls, one unbreakable floor
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01Ordinary moneyMarkets, wages, business — they stay.
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02A survival floor money can't buyFood, shelter, medicine, water — by right.
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03Shared value, shared backValue no one made, returned to everyone.
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04A fading, equal voiceCivic priority you can't buy or hoard.
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05Earned public rolesService qualifies you — not money.
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+ The floor is the line money may never cross. + Punishment can take your freedom. It can never take your food, your voice, or your fair shot. +
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The ask
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$700,000–$1.4M to run an 18-month pilot with 150–300 people — testing the survival floor and the one wall the whole design rests on.
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Who
150–300 volunteers, in one community. Their existing benefits are protected — and a hold-harmless fund makes them whole if anything ever slips.
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What
A guaranteed floor of food staples and basic medicines — tested against a cash comparison group, to prove it's the walls doing the work, not just the money.
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The proof
A simulated scarcity stress-test, referees the funder pays (not us), and one hard line: zero breaches of the floor.
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For comparison, Finland's UBI experiment cost roughly €20 million. This asks a small fraction to test a deeper question.
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Where the money goes

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Roughly — full budgets need site-specific legal and clinical review. Notice that a real share pays for outside scrutiny: independent review is funded, not invited later.

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Staffing & deliverythe team that runs it, ~27 months
~35%
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Essential goodsfood staples + basic medicines
~27%
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Cash comparison groupto isolate the walls from the money
~10%
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Independent reviewoutside referees + pre-registration
~9%
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Participant protectionbenefits hold-harmless + legal review
~9%
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Data + public post-morteminterviews, results, published findings
~10%
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01
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The idea, in one move

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When one thing does all three jobs, whoever has the most of it controls everything — including whether you eat. So split the jobs apart, and wall them off from each other.
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Markets stay. Profit stays. What changes is that none of them can be turned into power over another person's survival or vote.

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Each wall protects one thing from being bought. The walls between them aren't a feature of the system — they are the system.

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1

Ordinary money

Everyday spending, saving, wages, and business. Yours to use freely — no one can secretly shrink it.

Flow
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2

An unbuyable floor

Food, shelter, medicine, and water as a right, not a reward — no matter what's in your account.

Essential Access
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Shared value returned

Value no one created — land windfalls, resource rents, monopolies — returned to everyone as a stake. Ordinary earnings, homes, and tools are left alone.

Commons Return + Stake
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A voice that fades

An equal, expiring claim to put an issue on the table. It can't be bought, stockpiled, or turned into a status score.

Voice
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Earned public roles

You qualify for public roles by contributing, then rotate through — not by wealth or connections.

Service Record
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A scarcity backstop

When there genuinely isn't enough of something essential, it is rationed by need and a fixed rule set ahead of time. Never by who can pay the most.

Shared Storehouse
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02
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The pilot — start with the foundation

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Four pilots are designed; this is the one to run first, because it tests the survival floor and the non-convertibility wall the entire design rests on. A pilot has one job: find out what we got wrong before anyone depends on it.
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People
150–300Volunteers. The allocation is added on top of whatever support they already have — no one's real survival is on the line.
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Length
18 monthsLong enough to see the floor hold, get gamed, and run a simulated shortage. (~27 months counting setup and the published post-mortem.)
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Covers
Food + medicineThe easiest survival goods first — named honestly. Shelter and water come in a later, larger test.
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Tested three ways
In parallelDirect goods, locked credit, and a cash comparison — to learn whether the wall holds by design or only friction, and whether it's the walls or the money doing the work.
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The question a skeptic actually cares about: can a person quietly turn their survival floor back into spendable cash — and can a shortage be faked to cut people off? Most of the pilot points its instruments at those two failure modes, because that's where the design either earns trust or loses it.

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The hard test (months 9–11): a shortage is simulated — no real supply is cut — and the whole rationing machinery runs against it. The declaration must survive an outside reviewer trying to fake it, and the rationing must follow the rule, not price. (Deliberately starving real people to study them is the one thing a pilot must never do.)

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The one line that can't be crossed
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Zero breaches of the survival floor. Every other result is a finding to learn from. This one is a full stop.
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What would change for the people in it

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There's no data yet — that's the whole point of running it. But the pilot measures more than whether the machinery works: against a cash comparison group and validated scales, it asks whether life is actually different for the people in it. What we look for, and what it looks like up close:

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Enough food
Food securityThe standard USDA measure — and, up close, not running out before the month does.
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Medicine, not math
Skipped careWhether people stop skipping prescriptions because of cost — the pharmacy counter without the arithmetic.
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A floor that can't be taken
Felt securityWhether knowing the floor can't be revoked changes how it feels to be broke — something cash alone can't do.
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Room to breathe
Stress & agencyValidated distress and sense-of-control measures — whether removing survival precarity returns attention and choices.
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And we report what doesn't change. Some lives won't move much; some people will dread the pilot ending. Both get published — including the honest limit that an 18-month floor with a known end date may understate what a permanent one would do.

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03
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What 18 months looks like

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Honest by construction — exit is proven before anyone leans on the floor, and the result is published either way.
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Before month 1

Exit is rehearsed, not assumed

The pilot first proves a participant can walk away with no penalty and no loss of their existing support. You don't ask people to lean on a floor until you've shown they can step off it safely.

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Months 1–18

The floor runs — two cohorts at once

A monthly allocation of food staples and basic medicines. One group gets physical goods; the other a closed-loop credit that's technically blocked from cash-out. The comparison is the experiment.

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Months 9–11

The controlled scarcity test

A planned 30% shortfall in one good. Can the shortage be declared honestly? Does fair rationing beat price? Does the floor stay intact even when the measurement system is made to fail?

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Month 18

Results published — pass or fail

An independent reviewer holds the data and signs off. A failed pilot is published as failed, with a public post-mortem written into the grant. No rebranding.

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04
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What backing this actually buys

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Not a charity ask — a research bet. You're funding an answer to a question no one has tested, at a fraction of what these experiments usually cost.
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A genuinely new answer

UBI trials test cash. None test whether a survival floor can stay unbuyable — that money can't quietly convert it back. That's the open question this pilot is built to answer.

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Evidence you can trust

An independent reviewer holds the data and can publish. Every finding is replicable from open data. You fund proof, not a press release.

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A small bet on a big question

$350K–$860K against a question about how a society protects its most vulnerable. Finland spent €20M to test a narrower one.

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Honesty as the deliverable

It's designed to fail informatively. If a wall doesn't hold, you'll know exactly which one — published — before anyone builds on it.

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05
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What would kill it

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Serious money trusts a proposal that names its own failure conditions out loud. Here are ours — any one of them and we say, publicly, that the mechanism does not work as designed.
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A failed pilot is information, not embarrassment. It tells us which wall doesn't hold — before anyone depends on it.

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More than 5% of the floor's value leaks back into cash. The wall between survival and money is broken.

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A shortage can be faked to cut people off and survives the reviewer's audit anyway. A design-level failure, not a tuning problem.

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A black market covers more than 20% of the shortage gap. Rationing lost to price.

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Any breach of the survival floor. Not a metric to trade off — a hard stop.

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We don't yet know if this is legal everywhere, what the right numbers are, or who will host it. We say so plainly. The honesty is the point — it's the only thing that makes the test worth trusting.
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The two-minute version

+ Get the full proposal +
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What it is
A design that walls survival, voice, and power off from money — so wealth can't buy them.
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What we're testing
Whether a guaranteed survival floor can run for 18 months without being gamed, faked, or breached.
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The ask
$350K–$860K, 150–300 people, one community. A fraction of a typical basic-income trial.
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Why trust it
It names exactly what would prove it wrong, and commits to publishing a failure as a failure.
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06

Who's behind it

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CLPhoto coming
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Cameron Lames

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U.S. Army veteran. Founder of Project Ground Rules.
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"A safety net caught me when I had nothing left to stand on. I couldn't stop thinking about everyone who doesn't have one. That could have been me."

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I grew up inside systems that were supposed to help and didn't. I served in the U.S. Army, and I came home carrying service-connected PTSD. Things fell apart. After I survived an attempt on my life, what was left of my world came apart completely. What slowly put me back together was simple. I had a floor under me when I had nothing left, and the compensation I receive for my service is a safety net I am grateful for every single day.

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That gratitude turned into a question I couldn't put down. What about the people who have no floor at all? No benefit, no catch, nothing. That could have been me. And right now, it is a lot of people.

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I am not a politician or an economist, and I won't pretend to be. But something deep in me is certain there is a better way. I believe we can build systems that actually do what they say they do. The Humane Constitution is my attempt at that, and this pilot is how I find out, honestly, whether it holds.

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Get involved
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If this is worth testing, let's talk.

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Whether you could fund a pilot, host one in your community, or tear the design apart as a skeptic — that's exactly the contact worth making.

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Or reach out directly: cameron.lames@icloud.com
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