What membership means and what it does not mean

Q. If I join, do I have to pay dues or fees?

A. No. Absolutely free. (Also if you join the email bulletin board, you can quit, or change your email-reception status to "every message immediately," "daily digest," "special notices only," or "no emails" at any time.) You can, however, donate any amount of money if you ever want to!

Q. If I join, does that mean I agree with CRV's policies?

A. No. In fact, if you disagree feel free to join and try to modify our (wrong) direction. (But keep an open mind and try to learn, please... we prefer calm, brilliant, yet astonishingly fully-thought-through ultra-well-researched analyses, as opposed to "flamewars"...).

Q. Well, if I'm not paying and I'm not agreeing, then why the heck am I joining?

A. If you "join CRV" that presumably means you agree with at least some of our ideas, and enough so that you will be willing to help by volunteering your time and/or money and/or setting up your own project with other members. The act of "joining" is purely a matter of facilitating communication so that we can contact you in order to request you to use your skills or time or whatever to help us. That usage of your time might be as little as "writing a letter" or it might be more such as "setting up a corporation." It is whatever you are willing and able to do. You may even know what to do and how to do it, while we don't because we are too stupid. When joining you can tell us that. In order to make all that possible, we have to know how to contact you and what your skills or desires are! Filling out our "join" form simply enables you to tell us that!

Q. What about the email bulletin board?

A. Joining the bulletin board in some sense means even less than joining CRV proper! Since: if you do that we will not necessarily know your real name, you need not even agree with us one iota, and you are not saying you are ever going to help us in any way. Think of the bulletin board as like subscribing to a (free) newspaper - except you can also write your own articles in that paper. Does subscribing to (or even working for) a newspaper imply you endorse its stances? Of course not! But it does presumably mean you are interested in reading that paper and learning about stuff in it. And since our BB is more than just a newspaper - it also is our communication medium, with text-searchable archives, enabling you to make policy suggestions and have debates - it is excellent if you have something useful to contribute.