I finished watching The Take, recently. A film about worker-run factories in Argentina. I’m currently in the process of dreaming together a worker run software coding collective. And red star coven has recently written about a similar operation going on in Germany. The Guardian has this to say about a food factory.The times they are a changin’
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I just read about the one laptop per child project’s plan to make the laptop available to north americans only on a buy 1 give 1 program (ie you pay $399 and donate one laptop). After reading a review of the machine all I can say is I want one. As a software developer and as someone incredibly concerned about the real costs of energy.
I am delighted to know that you can power the thing manually (’wind it’ for 1 minute for 10 minutes of power). When the lights go out it would be nice to know that I can still potter about on the internet and earn a living. Coupled with high intensity urban gardening without fossil fuels (any links out there?).
Maybe that’s how we can disconnect regions from the grid?
Anyway regarding the one laptop per child program why not open it in the countries affected, I mean every third world country has a first world inside and I for one would love to get and give one of these kick ass machines in cape town, local is lekker.
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I watched a movie recently called The end of suburbia I ordered it and a few others from submedia.
One of the issues raised in the movie is that of food inflation caused by not only rising petrol prices passed on to consumers, but wider scale issues, such as long distance road transport becoming unfeasible due to the astronomical cost of propping up a decaying transport system.
As the price of petrol at the pump climbs past R7 a litre to R20+ roads promise to become crumbling threads strewn across the barren farmland laid waste by fossil fuel based pesticides and fertilizer. How will that affect our daily bread? Our social order?
Already it is politically (and no doubt economically) advantageous to separate base inflation from food inflation. I’m not aware of anything more basic than food bar water, so to say that the price of food is external to basic inflation(read inflation used to calculate your salaries) is to try and pull the wool over our eyes.
Thankfully we are starting to see local interest in better use of our roads(dedicated bus lane being enforced) but the real issue, which clearly lies within the next decade (and I’d bet on earlier), is the that oil is cheap now. Now we know that it will be prohibitively expensive very soon, then what the hell are we doing about it? Have we started planning for a Cape Town without oil?
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“We will fight them in the towns, we will fight them in the villages, we will fight them in the pastoral areas,”
“We have enough spirit and incentives and materials to liberate our country.” - Zakariya Mahamud Abdi, Somali Rebel Conference spokesman
My news provider paints one picture with words like this..
Years of clan bickering exploded with the ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and spawned a deadly power struggle that has defied numerous attempts to restore peace.
National Geographic adds some detail..
“I can say that we have a more efficient communications system than neighboring countries like Ethiopia and Kenya,” says Ido, the founder of Nationlink, one of Somalia’s ten fiercely competitive telephone companies. “In Mogadishu you get landline service eight hours after you order it—for ten dollars a month.” (Cell service is instantaneous.) Local calls are free, and international calls cost 60 cents to a dollar a minute, even from remote villages linked to a phone center by shortwave radio.
George Ayittey mentions, in his brilliant ted talk on Africa’s future, that the somali people have no chiefs in their societal structure.
Wikipedia says
Loyalty to one’s clan is important and in Somalia it often supersedes any central government authority.
The IOL article continues:
The three-year-old interim government has failed to exert its tenuous control beyond a few pockets held by allied factions, increasing fears by Western intelligence that the nation might become a haven for extremists sympathetic to Al-Qaeda.
Andrew Cockburn, who gave us the National Geographic piece, and admits the great troubles facing the country feels that
Nevertheless, there is a strong appetite for order and stability in Somalia. Commenting on the lack of social life and surplus of armed gangs in Mogadishu, Ido jokes mordantly: “There is no life here—sometimes there is death.” Bemoaning the power of the fractious warlords, sponsors of the chaos that first brought him opportunity, he insists that the time is ripe for real government and personally feels that the U.S. could and should impose a political solution. Recent history, however, suggests that Somalis may fare better when left on their own.
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Great article by Tim Folger on discover magazine, if this interests you, take a look at the book ‘faster’ by james gleick.
Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.” But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.
“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”
Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
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I read an article a while back about a man barricading his house in order to stave off the IRS which he claimed had no right to tax him. This lawyer says the same thing
Although the legal citations in the case tend to run the length of paragraphs, Cryer told WND the underlying issue is not that complicated. Essentially, he argued that income is not necessarily any money that comes to a person, but rather categories such as profit and interest.He said the free exchange of labor for compensation has been upheld as a right by the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t necessarily make the compensation income.
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Philip Dexter wrote an insightful piece on the role of the SACP in its alliance with the ANC. In the process posing the question to the SACP: when is the socialist revolution?
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So I am busy hosting my first couchsurfer, his name is Mateusz and he’s from Poland, although he has been travelling through africa for the last year on the power of his thumb, his wits, hospitalityclub and couchsurfing. From hashish smoking taxi drivers in Morocco to living with bishops in west africa to house sitting an observatory in Namibia for 2 months. His travels point to an implicit belief in life, that life is in flux and will push you in whatever direction it wills. Matt reminds me that there is life to be lived while others worry about their own ‘plans’ for it.
The world is more connected today than ever before by more and more of these alternative networks, rising in response to the global suppression of mobility amongst people (with simultaneous increases in the movement of capital and corporations). Networks like facebook are unsettling to me, while networks that exist in the name of hospitality and sharing cultures, I find intrinsically reassuring. We live in a time where real, inventive solutions are needed and they aren’t going to come from our mono-culture dominated by anglo-american corporate interests - corporations more interested in proprietary profit than planetary health, nature and even the health and happiness of their customers and employees!
We work, work, work but all we achieve is spewing more crap into the atmosphere and sea, in the name of profit above all. Perhaps we should think about common wisdom for a second - what kind of planet would we live on if we did talk to strangers, and forgot about the mortgage and private property(a global property boom looks increasingly poised to collapse). Let us start treating the entire planet as our collective property, not just our property either, but the property of our children yet to be born and our grandparents that have lived here before us. </rant>
We should be doing this in South Africa
Some aspects of the zerocarbonbritain
strategy—in particular, the sharp curtailment of aviation
transport—resemble components of the strategy that George Monbiot
tendered in last year’s book Heat to reduce the UK’s GHG output by 90% by 2030. Heat is scheduled to be released in the United States this month.
Others echo tenets of ecological economics, which has most famously
been championed by Herman Daly. In 1994, upon his retirement from the
World bank, Daly recommended four fundamental changes to the economic
accounting and policies of the Bank, and to economics in general:
Stop counting the consumption of natural resources as income. Daly considered this issue “an accounting error.”
Tax labor and income less; tax throughput more. Daly argued that
taxing the very productivity that society desires, while minimizing
taxation of throughputs that cause undesirable effects such as
depletion and pollution, was counterproductive.
Maximize the productivity of natural capital, and invest in improved productivity.
Move away from the ideology of free trade and free capital
mobilization and toward national production for internal markets. Daly
predicted that this last recommendation would be considered outrageous
by traditional economists.
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