“Much more of a how-to book is Rachel and Ruby’s “Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living”. It’s a big trade paperback, nearly a coffee table book in its elegant design and ample color photographs throughout. As Peter Bane writing in the latest issue of Permaculture Activist (“Hidden Connections in the Garden” is the theme… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2011"
How Open-Source Genomics helped defeat German E-coli outbreak
Opensource.com reports that a collaborative genomic investigation helped characterize and defeat the unusually violent mutated e-coli bacterium which, in May and June of this year, has infected thousands and killed some 50 people in Germany. Open sourcing an outbreak investigation Both publishing research groups working on this outbreak highlight the speed with which they obtained… Continue reading
How ethical is the hacktivism of Anonymous? (or why DDos can be a legimate tactic)
In the first excerpt, Dale Carrico reacts to a Radio Free Europe interview of “Oxblood”. In the second excerpt Gabriela Coleman looks specifically at the rationale of the FBI in arresting Anonymous members for DDoS attacks. Oxblood Ruffin: “Hacktivism uses technology to improve human rights. It also employs nonviolent tactics and is aligned with the… Continue reading
The end of the machine that produces fear?
Via. Excerpted from David Graeber: “There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist – most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn’t seem… Continue reading
The Political Economy of Waste (5): Waste in the production process and through marketing
Kevin Carson wrote an excellent study on how much of our economy is actually unproductive and non-contributive. You can read the full text here. And here is our wiki entry. We present now it’s typology elements: Internal Waste in the Production Process “The internal culture of cost-plus markup and lack of cost-minimizing incentives in the… Continue reading
Just transition as union-driven proposal
Excerpted from an article by C L’Hirondelle: One sign that a universal income benefit is on the horizon is the recent call from United Professionals for “Transition Rights” which parallels labor unions’ “Just Transition Fund” [1]. According to the UP article, Transition Rights are about “freedom to explore what [job] you want to do next, without… Continue reading
PayPygg – send money through Twitter
PayPygg is a service available as a mobile-friendly web app, and it also lets you transfer money to friends through the Twitter interface … if you are Australian that is. For now, the service is available only to people with an Australian bank account, but prospects are that it will soon expand into other countries…. Continue reading
The Political Economy of Waste (4): Waste through overhead and accounting systems
Kevin Carson wrote an excellent study on how much of our economy is actually unproductive and non-contributive. You can read the full text here. And here is our wiki entry. We present now it’s typology elements: Waste From Mandated Capital Outlays and Overhead “In addition to crowding out lower-cost alternatives by rendering high-cost means artificially… Continue reading
Open Data, Open Society 2nd report is now available online
Open Data, Open Society is a research project about openness of public data in EU local administrations by for the Laboratory of Economics and Management of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa. The first report of the project, released in October 2010 under a Creative Commons cc-by license, can be downloaded from the website of the DIME… Continue reading
The distribution of musical taste and its effect on creativity in music
Via Ross Dawson: “Back before a dozen years ago, radio and MTV exposed people to a limited range of music from label playlists, and the cost of records and CDs made it hard to experiment with new music. The first big change from that landscape was the widespread availability of online music downloads, which suddenly… Continue reading
TextbookRebellion wants open and cheap textbooks
From TextBookRebellion.org: “College textbook costs have skyrocketed, affecting students, families and professors alike. Many books cost over $200 each, and prices have been rising more than four times the rate of inflation.” We the undersigned believe the following: Textbooks should be affordable. Publishers should stop raising prices unfairly and offer a way to access each… Continue reading
The Political Economy of Waste (3): Waste through Subsidies and Radical Monopolies
Kevin Carson wrote an excellent study on how much of our economy is actually unproductive and non-contributive. You can read the full text here. And here is our wiki entry. We present now it’s typology elements: Waste from Subsidized Inputs “In addition to artificial scarcity rents on unequal exchange, by which workers and consumers pay… Continue reading
First official Social Forum – Indignados approachment
ITALIAN NETWORK FOR WSF – FIRST MEETING IN ROME ON SEPTEMBER THE 4TH 2011 OPEN LETTER ON “OCTOBER 15th” – EUROPEAN AND INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION and the other committements of the agenda OPEN LETTER 15 OCTOBER – EUROPEAN AND INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION The spanish indignad@s are inviting to take the squares, differents and… Continue reading
Israel re-awakening through its social movement
The balance of power has changed. The public understands that it has power both vis-a-vis the government and vis-a-vis the monopolies and the cartels. The political discourse has changed. Daphni Leef is a leader of the Israeli social protest movement. The first part of our entry is her speech at the mass rally (estimated at… Continue reading
How should we organize ourselves in the 21st century?
Harry Halpin and Kay Summer ask the following important question in Turbulence: How do we organise ourselves to achieve our political aims? It is an age-old question, with the answer often revolving around two poles of attraction, the centralised cadre versus the decentralised loose network. Excerpt: “Over the last decade, some of the currents of… Continue reading
The Political Economy of Waste (2): Waste from Artificial Scarcity Rents and Guard Labor
Kevin Carson wrote an excellent study on how much of our economy is actually unproductive and non-contributive. You can read the full text here. And here is our wiki entry. We present now it’s typology elements: Waste from Artificial Scarcity Rents “A major part of our labor goes to support unproductive consumption by holders of… Continue reading