Smells like indentured servitude:
The recession has been no friend to entry-level positions, where hundreds of applicants vie for unpaid internships at which they are expected to be on call with iPhone in hand, tweeting for and representing their company at all hours.
“We need to hire a 22-22-22,” one new-media manager was overheard saying recently, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year.
As NPR reports:
Prehistoric humans didn’t have toothbrushes. They didn’t have floss or toothpaste, and they certainly didn’t have Listerine. Yet somehow, their mouths were a lot healthier than ours are today.
“Hunter-gatherers had really good teeth,” says Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. “[But] as soon as you get to farming populations, you see this massive change. Huge amounts of gum disease. And cavities start cropping up.”
And thousands of years later, we’re still waging, and often losing, our war against oral disease.
Our changing diets are largely to blame.
via The REAL Source of Cavities and Gum Disease | Global Research.
We need our own gardens so we can be victorious against agri-business.
Today, people are gardening for all sorts of victories: saving money, sharing with others, teaching themselves or their kids a skill, fighting hunger, promoting physical well-being, helping the environment. Gardening is the perfect cause and the perfect solution to many personal and larger-scale issues. Gardening is victory!
Seems a bit like C. Keil’s Global Organization of Democracies.
Founded in May 2004, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) is the united voice and world advocate of democratic local self-government. UCLG is the largest local government organization in the world. Representing over half the world’s population, the members of UCLG are present in 136 UN Member States. Over 1000 cities are direct members of UCLG, as well as 112 national associations which represent all the cities and local governments in a single country.
The main objective of the UCLG Committee on City Diplomacy, Peace Building and Human Rights is to promote the role of local governments in social cohesion, conflict prevention, conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction.
So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive.
via The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food – NYTimes.com.
Now, as the federal government decides how to allocate new spectrum that is becoming available, it has to make a decision. Should additional spectrum go to the big wireless carriers, should it expand the potential of unlicensed networks, or should there be a mix?
We think the highest priority should be setting aside spectrum that can be used to create low-cost tools that allow our communities to build their own networks. We do not need a more powerful AT&T or Verizon. Our ability to build networks has been limited by policies that restrict local authority to invest in networks and the monopoly power of incumbent operators. We have been hamstrung by federal policymakers that believe Internet access is best expanded by giving all the resources to a few massive companies controlled by Wall Street.
via Christopher Mitchell: We Need Spectrum for Our Communities | Mag-Net.
The USofA is too tightly connected. More states would help:
Competitive federalism has many advantages. Citizens can move to communities that better reflect their preferences for public goods, they can vote with their feet, thereby penalizing poorly performing governments, and they can serve as a salutary example for others by trying out new ideas in governing.
Can 140 years of Tasmanian tradition be given new life on the West Bank of the Hudson River?
Every year for the past dozen or so years Tony Hicks has put together a brass band to play Christmas tunes, first for the Hamilton Park Ale House, and then when Maggie opened her own place on Newark Street, Tony booked us there, Skinner’s Loft. It was a fun gig. Around 6:30 we’d line up outside on the street and play for half and hour or so. Then we’d come inside, have a beer or two, and play a couple sets in the upstairs dining room. The staff would wear funny Christmas hats and people would sing along with the band.
Good holiday cheer.
This year, alas, for whatever reason, Maggie decided not to do it. We decided, on the contrary, that we’d give her a freebie. Not the whole gig, but out doors on the side walk, we’d do that.
So, after a good half-hour devoted to finding a parking space I enter Skinner’s Loft and see Tony and Ed, another trumpet player, sitting at the bar. I join them and Tony starts telling us about the Latrobe Federal Brass Band, back in Tasmania, where he’s from. Along about the time he gets to telling us about a particularly opinioned character named Scudgy Clayton we decided it was time to play.
So we go outside, set up our music stands, break out our horns—Ed on trumpet, Tony on Euphonium (a $3000 horn he got for $50 in a pawn shop), and me on trumpet, and start playing, Hark the Herald Angels, Jingle Bells, and so forth. Before you know it an eight-year old Vietnamese kid lays a twenty on Ed’s music stand.
Whoa! That never happened before. So we play some more while dreaming of mortgage payments and new shoes and before you know it, another dollar, and another, a quarter, and by the time we’re done, $29.25. All unexpected.
By this time it was raining, not hard, but enough to be annoying. So we pack up, go back inside, lay the $29.25 on the bar, and Tony regales Ed and I with tales of musical daring-do in old Tasmania. Continue reading
I find myself thinking a lot about the New Guinea people with whom I have been working for the last 49 years, and about the comments of Westerners who have lived for years in hunter-gatherer societies and watched children grow up there. Other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children. We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, videogames, and books. We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children. These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children, but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly telling them what to do. The adolescent identity crises that plague American teenagers aren’t an issue for hunter-gatherer children. The Westerners who have lived with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies speculate that these admirable qualities develop because of the way in which their children are brought up: namely, with constant security and stimulation, as a result of the long nursing period, sleeping near parents for several years, far more social models available to children through allo-parenting, far more social stimulation through constant physical contact and proximity of caretakers, instant caretaker responses to a child’s crying, and the minimal amount of physical punishment.
via Best Practices for Raising Kids? Look to Hunter-Gatherers – Newsweek and The Daily Beast.
Truth and Traditions 