Maybe I’m missing something here, but plenty of folks - blue collar workers, technicians, engineers - have away jobs where they work in different places for weeks or months at a time, and there are landlords who specialize in providing this clientele with bare-bones furnished apartments. I’ve been there, too - in fact, one year during the pandemic, I had spent just a bit more than half of my time working and living in a place away from home.
I thought about this a lot in recent months. Co-ops have existed before, especially in the 70s, but it seems greed got the better of people. People say it’s difficult to obtain funding, but why not create a co-op that lends money to other co-ops first, in order to bootstrap an alternative economy?
Why all these intricate hiring shenanigans or this whole thing of having one successful product or service, then trying to milk it for as long as possible during the inevitable downward slope capitalism dictates?
(Credit: Geoffrey West)
Different forms of organization are possible. Things don’t have to be done by the book; it would be us writing the book.
I’ve watched a documentary which mentioned Colab, an art collective. Paraphrasing Coleen Fitzgibbon, one of its more prominent members: Instead of having to be appointed and annointed to the workforce, we could simply be the workforce.
On the other hand, if we all work really hard, go the extra mile, burn the midnight oil… we can make it happen faster for that special someone.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do learn from history are doomed to look on helplessly as everybody else repeats it.
This fantastic opening quote must have also been Marx’s weirdest flex.
There are many forums like that, especially if you’re not limited to one language. Most of the ones I frequent have been around for 10 or 20 years or more, but kind of fly under the radar. ilxor being a very good example. AFAIK, the latter also adds only one new user per day. I’d say that’s a good thing, even though I had to apply several times.
Solé’s fantastic and extremely recommendable book “Phase Transitions” covers this as well. Quoting Janssen et al.: “even when the group is faced with negative results, members may not suggest abandoning an earlier course of action, since this might break the existing unanimity.”
“More generally, the underlying problem here is why complex societies might fail to adapt […]. Even if there is some social perception of risk, short-term thinking often prevails when facing long-term vulnerabilities. Such undesirable behavior is often favored by a combination of incomplete understanding of the problem, together with the misleading view that all changes are reversible.”
Surely that took a lot more practice than doing a cucumber. So I was told.
The Fartisan
Yeah, the 90s were a good time for movies that could not have been mainstream in any other decade. I’d place Judge Dredd, Demolition Man and Total Recall in the same “corny, but excellent” league as the 5th Element.
Then you had unofficial double features of sorts: Smoke/ Blue In The Face, Casino/ Goodfellas.
12 Monkeys needs to be mentioned as well, it’s probably the most palatable movie on my list.
In the “disconcerting, but unforgettable” league, I’d place As Good As It Gets, The Crossing Guard and, of course, the grisly “8 mm.”
Oh, yeah. It unofficially spawned “Friends,” too. Also, if you watch the music videos of the OST songs, you’ll find many (all?) of them have a “Singles” movie poster hanging somewhere. What an amazing level of coordination.
The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?
Normative nihilism is going to get us all.
I once took my bike to the Burger King drive-thru. It was late at night, no cars in sight. Yet the next time I went there, about two weeks later, they had already put up a sign explicitly banning bicycles.
Needs more “amazing.” Seriously, screw these corporate ass monkeys.
During the times of Caesar, Belgica started just north of Paris.
France has a land border with Brazil - in fact, it’s its longest border with any country. But I realize that non-contiguous countries pose quite a challenge for this type of layout.
They are all over Europe. I have three or four within walking distance. And they can hold some amazingly large items, too.