Defragmenting our selves
When I’ve talked about what a co-operative economy might look like I’ve had it said to me a few times that Yugoslavia, back when it was Yugoslavia, had an economy made up of co-operatives and that this experiment didn’t go very well. It turned out this wasn’t really true, but I discovered it can be…
I recently decided to look into how established housing co-ops with resources and access to better interest rates might help create new housing co-ops. Originally I imagined a kind of hire-purchase agreement between the new co-op and mother co-op, in which the mother co-op would buy the building, then lease it to the new co-op….
The city of Oaxaca has sunny weather, a beautiful colonial centre, and arguably the best food in Mexico. It is not, on the face of it, the type of place to forment political unrest. But in the main square of the city the first thing you see is a camp surrounded by political slogans. It…
Last week I found myself, for the sake of a trip out of Mexico City, at some pre-Colombian pyramids. They were big. They were pointy. They dominated the surrounding landscape. Much exploitation must have been necessary to build them. A group of people who considered themselves more important than the others presumably got those others…
Every year hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants ride freight trains up through Mexico in the hope of reaching the United States. They are riding ‘The Beast’ or ‘The Train of Death’. The nicknames give you some idea of how dangerous it is. The danger is not only in jumping on and off moving…
This is the lid of a toilet on a Virgin train. The same message was also being played in audio in the toilet cubicle. When I came across it yesterday I was trying to work out exactly what creeped me out about Corporate Cute. There’s a lot of it around now. The first example of…