Samuel Freilich's Blog – April 2010 Archive (10)

By that, I'm not asking whether the indigenous knowledge of today will be preserved decades into the future. Though that's an interesting question in its own right.



But even given a radical reversal in the trend of communication and transportation costs, I don't see new groups becoming culturally isolated in the near future. Nor do I see the groups that are currently somewhat isolated remaining so.… Continue

I'd expect that Boston is actually likely to be a fairly resilient city. On a port, access to a (now relatively healthy) waterway. On major rail routes. Moderately walkable. Decent public transit. Fairly strong civil and medical services. Not located in an area that's geologically active. Some concerns about flooding, but otherwise little concern about storm-related disasters.



I couldn't find a centralized summary of Boston's plan for resilience, but there seem to be a large number of… Continue

Probably one of the most dangerous crises faced by cities in the near future will be resource riots, where a shortage of food or fuel. The world saw some of this already, in the fuel and food price surge leading up to the current economic collapse.



There are several sorts of information you'd want to keep track of in such an emergency:

1. Locations where roads are blocked, or where bus and train… Continue

Here's a program to educate women in Darfur, a region living under dictatorship, suffering from resource shortages, torn by cultural conflict and war. What became of the graduates of this program ten years later?



Does their knowledge of nutrition give them better-nourished families? Are their families healthier as a result? Does the resulting spare money and time give them more time to think about ways to… Continue

It seems that charitable causes that attempt to help women fall into one or more of the following categories:



1. Give resources to women because women are disadvantaged in general ("affirmative action"). For example, see this running/walking based fitness program for women, while they attempt to address a problem for women (isolation / depression / bad health), they don't argue that… Continue

Browsing the WomenWatch feed, I came across an article on the ongoing battle over child marriage in Yemen, and remembered that I'd seen some excellent commentary on that story recently. The post notes that child marriage is as much motivated by economic factors as… Continue

Well, I looked into Kickstarter and I've been active with Kiva, and there's not much in the way of community currency movements in my area. I went looking for similar ventures and found a few interesting things.



First, there's Microfundo, which applies the Kickstarter model of microfunding to music specifically. So does SellaBand. Spot.us uses a… Continue

A key idea: The greatest paradox of modern society is the failure of labor-saving technology to free human beings from work.



Agent Ezra Ho has done an excellent job blogging about The Zeitgeist Movement. Their idea is to abolish money by effectively ridding the world of scarcity, having resource-management done by AI as opposed to distributed… Continue

So, quite a bit to comment on in the past few chapters: Citizen X turns out to be less ideological and more like a more anarchistic version of Reddit, with some members (including our would-be infiltrator, Cipher) still interested in the potential for anonymous citizen journalism. Cipher runs into the team in London and finds he's got an in with Eureka, who's really bad at secrecy (or maybe just has a thing for shaggy guys with beards). Interesting, given… Continue

Not far from where I live, the Charles River flows between Cambridge and Boston, out into Boston Harbor. Here's an excellent example of a water-system greatly affected by human intervention.



The Greater Boston Area currently gets several benefits out of the Charles River Basin:

• Economic / recreational, the river basin is a popular center for sailing, the river has fish again, swimming is again possible on parts of the…

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