— “Many in position of power think the world has become overpopulated recently, and Africa takes the center of attention because of the constant increase in population” — “European countries are nowadays giving incentives to their women to give birth to more babies. Yet, an already underpopulated continent, Africa is crowded with Western ‘experts’ giving money to NGOs and governments to stop the population growth” — “The debate about the world overpopulation should not be about headcount, but about a single individual’s impact on the environment, and it is necessary to recalculate the ‘overpopulation factor’ based on those parameters” Last month in Paris, a conference gathered a panel of white people to think about more effective ways to reduce black population in Africa. One of the conference organizers, a historian and Associate Professor of African history, Bernard Lugan, said: “Population growth in Africa is a threat to European civilization … I’m not recommending to drop a nuclear bomb on Africa, but we can’t wait to see that population growth next to Europe. It’s a danger we have to take seriously.” Their plan is to syndicate more closely private and public organizations in Western countries to provide money and logistics for faster and more effective actions to curb the ‘frightening’ African population growth. This is just surreal, but let’s take a calmer road to answer the fundamental question behind such conferences and the numerous similar initiatives in Europe and the United States: is Africa overpopulated? First, what is overpopulation? Overpopulation is an array of negative social and ecological impacts caused by increasing competition between individuals or groups due to the increasing scarcity of resources. The scarcity could be caused either by decreasing resources of water, food and other life necessities because of a growing population, or by overconsumption of those resources due to unhealthy lifestyle or economical ideology. Put simply, overpopulation is caused either by limited resources not enough to sustain the ever-growing population, or by overconsumption due to unhealthy lifestyle. The debate on the world overpopulation has been ongoing for over 150 years. Many in position of power think the world has become overpopulated recently, and Africa takes the center of attention because of the constant increase in population. Often, the people behind the Africa overpopulation debate would produce shiny graphics and complex MBA types of matrix that look very convincing, and indeed would trick people not familiar with the issues …
Can autonomous cars give us a do-over with our cities, fossil fuel dependence, affordable housing, and also workers? Robin Chase, author of Peers, Inc and co-founder of Zipcar says yes. Or at least they have the potential to.
by Maira Sutton, Cat Johnson and Neal Gorenflo The sharing economy held great promise when it first emerged. It was seen as a way to help people build community, reduce unnecessary consumption, and generate extra income. It was based on the brilliantly simple notion that when we share, everybody has more.
Amid all the mayhem and turmoil of recent weeks, here's a news story you may have missed. The Romanian parliament unanimously passed an amendment to the country's "Law on the Sale of Food Products" bill which states that every large supermarket in the country must ensure that 51% of the fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, honey, dairy products and baked goods they stock are "locally sourced". As a demonstration of how enlightened policymaking can unlock Transition, it's an eye-catching and paradigm-shifting piece of legislation. But is it legal, and, actually, does that matter anyway?
I came across a fantastic article, that, at least for me, could be a game changer. It deals with clinical practice in the Amish communities of America. The Amish faith dictates they vet very carefully any innovation for stuff that could introduce perverse incentives in their lives. They prize something they call "autonomy": electricity, for example, can be bad if it powers activities that will make people drift away from the community, but it's OK for, say, lighting your workplace.
The three main ideas are summarised here. They were more progressive taxation to create greater equality both as a matter of fact and to deliver justice in the way that the deficit was tackled. Second, the tax gap was to be tackled to provide funding and to create a level playing field for business. And third, People’s Quantitative Easing was, in combination with a National Investment Bank, to be used to fund a new industrial strategy. What the document did not say was what the overall vision was: it focussed on policies not philosophies but it rattled the mainstream media and much of Labour nonetheless.
Michel Bauwens answered to the critique of Stefan Meretz on Peer Production License. Jakob Rigi from Hungary enters the debate commenting on both positions. They are documented in the following. My…
"Our economy is neither overwhelmingly capitalist, as Marxist political economists argue, nor overwhelmingly a market economy, as mainstream economists assume. Both approaches ignore vast swathes of the economy, including the gift, collaborative and hybrid forms that coexist with more conventional capitalism in the new digital economy. Drawing on economic sociology, anthropology of the gift and heterodox economics, this book proposes a groundbreaking framework for analysing diverse economic systems: a political economy of practices. The framework is used to analyse Apple, Wikipedia, Google, YouTube and Facebook, showing how different complexes of appropriative practices bring about radically different economic outcomes. Innovative and topical, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy focusses on an area of rapid social change while developing a theoretically and politically radical framework that will be of continuing long-term relevance. It will appeal to students, activists and academics in the social sciences."
Recommended reading if you want to know what is Changing Fast. I. "Exponential Organizations" Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) Paperback – October 14, 2014 by Salim Ismail (Author), Michael S. Malone (Author), Yuri van Geest (Author), Peter H. Diamandis (Foreword)…
((updates: Bratislava, Köszeg and Kumport added; Leicester added)) Since 2008 we all are in an economic crisis. Fortunately, in certain cities and city area's recently business and industry is suddenly picking up speed. Examples are Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Bavaria in Germany ("Laptops und Lederhosen"). On closer inspection city area's are booming in a trail from…
The Book of Peer Production has been released as a special edition of Journal of Peer Production. It consists of papers written by presenters at the Peer Production-track at the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) in Göteborg 2014. It is cool, that all content in the book is in the public domain.
When healthcare is expensive, the Amish culture of autonomy and thrift may be a way to balance communal support and individual responsibility. Sara Talpos finds out more.
Complementary currencies like the Bristol Pound act as vouchers for national currency. You swap one Bristol Pound for a Bank of England pound at a 1:1 or 1:0,9 rate. The benefit of a currency like that is that it encourages money to stay in the local economy (jobs with it). The Bristol Pound is valid…
This video will be updated soon to reflect more recent developments in Noomap´s progress, and we still love sharing this because it expresses some core values,…
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