Monday, December 30, 2013

Vinduslamper uten blending

(Se også artikkelen Lysvett i vintermørket)

I mange tilfeller vil det være nok å velge en mørkere, noe større skjerm, slik at kontrastene minsker. Rødt er en mildere kontrastfarge mot en mørk bakgrunn.

Eksempler på blendingsfrie vinduslampetter:

Vinduslampe helt uten blending.
Tradition Flower Pot VP3
Fås i mange farger, trolig er rødt den mest behagelige fargen i vintermørket.

"Flowerpot bordlampe VP3 fra &Tradition, design Verner Panton. Lampeserien Flower pot hører til Verner Pantons mest velkjente kreasjoner og har oppnådd kultstatus for lenge siden. Serien ble utviklet allerede på sluttet av 1960-tallet og med sine elegante linjer og organiske geometri har Flowerpot gjort ett inntrykk i designverden. Flowerpot bordlampe VP3 er produsert i lakkert stål med transparent ledning i PVC og gir et behagelig blendingsfritt lys. Flowerpot finnes også som taklampe."

GIBIGIANA 1
Tom Dixon Pipe

Eclisse Bordlampe Hvit - Artemide

Romantisk DIY Led Night Lamp

Moseskogbunn


7 Things Everyone Knows about Energy that Just ain't So (2013 Edition)

Mark Twain once said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." And, there are many, many things that the public and policymakers know for sure about energy that just ain't so.

That list is very long indeed and getting longer as the fossil fuel industry (which has little interest in intellectual honesty) continues its skillful manipulation of a gullible and sometimes careless media.

Pinocchio in a parade http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1916MomusPinocchio.jpg

Below I've listed seven whoppers that it would be charitable to call misleading. Longtime readers will recognize that I've addressed them before in various pieces. But I thought that it would be useful to review the worst of the worst of 2013 as the year ends.

Here are seven things everyone knows about energy that just ain't so:

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Shoe City: Cheap People, Cheap Nature


The Chinese firm Huajian, which makes shoes for Tommy Hilfiger, Guess, Naturalizer, Clarkes and other western brands, is building a ‘shoe city’ in Ethiopia.

This global hub for the shoe and accessory industry – ‘a one-stop shop for manufacturers similar to us’ – will house up to 200,000 guest workers on wages that, at US$35 a month, are ten times lower than those in China. Seven-year tax breaks, regulatory exemptions, cheap land, and ‘cost-sharing schemes for foreign experts’ are among additional attractions to global firms. Continue reading...

PatternDynamics: Following The Way Nature Organizes Itself to Deal with Complexity

by David MacLeod, originally published by Integral Permaculture

The natural world is staggeringly complex, and yet amazingly elegant in how it manages the multitude of interconnected parts into organized, unified wholes that thrive. What is the secret for harnessing this elegance for use in human systems? Tim Winton found that observation of the most common patterns found in the natural world led to the development of high level principles which can then be used to address the most complex challenges that human systems face.

After learning some of the common patterns found in all natural systems, we can then begin to recognize these patterns in human systems, and learn how to balance the ones that are skewed, and to integrate in the ones might add a greater level of enduring health. We can “make a deeper difference by changing the system!”
change the system
PatternDynamics is a systems thinking tool for creating systems level change that Winton has been developing over 20 years as he’s worked in diverse fields, including: environmental services contractor, organic farmer, sustainability educator, designer, project manager, consultant, executive leadership, and corporate governance.

What is unique about PatternDynamics is that it combines the patterns of nature with the power of language, to produce a sustainability pattern language.

In a recent paper by Barrett Brown, referring to a study he had done in 2012 of top performing organizational leaders, he observed that these top leaders “use three powerful thinking tools to design their initiatives and guide execution. They are (a) Integral theory, (b) Complexity theory, and (c) Systems theory. These models help them to step back from the project, get up on to the balcony, and take a broad view of the whole situation. They use these tools to make sense of complex, rapidly changing situations and navigate through them securely.”

And famed Permaculture teacher Toby Hemenway (author of Gaia’s Garden) recently posted on his blog the following recommendation: “To enrich our ability to use recipes and put them into context, without engaging in a full-blown design analysis from scratch, we can use pattern languages. The term was coined by architect Christopher Alexander to mean a structured grammar of good design examples and practices in a given field—architecture, software design, urban planning, and so forth— that allow people with only modest training to solve complex problems in design. … Like recipes, pattern languages are plug-and-play rather than original designs, but they allow plenty of improvisation and flexibility in implementation, and can result in rich, detailed solutions that fit. A handbook of pattern languages for the basic human needs and societal functions, structured along permaculture principles, would be a worthy project for a generation of designers.”[my emphasis]

Snow Crystals (Snøkrystaller)

Foto: Alexey Kljatov @ChaoticMind75/Flickr

Thursday, December 26, 2013

How Communitarian Culture Changes the World: the example of Co-Housing

In Norway we have the largest immigration numbers of Europe, so industry and the state tell we need to build thousands of new dwellings. At the same time we have the largest per person square metres of dwelling space in the world. The answer is therefore not more houses, but co-housing.

Excerpted from Allen Butcher:

“Developing a process for creating intentional community, whether from no pre-existing organization or by transforming an existing religious or any social organization, is the process called in this writing, “intentioneering.” People simply come up with ideas on how they would like to live, often based upon existing successful communitarian movements, then make agreements on processes that support and perpetuate their desired lifestyle.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

7 Environmental Problems That Are Worse Than We Thought

With as much attention as the environment has been getting lately, you’d think that we’d be further along in our fight to preserve the world’s species, resources and the beautiful diversity of nature. Unfortunately, things aren’t nearly that rosy. In fact, many of the environmental problems that have received the most public attention are even worse than we thought – from destruction in the rain forest to melting glaciers in the Arctic. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
7 Environmental Problems That Are Worse Than We Thought – The Environmental eZine

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Hva du som hageeier kan gjøre for å gynne sommerfugler

Vanlige hageeiere kan også bidra, gjennom å dyrke sommerfuglvennlige planter som timian, bergmynte og kardeborrearter.
- Sommerfuglene trenger flere enger

Foto: Michael H. Lemmer

Friday, December 20, 2013

Rules First

In principle, it is best to make the rules before taking the field, before startingthe meeting. When we decide how we are going to make decisions before we find ourselvesin the tension of making them, it lowers our chances of conflict. It is much easierto establish proposal-development steps and decision criteria in the hypotheticalrather then when actually confronted with a real proposal and with real personalities.

"We'll figure out the rules as we go," rarely turns out fair and often leads to conflict and resentment.

Establishing rules of engagement beforehand lets everyone know what to expect, giveseveryone equal opportunity to participate, and increases chances of creative, peacefuldecisions.

Practical Tip: Before you get to the hard decisions, first establish who gets tovote and who does not, how proposals get developed and discussed, and norms of behavior for meetings. For many groups, such rules are embodied in bylaws and meetingground rules. Imagine the tough situations before they arrive and decide in advancehow they will be handled.

Establishing and enforcing rules does not limit creativity, but rather encouragesit. Knowing what to expect gives us courage to fully participate. Craig Freshley

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Can Bytes Save the Future? The Money Value Delusion

King Midas got his highest wish granted: All he touched turned to gold. Here seen with his golden daughter . He starved to death shortly after.

On behalf of us all, investors make the same mistake as King Midas did. Human behavioural ecology knows why this paradox exists. Would it help if everybody knew?

Mate choice and sexual selection is the ultimate evolutionary force that has shaped the human mind. Cognitive mechanisms like consciousness, language ability and emotions are ultimate evolved strategies in the battle over mates. Status, showing off, beauty and the quest for value symbols are universal mate preferences. They are expressed in some form or another in all cultures, through all times.
Fortunately, attractive mate strategies also include the urge to display generosity and cooperation. Game theory reveals these human universals, and under which circumstances they appear and thrive. Human evolutionary past consisted of 'ingroups' in which all members knew each other. These ingroups favoured sexual selection through a well-known behavioral mechanism called the Handicap Principle. The peacock’s tail is only the tip of an iceberg compared to the human results of this attractivity selection: "Look at me, I can be generous and share my wealth, I can show-off and bear burdens of all kinds, and still be top among peers". In cities, extreme examples are observed.



"I’ll die before I’m 25, and when I die I will have lived the way  I wanted to. " Sid Vicious (1957–1979), Sex Pistols

The universal locations of cognitive mechanisms are now read with brain scanning techniques. Emotions are evolved as positive or negative drivers - rewards or punishments - to seek or respectively avoid, certain situations and actions. The environment we live in merely push the buttons. No button – no reaction: How did you learn the taste of sugar? The feeling of pain? The rewarding sensation of money, the locations seen in this picture? What about the urge to be visible? The need to be right in discussions…? The buttons are inherited from our ancestors, because those who had them, won. The others didn’t.



A model of the ultimate representative democracy, adjusted for Norway. Larger nations will need one more level of ingroups.

Cultures are in this way manifestations of the roots of sexual selection. This pattern is overwhelmingly clear, once seen. Unfortunately, the global community is now among 'outgroups', and the cooperation and generosity found among friends and small groups meet with the evolved human strategies of competition with "the unknown, the outsiders"; potentially uncertain competitors, out to seek the same resources, habitats and mates as ourselves. The global capitalism is a result of such outgroup strategies. From this, several important insights and suggestions to solutions emerge. Here are two examples to show the range of implications:

1. The Norwegian petroleum policy is following the logic of profit: Empty the reservoirs and convert it into value symbols as fast as possible: "Norway’s petroleum fund is now so big that we can subsist on it forever" (Torgeir Micaelsen, Chairman of the finance committee of the Norwegian parliament, speaking on national TV). Will it be a choice between the last meal on earth, and a data server containing 350 billion Euro…

2. Fish farming is using more resources than it produces. Because of the profit, this unsustainable industry is looked upon as successful. "The money feeling" is short-sighted, and evolved during a time of plenty where there was no need for planning for centuries.
Is it possible to design a democratic, solidary and sustainable society, stabilised by human ingroup drivers?
In our book The biological human being – individuals and societies in the light of evolution (preliminary only in Norwegian) we suggest a model for a national and global ultimate democratic economy, which can handle and execute ownership on five levels (see figure above). It is both about curbing the bad sides and letting the good sides thrive. There are several prerequisites in order to stabilise such an organisation, of which three are most important:

1. A political solution to sustainability must include democratic control over production and economy.

2. Production must be for the purpose of sustainability, not profit.

3. Civil salaries must include all and be decided democratically.

This can be achieved through ingroup control over the unwanted, selfish strategies of our human mind: When we are observed, among our closest, we hide egoism and are cooperative and generous. No-one is openly selfish when being watched. This democracy, once established, will be extremely stable. Justice and fairness will be decided through open democratic decisions, by elected peers, on each level. Freeriders are controlled within the groups. Surely, we CAN decide to keep on overexploitating, and send our children into an uncertain future, but we will at least decide it ourselves. For example, in the US, only a few extremely rich persons may win elections.

A safer future can be planned. Profit and economic growth can be replaced by sustainable production: Reusable, repairable and recyclable products. Research and efforts can be focused to meet these goals, without the need for capital growth and profit. Solidarity will be forced upon decision making, through the evolved ingroup strategies. We suggest an interdisciplinary research group on concrete solutions like this. Please contact us if you find this interesting.

Terje Bongard, Norwegian Institute for Nature Research Terje.bongard@nina.no phone +47 986 44 786
Editorial Notes: All of the materials on the original website are in Norwegian. -KS

Recommended at Syndax Vuzz.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

High Speed Trains are Killing the European Railway Network

by Kris De Decker, originally published by Low-tech Magazine
High speed rail is marketed as a sustainable alternative to air traffic. According to the International Union of Railways, the high speed train "plays a key role in a stage of sustainable development and combating climate change". As a regular long-distance train traveler in Europe, I have to say that the opposite is true. High speed rail is destroying the most valuable alternative to the airplane; the "low speed" rail network that has been in service for decades.

The introduction of a high speed train connection invariably accompanies the elimination of a slightly slower, but much more affordable, alternative route, forcing passengers to use the new and more expensive product, or abandon the train altogether. As a result, business people switch from full-service planes to high speed trains, while the majority of Europeans are pushed into cars, coaches and low-cost airplanes. Continue reading...

Monday, December 16, 2013

Wat Arun Temple, Bangkok, Thailand (Scaling Hierarchy)

Wat Arun Temple, Bangkok, Thailand. Photo: Diego Delso

Husqvarna kjøleskap en fiasko (Krav for nytt kjøleskap)

Husqvarna kjøleskap har en stylet finish, men er under fasaden like falskt og mislykket som Pamela Anderson

Min bror har alltid hevdet at for å være miljøbevisst må man kjøpe det dyreste og beste, da dette gir varige produkter slik at man skåner miljøet. Mitt Husqvarna kjøleskap var et såkalt dyrt skap med helautomatisk avising og det hele. I dag forstår jeg at avisingssystemet aldri har fungert, det er derfor det har duret og gått uavbrutt dag og natt siden det var nytt. Der vi bodde før var ikke dette noe problem, da kjøkkenet var for seg selv. I dag har vi en såkalt åpen kjøkkenløsning, en uting, noe jeg vil komme tilbake til i en seinere post.

Det siste året har jeg virkelig fått merke denne duringen, da jeg har sovet på rommet under kjøleskapet, noe som nærmest kan sammenlignes med å ha et pressluftsbor i hodet. Naturligvis, i profittens navn har Block Watne droppet å legge inn lydabsorbenter i etasjeskillene, slik at vibreringen fra kjøleskapet har avstedkommet adskillig verre støynivå i underetasjen enn i rommet der det er plassert.

Block Watne har heller ikke avsatt tilstrekkelig plass mellom vindu/kjøkkenbenk og vegg, slik at jeg må dra fram kjøleskapet for å få fram skuffer og hyller for rengjøring etc. Dette gjør det også vanskelig å bygge inn kjøleskapet.

Uansett, i går prøvde jeg å åpne inn mot vifta i frysedelen, da denne igjen hadde sluttet å gå. Det viste seg at nesten hele fryseelementet, vifta, rør etc. var innkapslet av tykk is, dette skal liksom være et selvavisende kjøleskap! Isen var så massiv at jeg måtte legge hårføneren over fryseelementet.

Hvor klønete kjøleskapet er laget viste seg i all sin gru når jeg skulle sette delene på plass igjen, dette gikk knapt og hovedskuff og frontdeksel i frysedelen ble det ikke plass til hvis man skal lukke døra, noe som jo er en fordel. Under arbeidet røk også føleren for døra sund, da denne var av simpel plastikk. Husqvarna kjøleskap er definitivt ikke laget for å repareres og vedlikeholdes, kun for å kasseres. Men dette er jo hemmeligheten med hele det kapitalistiske systemet.

Så nå er det ut igjen på kjøleskapjakt. Jeg hater å kjøpe ting, så dette var det siste jeg ønsket i julestria. Det viktigste er å sette opp ei skikkelig kravliste, håper denne også kan være til hjelp for lesere av bloggen. (I går hadde jeg 326 sidevisninger, forrige måned 5 315 sidevisninger).

Krav for nytt kjøleskap:

  1. Man må kunne få ut hyller og skuffer for rengjøring og tilpasning uten å måtte dra fram kjøleskapet, dette med en lysåpning på 66 cm. (Egentlig 68 cm, men ønsker å "kle inn" kjøleskapet med heltreplater på sidene. Døra må gå ordentlig opp.
  2. Det bør ha et støynivå på maksimalt 34 dB, helst lavere. Må ikke gå hele tida, kun i korte perioder avbrutt av lange perioder med stillhet. Gjelder også vifta.
  3. Det må ikke avgi noen form for vibrasjoner til gulvet, som kan spre seg til soverom i underetasjen. F.eks. at kompressor er montert på støtabsorbenter, gjerne noe opp fra gulvet, gjerne også at kjøleskapet har støtabsorbenter mot gulv.
  4. Det må være selvavisende.
  5. Det må finnes et skikkelig serviceverksted i nærområdet.
  6. Det bør være et håndtak under kjøleskapet slik at det blir enkelt å dra fram.
  7. Slagretning på døra må kunne endres. (Slår mot venstre i mitt kjøkken).
  8. Må ha frysedel.
  9. Evt. hevet fra gulv for rengjøring, evt. innebygd front.
  10. Skal det ikke bygges inn bør det ha svarte sider og metall front.
  11. Gjerne en "brekkløsning" på døra slik at det blir lettere å åpne når døra suger seg inntil.
  12. Ikke Husqvarna.
  13. Enkelt innstillingspanel for temperatur etc.
  14. Enkelt å reparere.
  15. Ikke for tungt. (Tungt å transportere, flytte, og tyngden overfører trolig i sterkere grad evt. vibrasjoner til gulvet).

INTELLIGENCE-BASED DESIGN: A SUSTAINABLE FOUNDATION FOR WORLDWIDE ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION (Free e-book)

by Nikos A. Salingaros & Kenneth G. Masden II


Download pdf directly here

Description:
Architectural theory as currently taught in modern universities throughout the world no longer provides a plausible basis for the discipline and practice of architecture. Students studying within this model are left to their own inventions if they hope to gain an architectural degree. Forced to formulate a body of work constrained by the paradigm of contemporary design, students learn to copy fashionable images without understanding their geometry; or simply invent forms that look as if they possess a contemporary sense of architecture. By their very nature, such forms are irrelevant to human needs and sensibilities. Contrary to what students are led to believe, this practice does not provide a broader base for creativity, but instead effectively restricts choices to a very narrow design vocabulary. Most architectural institutions continue to propagate a curricular model that has sustained their particular ideals and ideologies for decades. While many innovative didactic materials and ideas for revising the architectural curriculum are available today, they are often overlooked or ignored. If implemented, these new ideas could drastically improve the educational model, allowing students the world over to participate in a learning experience specific to their immediate and local context. By re-situating the education of an architect in more practical and contextual terms, we emphasize components of building design that relate directly to human existence, human perception, and the human values and beliefs that have for millennia served to establish culture and identity. A new model of learning is developed here for students wanting to make real architecture, and for educators and practitioners that seek the same. The following proposal is predicated on the knowledge of human interaction with the physical world and the necessity of corporeal engagement with the built environment. Furthermore, our model re-institutes values in the practice and education of architects, values that once sprang forth naturally from local cultures and traditions throughout the world, but which have in recent decades been usurped by the influence of global capital.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Koseligheten tar hevn

Kjetil Rolness vrir øra rundt på hvem det måtte være. Sist ut er arkitekter som ikke tar folks ønske om kos og komfort på alvor. Les mer...


Koselig hus på Maihaugen

Hvorfor tregrening?

I et samfunn der det er religionen som bestemmer alt, blir åndslivet kneblet, og det økonomiske livet blir strengt underlagt statlige reguleringsmekanismer. I et samfunn hvor rettslivet bestemmer alt, utvikles stater som det sovjetkommunistiske, hvor staten får all makt, og det enkelte mennesket ikke har noen personlige rettigheter. I slike stater blir tenkningen også svært ensrettet, ikke bare det økonomiske livet. I samfunn der næringslivet bestemmer alt, bestemmer næringslivet også over åndslivet og samfunnets rettslige prinsipper. - Henning Næss

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Apenes planet

Skal me bry oss om gårsdagens klimarapport må me først kvele vår indre Fred Flintstone, skriver Agnes Ravatn.


RÅDGIVERE?: Kor fornuftig er det eigentleg å bruke ein tre millionar år gammal apekatt som rådgivar? spør laurdagskommentator Agnes Ravatn.

Publisert den 27. sep 2013, kl. 22:21 av
Gåte: kva er det som er stort og trugande, ikkje har påført oss synleg liding enno, skrir så langsamt fram at ingen legg merke til henne, rammar andre folk enn oss først, og ligg så langt inn i framtida at me har slutta å bry oss?

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Fotodokumentar over skjendingen av innlandets dronning en mørk og trist desemberdag 2013

Denne fotodokumentaren av ødeleggelsene på østsida av Mjøsa ved utbyggingen av ny E6 Kolomoen-Minnesund ble foretatt mandag 9. desember. Alle bildene ble tatt i fart mens jeg kjørte, utsnittene er derfor tilfeldige. Dette gir både uskarpe bilder og underlige motiv, men samtidig synes jeg det gir en ekstra realistisk dimensjon over dokumentasjonen av denne pågående dystopien.

I en kommentar nylig hos Pål Steigan skrev jeg følgende:
I disse dager skjer det også en nådeløs skjending av innlandets dronning, med utbyggingen av nye E6 nede i mjøsstranda, jernbanen legges delvis på fyllinger ute i Mjøsa: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vegarbeider_p%C3%A5_ny_E6_mellom_Kolomoen_og_Minnesund_ved_Mj%C3%B8sa-5.JPG

Selv gleder jeg meg til dette landskapet en dag igjen vil bli oppfylt av beitedyr, men sårene trengs det en ny istid for å utbedre. Frykter også for all isolasjonen som benyttes her til lands, vil anta de fremdeles benytter polystyren.

Motorveien og skyskraperen er begge symboler for moderniteten, en arv fra Le Corbusier. Men de er også energisluk, derfor er deres tid snart forbi.

Motorveiene ble først og fremst bygget for å øke kapitalakkumulasjonen, ved å transportere varer raskere til utvidede markeder. Utvidelsen av E6 til Hafjell skyldes derimot hovedsaklig at elitene i Oslo skal kunne kjøre i 100 km/t til alpinanleggene og hytteparadisene sine. Hadde de brydd seg om industrien ville de satset på å utbedre infrastrukturen på vestsida av Mjøsa, hvor de tunge industrimiljøene ligger. Aksen Moelv-Gjøvik-Raufoss er et av de sterkeste industrielle tyngdepunktene i Norge.
The Thought of Ivan Illich Today:
Illich’s theories on the effectiveness of cars, air travel, and energy showed that industrial progress actually hampers the speed and effectiveness we have as people who were born capable of walking to our desired destinations. Roads, airports, stations, traffic jams, all take away the benefits of using complicated engineered methods of travel, and make our actual travel times longer. - David Bollier
Lysbildeserien forsvant, da dette var fra en tid hvor jeg lenket bildene til fb, en stor tabbe. Men alle fotografiene kan ses hos Wikimedia Commons her!

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Mattilsynet oppfordrer til mindre bruk av kanel

Mattilsynet følger nå opp regelverket fra EU og anbefaler folk å begrense inntaket av kanel.

Foto: photo8

NTB.

EU har fastsatt en grenseverdi på 15 milligram kumarin per kilo bakst. Kumarin er et stoff som finnes i kanel og som kan påføre skader på leveren ved høyt inntak.

Det er anslått at kroppen kan takle et daglig inntak av kanel på 1,4 gram, noe som tilsvarer en halv teskje, ifølge Mattilsynet.

- Det er ingen grunn til bekymring for folk med et variert kosthold. Det er i første rekke bakerne som må tenke litt ekstra på hvor mye kanel de strør på baksten, sier seksjonssjef Atle Wold i Mattilsynet.

Det er bakeren som i utgangspunktet må vurdere kanelinnholdet.

Her i landet brukes kanel blant annet i de bergenske skillingsbollene, og den norske risgrøten er fast innslag på mange familiers bord. Mattilsynet ber foreldre passe på kanelinntaket hos små barn.

- De spiser gjerne mer grøt enn andre, og siden kroppen er liten, tåler de også mindre enn voksne, sier Wold.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

A Home in Harmony with Nature? Why, that's illegal!

This sounds like the kind of book I would have loved to have written if I had skills.: "The Diary of Amy, the 14-Year-Old Girl Who Saved the Earth" by Scott Erickson..."A home in Harmony With Nature? What, that's illegal!" Continue reading...
 

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Sovebyen Skoglundfeltet ved Gjøvik

Det er nesten så man sovner bare ved synet. Klikk i bildet for en forstørrelse.
The practical result of government promotion of monoculture development is that for most of us there are two communities: a community in which we work and shop, and a bedroom community in which we are stored. – Kevin Carson
Når man ikke sover i sovebyen er man gjerne på CC og shopper
Here we can see the radical nature of Berry’s vision. Our entire economy, our very culture of work, leisure, and home is constructed around the idea of easy mobility and the disintegration of various aspects of our lives. We live in one place, work in another, shop in another, worship in another, and take our leisure somewhere else. According to Berry, an integrated life, a life of integrity, is one characterized by membership in a community in which one lives, works, worships, and conducts the vast majority of other human activities. The choice is stark: “If we do not live where we work, and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.” – Wendell Berry and the New Urbanism: Agrarian Remedies, Urban Prospects

Monday, December 2, 2013

Pat Conaty on the History and the Rediscovery of the Cooperative Commonwealth

Watch this interesting video presentation here:


Content details:

“Solidarity Co-operatives have been developed as a unique multi-stakeholder Co-operative system since the 1980s. They are unique because co-production members include paid workers, volunteers, service users and social investors. In Italy they provide social care, health services and educational services for local communities. There are now over 14,000 of these Co-ops across Italy providing services to 5 million. The Solidarity Co-op movement has spread in Europe to France, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Poland. They have been developed in Quebec and in the UK there is early work underway to develop them in England and Wales.

This talk, given on November 25th 2013 at Schumacher College, was the tenth of 11 talks during the autumn of 2013 on Adventures in New Economics – a wide-ranging speaker series covering the key topics in new economic thinking today, presented by Transition Town Totnes, Totnes REconomy Project, and Schumacher College.”

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Saturday, November 30, 2013

The Small-Mart Revolution

To Save the World, with P2P to a post-capitalist society

Book by Michel Bauwens, published in Belgium:

Save the world
With P2P towards a post-capitalist society


From the back cover:
Our present society is based on the absurd idea that material resources are abundant and immaterial ideas are scare. We behave as if the planet is infinite and exploit the earth in a way that endangers survival of the human species. On the other hand, we are building artificial walls around human knowledge to prevent and impede sharing as much as possible.

The peer-to-peer model of Wikipedia (knowledge), Linux (software) and Wikipspeed (design), inspired by open source, wants to turn this logic on its head. According to Michel Bauwens, the sharing economy, P2P-networks, open source, crowd sourcing, fablabs, micro-factories, hackerpsaces, the makers’ movement, urban agriculture… all new phenomena forming patterns that lead us towards a post-capitalist society, in which the market will be subsumed to the logic of the commons.

Just as feudalism developed within the womb of the Roman slave society and capitalism developed within feudalism, we are witnessing the embryo of a new form of society within capitalism.

In order to save the world, we need a relocalisation of production and an extension of global cooperation in the field of knowledge, code and design.
Additional information:

The book is based on a 12-hour interview by former journalist Jean Lievens with Michel Bauwens, and is divided into sis chapters: the Economy of P2P, The politics of P2P, P2P and spirituality, the Philosophy of P2¨, the P2P Foundation and a Biography of Michel Bauwens, who was the only Belgian elected on the Enriched List of the Post-Growth Institute, a list with the 100 most inspiring people (dead and alive) ever in relation to sustainability.

A New System of Values is being Born

How does deep social change and a phase transition from one system to another start? It starts with a cultural revolution. It starts with a new system of values being born, a “transvaluation”. The feudals and the Christians did not have the same values as the elite of the Roman Empire. If you were a member of the Roman Empire work was bad, it was for the slaves, but if you were a Christian monk work was good. You were supposed to work, you were creating God’s word on earth. So feudalism was not just a continuation of the Roman empire, it was a value revolution, of course it took something over but it was really another system. This new system of common production, the commons-based peer production, is not just a continuation of capitalism, it is not just a marginal rearrangement of the furniture, it is basically a revolution in values. For us openness, sharing and commons are the core of our value system. We are still entrepreneurs but we are a different type of entrepreneurs.

What do you do if you have a bunch of people with new values?
Let us go back to the end of the feudal system: the serfs escape the countryside and go to Florence and Venice where they meet up with the merchants and because they do not fit in the guild system they have to work for the merchants. What happens in that situation? This new segment of population demands new things and new social charters are established (the Magna Charta, the free city charters). What is a GPL, a General Public Licence? It is a social charter that says: we, the community, tell you, entrepreneurial coalition (of course it is often the same people, the developers working for Linux are the same that work for IBM or that own small companies developing Linux services), that if you want to collaborate with us you have to abide by five rules and if you don’t you do not play.

Next step: we are embedding those new values and those social charters in new open infrastructures. Think about BarCamps, a new way of meeting where the people collectively decide how the meeting will go. It is a new way and it has a new value embedded in the infrastructure of meetings. These are co-working spaces, hackers’ spaces, new infrastructures of cooperation based on different values.

Open manufacturing like Arduino is another example. Or the eCars project in Finland … if you are interested I have on p2pfoundation.net a list of over 300 project that are emerging among which about 25 open-source cars being planned and developed. The first one, Local Motors, based on crowdsourced design, is already on the road in the United States. ECars in Finland has made its own first shared design to transform Corolla into eCorolla, the “common” car in the Netherlands is headed for production in 2011. This is not a utopia. We are talking about real projects that are advancing at a pretty fast speed, faster than open software. These open charters, open infrastructures become new practices. You are doing open designs, you are doing open currencies, open funding, crowd funding which you apply in your own domain, so now we have open science, open education, open politics which create products. Then you have people like me who think that this is exciting and we talk about it and try to put a little grease in the system.

This is what I am trying to say: the old system is obviously crumbling and the alternative is not going to be centralised state planning, I think most people today agree on that. So what are the new alternatives? I would argue the alternative is being built. You may not see it; it depends on where you are in the system. I have a good friend who has been working for IBM for 3 years and it was really frustrating because I was excited, I am an evangelist so I always see the good side of things but he would say: “Michel, I do not see these things happening, I do not know what you are talking about”.

Well, luckily his wife got a really nice job and now he is not working but being a house-dad, he is in Alicante and I just skyped with him yesterday and he said: “Michel, for the first time in 3 years I am starting to think that you were right”. He is no longer working for IBM so he sees things differently, he is starting to see that young people today have no future, there is generalised insecurity. So if you are faced with a crumbling mainstream system, what do you do? You look for alternatives.

A little anecdote and then I close. The chairman has been very kind to give me some more time. I was in Tampere in Finland one month ago. There was in the audience a lady who is a start-up entrepreneur. There is a new subjectivity being born. Young people are building their identity based on their contribution to this common projects. So more and more identity is going away from “I am working for IBM” to “I am doing Linux”. It is the combination of their engagements which creates a reputation, association networks and their happiness in life. I have seen that many times, for example in Amsterdam. What the lady said was: “I am creating this company and I want to hire people. Finland is in crisis, you know, there is unemployment also in Finland. And you know what? I cannot find anybody who wants to work more than 3 days a week for me”. Now, why is that? According to a study in the city of Malmö, 52% of the population is engaged in peer production. 52%! And this is why Google did it, Google is a pioneer in leaving one day a week for people to engage in their own projects. This has become the reality for young people in Finland. They are not just victims of job insecurity, they also need it in a way because they want to be engaged in their passionate projects. This is what gives meaning to their lives and this is why we have a new culture and why we are building all these new alternatives. - Michel Bauwens

You Cannot Really Make Real High Quality Products that Last Long and are Sustainable Because You Would Lose the Competitive Game

You may not believe this when you hear me talking but I have been in business for over 30 years and you know how that works. If you are in business you spend half of your money making a good new product, innovating and then you spend the other half of the money making sure that your competitors are not going to copy it, making sure that your TV breaks down after 10 years so people buy new ones. The game is rigged. You cannot really make real high quality products that last long and are sustainable because you would lose the competitive game. - Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens on New Age

In other ways, New Age thinking was an heir to utopian socialism. Given the difficulty of changing society in radical ways at the macro level, people began to change their own lives by abandoning blind trust in the mechanistic approaches to the human body that were espoused by Western medicine; and by leaving aside the knowledge-stuffing, rote-learning style of education they were fed in order to treat children as whole persons. These changes have made the world unrecognizable from thirty years ago.

Whatever the negative features of the neoliberal age, many institutions have become more humane, more egalitarian, more respectful, and more attuned to the whole individual. People have changed, institutions have evolved, and many small-scale communal experiments have yielded valuable learning experiences even if they have failed to change the bigger picture. 
At a time when the left was disintegrating and many social gains were undone, New Age thinking provided a banner under which millions of people continued their concrete efforts for personal and social change. Nevertheless, this thinking was also reactionary in its exaggerated rejection of 'cognicentrism' - the Western focus on the thinking mind alone. It went too far in dismissing the role of critical intelligence.

Instead of being integrative it was often regressive, a 'liberation' where selfish desire could reign unchecked. It fell prey to cults, mindless anti-modernism and extremism in the fields of diet and medicine that refused to see anything positive in western science. Spiritually, it had a romantic, rosy-tinted outlook that served to compensate for a life of dreary reality in which hyper-competition was degrading the quality of human relationships.

Finally, being born in an age of hyper-commerce, New Age thinking took on the trappings of the market, and it started functioning in ways akin to market logic. It encouraged people to behave like consumers in picking and choosing what they wanted. It became too focused on the individual and neglected processes of social change. Many of these trappings, which sometimes verged on exploitation by scumbag cults and gurus, were incompatible with authentic spirituality, which must be open-ended and participative, not based on a market model of paid experience.

In pre-modern times, people lived as members of communities with roles that were largely externally defined; in modern times they live as atomized but autonomous self-directing individuals who are bound together through social contracts and institutions. Post-modernity, seen as a critique of neoliberal capitalist structures, sees the individual as increasingly fragmented, and it has developed a strong critique of all the forces that have shown us that we are not nearly as autonomous as we think, including language and power. But this process has also left us stranded as fragmented individuals without much sense of a direction, forever deconstructing realities but rarely reconstructing them with much success. Therefore it is time for something new.

Today, individuals are no longer defined only by their membership in traditional communities or rigid roles. In my world, for example, an increasing number of people see themselves as contributors to open-source software systems like Linux rather than employees of Microsoft or Google. In this context, the key to an integrated self is to construct a rich identity of contributions that stem from active participation in many different communities. No longer New Age or Old Age but building on elements of both, a relational spirituality could form a cornerstone of the contributive societies on which the twenty-first century will be built. - Michel Bauwens

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Capitalism as the Second Revolution

I think that the second revolution in human productivity is capitalism because what capitalism does, at least in theory, is that it changes the primary motive from extrinsic negative motivation, fear (if I do not work I die) to a new game whose logic is: I am exchanging something for my benefit against another benefit. I sell my labour against a wage, I sell a product and I get money. This creates a huge leap in human productivity when we shift from a situation of negative extrinsic motivation, where basically you do not work if there is no coercion, to a situation where you work because you get a benefit. - Michel Bauwens
The Third Revolution

Kjernen i miljøkatastrofen

Sjelden jeg får 13 likes og ingen dislikes. Kommentaren er litt satt på spissen, men essensen er klar.

Les artikkelen her.
Unge kvinner på +/- 21 år er en ekstremt ettertraktet knapphetsvare blant klodens 3,5 milliarder menn. Vi rører her ved kjernen i miljøkatastrofen, det faktum at kvinner foretrekker RESSURSSTERKE og RESSURSRIKE menn. Ja, kvinner søker også snille menn, men uten ressurser kommer dette langt ned på lista, det ses heller på som en evt. bonus.

Vi har her milliarder av menn ivrig opptatt med å utpine klodens ressurser for slik å tiltrekke seg unge kvinner, i naturen symbolisert i atlaskgartnerfuglen (Se "Det biologiske mennesket" av Terje Bongard).

Hvem som egentlig har mest skyld i at vi er i ferd med å kverke oss selv, kvinner som ønsker menn med gods og gull, eller menn som sanker alt dette godset og gullet for å tiltrekke seg kvinner, er ikke godt å si.

Uansett, faktum er at uten kvinner i verden ville vi menn satt oss rett ned rundt bålet og fordrevet dagene med å fortelle historier, og vært strålende fornøyd med et lite krypinn under ei gammel gran eller lignende.
PS! Det viser seg nok at uten kvinner ville menn skutt hverandre ned til siste mann. Uten kvinner ingen sivilisasjon!

- Menn er dyr - kvinner også

Kjernen i miljøkatastrofen! Foto: Ferdinand Reus

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Barn «støpes til kopier» og blir «statens barn» i barnehage

"Studerer jeg dagens familier der barna «settes bort» i barnehager eller til dagmammaer allerede fra ettårsalderen, er jeg ikke forundret over at de mangler tilhørighet og tilknytning. Min påstand er at familien er gått i oppløsning, og at barn og unge støpes til kopier av hverandre. Det unike hos det enkelte barn files bort, de mister sitt opphav, sin identitet og sin trygghet. Jens Bjørneboe beskriver dette på en god måte i boken Jonas. «Statens barn» er blitt en realitet, og barnehagen, skolen, skolefritidsordningen og psykiatrien har overtatt foreldrenes rolle." - Per Sandberg

Monday, November 25, 2013

“Damn the Masters’ Plan!”, by Wouter Vanstiphout


Strelka Talks. "Damn the Masters' Plan!" by Wouter Vanstiphout from Strelka Institute on Vimeo.
Read more about this talk at Archiframe.
 
Nikos Salingaros says about this video:
Here is an excellent video linking urbanicide to modernism. Wouter still likes the modernist aesthetic look, but he clearly analyzes its destructiveness. It’s what we have been saying all along, though nobody paid any attention!
Maybe the time has finally come for a change?

Saturday, November 23, 2013

How to help have a great meeting - Responsibility for Attitude

How to handle the person who talks too much – Validate and hear from others

A common complaint about meetings is that one or two people talk too much and dominate the conversation. Not only does this make others feel resentful and unfulfilled, it can be very unproductive and inefficient for the group as a whole. It’s unproductive because the best ideas may not have found room to be shared or because the group got diverted off topic, and it’s inefficient because the whole group spends time going over and over the same ground or serving the interests of a single person.

As a meeting facilitator or group leader, how can you fix this? Validate what the person is saying and then make it about wanting to hear from others.

Check out the video for an explanation and a little demonstration.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

That Answer is Faith

It’s not a minor point, nor one restricted to twentieth-century French intellectuals. Shatter the shared figurations and abstractions that provide a complex literate society with its basis for collective thought and action, and you’re left with a society in fragments, where biological drives and idiosyncratic personal agendas are the only motives left, and communication between divergent subcultures becomes impossible because there aren’t enough common meanings left to make that an option. The plunge into nihilism becomes almost impossible to avoid once abstraction runs into trouble on a collective scale, furthermore, because reflection is the automatic response to the failure of a society’s abstract representations of the cosmos.  As it becomes painfully clear that the beliefs of the civil religion central to a society’s age of reason no longer correspond to the world of everyday experience, the obvious next step is to reflect on what went wrong and why, and away you go.

Religion can accomplish this because it has an answer to the nihilist’s claim that it’s impossible to prove the truth of any statement whatsoever. That answer is faith: the recognition, discussed in a previous post in this sequence, that some choices have to be made on the basis of values rather than facts, because the facts can’t be known for certain but a choice must be made anyway—and choosing not to choose is still a choice. Nihilism becomes self-canceling, after all, once reflection goes far enough to show that a belief in nihilism is just as arbitrary and unprovable as any other belief; that being the case, the figurations of a religious tradition are no more absurd than anything else, and provide a more reliable and proven basis for commitment and action than any other option.
The Second Religiosity may or may not involve a return to the beliefs central to the older age of faith. In recent millennia, far more often than not, it hasn’t been. As the Roman world came apart and the civil religion and abstract philosophies of the Roman world failed to provide any effective resistance to the corrosive skepticism and nihilism of the age, it wasn’t the old cults of the Roman gods who became the nucleus of a new religious vision, but new faiths imported from the Middle East, of which Christianity and Islam turned out to be the most enduring. Similarly, the implosion of Han dynasty China led not to a renewal of the traditional Chinese religion, but to the explosive spread of Buddhism and of the newly invented religious Taoism of Zhang Daoling and his successors. On the other side of the balance is the role played by Shinto, the oldest surviving stratum of Japanese religion, as a source of cultural stability all through Japan’s chaotic medieval era. John Michael Greer

Sunday, November 17, 2013

The Recovery of a Shareable Basis for Life

In such a discussion, it is never quite enough to critique the failings of the mainstream approach, even if it is catastrophic. One has an obligation to provide a working alternative, which illustrates a proposed path to addressing the challenge. Once we stop favoring the machine aesthetic that produces giant abstract sculptures in place of buildings, then we can turn to nature, science, and common human values for new design tools. This is what those of us who are harshly critical of the current “business as usual” — like the authors — must also surely do.

So we work on new pattern language tools, new kinds of wikis, new strategies for making more walkable neighborhoods, and new types of buildings and places that learn from the successes of old ones. We believe that the problems we humans face today are largely of our own creation, and can be resolved by us too — IF we understand the structural nature of these challenges. But we also believe that it is long past time to surrender the dogmatic claim to a failing ideology of design — one that belongs to the last century and its failing industrial approach, and not to the next century and its biological lessons.

In creating a shared language for architecture and urbanism, one that relies upon positive human emotional and physiological responses, we find universals that cross all cultures, periods, and locations. This appeal to a shareable language was a centerpiece of Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, and is extended by Alexander’s The Nature of Order, the present authors’ own writings, and many others’ work. A commons-based shareable form of architecture supports life in all its complexity, all of its emotional and even hidden dimensions, through the geometry and multiple configurations. The experimental evidence has been mounting that, because of its self-imposed geometrical limits, Modernism and its variants simply cannot achieve this positive response.

We have pointed to humans’ innate biological need to create and enjoy ornament, as witnessed in all societies. Indeed, the cultural wealth of human civilization, in all its myriad expressions around the world, comes down to its ornament — its “illumination” of the most profound aspects of ordinary life. A healthy society must affirm and enable such an approach, and continue to develop tools to support it and make it feasible. This is as much an economic challenge as a social and environmental one.

Ironically, Loos was right, though in the opposite sense of what he intended: a crime had been committed, one that had inflicted “serious injury on people’s health, on the budget and hence on cultural evolution”. To that we can add injury to the planet’s ecosystems, and the life of cities around the globe. The crime was the adoption of a geometrical fallacy — geometrical fundamentalism — which is, quite simply, incompatible with a sustainable future. - Salingaros & Mehaffy

Modernism is Not Simply One Style Among Many

There is a more serious reason to critique the continued use of architectural Modernism, and its “rococo” and “Neo-Modernist” variants, as suitable foundation for design in the 21st Century. That is because Modernism is not simply one style among many, but an expression of an elaborate discourse and practical methodology for the generation of environmental structure — and which makes a totalizing claim to its exclusive legitimacy. Modernism proposes itself as a universal form-generating discipline, allowing no alternatives. In turn, this methodology relies upon an equally elaborate theory of society, of technology, and of geometry. - Nikos A. Salingaros

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Valget mellom IGD (InnGruppe-Demokratiet) eller katabolisk kollaps

En innledning til mitt essay "Kapitalist-modernismen: eit fatalt feilsteg etter vegen mot ein varig sivilisasjon"

Les essayet her:

Kapitalist-modernismen: eit fatalt feilsteg etter vegen mot ein varig sivilisasjon

På et vis er overskriften til dette innlegget feil, vi kan ikke velge mellom katabolisk kollaps og IGD, da katabolisk kollaps er uunngåelig. Katabolisk kollaps vil si en gradvis kollaps av vår industrielle sivilisasjon i løpet av de neste 100-300 år, med en tilsvarende nedgang i verdens befolkning, teknologisk utvikling etc. Begrepet forfektes i dag først og fremst av bloggeren John Michael Greer. I følge Greer har vi allerede entret vår sivilisasjons undergang, hvoretter vi går inn i en ny "mørk middelalder". Trolig vil det vare flere tusen år før menneskene igjen blir i stand til å danne en ny sivilisasjon, og en ny fossilbasert sivilisasjon som vår egen vil neppe igjen se dagens lys før om 100 millioner år, men da av andre intelligente vesener som har etterfulgt mennesket.

I stedet for å ta grep og forberede oss velger de fleste mennesker en av to meget farlige fornektelsesstrategier, troen på evig fremskritt eller troen på at mennesket er dødsdømt uansett. Begge valgene bunner i en motvilje til å ta ansvar.
I’ve suggested in the past that one of the things the paired myths of inevitable progress and inevitable apocalypse have in common is that both of them serve as excuses for inaction. Claim that progress is certain to save us all, or claim that some catastrophe or other is certain to doom us all, and either way you have a great justification for staying on the sofa and doing nothing. I’ve come to think, though, that the two mythologies share more in common than that. It’s true that both represent a refusal of what Joseph Campbell called the “call to adventure,” the still small voice summoning each of us to rise up in an age of crisis and decay to become the seedbearers of an age not yet born, but both mythologies also pretend to offer an escape from life, in the full, messy, intensely real sense I’ve suggested above. - John Michael Greer
Et parti som Fremskrittspartiet, som viser total fornektelse for at vi er inne i en katabolisk kollaps, og helt og fullt dyrker fremskrittsmytologien, blir i denne sammenheng livsfarlig. Blant de politiske partiene har vi ikke en klar motpol til Fremskrittspartiet, dvs. et parti som sanker stemmer på å predikere menneskets og sivilisasjonens dødsdom, hvilket kanskje heller ikke er så underlig.

Men vi trenger ingen av disse to alternativene, hva vi trenger er et politisk system som innser realitetene i en katabolisk kollaps, og at vi nå har entret vår sivilisasjons undergang slik vi kjenner den.

Her har vår egen adferdsbiolog Terje Bongard tatt grep og utformet en ny demokratiform, InnGruppe-Demokratiet eller IGD. Denne demokratiformen har en svært resilient utforming og tar innover seg realitetene av at vi i dag lever i et utgruppesamfunn, samt at vi dyrker de mørkeste kreftene i handikapprinsippet gjennom kapitalismen. Dette kan ikke vare ved!

Bildekreditt: Bioman.no

Videre er jeg overbevist om at vi må lenke IGD opp mot biofilia, ikke biofobia. Moderne arkitektur og struktur er en materialisert form for biofobia, og må derfor opphøre, på lik linje med kapitalismen.

Konklusjonen av mitt essay er derfor at for å kunne tilpasse oss realitetene av en katabolisk kollaps, må vi bygge en sivilisasjon som består av en symbiose mellom IGD og biofilia.

Alternativet er en flere tusenårig ny mørk middelalder for menneskeslekten, som vil få vår foregående middelalder til å fremstå som en søndagstur.

Architecture in the Age of Austerity: Leon Krier


Hi Øyvind,

Many thanks for passing along these resources! Krier is a giant, it has been some time since I've engaged with his thinking, but I've very much enjoyed watching this provocative presentation. And it links up quite well with J.A. Arnfinsen's conversation with Nikos Salingaros at levevei.no.

In particular, I found it interesting to come into some of these lines of thinking after having wrapped up the past month of working on this exhibition in San Diego: http://uag.ucsd.edu/. Good to pull into these topics now that the dust has settled a bit.

All the best,
Joseph Redwood-Martinez

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