Society

"Well, at least Mussolini made the trains run on time." Except he didn't, of course. Mussolini sought to convince the world that fascism delivered Italy into a technologically efficient order; and the story was part of the dictator's careful (and successful, even) crafting of a mass-media mythology. As Victoria de

Coping strategies for the next few days — and the next four years.

The Pentagon is pursuing every available option to keep US troops safe from the rising tide of adversary drones, including a robotic twist on its standard-issue small arms.

From our editor: last week’s US election will affect the future for all of us. Here’s how we’ll cover it.

For the first time in 80 years, Karl Polanyi’s magnum opus has been published in the UK.

A defense industrial base (DIB; also sometimes referred to as a defense industrial and technological base) is the network of organizations, facilities, and resources that provides a government with materials, products, and services for defense purposes (especially the supply of its armed forces). It may include both public and private actors, including some entities that may not exclusively engage in defense-related production, and is often defined in geographical or national terms (e.g., the U.S. or Chinese defense industrial bases). It may also be divided according to the kinds of weapons and equipment produced (one may speak of a "submarine industrial base," for instance, or a "rotary-wing aircraft industrial base," etc.).[1]

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is an idea in psychology proposed by American psychologist Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" in the journal Psychological Review. Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, some of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans. The theory is a classification system intended to reflect the universal needs of society as its base, then proceeding to more acquired emotions. The hierarchy of needs is split between deficiency needs and growth needs, with two key themes involved within the theory being individualism and the prioritization of needs. While the theory is usually shown as a pyramid in illustrations, Maslow himself never created a pyramid to represent the hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy of needs is a psychological idea and an assessment tool, particularly in education, healthcare and social work. The hierarchy remains a popular framework, including sociology research, management training, and higher education.

Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, and forestry for food and non-food products.[1] Agriculture was a key factor in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. While humans started gathering grains at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers only began planting them around 11,500 years ago. Sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle were domesticated around 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. In the 20th century, industrial agriculture based on large-scale monocultures came to dominate agricultural output.

A subsistence economy is an economy directed to basic subsistence, the provision of food, clothing, shelter rather than to the market.

Extensive farming or extensive agriculture is an agricultural production system that uses small inputs of labour, fertilizers, and capital, relative to the land area being farmed.

Subsistence agriculture occurs when farmers grow crops on smallholdings to meet the needs of themselves and their families. Subsistence agriculturalists target farm output for survival and for mostly local requirements. Planting decisions occur principally with an eye toward what the family will need during the coming year, and only secondarily toward market prices. Tony Waters, a professor of sociology, defines "subsistence peasants" as "people who grow what they eat, build their own houses, and live without regularly making purchases in the marketplace".

Establishing Salish Sea Summits under the Oceans Protection Plan

The Pacific Northwest (PNW; French: Nord-Ouest Pacifique), sometimes referred to as Cascadia, is a geographic region in Western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Though no official boundary exists, the most common conception includes the U.S. states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Some broader conceptions reach north into Alaska and Yukon, south into northern California, and east into western Montana. Other conceptions may be limited to the coastal areas west of the Cascade and Coast mountains.

The Salish Sea is a marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean located in the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. state of Washington. It includes the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound, and an intricate network of connecting channels and adjoining waterways.

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.

Community-supported agriculture or cropsharing is a system that connects producers and consumers within the food system closer by allowing the consumer to subscribe to the harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. It is an alternative socioeconomic model of agriculture and food distribution that allows the producer and consumer to share the risks of farming. The model is a subcategory of civic agriculture that has an overarching goal of strengthening a sense of community through local markets.

No.332 — AI’s “human in the loop” isn’t ⊗ I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is ⊗ Jules Verne’s technocratic worldmaking

Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief product officer, said something in a 2020 conversation that has stuck with me since. “Twitter is one of those products where I can see overuse making people have a…

Even if you think you are crushing it, you should read this.

I’m surprised more people aren’t saying this.

Interesting. American Voting has been subject to repeated hacks since at least #BushVGore where hanging chads were just a distraction, the hack was in Valusia County. I was a le

Donald Trump and Republicans won in a rout

In an era of disasters and despotism, one way to get people connected and ready to respond is to host an open assembly. Here's how.

With Donald Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling the Senate, an increase in book bans is a serious threat.

Progress hasn’t stopped, but it’s never easy, and never without backlash.

In the last week, I have been referred to as "Daddy" more times than ever before in my life. And apparently I'm a "boomer" now. I've also been told that my blog is a psyop to protect the dollar. Since the twit-shitshow (twitshow) began, it looks like I got 1.7M "impressions", around 30K likes, 7K RTs, 700 replies, and my number of followers went from 15K to 24K. (But then I immediately ...

Election day, 2024.