Getting Away from Mainstream Media and Finding the News That's RelevantWritten by Jesse S. Somer
If you’re anything like me you are really getting tired of mainstream media’s one-voice-to-many analysis of life on Earth. First of all, it’s just too negative! I read a survey recently that stated that fourteen out of fifteen newspaper and TV News stories had negative fear-based stories. I don’t know about you, but if I look at my everyday life, amount of good and bad I experience seems to be much more balanced. Why does ‘big’ media think we all love hearing dark side of things so much?If you look at what news stories truly are in historical terms, it is a person sitting around tribal campfire at night telling a tale to inform people both in wisdom and knowledge. In any tribe there were many storytellers, so different perspectives were always available to masses. Well, if you think today’s media sources are too monopolized in their power of authority over stories we are told, there’s a new option for humanity. The answers and views we are seeking in our daily lives could lie in Internet. This Internet thing really could be key for humanity to evolving into a species that thinks independently, leaving this age of fear behind. It’s time to bypass main media sources. On Web we can access non-profit news organizations, we can hear personal views of individuals in news forums and blogs, we can even express our own views on world issues as well as sharing our own personal experiences! With this newly accepted technology called RSS Readers we can start to get type of information that we feel is most relevant to ourselves as individuals. It comes straight to us and then we can sort through it and decide which people and sources we want to hear from on a regular basis. This is awesome as it means we don’t have to search through a bunch of stories that have little interest to us. It also means if we want to hear more positivism, we can push negative views out of our perceptions.
| | Some Villain Thoughts About a Container VillageWritten by Iulia Pascanu
Preview: "Shipping containers" have yet nothing to do with "housing" in Romania. Is there any chance that they will soon? Belonging to Eastern European block, released in 1989 from communist oppression, Romania has already experienced 15 years of less and less stunning freedom. ----------- I read a few articles about shipping container housing. It took me about five minutes to realize this subject makes your mind frolic endlessly on an imaginary (however not utopian) land. Those articles belong to some very respectable gentlemen (at least that was impression they made on me, at first reading) – that praise living in shipping containers. Let's go cheap A 40 foot-long shipping container could reach to $1,500-2,000. I started asking myself questions about how this subject could become a solution for homeless people in Romania (that's where I live), where flats cost (at least) $20,000. And they're not 40 foot-long. At same time, Romania has a lot of peripheral categories: poor, old, young, unemployed, pitman, gypsy, orphan, student. Could they benefit from this recent discovery that living in some kind of shoe-boxes can be really cool and trendy? I'll try to answer that. A few advantages from a Romanian point of view: for peripherals it's cheap, for artists it's unconventional subject is quite green you can "camp" anywhere you want (Romania has not few spectacular landmarks) result you get using shipping containers can be anywhere between "plastic" and "platinum", practical and fantasy, serious and ludic - you can move your "house" around. At least that's what LOT/EK people are trying to prove by their "mobile dwelling unit" project. Earthquakes, floods and sliding land are some serious problems in Romania, so being able to leave place at a snail's pace may be useful. - most Romanians live in blocks of flats that pretty much look like overcrowded shipping containers (and usually inadequate to modern standards: water supply, heating, insulation, comfort etc). Could shipping container houses actually mean a reasonable escape? Maybe, if they are properly transformed and adapted to living conditions. - A sad fact is that few Romanians actually have possibility to pay $2,000 cash for a house-to-be. If you are not a Romanian 2007 could be, in optimist version, year that Romania will join EU. Compared to Western standards, Romanian land properties are very cheap. Land-purchase conditions are same for both Romanians and foreigners.
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