Here's a site that deserves your attention: an ongoing collaborative project to photograph the integral confluences of longitude and latitude (49N x 100W or 45N x 75W, for example), excluding areas at sea. Your mission, find the confluence by hook or by crook and by GPS, stand in the spot and photograph north, south, east and west. A fair portion (a minority, but a large minority nonetheless) of the world has now been photographed, and the website is an excellent travelogue featuring not only photographs, but commentary.
Thanks to Path of the Paddle for the link
About a week ago, I wrote this article and saved it to bolster any other entry that I thought was a little short. It's since dated on me a little, but here it is:
If capitalist society is so good, and the free market by design always gives us riches, why is it that there are more two-income families struggling to make ends meet these days, than there were one-income families doing fine fifty years ago? Don't blame taxes; they're lower now than they have been in twenty years, and still a lot of unemployment exists. Why is it? Twenty-three years ago, we were promised a future of abject leisure, not to mention flying cars. Where are the flying cars?
It's easy to criticize Michael Moore and those others of us sitting in our ivory towers for lecturing the West on corporate greed, and the diminishing purchasing power of the middle class family; we have a job, we're doing fine, we're proof that despite our hectoring, the capitalist system works. But try doing that to a person who's in the thick of capitalism's effluent, and see if the criticism still works. Mr. G at Teledyn rips into capitalism in a big way, and then speaks out on a way to save it. It's well worth reading.
Since then, Mr. G has made his pitch for a new, decentralized, business model, and there are signs that he's getting some interest. It's still all well worth reading, so read on.