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Showing posts with the label free enterprise

No Plan? Or Just Not Saying? Boothbay's Unfunded Fifty-Million-Dollar School. Time to Visualize An Alternative Way.

Comparing Centralized and Decentralized Development Strategies for Future Culture and Economies. Hannah Joshua Unsplash In the recent Boothbay Register write-up about Boothbay's fifty-million-dollar school project, school board member Bruce MacDonald commented on the missing discussion pertaining to education. In  a Nov 2020 article in the Boothbay Register , a discussion about education was initiated by Lance Whitehead, of Lavallee Brensinger Architects, the same architects who were recently selected to design the master plan. Quoting – Lance Whitehead, of Lavallee Brensinger Architects from that article: “We wanted to create some sort of biophilic design as part of any solution ... Future driven school with guiding principles that are community based education, economically viable, social-emotional learning environments for multi-age groups, future-proofing as much as possible ... and really making it unique for your local resources” So let's talk about the future and let...

New Horizons and An Old Order

Prototype of Leaning Mug. designed and decorated by Weston Neil Andersen Photo and editing by Mackenzie Andersen A Proposal Gets A Positive Response In  Starting a Remote Work Career from Scratch , I made a proposal to  Humanities and Social Science Communications , and asked if they would waive the very large fee for publishing a paper in consideration of the fact that I reviewed a paper at their request, without charging them.  As it happened that was a good move. At first I was given the brush off and a link to the page listing the very large fees. I responded that it is beyond my means and forgot about it until yesterday when I received a different response from an assistant editor in London which includes the contact information to apply for a waiver and the next day I was asked, by a different office to review another paper, which I accepted.  The new paper to review is quite different from the last which was an economic development paper from South Americ...

Are "We the People" Being "Deleted As Spam" in the USA?

 Happy New Year Everyone brian-wangenheim-unsplash Yesterday morning I posted a comment to a story in the  Boothbay Register about the minimum wage increase in Maine.  It remained online for a least a minute before it was wiped. Interestingly Disqus was on to it before I even got there about two minutes after my comment was wiped. The message on Disqus says "Deleted as Spam: and then "Thanks, were working on getting this corrected". A while back, when my Boothbay Register comments first started being deleted, they were marked as spam in Disqus and there was a link to contest it. Now it is being corrected by Disqus without any action on my part. Perhaps the Russian hackers are doing me a small favor since so many major corporations were hit, could it be that their hack detectors are working much better now, across all industries?  I should add that I am actually using Blogger to compose my post. A while back I was working on a post for several hours in the morning and...

A New Industrial Evolution

Contemplating A Brave New World One of a Kind Prototype of the Emperor Penguin designed by Weston & Brenda Andersen T he reality of the world radically changing through an act of nature is difficult to comprehend even as we are living through it. We are adapted to our norms but they are shifting under our feet. How do we move forward when our norms are no longer our anchors? Political actors call for Governor’s to reopen the economy or resign, as if, reopening will bring about a return to a former normal. Reopening the economy will not cast a spell and bring back normal. In Boothbay Maine, where I live, the primary industry is hospitality, one of the hardest hit industries. Most do not want to risk their lives and those of their loved ones by exposing themselves to a virus which is still mutating and we still know little about. Wooden Mermaid Sculpture outside of house at Ocean Point, Maine The demand for re-opening eludes the calling for the reinvention of o...

Economic Complexity Theory in the Time of Coronavirus

Originally created for Medium These  vintage prototypes  by Weston Neil Andersen, presented in the images throughout this story, tell of a love for the work process which evolved into our company,  Andersen Design Introduction I grew up in a business in a home that designs and handcrafts ceramics. For a while the business also had a production employing about 25 people in a separate location. It was found that our type of production is better suited to a smaller more intimate setting, such as a business attached to a home. However, over the course of 67 years, the size of the of the line grew too wide and large to be produced in a small studio and I envisioned that the future of production should be a network of small independently owned ceramic production studios, which could function as an interactive network. Last month my idea was an anomaly as if existing in an alternate reality, but as the world turned toward social distancing and sheltering i...