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Mostly, I Write
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Storie e pensieri suoi e di altri, raccolti da Antonio Dini http://www.antoniodini.com
Per contatti su Telegram: @antoniodini
Per iscriversi alla newsletter Mostly Weekly: https://tinyletter.com/MostlyIWrite
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La guerriglia casa per casa, ospite per ospite, di AirBnB per non far pagare le tasse ai suoi affiliati

Money quote: "Airbnb is engaged in “a city-by-city, block-by-block guerrilla war” against local governments, says Ulrik Binzer, CEO of Host Compliance, which helps cities draft and enforce rules for short-term rentals, sometimes putting it at odds with hosting platforms. “They need to essentially fight every one of these battles like it is the most important battle they have.”"

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-airbnbs-guerrilla-war-against-local-governments/
C'è una tecnica, un algoritmo e un software capace di trasformarvi in geni. La cosa pazzesca è che funziona. L'ha inventato un polacco, il software si chiama SuperMemo. La sua storia è ancora più incredibile.

Money quote: "Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo."

https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/
La mano invisibile al lavoro: la legge della domanda e dell'offerta. Quando i cartelli della droga fanno macelli, il business delle casse da morto esplode (sembra uno spaghetti western e invece...)

Money quote: "At the coffin factory—a nest of corrugated iron and wood peeking out through a copse of oak trees a few miles up a rutted track—the work stations inside roughly track the construction process. Near the entrance, carpenters hammer nails and cut with wailing electric saws through planks hewn from the local olive trees. In another corner, men varnishing finished coffins with a thick black sealant resemble coal miners, their faces coated in the varnish and their eyes watery and red with irritation. In a separate hut across an open-air courtyard at the back of the workshop, the last set of workers uses a spray gun to paint the coffins, the way mechanics repaint a car. “We have to get them nice and shiny,” one says. “That’s what customers look for.” Like their competitors, the factory’s seven workers make money by the coffin, Juan Carlos says. He estimates that a good carpenter there makes $250 a week; a painter, about $150."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-06/this-city-of-coffins-fills-the-needs-of-families-of-victims-of-ms-13-and-barrio-18
Riflettiamo sul senso dei campi estivi. Degli scout, delle giovani marmotte. Negli Stati Uniti i campi estivi per ragazzini sono molto diffusi da più di un secolo. E hanno un'agenda. Quella di base è ricreare il contatto con la natura che manca in città e porta a nevrosi e peggio. Ma ce ne sono anche altre (ad esempio, i mormoni). Per esempio, i campi estivi degli ebrei volevano preparare già dall'inizio del secolo scorso al ritorno ad Israele.

Money quote: "Jews attend summer camp at a higher rate than Americans as a whole, though not nearly as high a rate as Mormons, but the particulars of the Jewish camping experience—begun due to exclusion, changing rapidly due to politics and social movements and the Holocaust—put it in a unique place.

Summer camping in the United States began as a movement in the late 19th century, a sort of rebellion against increasing urbanization and industrialization. By the late 1920s, Jewish summer camps had gotten explicitly ideological: socialist, communist, anarchist, Zionist, Yiddish. Despite this, they were, and remained until after World War II, almost entirely secular. The Yiddish camps focused on Yiddish language and culture, and the Zionist camps on building, farming, and a connection to Israel; neither put much of an emphasis on religion.

A socialist summer camp would have no individual money, and any packages a camper received from home would be divided equally to the rest of the camp. Labor was highly valued; a punishment for bad behavior would never be, say, cleaning the bathrooms, because bathroom duty was a noble and important role in the camp society.

Zionist summer camps prepared kids to move to Palestine (which they sometimes called EY, which stands for Eretz Yisrael, or “the land of Israel”)."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/jewish-summer-camps
È uscito il numero 5 di Mostly, I Write, la mia newsletter (ci si abbona qui: tinyletter.com/MostlyIWrite ) Se correte ad abbonarvi, ve lo rimando... :-)
Forwarded from Scrivere zen
“Il diario, da dies (giorno), si nutre d’una materia molto ordinaria. «Nulla dies sine linea», diceva Plinio del pittore Apelle: non lasciava passar giorno senza tracciare almeno qualche linea, e noi potremmo dire almeno qualche riga, perché senza la scrittura, esercizio costante che unifica spirito e corpo, mente e mano, l’uomo tende a «smembrarsi», mentre quando scrive «rimembra», ritrova, giocando con la parola, la sua unità” 📃https://www.corriere.it/digital-edition/CORRIEREFC_NAZIONALE_WEB/2019/04/08/1/ple-parole-prime-p_U3110991488601LKB.shtml
In America sta creandosi una frattura inedita per quel paese tra destra e sinistra. Non finirà presto.

Money quote: “The movie Mudbound helped me train for a half marathon last year. I watched it on a treadmill and it made me so angry that I didn’t even think about the tightness in my shins and hamstrings; it distracted me from the grueling workout”

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/577543/
L’annus horribilis del Giappone. È stato un disastro.

Money quote: “The tradition, known as picking out the “kanji of the year” (今年の漢字), started in 1995 as part of the Kyoto-based Foundation’s efforts to promote the continued use of kanji, or Chinese characters, in the country. For 2018, Japan chose the character for disaster (災), not because of the exponential growth of fascist movements around the world, but because the country has suffered devastating natural disasters this year, including an unprecedented heatwave, flash floods and torrential rains in western Japan, and a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in Hokkaido.”

https://theoutline.com/post/6784/kanji-of-the-year-japan-disaster-tradition-reflection-history