Category — URBAN

The Glennon family’s next home looks like a stack of shipping containers of all different colors from the outside.

That’s because it is a pile of shipping containers.  Once it’s complete, it will be a sprawling, 5,000-square-foot, four-storey building – two levels above ground, a walkout basement and another level below – with four bedrooms, five bathrooms, a games and media room, garage and workshop, and two enclosed decks.

It will cost about $150 per square foot –  well below the (more…)

As long ago as 1999, Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, told reporters: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Others, including the top executives of Google, LinkedIn and Facebook, have since said much the same thing.

They are right.

Privacy in 2011 is a matter of nostalgia. In the past two months, Facebook introduced “frictionless sharing,” Verizon told customers it could share their location and search strings with advertisers, and two members of Congress have called for the FTC to investigate “supercookies,” which track your activity across multiple websites and are difficult to detect and remove. These developments signal an accelerating rush to compile, index and disseminate personal data in the digital age.

There are several reasons for this, but the most important is corporate profit. Many people freely surrender personal details on social media sites or in exchange for a discount. Government agencies monitor and catalog a dizzying array of personal information, from biometrics to travel history. (more…)

“A storm is coming,” says a new documentary featuring  84-year-old Congressman Roscoe Bartlett.  the movie takes a “common sense” view of the problems city-dwellers will face if there is a event such as economic collapse or a natural disaster.

(more…)

There’s really no nice way to say this: Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) is robbing me freaking blind.
I live in a one story, two bedroom, brick house that was built in the late 1940′s. It’s less than 1,500 square feet and has been recently renovated (and better insulated.)
I keep the heat at average temperatures-never above 63 or 64 degrees. This month, my electric bill was $560.
Last month it was more than $500 also.
So BGE: What’s is the deal?
If you’ve ever received one of these “you’ve got to be kidding me” bills from BGE (and I understand many people have) then like myself, you probably called and asked for an explanation. And like myself, you were probably thinking it’s not possible that you used that much energy in one month.
And if your experience was anything like mine, the customer service representative gave you some seemingly rehearsed line about how it’s “normal” to see your bill double during the coldest time in the winter.
OK, let me start by saying my bill was around $120 per month this fall. So more than $500 is more than double, right? (more…)

The conventional wisdom is that if the system breaks down for reasons of economic collapse, or some sudden natural disaster, then the best place to be is the countryside, in a rural community with provisions and the means to grow more.

However a few folks on different discussion boards have been questioning that – wondering whether actually the city might be a better bet…..I have opened a discussion about that over in our forum.

Here are two views from the off-grid Facebook page:

Noreene Bailey-Treece says: I am in the country and would prefer to be there (in an Emergency. I have medical training. am used to going without so called vital services. i feel i would fare better at home in the country. As for shelters.. as a parent i would not take my children to one. there is too much risk and danger there for them. ie the superdome in New Orleans. (more…)

Its not quite a McMansion, as its appearance is too distinctive, but is this $500,000 home a case of greenwash, or just naive?

An Australian design company has won a local eco-building award for its huge Convertible House, which looks like an upmarket Nissen hut, with a curved, corrugated iron exterior; the wrinkly tin is ubiquitous in Australia — think water tanks and sheds. (more…)

JP and daughter- homespun

There are not many books about learning the humble art of sewing that set up the problem with a few chapters on the world’s religions plus a visit to Prince Charles’s Savile Row tailor.  But John-Paul Flintoff’s personal memoir,Through the Eye of a Needle: The True Story of a Man Who Went Searching for Meaning – and Ended Up Making His Y-fronts
UK version, (currently available in the US via Amazon UK)  is about learning to sew in a Post-Modern way, and so it is stuffed full of influences from Christianity and  Zen Buddhism to personal shoppers and Indian call-centers.

Flintoff’s starting point is the vanity of our current clothes purchasing habits plus the way that we have all been disempowered by Western consumer society, so we no longer know how to

do any of the things that got our grandparents through the last Depression.

He finds a copy of “Make do and Mend: Keeping Family and Home Afloat on War Rations,” a collection of war-time DIY pamphlets. This immediately inspires him to mend his wife’s hand-made and very expensive bra, as well as some socks and jeans of his own.    His stitching looks like the work of a blind man, but no matter (more…)

Which would you choose? Earning money or having a meaningful, engaging life?

Suddenly people are talking about
Your Money or Your Life

- funny how it goes like that. The book was first published 17 years ago – but there is something very contemporary about its injunction to start living and stop being a wage slave – the authors call it “making a dying.”

We hope to run a diary soon from a young investment banker in Toronto who is about to start living in his car (a Porsche presumably) partly as a result of reading this book. (more…)

Vincent Kartheiser likes living off the grid. He doesnt have a car, a toilet, a TV or a mirror. Its a far cry from his Mad Men role as an ambitious 1960s ad man.

The TV series portrays the ad men as archetypes, always selling versions of themselves to anyone who will listen. And Kartheiser, on the screen, is able to convey that sense perfectly.

So, among all the riddling personas, does he have a stable sense of who he is? One thing is for sure – he is not defined by his possessions. (more…)