#caribbean construction

[reasonsforhope]

"While tourists visiting Mexican beaches complain about piles of smelly seaweed, one Mexican gardener reckoned it was something like a gift.

The governments in places like Cancun have been required to clear away as much as 40,000 tons of sargassum seaweed, which smells like rotten eggs, but Omar de Jesús Vazquez Sánchez is steering it away from the landfills and into a kiln, where he makes adobe-like blocks that pass regulation as a building material.

He started SargaBlock to market the bricks, which are being highlighted by the UN Development Program as a stroke of brilliance, and a sustainable solution to a current environmental problem.

His story begins back in 2015 when, like any experienced laborer, he found rich people were stuck with a job they didn’t want to do. In this case, it was cleaning up the sargassum on the beaches of the Riviera Maya.

Omar grew up in poverty, immigrated to the US as a child to become a day laborer, and eventually dropped out of school and became a substance abuser. The American dream never appealed to him as much as a “Mexican dream”—a mix of memories from his childhood and dreams of being a gardener back home, so he moved back.

His time feeling unwanted as an addict and immigrant gave him a unique perspective on the smelly seaweed.

“When you have problems with drugs or alcohol, you’re viewed as a problem for society. No one wants anything to do with you. They look away,” Omar told Christian Science Monitor in a translated interview.

“When sargassum started arriving, it created a similar reaction. Everyone was complaining, I wanted to mold something good out of something everyone saw as bad.”

The ecology and environment offices of Quintana Roo, the legislative area that includes the city of Cancun, approved the SargaBlocks for use, and similar organic-based blocks have been reckoned as being capable of enduring 120 years.

The UN Development Program selected Omar’s work to be featured in their Accelerator Lab global broadcast to alert the world of its value and ingenuity.

There are all kinds of naturally-occurring pollutants or burdens that could be used in construction, and the UNDP hoped that by sharing Omar’s vision of the future of the Caribbean’s sargassum problem, it would inspire others to act in similar ways.

Bricks and cement can be great sources to use up naturally-occurring material that’s dangerous or burdensome—like this Filippino community using the ash from volcanic eruptions to make bricks.

Omar has been fortunate enough to be able to donate 14 “Casas Angelitas,” or homes made of SargaBlock, to families in need, and seems to be exceedingly close to achieving his “Mexican dream.”"

-via Good News Network, 4/24/23

[denwenai]

of course they're gay all pirates are gay

[zhuhongs]

many thots on body image and the way i present myself in light of going to pr and my cousin from belize coming to live with us and. sighsss. Btw i dont want any opinions. im just Thinking

[isoetiks]

Spaceport

[luvmesumus]

[agilnetworks]

Consulting Services In Florida | Telecommunication Industry | AgilNetworks

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[howmanybees]

Twice this week I’ve been hit on by old men

:( this is why I hate going anywhere by myself

[gilbertkingelisa]

El Capitolio .⁣ .⁣ .⁣ .⁣ .⁣ #GilbertKingElisa #aerial #sky #architect #building #caribbean #caribbeanislands #caribbeansea #caribbeantravel #construction #contractor #cuba #cubancigars #cubanstyle #dji #drone #droneoftheday #dronephotography #homedesign #clouds #islandlife #miami #puertorico #republicadominicana #travelblog #traveller #travelphoto #travelpics #travels #traveltheworld (at Havana, Cuba) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnc5eO6PozZ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[generalcontractorsflorida]

General Construction and Real Estate Development Florida

We are general construction contractors in Florida and serving all the major regions such as Puerto Rico, Jacksonville and Caribbean. This presentation depicts the overview of our major services and the contacting details to help our potential customers to reach out easily.

[salvadorbonaparte]

Since my big Languages and Linguistics MEGA folder post is approaching 200k notes (wow) I am celebrating with some highlights from my collection:

Africa: over 90 languages so far. The Swahili and Amharic resources are pretty decent so far and I'm constantly on the lookout for more languages and more resources.

The Americas: over 100 languages of North America and over 80 languages of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Check out the different varieties for Quechua and my Navajo followers are invited to check out the selection of Navajo books, some of which are apparently rare to come by in print.

Ancient and Medieval Languages: "only" 18 languages so far but I'm pretty pleased with the selection of Latin and Old/Middle English books.

Asia: over 130 languages and I want to highlight the diversity of 16 Arabic dialects covered.

Australia: over 40 languages so far.

Constructed Languages: over a dozen languages, including Hamlet in the original Klingon.

Creoles: two dozen languages and some materials on creole linguistics.

Europe: over 60 languages. I want to highlight the generous donations I have received, including but not limited to Aragonese, Catalan, Occitan and 6 Sámi languages. I also want to highlight the Spanish literature section and a growing collection of World Englishes.

Eurasia: over 25 languages that were classified as Eurasian to avoid discussions whether they belong in Europe or Asia. If you can't find a language in either folder it might be there.

History, Culture, Science etc: Everything not language related but interesting, including a collection of "very short introductions", a growing collection of queer and gender studies books, a lot on horror and monsters, a varied history section (with a hidden compartment of the Aubreyad books ssshhhh), and small collections from everything like ethnobotany to travel guides.

Jewish Languages: 8 languages, a pretty extensive selection of Yiddish textbooks, grammars, dictionaries and literature, as well as several books on Jewish religion, culture and history.

Linguistics: 15 folders and a little bit of everything, including pop linguistics for people who want to get started. You can also find a lot of the books I used during my linguistics degree in several folders, especially the sociolinguistics one.

Literature: I have a collection of classic and modern classic literature, poetry and short stories, with a focus on the over 140 poetry collections from around the world so far.

Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia: over 40 languages and I want to highlight the collection for Māori, Cook Islands Māori and Moriori.

Programming Languages: Not often included in these lists but I got some for you (roughly 5)

Sign Languages: over 30 languages and books on sign language histories and Deaf cultures. I want to highlight especially the book on Martha's Vineyard Sign Language and the biography of Laura Redden Searing.

Translation Studies: Everything a translation student needs with a growing audiovisual translation collection

And the best news: the folders are still being updated regularly!

[proton-wobbler]

Warbler Showdown pt 2; Bracket 1, Poll 3

Golden-cheeked Warbler (Setophaga chrysoparia)

IUCN Rating: Endangered

Range: central Texas during the breeding season; overwinters in Central America- Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and northern Nicaragua.

Habitat: Old-growth and mature regrowth juniper-oak woodlands in limestone hills and canyons. Ashe juniper is a key tree species on the breeding grounds, as the bark is used in nest construction.

Subspecies: none

Black-throated Blue Warbler (Setophaga caerulescens)

IUCN Rating: Least Concern

Range: prefers the Appalachian mountains when in the eastern states, otherwise breeding in southeast Canada or New England. Overwinters in the Greater Antilles, as well as the Bahamas and along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan, Belize, and Honduras.

Habitat: interior forests of undisturbed hardwood and mixed deciduous-coniferous trees.

Subspecies: 2

Image Sources: GCWA (Brendan Klick); BTBW (Matt Zuro)

[northameicanblog]

Little Bay, Montserrat: Little Bay is a port town under construction which is intended to be the future capital of the island of Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean. It is adjacent to the town of Brades, where government headquarters are currently located. Wikipedia

[enbycrip]

So given the Rowling stans crawling out of the woodwork to say they are still allies - or worse yet, community members - while still plastering Potter stuff all over their online presence by saying they “separate the art from the artist” after the latest acknowledgment that she is trying to swing Labour in an even more transphobic direction, a short primer on what “death of the author”, which is the origin for that less provocative phrase, actually means.

“Death of the author”, in extreme brief, is an academic construct that was developed at a time when the author as the sole arbiter of meaning in a text was very privileged in the discourse to help people understand that any interpretation of a work is valid *as long as it can be supported by textual evidence*. Your interpretation of a text, as the reader, is as valid as the author’s *if* you can produce just as much, or more, evidence from *within the text itself* that supports your interpretation.

This is particularly useful for students within an academic context.

It is *not* in any sense a reasonable justification to say that one is not *actively supporting* a living artist/author/creator, particularly one who has gained huge cultural influence and financial wealth, by buying and actively promoting their work.

Genuinely, I wouldn’t engage with work from a dead very bigoted artist without acknowledging their bigotry.

If I write about or produce a story set within the Cthulhu Mythos, you had better bet that I am acknowledging Lovecraft’s horrific and pervasive racism and misogyny and the effects of that within the Mythos.

If I write about or do some sketches that acknowledge Degas as an influence, you can bet that I am acknowledging his rampant racism and antisemitism and the fact that his familial wealth which allowed him to have the financial freedom to create the art he did was built on plantation slavery in the Caribbean.

If I write about or paint something with Klimt’s ethereal goldwork as an influence, you can bet I’m writing about his deeply abusive sexual relationships with the women he drew and painted, that he used sapphic eroticism in his work while sexually abusing working class sapphics he paid to model for him, and acknowledging that he had the freedom to produce that work because he got the women in his family to tend to his every whim and perform all his domestic labour for him.

That’s the basic acknowledgment you undertake while engaging with the work of someone deeply bigoted - *even* if they are not directly benefitting from your engagement with their work because they are deceased. The material conditions around how a work is produced and consumed are *always* relevant to that work, because otherwise we miss why, for example, privileged people have the time, resources and cachet to create art and have it be consumed *as* art, while other people never have the resources to do so or have the work they create relegated to categories like “domestic crafts” if it is acknowledged at all.

So just saying “I can separate art from the artist” while financially supporting a living bigot who continues to use your money and the cultural cache you are giving her by doing so to wreak genuine damage on the queer, especially trans, community - that’s basically both completely meaningless and incredibly disingenuous. Particularly when said bigot is *actively* attempting to parlay that financial and cultural influence into making an already very transphobic, racist and disableist political party who are, according to current polls, likely to be running the U.K. shortly, into supporting more actions that *will* materially harm trans people.

[opencommunion]

"My analysis challenges a number of ideas, some mentioned above, common in many Western feminist writings:

Gender categories are universal and timeless and have been present in every society at all times. This idea is often expressed in a biblical tone, as if to suggest that 'in the beginning there was gender.'

Gender is a fundamental organizing principle in all societies and is therefore always salient. In any given society, gender is everywhere.

There is an essential, universal category 'woman' that is characterized by the social uniformity of its members.

The subordination of women is a universal.

The category 'woman' is precultural, fixed in historical time and cultural space in antithesis to another fixed category—'man.'

... Merely by analyzing a particular society with gender constructs, scholars create gender categories. To put this another way: by writing about any society through a gendered perspective, scholars necessarily write gender into that society. Gender, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. The idea that in dealing with gender constructs one necessarily contributes to their creation is apparent in Judith Lorber's claim that 'the prime paradox of gender is that in order to dismantle the institution, you must first make it very visible.' In actuality, the process of making gender visible is also a process of creating gender. Thus, scholarship is implicated in the process of gender-formation."

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997) ~

"Feminist anthropologists of racialized peoples in the Americas tend not to think about the concept of gender when they use the term as a classificatory instrument, they take its meaning for granted. This, I claim, is an example of a colonial methodology. Though the claim that gender, the concept, applies universally is not explicitly stated, it is implied. In both group and conference conversations I have heard the claim that 'gender is everywhere,' meaning, technically, that sexual difference is socialized everywhere. The claim, implied or explicit, is that all societies organize dimorphic sexuality, reproductive sexuality, in terms of dichotomous roles that are hierarchically arranged and normatively enforced. That is, gender is the normative social conceptualization of sex, the biological fact of the matter. ... The critique of the binary has not been accompanied by an unveiling of the relation between colonization, race, and gender, nor by an analysis of gender as a colonial introduction of control of the humanity of the colonized, nor by an understanding that gender obscures rather than uncovers the organization of life among the colonized. The critique has favored thinking of more sexes and genders than two, yet it has not abandoned the universality of gender arrangements. ... Understanding the group with gender on one’s mind, one would see gender everywhere, imposing an order of relations uncritically as if coloniality had been completely successful both in erasing other meanings and people had totally assimilated, or as if they had always had the socio-political-economic structure that constitutes and is constituted by what Butler calls the gender norm inscribed in the organization of their relations. Thus, the claim 'There is gender everywhere' is false ... since for a colonized, non-Western people to have their socio-political-economic relations regulated by gender would mean that the conceptual and structural framework of their society fits the conceptual and structural framework of colonial or neocolonial and imperialist societies. ... Why does anyone want to insist on finding gender among all the peoples of our planet? What is good about the concept that we would want to keep it at the center of our 'liberation'?" María Lugones, "Gender and Universality in Colonial Methodology," in Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges (2022)