Gary - Thanks for the additional context. I wonder who else we have here from significantly non US contexts. We just heard from Pietro and do hear from Jochen and the two? Aussies off and on, I'm sure we have lurkers from many more places (I think Mohammed El-Betagay (Cairo/Stockholm) left the list a long time ago?) that might provide yet more parallax. I'm about to chat with my UK/Spain colleagues for the second time since Humpty-Dumpty started to slip off his perch. Their network is quite wide throughout Europe and the middle East.
> Ok, a little clarification is in order. Quito is about 50 miles away, > but I'm not allowed to drive there (travel is extremely controlled > right now). Where I can shop is only about 15 miles away, but I can > only drive on Fridays, from 5am until 2pm. That matches my general recollection of your context. I would hope that in a country such as Ecuador, that *local* agriculture would be ramping up (though I realize you are *at the Equator* but also *at altitude* so not sure how that translates into growing seasons/contexts. In any case, the options there *have* to be better than our short non-freeze growing season and significant drought right at the beginning of the growing season (mid-may->june). Eric Smith mentioned his engagement with local farmers (local to SFe or just farmers interested in local markets everywhere?) and my own engagement with a subset of the local sustainable farmers in northern NM suggests that they will be the next group of front-line essential (though not so much at risk as health/emergency) workers. They may not get remunerated particularly well, but for the first time in a very long time, their local market for their produce may be expanding beyond the elite farmer's markets and expensive restaurants that they had to depend on in the past. I didn't realize Ecuador had normalized to US $$ (you have probably mentioned it before)... it does seem like an incredibly mixed blessing. Being a petroleum economy isn't promising if my own predictions (similar but very different to Dave's?) unfold. Bananas might not fare much better if the destination(s) are first world nations (US only?) an ocean away (as they must be?). it seems like trade with your geographic neighbors (Peru, Brazil, Columbia) don't provide a lot of opportunity for leverage (they produce similar things and have similar appetites for consumer goods?). I haven't followed Ecuadorian politics closely but a quick check shows that Moreno is probably getting his low marks due to a combination of austerity and authoritarianism which it seems he *has to* double down with during this crisis. After my own flirting with moving to a rural part of a third (second?) world country, my own feeling about such is ambivalent in these contexts. If I had managed to get settled, get to know my community, build some self-reliance (water, power, food), I might feel a lot better where you are than where I am. I feel like NM is a bit of an island of sanity in some ways, having *some of* the benefits of rurality and low population but with a modestly high index of education and worldliness. Mary, whose family-of-origin is in *western* NE and whose children are in small-cities in TX and the Midwest is getting very different messages than we experience here. - Steve .-. .- -. -.. --- -- -..-. -.. --- - ... -..-. .- -. -.. -..-. -.. .- ... .... . ... FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/