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Hasbro Announces Venezuela Replaced by Ecuador on the new Risk board

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CARACAS (SNS)  In a move that has sent shockwaves through both the geopolitical and tabletop gaming communities, Hasbro Inc. announced today that all future printings of the board game Risk will officially scrub “Venezuela” from the map.

The territory, a longtime staple of South America and a favorite jumping-off point for players looking to harass North America, will be replaced by Ecuador.

Too Expensive to Play

According to unnamed sources familiar with the situation, the decision came after a “playtesting disaster” in which players who conquered the Venezuela territory were immediately forced to repair hundreds of defunct oil wells.

“It was ruining the game’s flow,” said one lead designer. “In the old version, you’d take Venezuela with three infantries. In the new version, the moment you roll a six, you are legally responsible for the territory’s external debt, its crumbling power grid.”

The Ecuador Swap

The decision to swap in Ecuador was described as a stability play.

“Ecuador is manageable,” the source continued. “It’s compact, it’s got great tourism potential, and the U.S. dollar is the accepted currency.”

The change has drawn mixed reviews. Casual gamers are happy they no longer have to manage hyperinflation during family game night, but hardcore strategy fans are disappointed.

“The Venezuela-to-Ecuador swap takes the teeth out of the game,” said one Grandmaster-ranked player. “Part of the fun of Risk was the high-stakes taunting. Now, if I occupy South America, I just get a reasonable trade agreement and a steady supply of bananas. Where’s the drama in that?”

At press time, sources say Hasbro is also considering replacing Ukraine with a “Permanently Contested Neutral Zone” consisting entirely of mud and broken drone parts to “better reflect the 2026 gaming meta data.”

How affordable cohousing can unite a divided America: ‘Get Up Off the Couch!’

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ssv gardening lindy rica 2017

Cohousing residents share in the upkeep and maintenance of their communities through a collaborative, sharing, caringand consensus culture, 24-7-365.

Above, the cover photo was taken in Memel, South Africa. Former CoHoUS board member Steven Ablondi and his wife Cindy Burns are building cohousing there to help fill the housing gap in post-Apartheid South Africa. They are teaching construction trades and use “rammed earth” blocks to construct the homes.

America has always been a country divided. What is it about cohousing that can close those social and cultural divides?

Cohousing, as a national m ovement, is just beginning to come to grips with the potential influence intentional communities can have when influencing social change efforts.

In fact, the Cohousing Association of the U.S. (CoHoUS) is exploring retrofit, adaptive reuse alternatives to traditional cohousing that is largely accessible to people with lots of money and time.

Check out the “Affordable Conference on Affordable Cohousing.”

I provide this historical information to provide context about how cohousing can have an impact on making social change happen.

When the United States were founded, never in their wildest dreams did settlers from Western Europe think that there were local people freely migrating across what is now the southern border, or coming and going along the Pacific Ocean coast.

Today, the divides are more apparent. In my view, on one side of the canyon are those who haven’t been paying attention to those standing on the other side who see themselves as being increasingly disenfranchised since the end of the Cold War.

Life was good for main stream Americans during suburbanization following World War II. Beginning during the 1960s, their sense of privilege was challenged by legislated civil rights for people, primarily African Americans disenfranchised since the Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society that brought about the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then Affirmative Action was viewed as a program that took jobs and college placements away from the dominant culture as ways to level the academic and employment playing fields.

In the 1930s, the two main political parties flipped ideology. The Republican Party that included Lincoln, was once the party of inclusion and a strong national government, which evolved into the opposite, when Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal grew the federal government to pull the nation out of the Great Depression starting in 1932.

Seems that now, party identifications are flipping again. The Republicans are now the party with a galvanized working class base, while the Democrats have become the party for a highly educated, but fragmented elite class and have lost it’s historic New Deal base.

What does this have to do with affordable cohousing, diversity and inclusion? Those include an infinite number of subtle intersections and collaborations around class, race, ethnicity, ability, gender, sexual orientation, etc. It’s a daunting task to deal with each of these differences on their own.

I’d say that every cohousing community has as a value, one about diversity and inclusion. Based on the conversations I hear about these topics, there’s a sense of frustration around what to do.

Living in cohousing changes the way each of us looks at the world and how we better accept people different from ourselves. Affordable cohousing results in greater diversity.

I’d say, people are generally uncomfortable about discussing personal issues and views around Superman’s American Way, money, race, class, gender identity, sexual preference. But those discussions are key to forming strong and cohesive communities – intentional or not.

While the bricks and mortar of cohousing are the buildings where residents live, the individuals who form a community are the most important aspect.

alan-shoveling

Cohousing members chip in their time and effort to keep the community operating 24-7-365.

I live in cohousing and while, at least in my experience, it’s far from perfect, the intentionality brings neighbors together to work through tough issues – even though some may be on the petty side – like do we get rid of that old chair or not – they might as well be matters of life and death.

The upshot is, if there’s a housing configuration that is suited to forcing conversations among divergent opinions it’s cohousing.

There are 170 existing communities and 15,000 residents. The typical cohouser are characterized as: Caucasian; having high perceived social class; high income; high levels of education; progressive; 65 percent of the time an introvert; 70 percent of the time a woman.

To me the biggest frustration about cohousing is this. Cohousers by definition, because we’ve chosen this collaborative, cooperative, consensus-based lifestyle, we should be able to organize ourselves into some higher “saving the world” purpose.

  • Changing Superman’s American Way, we are driven to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, make a lot of money and be on top. These cultural norms create roadblocks for the advancement of caring and interactive communities beyond what is familiar.
  • Cohousing communities, by definition, bring diverse people together.  Cohousers look at their personal histories and make changes so as to become more inclusive as opposed to just believing it’s a good idea and how to outreach to diverse communities.
  • There are institutional barriers such as city councils and planning boards Cohousing “burning souls” create and maintain high-quality conversations and relationships personally, in community, and with city and county planners with innovative projects.
  • American culture of rugged individualism precludes cohousing from entering the mainstream as it has in other countries. Cohousing is just starting to go viral. There are untapped numbers of diverse people who are parts of the “non-traditional” cohousing demographic and learn ways to approach that market.

According to the Cohousing Research Network, retrofit cohouser demographics are more likely to include: more racial and ethnical diverse; lower and middle perceived social class; low to moderate income earners; progressives; more single mothers.

The cohousing movement can become a catalyst for positive change including, non-traditional and diverse cohousing communities that bridge the gap between the left and right, the haves and have nots, in the U.S. today.

Sign up today for the Affordable Conference on Affordable Cohousing. There’s a little something for everyone.

Braceros, Traqueros: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

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reagan quote immigration

Ronald Reagan signed immigration reform into law in 1986 that was sponsored by former Wyoming US Senator Alan Simpson. The law gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented people.

For the past 150 years, the US government, railroads and agricultural industries welcomed immigrant workers from Mexico. How did they end up coming to the United States in the first place?

Rather than keep immigrants seeking asylum detained, why not give them all temporary visas and put them to work. That’s why they trudged hundreds, if not thousands of miles to America.

I heard there are upwards to 50,000 asylum seekers currently being held around the country awaiting court hearings.

They’re fleeing danger in their homelands, need local sponsors and something to do once they are granted asylum. Anyone who thinks they are going to take their jobs, that’s just hyperbolic race-bait ranting.

What work needs to be done? Here are a couple ideas:

  • Rebuild crumbling roads and bridges
  • Building affordable housing

For the record, I’m not in favor of cutting illegal immigrants any slack. I was an illegal alien and kicked out of Mexico in 1991 for working in Zacatecas on a tourist visa from Jalisco.

My business partner and I were stopped by the federal police, held at machine gun point in the middle of nowhere between a small town of Sombrerete and Fresnillo.

One soldier questioned me in English, my partner in Spanish hoping we would give conflicting stories.

They tossed our pick up truck, groped through my luggage, put everything back and searched again. I think they were looking for drugs. Around this time, the United States and Mexico agreed to stifle cocaine and marijuana traffic. Zacatecas is just south of Colorado.

Luckily for me, they let us go.

I was caught using a Mazatlan tourist visa, but actually working in Zacatecas. I ended up getting my paperwork together and made formal application, along with $97.00 USD and obtained the equivalent of a green card.

A year or so ago, I listened to a presentation by Lu Rocha at a workshop organized by my grad school Center on Domestic Violence at CU-Denver.

She gave a history of the Latino/a/x/ labor force in the United States that dates back to the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1800s and propping up the war efforts between 1942 until it’s repeal in 1964.

Immigration issues have been in the news lately. There’s talk of expanding the number of immigrant detention centers in Texas reminiscent of the three war relocation camps set up during World War II to detain and intern Japanese mostly from the West Coast.

daca sign

POTUS 45 repealed DACA put in place by President Obama in 2012 as a stop-gap measure to protect kids of undocumented residents.

The Reagan administration signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 which heightened border security but also granted amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. This was a bi-partisan effort led in the US Senate by Wyoming’s Al Simpson.

Red and Blue presidents and congresses failed to act on immigration reform until Obama in his lame duck term issued the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrives (DACA) executive order which cut some slack to kids brought to the US by their undocumented parents. It was a compassionate Band Aid.

POTUS 45 used his bully pulpit, but failed to overturn DACA. Congress continues to be at a standstill, more so now because the House flipped Democratic in 2018.

Immigration reform is a wedge issue for Republicans. They are against immigrants, generally, because of they supposed are “taking of American jobs.” Are all Republicans cleaning toilets, picking beans, or loading dishwashers over at Denny’s in fear of losing their jobs?

At the same time, American business is reliant on immigrant laborers who perform low-end work that regular Americans won’t do which is a throwback to the transcontinental railroad construction and World War II worker shortage.

traqueros

The Transcontinental Railroad was completed by laborers from Mexico.

Traqueros – In 1881 Governor Luis Terrazas of Chihuahua drove a silver spike completing a rail line linking Mexico and United States which allowed immigrants transport to the United States and coincided with the West’s construction of the transcontinental railroad.

Mexicans were the dominant immigrant labor laying track in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite low wages compared to their native born coworkers and discrimination, immigrant Mexican laborers became permanent residents, not by law but by fact. By the time of the Great Depression, workers moved to the cities in search of other low-skill work.

Bracero Program

The US Department of Labor and the Immigration and Naturalization Service collaborated on the Bracero Program at the start of World War II. Braceros were allowed in to the US to provide help on farms during wartime.

Braceros – The bracero program (Spanish for manual laborer) began in 1942 and operated as a joint program of the State Department, the Department of Labor, and the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), as it was known then, in the Department of Justice.

Laborers from Mexico were promised better living conditions in camps, including housing, meals and toilet facilities. They eventually were paid a minimum wage of 30 cents / hour. The pact also stated that braceros supposedly would not be subjected to discrimination and exclusion from “white-only” areas.

During World War II, the bracero program intention was to fill the labor gap, particularly in agriculture. The program lasted 22 years and offered employment contracts to 5 million braceros in 24 U.S. states—becoming the largest foreign worker program in U.S. history.

The bracero program caused problems on both sides of the border with labor shortages in the northern states in Mexico and resulted in illegal immigrants who remained in the United States. Millions of Mexican Americans attribute their roots to their fathers and grandfathers who crossed the border as braceros.

DACA MASS WALKOUTDACA – Circle back to DACA kids. They are the modern day traquero/a/x and bracero/a/x. They are people who arrived in the United States under the radar as children.

Like the braceros and traqueros, while they should have returned to Mexico, those families have remained – while looking over their shoulders – without documentation and became productive members of their communities.

The DACA kids ended up with high school and college educations, contribute to society in professional jobs, have families of their own with kids in local school systems. They pay taxes and volunteer in their communities.

DACA kids aren’t Manson women who ran underground and assumed new identities.

When the Bracero Program was ended in 1964, the positive outcomes were better working conditions for farm workers thanks to advocacy by activists including Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta. There were no immigration laws that turned traqueros back to Mexico.

DACA was a short term fix when Obama acted because Congress didn’t. The immigration issue has come full circle from 1986.

Whether Congress and POTUS 45 get their acts together on immigration reform will be a defining moment for the Republicans like it was for Republicans and Ronald Reagan.

Until then let’s figure out how to engage asylum seekers in useful ways while they awaiting their hearings.

simpson reagan signing“We have consistently supported a legalization program which is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America. The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.” Ronald Reagan on November 6, 1986 upon signing the Immigration Control and Reform Act.