Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.
Reading and Navigating Blogs
Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.
Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.
For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.
All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.
Creating Blog Posts
If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.
You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.
Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.
Questioner: In a debate I had with a capitalist once, he asserted that most US investment occurs in European and developed Asian countries, saying that that means that free trade is beneficial. Your reaction?
He's right that most Foreign Direct Investment (not only US) is in developed countries, and the rest is mostly in a small number of countries. But the gross numbers are almost meaningless. Egypt had more FDI than South Korea until about 10 years ago, but it was mostly in the extractive industries, while Korea, which radically violated the rules and therefore was able to develop, controlled and targeted FDI for the purposes of economic development. In the mid-1990s, during the period of great enthusiasm for "emerging markets" and the great investment opportunities they offered, Commerce Department figures for US FDI in the Western Hemisphere (minus Canada, considered part of Europe, rightly) showed that 25% went regularly to Bermuda, about 15% to the British Cayman islands, and about 10% to Panama. Not to build steel mills. The rest was largely takeovers, much of it close to robbery. One has to look at what is behind the numbers, always.
I doubt very much that you met a capitalist who believes in free trade. To my knowledge, that is close to a non-existent category. What "free trade" was he talking about? Certainly not WTO, NAFTA, etc. They are remote from any notion of free trade. In fact a large part of what is called "trade" is not trade in any serious sense at all, but rather interactions within huge command economies (corporations) that happen to cross borders -- about 2/3 of US "trade" with Mexico, apparently. Note that all such numbers are estimates, because the private tyrannies that dominate the international economy are largely unaccountable.
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