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by arjie 32 days ago
Thank you for sharing. I'm also familiar with Mondragon in Spain as a cooperative - similarly an agricultural one primarily. When I said "here" in the sentences "...there must be 100 people like this here on this forum in the US. Can they point me to one such one here..." I was referring to the US.
1 comments
defrost 31 days ago
Here is relative, I'm here on the forum and here in W.Australia.

There's nothing preventing co-ops from operating in the US other than culture.

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arjie 31 days ago
> Here is relative, I'm here on the forum and here in W.Australia.

That's true. "Here" doesn't mean anything on its own. I gathered as much from your response. I was clarifying what I was curious about because clearly I'd attached my "in the US" in my original comment to the wrong phrase.

> There's nothing preventing co-ops from operating in the US other than culture.

Right, and this is why I was curious. It seemed to me that while there is nothing preventing this from happening, and while there are many commenters here who are expressing that they'd like one, I haven't really heard of one. In the US, of course.

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defrost 31 days ago
Yep, that's the US (sadly) where apparently any form of social policy, general cooperation, long term planning, etc. gets torn down under the guise of equating to communism.

Weirdly, CBH is almost equivalent to a US style company in many ways - just that the major shareholders are all equal voting co owners with skin (well, land) in the game.

Which is very different to what an IT / programmer collective might look like - the assets are the intangible skills and knowledge that members bring to the table.

We (Australia) also do Men's Sheds which are often co-op type structures - place for blokey types to hang and build stuff as they get older - some of their projects can get largish in scale.

* https://mensshedswa.org.au/

* https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/mens-sheds/about-mens-she...

There's certainly room and scope to drag a few NAS boxen and community services (photo archiving, free to air public broadcast mirroring and on demand streaming, drone mapping and GIS path maintaining, etc.) into local area Men's Sheds.

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