Hard Brutal Living
By 
Your must read of the morning is William Finnegan’s essay on the highest settlement in the world, which is an unregulated gold mine town in Peru. As I’ve said before, I’ve been to Potosí in Bolivia and those conditions were unbelievable enough. To think of an even colder, harder, worse life, yet one that thousands of people choose to do (they are working for themselves after all), is remarkable and says a lot about the economic options for the poor in these nations.