Poverty reduction in the Third World has been tremendous, and more is yet to come. Besides, many goods and services are less expensive than they would without globalization. However, global capitalism isn’t working for the middle class in the USA: they are struggling to find or keeps (poorly paid) jobs, while the benefits are mostly being enjoyed by the C-suite.
Archives
- Mother Earth law in Bolivia would give nature legal rights, specifically the rights to life and regeneration, biodiversity, water, clean air, balance, and restoration, mandating a fundamental ecological reorientation of Bolivia’s economy and society, as in: moving to renewable energy development of new economic indicators that assess the ecological impact of all economic activity. Goodbye GDP! ecological audits of all private and state companies regulation and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions development of policies of food and renewable energy sovereignty research and investment of resources in energy efficiency, ecological practices, and organic agriculture requiring that all companies and individuals be accountable for environmental contamination with a duty to restore damaged environments.
- Hendryx is a national expert on coal’s real-world impacts. Unlike the front group operatives that the coal industry underwrites to move its claims in the court of public opinion, it’s reasonable to assume that he doesn’t make any more money if his research finds that coal’s arguments bear out in the real world - or not. That means his conclusions are worth repeating: coal’s “clean” claims are absurd coal spokespeople claiming it’s an abundant fuel supply are “simply lying”
- Two of the three urgent pleas from Sheila Parks of the Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots in Down the Rabbit Hole With Democracy are against e-voting: SECOND URGENT PLEA: Please pay attention to those of us who educate, write, investigate, litigate, legislate and talk about the rigging of our elections by all electronic voting machines. The putsch with electronic voting machines is a more devious way of murdering us. THIRD URGENT PLEA: We need secure hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB) elections now.
- According to italian newspaper Terra, Asbestos continues to kill in Italy. The current toll is 800 victims each year only in Lombardy (the northern region where Milan is) and is expected to rise, since this substance continues to be present in some areas and acts very slowly. A chilling detail of this story is that future death will also happen among people for whom current law doesn’t provide any compensation. As the Terra article puts it “the new law gives the right to claim for compensation to people who were exposed to asbestos in their work.
- According to the Madisonian, astronaut Buzz Aldrin has sued a trading cards manufacturer that used his image and likeness without his permission. The problem is that, apparently, the fight is over photographs that are a) taken more than 40 years ago and b) have probably been in the public domain anyway since the day they were shot, being “a work of the US Government”. Copyright madness doesn’t live just in comics, it also travels in space now.
- File formats are the alphabets of the digital age. Some Universities, or at least some Faculties of some Universities still are so culturally retarded to not deal with this fact. They more or less implicitly require students to use only proprietary file formats to study and graduate. A recent, real world example from Italy is here. Luckily, not all Universities are like that. I found out with great pleasure that the University of Guelph got its requirements for Electronic Thesis formats straight.
- The EU’s rules on data retention, forged to combat terrorism, look to Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx as “the most privacy-invasive instrument ever”. Hustinx added that “There is no proof that the Directive is necessary as it is… We have a difficult balance to manage here: Is it acceptable to impose far-reaching retention schemes with view to a limited number of cases? Whether it makes sense in these cases needs to be analysed.
This happened in February 2011 but I only discovered it this week, when other Italian media resurrected the story, and it’s too good, or too serious, not to give it the greatest possible exposure.
- One year after the BP Deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Greenpeace needs your help to find out exactly who is to blame for what parts of that disaster: we have around 30,000 pages of memos, reports and even flight records about the worst oil spill in American history… The problem is we simply don’t have time to go through them all. But no one has the manpower to read the fine print.