… Buy Nothing Day (BND) is an international day of protest against consumerism. In North America, Buy Nothing Day is held on the Friday after U.S.Thanksgiving, concurrent toBlack Friday (November 27, 2015) …
Category: economics
home-made Christmas presents are best
Wei works in a factory in Yiwu, eastern China, coating polystyrene snowflakes with red powder. He wears a Christmas hat to protect his hair, and goes through at least six face masks a day.
According to the Chinese government press agency, 600 factories in Yiwu produce around 60 percent of the world’s Christmas decorations. The factories are staffed largely by migrant laborers, who work 12-hour days for between 270 and 400 euros a month. Wei, who comes from rural Guizhou, 1,500 kilometers away, is not entirely sure what Christmas is, but thinks that it is a foreigners’ form of Chinese New Year.
I saw that award winning photo at the 58th World Press Photo contest exhibition in London.
power generated from a bicycle
This looks promising. Fitness and internet. 🙂
60 Minutes On This Bicycle Can Power Your Home For 24 Hours!
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
showering in desalinated water
Water pressure is pretty good in my hotel in the capital of The Kingdom. Turns out it’s been transported a long, long way.
Saudi Arabia is one of the driest regions in the world, with no perennial rivers. Water is obtained from four distinct sources:
- non-renewable groundwater from the deep fossil aquifers
- desalinated water
- surface water
- renewable groundwater from shallow alluvial aquifers
Riyadh, located in the heart of the country, is supplied with desalinated water pumped from the Persian Gulf over a distance of 467 km. Given the substantial oil wealth, water is provided almost for free …
Quoting Christopher Gasson of Global Water Intelligence, “At the moment, around 1% of the world’s population are dependent on desalinated water to meet their daily needs, but by 2025, the UN expects 14% of the world’s population to be encountering water scarcity. Unless people get radically better at water conservation, the desalination industry has a very strong future indeed.” …
The single largest desalination project is Ras Al-Khair in Saudi Arabia, which produced 1,025,000 cubic meters per day in 2014, although this plant in Saudi Arabia is expected to be surpassed by a desal plant in California. The largest percent of desalinated water used in any country is in Israel, which produces 40% of its domestic water use from seawater desalination. …
Scottish racist
… Britain, the U.S., Canada and Australia more tolerant than anywhere else. …
But if you walk alongside the Clyde River in Glasgow you’ll likely see a Gypsy lady with a disposable cup siting on one pedestrian bridge. She sits quietly.
There must be enough regular pedestrian traffic to bring in some money each day. She’s there at least 10hrs / day.
I was passing when a young Scottish guy diverted to give her some grief. He then wanted to bend my ear.
“Scum taking the jobs of the white man.”
She was as white as he. Clearly didn’t have a job.
Most of the rest of the rant was unintelligible. He was angry. She a convenient target. Perhaps he shouts at her every day on the way to work.
Unhappy. Fearful. This is the kind of voter Donald Trump appealed to when he said:
They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Gypsy beggars are common in Europe.
I don’t like begging. But this woman on this bridge is no problem.
I don’t like illegal immigration. I’d rather spend the tax money to resettle illegal immigrants. Or – if they decline being returned to their homeland – to deliver them to a safe refugee camp.
We should spend even more tax dollars improving the systems of how illegal immigrants are processed. It’s the right thing to do.
Note: Most of the Romani people (Gypsies) in Europe are not illegal immigrants.
___ related
Udemy – online learning platform
Udemy … a website that enables anyone to teach and learn online. Launched in 2010, Udemy tries to democratize online education by making it fast, easy and free to create online courses. You keep 70% of the revenue from your courses (or 85% if you directly refer the customer to the course).
Unlike academic MOOC programs driven by traditional collegiate coursework, Udemy provides a platform for experts of any kind to create courses which can be offered to the public, either at no charge or for a tuition fee.
Learn more on YouTube.
Thanks Mike.
Syrian Refugee Crisis Explained
This video, by In a Nutshell, speaks about how the Syrian crisis is an international issue, and how it all started with countrywide unrest and the civil war in Syria. …
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
$350,000 to shoot a rare black rhino
Sounds horrendous. The hunter faced death threats from outraged conservationists.
But the issue is far more complex than it seems at first glance.
The permit came from Namibia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism. Each year it targets several older rhinos that are no longer able to breed but still pose a deadly threat to younger males. The proceeds are meant to go toward anti-poaching and conservation efforts.
That $350,000 does much to protect black rhino. Many hunters are keen conservationists.
Want to know more?
Back in 2014, Corey Knowlton paid $350,000 for a hunting trip to Namibia to shoot and kill an endangered species. He’s a professional hunter, who guides hunts all around the world, so going to Africa would be nothing new. The target on the other hand would be. And so too, he quickly found, would be the attention.
This episode, producer Simon Adler follows Corey as he dodges death threats and prepares to pull the trigger. Along the way we stop to talk with Namibian hunters and government officials, American activists, and someone who’s been here before – Kenya’s former Director of Wildlife, Richard Leakey. All the while, we try to uncover what conservation really means in the 21st century.
Listen to the story on RadioLab.
prevalence of guns results in more murders / suicides
If you like guns, fine. Buy them. Use and store them safely.
But don’t tell me the average person is safer at home with a gun than without. They’re not – even if 63% of American believe that NRA lie to be true.
WITH one of the highest murder rates among OECD countries—second only to Mexico—America retains its reputation as a disproportionately dangerous country.
The number of violent assaults in America is comparable to those of other western countries, yet murders are much more common. The prevalence of guns goes a long way toward explaining America’s terrible record—they are used in two-thirds of all murders. Americans are five times as likely to be murdered as Brits but over 40 times as likely to be murdered with a gun. …
USA should QUIT the Middle East
Andrew J. Bacevich:
… Today, three-and-a-half decades after America’s War for the Greater Middle East was launched, that region is less stable than it was when U.S. forces first began making their appearance.
Costs, sustained as well as exacted, have been considerable. Successes have been few and transitory. …
… In our day, it’s not Saudi Arabia and Iraq that the United States should worry about defending, but Canada and Venezuela. Given startling adjustments in estimates of accessible global oil and natural gas reserves, the United States can count on being able to satisfy its energy requirements by drawing entirely on sources within its own hemisphere for many decades to come. We don’t need the Gulf.
So although ISIL is as vile and vicious an organization as humankind has managed to produce in recent memory, it does not pose a particular danger to the United States. …
U.S. policymakers who conclude otherwise — who persist in claiming that it’s incumbent upon the United States to “degrade and defeat” ISIL — are throwing good money after bad. …
Politico – ISIL is a problem, but not America’s problem
Andrew J. Bacevich is writing a military history of America and the Middle East.
American troops should put boots on the ground … in America. Bring the troops home.
related – Why Does the U.S. Have So Many Military Bases Abroad?
Rick McCharles 