Fascinating read in The Atlantic. Patagonia as a company has tried hard to remove exploitation from it’s supplier chain, but in 2011 they decided to investigate deeper, beyond the usual first-tier direct suppliers, into their second level, and they found abuses of labour laws and unethical practices in their sub-suppliers that they are now aiming to […]
Fintan O’Toole in the Times: ‘I don’t know what the definition of public interest is.” Thus said Alan Dukes, former chairman of Anglo Irish Bank/IBRC on Morning Ireland yesterday. Dukes was appointed as “public interest director” at Anglo in December 2009. Says it all really. The definition of excessive private power is that it ceases […]
Instructive piece on the BBC about the demise of some Tesco stores in the UK and the effect that has on the towns and villages they were built (or going to be built) in. It’s a lesson in the wisdom of allowing large, distorting enterprises to be built. On arrival, they tend to destroy by […]
In Germany, they have a term for silicon valley companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, the big beasts of the internet that have come to dominate our online lives. They are known as the datenkraken. The word means data octopuses, and it is intended to frighten – in Norse myth, the Kraken was a murderous […]
This is quite good: via Twitter / glitterylou: Yay! Proud to be from Swansea, well done whoever did this #ukip #ukipbillboards .
Remember the big stockpiling exercise by Governments of Tamiflu for our benefit in the event of a pandemic a few years back? Looks like all that money was wasted … So does Tamiflu work? From the Cochrane analysis – fully public – Tamiflu does not reduce the number of hospitalisations. There wasn’t enough data to […]