More news puns

From The Economist:

Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s Republican governor, has led the advance, with muscular measures legislating Kyoto-style curbs in his state. His popularity has rebounded as a result.

Don’t you love journalists…

Useless packaging part 3

Third installment of the anti-useless-packaging campaign run by The Independent.

A podcast by Greg Mankiw

Greg Mankiw, one of the Web’s most popular economists, has just released a podcast on EconTalk. He also has a blog.

More on useless packaging

Follow on front page article on The Independent about the anti-useless-packaging campaing.

Di Pietro on YouTube

Antonio Di Pietro, the current Italian Minister of Infrastructures, has started a weekly vidcast on YouTube where he talks about the issues discussed in the Italian Parliament that week. Notable initiative.

BA strike

Great! BA has announced a strike and on one of the days when they might be striking I am flying.

I’ll blog again about this. Meanwhile here are some links:

• FT
• BBC News
• The Independent
• The Guardian

The Independent’s campaign on useless packaging

Finally something decent on the front page of a newspaper: The Independent is conducting a campaign to raise awareness of useless packaging.

Many items today packaged for no reasons or “overpackaged”. For example why package bananas in a polystyrene tray and cellophane? They already come with a perfectly good natural wrap!

Other items are packaged to make them look, bigger and more enticing. My tiny iRiver music player came in a box (I’d say) 5 times bigger than necessary.

Too much packaging is bad for the environment and is bad for our bank accounts. It’s bad for the environment because only part of it get’s recicled, the rest is buried somewhere under ground. It’s bad for our bank accounts because obviously we pay also for the cost of the useless packaging, not just for the item that it contains. Big boxes obviously also make things bulkier and hevier and therefore more expensive to transport.

Read the article.