Archive for the ‘news’ Category
Again news puns
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Worries about Starbucks’ magic fading have been brewing for some time.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jan/07/starbucks.useconomy
Why do they do it? Why?
More news puns
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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
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Third installment of the anti-useless-packaging campaign run by The Independent.
More on useless packaging
Follow on front page article on The Independent about the anti-useless-packaging campaing.
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:
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.
WTF!? Molecules on papers front pages?
“Quality” newspapers The Independent and The Times today have on their front page a big computer generated picture of PVL, the new strain of the infamous MRSA virus.
What does the average reader think? “Shit, that new virus looks whack, look at all those green coils! We’re better run!”.
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman died November 16 at the age of 94. He was one of the most influential economists of this century.
Numerous new stories and blog articles have reported his death and discussed his enormous contributions to Economics: NY Times, The Economist, again The Economist, and the FT. Also in Greg Mankiw’s and Becker and Posner among many others.
Most of the articles above hardly mention that Friedman was a fierce advocate not only of ecomonic friedom, but also of social freedom, such as ligalisation of drugs. I assume this is because most of the writers of the articles have politically conservative tendencies. It’s worthy of note that Friedman’s support for ligalisation of drugs is not based on abstract moral convictions, but on paracmatic economic analysis.
Here is an articles that don’t:
- The Baxter Bulletin
- American Chronicle
Here are some articles my the man himself:
- An Open Letter to Bill Bennett (April 1990)
- The Drug War as a Socialist Enterprise (November 1991)
- Prohibition and Drugs (May 1972)
He also co-coauthored a book on the subject: Friedman and Szasz on Liberty and Drugs: Essays on the Free Market and Prohibition, by by Arnold S. Trebach, Kevin B. Zeese, Milton Friedman. It’s out of print, you can get it used on Amazon or Bookfinder.
PS: This is already the second post on drug legalisation. I hope I won’t end up on Crack Whore Magazine!
News puns
Are they so necessary? They are always found in the title, at the beginning, and at the end of an article.
This time The Economist as outdone itself. The closing sentence of an otherwise respectable article on AIDS concludes with the following sentence: “To rub out AIDS there is still no substitute for rubber.”
No comment. Full article here: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_RPTPSGS .
Cocaine
The BBC reports that the UK is the cocaine capital of Europe, that the street price of the drug is falling, and that cocaine is being sole sold cut with a carcinogenic agent. It also reports that traffickers smuggle cocaine gruesomely inside live dogs and that producers exploit children to obtain it from coca plants.
In the video an interviewee comments that Cocaine is seen as a glamorous drug, much like Champaign is seen as a glamorous wine, but unlike Champaign, which is subject to rigorous quality assurance processes, Cocaine can be found mixed with any kind of rubbish.
Read story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6178026.stm
Watch the news story from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3681938.stm
The news story fails to propose the idea that if Cocaine were legal and sold in supermarket isles like Champaign, it would indeed be subject to rigorous quality assurance processes, children would not be exploited for its production, and there would be no need to smuggle it inside dogs. As an added benefit, profits from its sale would not feed into organised crime.
