etiko high tops

by | Sep 6, 2009 | capitalism

My Chuck Taylors are falling apart at the seams and since Converse were bought out by Nike a few years ago (which makes them evil), I wanted to make sure I bought some shoes that are made by a Fair Trade manufacturer and that are also eco-friendly. Morgs at Urban Grind recommended Etiko and that’s good enough for me. So I picked up some Etiko high tops today. From Etiko’s site:

Produced in Pakistan by the same licensed Fairtrade manufacturer who produces our Certified Fairtrade Etiko sports balls, these sneakers are based on a classic design. They also feature a rubber sole which has been certified sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) …..making the sneakers ethically and environmentally sound. A fair trade premium ensures that the workers who actually produced the sneakers are paid a living wage and are entitled to benefits and conditions which are a rarity in the footwear and garment industries in most developing nations. A trust account that we contribute to helps fund a health care program for the workers and their families as well as a micro credit program for any one that wants to set up their own small business.

I originally went to Bliss Ecowear in Paddington to get them but they ended up being almost TWICE as expensive as they were at Happy High Herbs in New Farm. What’s that, the Paddo yuppy tax?


GDay World 392 – Guest: Mike Snyder on Evolution vs Creationism

by | Sep 4, 2009 | Christianity, Podcast, science, science vs religion

Today my guest is Mike Snyder (@mambomike282), a listener of the show who owns a security firm in Washington state. As a Christian, he wanted to challenge me on the subject of evolution and religion, and so we went for it. 🙂

 

The Podcast Network is supported by:

neo.org – a social network with a purpose – to transform the world by enabling people to transform themselves

and

our first TPN Patron – Tony Kynaston.

 

Max Planck Scientists Agree With Me That Free Will Is An Illusion

by | Sep 4, 2009 | free will, science

I’ve been trying to explain to people for 20 years that free will is an illusion. I’ve covered the subject on a few podcasts, including this one and this one with Dr Susan Blackmore. I even mad a simple flowchart explaining why it must be an illusion. Now, finally, some neuroscientists have agreed with me.

According to Wired:

Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it. If that’s the case, do people actually make decisions? Or is every choice — even the choice to prepare for future choices — an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid? Those questions are raised by a study conducted by Max Planck Institute neuroscientists and published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. Test subjects chose whether to push a button with their right or left hand; seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity already predicted their final decisions.

(via Cameron Collie via Is Free Will an Illusion? | Wired Science | Wired.com)

You may say “who cares?” Well you should. It’s incredibly important to understand. It’s easily as important as understanding that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around. It will change your life. At least, that’s been my experience and the experience of lots of people I know.

It’s Official: The World’s Finances Are In The Hands Of The Few

by | Sep 2, 2009 | banksters, capitalism, geopolitics

I wonder how closely the names on this report map to the Bilderberg Group?

A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world’s finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system’s vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.

A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the “backbone” of each country’s financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country’s market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.

The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. Paradoxically; these same countries are considered by economists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world, with ownership of companies tending to be spread out among many investors. But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston’s analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock, meaning that comparatively few hands are holding the reins of the entire market.

via Research – ISNS.

Bad news for newspapers

by | Sep 1, 2009 | Australian media, media 2.0

Bronwen has written a great piece explaining, once again, why newspapers (and the companies behind them) are at the end of the road.

Of course the argument for paid content is about defending commercial news organisations and not journalism. Problem is the two aren’t mutually exclusive anymore.

For starters, it excludes the competition from government subsidised media – SBS and ABC – who probably can’t wait for News Corp and Fairfax to start charging for their content. A senior news person at SBS told me just yesterday that he “WANTS those sites to charge!” – not because he believes in paid content, he doesn’t, but because it certainly brightens his future.

read more: bronwen clune » Blog Archive » Bad news for newspapers, great news for journalism.