George Monbiot writes about another boneheaded reform from a Conservative-led government nobody voted for. He concludes:
Plutocracy passes through a perpetual cycle. It lobbies against the restraints that curb its destructive greed. It succeeds. As a result it collapses. It gets rescued, at enormous cost, by the forces it fought: regulators, planners, tax collectors, an interventionist state. It recovers, dusts itself down, then resumes its attack on the people who rescued it. This assault on planning belongs to the cycle. But the damage the plutocrats mean to inflict will not be reversible.
These are the times in which we now live.
I’ve decided to attend next years SXSW Interactive festival followed by a tour of North America. The details of where I’ll be visiting and for how long remain undecided, but I imagine my itinerary will be varied and involve much travelling by train.
A few months ago I wrote about not upgrading to the iPhone 4, regardless of the fact I’m eligible for a free upgrade. This turned out to be something of a radical position but I enjoyed the debate that followed.
dConstruct has long combined its conference programme with the name badge, a simple yet cost-effective design. This year we hope to go one better.
Once again, I feel the duty falls upon me to remind those attending this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, that you really need not pick up that big, heavy, cumbersome and frankly useless bag of marketing junk.
I ended my review of 2009 promising to write more about green issues and how I plan to lessen my impact on the environment. Now I expand on those ideas further.
Friday saw the start of this years SXSW interactive, film and music festivals in Austin Texas, and once again they highlight the scourge of swag: the ‘stuff we all get’ that soon becomes the stuff we don’t want.
In what has become something of a rarity, I sat down in front of the television yesterday evening. Upon turning on the set-top box, I was greeted with an interesting message.
Last weekend we witnessed another global entertainment event, this time aimed to raise awareness of ‘a climate in crisis’—Live Earth.
As we rapidly approach the end of the year, so can begin some reflection of 2005. With this in mind, I wish to mull over a topic that has really grabbed my imagination this year—that of taking personal responsibility for the planet we live on and the economic and political environments that govern us.
