Martin Screeton

Four months ago Martin Screeton on Linkedin claimed that the arsehole in the Whitehouse wouldn't last the summer.

Knowing a thing or two about politics I placed a bet with Martin that he would.

I made the small mistake of assuming there were 31 days in September so I waited till the first of October to cover the extra day. 

However, Martin has chosen not to honour our wager. 

It's not about the 50 bucks. It's about people who don't keep their word. If you need the money Martin, you could have just said you couldn't afford it. I'll delete this post if you pay the money into a Palestinian charity of my choice.

视频: 2012.09.12 TEDTalks - Leslie T. Chang

To agree or disagree with author of Factory Girls, Leslie T Chang's TED Talk about the people who clamber over each other to work in China's factories to make the consumer electronics and handbags we buy is missing the point. There are so many dimensions to this topic that listening to her should make us all feel a little more humble about knowing how little we know.

I loved hearing about the people and their dreams instead of the endless talk of capitalism and consumer products.

Cheap is at somebody else's expense

Its been cropping up a fair bit recently but the idea that cheap is good is particularly obscene while we sit out this peak oil consumption frenzy. Cheap is only good if you can't afford anything else, otherwise it's just somebody else on the other side of the world scraping a living out of our frequent impulse-buys that end up as the pile of junk that heats the world while our collective urges are sated. I'm quite confident that oil at 200 dollars a barrell is the only answer for those oil junkies who are in complete denial about where we are. I will be having a little party around then but in the mean time here is the culture of our times on plastic bags. We worship cheap when in actual fact, we can't really afford it.