[Peter Boone and Simon Johnson] Investors sent Europe’s politicians a painful message last week when Germany had a seriously disappointing government bond auction. It was unable to sell more than a third of the benchmark 10-year bonds it had sought to auction off on Nov. 23, and interest rates on 30-year German debt rose from 2.61 percent to 2.83 percent. The message? Germany is no longer a safe haven.
Why run an ad in The New York Times on Black Friday telling people, “Don’t Buy This Jacket”?
It’s time for us as a company to address the issue of consumerism and do it head on.
The most challenging, and important, element of the Common Threads Initiative is this: to lighten our environmental footprint, everyone needs to consume less. Businesses need to make fewer things but of higher quality. Customers need to think twice before they buy.
I just read that John Neville, who played Baron Munchausen in The Adventures Of ..., and the Well-Manicured Man on The X-Files, has died. In stories, Munchausen was a comical hero able to lift himself to the moon by his own bootstraps, or out of a swamp by his own hair, and so on.
In the 1970s, I wanted an EV so I could avoid sitting in gas lines. On the one hand pretty girls would walk up and down the line selling coffee, doughnuts, and Washington Posts but on the other there were fistfights and guns drawn over one's place in line. I bought a 120 mpg moped and filled it from my car's tank, so my fingers smelled like gasoline but I only had to refill every 1000 miles.
Kalle Lasn spends most nights shuffling clippings into a binder of plastic sleeves, each of which represents one page of an issue of Adbusters, a bimonthly magazine that he founded and edits. It is a tactile process, like making a collage, and occasionally Lasn will run a page with his own looped cursive scrawl on it. From this absorbing work, Lasn acquired the habit of avoiding the news after dark. So it was not until the morning of Tuesday, November 15th, that he learned that hundreds of police officers had massed in lower Manhattan at 1 A.M. and cleared the camp at Zuccotti Park.
In high school swimming at a boy's school, I only remember one girl on an opponent's team—probably Sidwell Friends. She swam one race, then got out of the pool and ran to the locker room with her hand over her mouth. In college, men and women swam separate events, except for diving.
By Donal on Sun, 11/20/2011 - 2:41am | Social Justice
My wife is staying with her mother, and I had thought about visiting Occupy DC this weekend, but I decided to work instead. On weekends the office is quiet enough that I can fully concentrate on my cad draughting chores. A fellow called Weasel used to deejay for WHFS, 102.3 FM in Bethesda, when it was a progressive rock station in the 1970s and 80s, and is now doing a Saturday show for WTMD, a public alt rock station broadcast from Towson University. So I grooved and got quite a bit done.
Over lunch I checked out Occupy Baltimore's website. They were planning to support a SleepOut in front of City Hall, and planned a solidarity march to welcome fifty Occupy the Highway (OtH) marchers, shown in the video above, who had been interviewed en route by WBAL, as shown in this video.
The all-new 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas – the only factory-built, CNG-powered car produced in America – was named 2012 Green Car of the Year® at the Los Angeles Auto Show today. The award was presented to Honda by the editors of Green Car Journal representing a diverse panel of environmental experts and automotive enthusiasts who annually select a single vehicle for its outstanding environmental performance.
FORTUNE -- Few weekenders making the four-hour run from L.A. to Vegas notice the big mill works overlooking Interstate 15 at Mountain Pass Summit in California, near the Nevada line. Even fewer realize that the pale-pink buildings, gone patchy with age, are the focus of an extraordinary business drama that involves national security, China's monopolizing the strategic market in rare-earth metals, and one company's attempt to restore American preeminence in a crucial mining sector it once dominated.
In two days the top eight male tennis professionals will play in the Barclay's ATP World Tour Finals in London. The tournament is organized much like the WTA Championship in Istanbul. There are two groups of four players, who play each other. Whoever has the best record and second best record in each group are seeded into the single-elimination semifinals. Number and percentages of matches, sets and games won all count towards breaking ties - which is supposed to discourage less than stellar efforts by making no match entirely meaningless.
[Ann Coulter] The mainstream media keep pushing alternatives to Mitt Romney not only because they are terrified of running against him, but also because they want to keep Republicans fighting, allowing Democrats to get a four-month jump on us.
Meanwhile, everyone knows the nominee is going to be Romney.
That's not so bad if you think the most important issues in this election are defeating Obama and repealing Obamacare.
There may be better ways to stop Obamacare than Romney, but, unfortunately, they're not available right now.
By Donal on Wed, 11/16/2011 - 10:38pm | Technology
I found a blog called Triple Pundit - People, Planet, Profit - which purports to discuss sustainable business practices. As a reflection of the difficulty of practicing both sustainability and profitability, some articles impress me and some depress me.
The much-anticipated break of oil prices above $100 a barrel kicked in Wednesday on news that Enbridge(ENB_) and Enterprise Products Partners(EPD_) have agreed to open a crucial US oil artery by mid-2012.
Citing an increase in domestic energy production and job creation, the House Natural Resources Committee proposed legislation Friday that would open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and natural gas production.
Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, of Washington, and Alaska Rep. Don Young announced plans to introduce the Alaskan Energy for American Jobs Act, which is part of the energy and infrastructure jobs bill announced by Ohio Rep. John Boehner in early November.
“Banks tried the in-your-face fee with debit cards, and consumers said enough,” said Alex Matjanec, a co-founder of MyBankTracker.com. “What most people don’t realize is that they have been adding new charges or taking fees that have always existed and increased them, or are making them harder to avoid.” ...
By Donal on Mon, 11/14/2011 - 10:06pm | Technology
In 2007, Time Magazine dubbed the Prius design team, Heroes of the Environment. By contrast, I recently posted a Mother Jones news item about the dirty secret that making hybrids, EVs and a lot of other gizmos requires rare earths that are about as nasty to refine as tar sands.
Over at TTAC, Bertel Schmitt first interviewed the leader of that team, Toyota Chief Engineer Ogiso Satoshi (in the center, above) about the effort that led to the Prius:
“Look, when we started the Prius project in 1993, we did not even think of a hybrid system for the Prius. We did not set out to build a hybrid. We studied what was needed for the 21st century, and two things were certain: The need to protect the environment, and the need to bring consumption down. That’s all we knew, and you did not need to be a clairvoyant to know it.”
... Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work.
For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.
I just read that John Neville, who played Baron Munchausen in The Adventures Of ..., and the Well-Manicured Man on The X-Files, 
In high school swimming at a boy's school, I only remember one girl on an opponent's team—probably Sidwell Friends. She swam one race, then got out of the pool and ran to the locker room with her hand over her mouth. In college, men and women swam separate events, except for diving.
The greenest car in America still runs on fossil fuel: Compressed Natural Gas (CNG).
