Christmas eve, and it’s time to put the blog to bed for the holidays. As 2012 rolls around, I will have been blogging for ten years, five of them on Make Wealth History. I intend to celebrate with a design refresh, so apologies in advance if it looks a little messy around here for a [...]
Archive | December, 2011
Why Britain needs usury laws
The payday loan company Wonga.com is advertising aggressively at the moment. With the pressure of Christmas, many people might be tempted to bring forward their December paycheck by a few days to get some last-minute spending in. But you pay a high price for that advance: Wonga’s homepage declares a typical APR of 4214% Now, [...]
Ten implicit messages in advertising
Looking out the window this morning from the train, I found myself looking at the billboards. I don’t pay much attention to adverts, but I started making a mental note of the implicit messages of each ad. Then I started jotting them down: You want to be financially better off. You like to be noticed. [...]
Unearthing the truth about mining rights
After yesterday’s post on corruption at the micro level, I thought it might be interesting to look at it at the macro level. (Thanks to Ben for the suggestion.) Ipaidabribe works by getting lots of ordinary citizens to record the small bribes they have had to pay in the course of their everyday business. That’s [...]
I paid a bribe in Kenya
Growing up in Madagascar and Kenya, I became rather familiar with corruption. Demands for bribes crept into the most everyday of activities, from picking up parcels at the post office, to getting a prescription, or connecting a phone line to the house. Policemen would stop cars at random and tell the drivers their papers were [...]
Tax evasion: the top ten biggest losers
Globally, $1 in every 6 goes illegally untaxed, squirreled away through clever accounting, tax havens and shadow companies. The Tax Justice Network has calculated the size of the international shadow economy and drawn up a list of countries and what they lose to tax evasion. Here are the top ten biggest losers, with the estimated [...]
What we learned this week
I usually find the New Internationalist a little too ranty and socialist for my liking, but this is a great article on the arms trade. Facebook has embraced renewable energy, and aims to move all its operations and servers off coal . Visit Greenpeace’s site to tell Apple, Microsoft and Twitter all about it. Has [...]
Offsetting gone wrong
A couple of months ago I expressed my interest in offsetting the carbon emissions I can’t cut, clearing the decks as best I can at the end of the year. I still intend to do so, and am looking into how best to do it. Not all offsetting schemes are created equal, as The Ecologist [...]
Appropriate technology of the week? The Unicef brick
I’m not sure this is a product that will ever be manufactured and used, but it’s an interesting idea. Product design house Psychic Factory have developed a food and water container that doubles as a building material. The container would be filled with water or food – perhaps rice – and shipped as disaster relief. [...]
The 200 year wait for water and sanitation
The summer of 1858 as gone down in British history as the year of ‘the great stink’, when the Thames became so clogged with effluent that Parliament refused to sit because of the smell. It was the turning point for water and sanitation in London, and once the MPs had calmed down and straightened their [...]
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