I’m really glad to see this issue is starting to hit the mainstream. The things that make our lives so privileged often come at too high a cost for those who work in the factories that make them.
Stories like this make me want to move forward with Shop Conscious, a pet project I’ve been mulling for 2 years now:
According to reports, dozens of workers at a Chinese factory that assembles Xbox 360 consoles threatened to jump off a dormitory roof. The rooftop protest began on Jan 2, following plans to close the Xbox assembly line, with workers saying that Foxconn reneged on a promise to compensate anyone wanting to leave.
While an incident of this scale is unusual, suicides at Foxconn factories are far from unheard of. A suicide cluster in 2010 saw 14 deaths, with workers throwing themselves from the tops of the company’s buildings. Last year employees were asked to sign a ‘no suicide’ pact in response to the rise in suicides, and the company unveiled plans to install safety nets around its buildings, to keep workers from jumping to their deaths.
Does your spending match your values?
When my mom is an early adopter of something, I tend to think it’s important. She’s been raving about Pinterest for many months now and as of this writing has pinned 1,990 items on the site. (Here she is, if you’re curious). My sister and a few other friends – mostly women – are also in love with Pinterest. It’s giving them a spot to record and remember the creativity of others to inspire more creativity in their own lives, which I think is awesome.
But my sister tells me that Pinterest has a problem, and it seems to me that it’s going to be a fairly tough one to solve. Now that the site is gaining users more quickly, their tastes are diverging just as quickly, severely reducing the relevancy of common pages like Women’s Apparel, which my sister claims is now full of ugly, unfashionable clothes. For a site built on collecting peoples’ tastes, this seems to me to be a major scaling problem. Continue reading
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. That’s pretty much a guarantee that I’ll forget about them before the end of January. But I am a very aggressive goal-setter, so I tend to pick a Big Theme for the year and develop a set of goals surrounding that theme.
The past two years have felt a bit stagnant for a mixture of reasons, only some of which have been in my control. So 2012′s theme is Make It Count, and I spent the last two months of 2011 preparing to hit the ground running. Continue reading
Like many of my peers, I buy a lot of domain names. As I’ve launched products and sites over the years, finding an available domain is a challenge, and becomes more challenging every year. So when I am thinking about a new project, I’ll usually invest in a few domain names early on, ready and waiting in case I decide to bring the idea to life.
In other words, I’m a domain junkie. I’ve purchased hundreds of domains, and for years GoDaddy has been my go-to dealer for my domain habit. I’d heard the stories about their sexy ads, their founder’s questionable lifestyle and political beliefs, and most recently, their support of SOPA and PIPA, two bills that I believe will contribute to the demise of innovation and the remix culture I value so highly.
So, in keeping with my desire to match my spending with my beliefs, I have been using Hover.com to register domains. Tucows, the owner of the Hover service, actively opposes restrictions on the Internet such as SOPA and PIPA. Plus, it’s SO much easier to use than GoDaddy and doesn’t annoy me with ads, emails, and phone calls.
The link above is a referral, but Hover has not asked me to write this post or compensated me in any way.
Over a lovely Christmas dinner, our family had a long discussion yesterday about the lack of products made in the USA, and how impossible it feels to shop for gifts that help American workers. And indeed, when I look at my Christmas gifts (thanks, family!) I see nearly everything made somewhere else while millions of US workers are unemployed.
It confirmed to me something that has been percolating in my mind for 2-3 years now – that it’s extremely hard to ensure that your spending matches your values.
Did that coffee grinder I bought cause a Sri Lankan to lose a finger in a factory accident? Did my shirt help fund attacks on gay men and women in unfriendly countries? Was toxic waste dumped into the ocean because I bought a lamp? Continue reading
I love love love this and will certainly remember 2011 as a year when gay rights were significantly expanded.
It’s nearly time for the feats of strength and the airing of grievances.
People are walking into their local Kmart and anonymously paying off the layaway accounts of people trying to get gifts for Christmas. Many times they are asking about accounts with toys in them to ensure that some kids have gifts under the tree.
I heard this story on NPR and am in love with the generosity of my fellow human beings.
Mystery Elves. At Kmart stores around the country, anonymous donors are walking in and paying off the layaway accounts of complete strangers. It seems to have started in Michigan, but the holiday spirit spread. Kmart says the stealth benefactors usually ask for accounts that include toys.
At one store in Omaha, Nebraska, a dozen accounts were paid off in the last 10 days. At another Kmart in Tennessee, a young father was in line waiting to pay down a bit of his account when a woman stepped up and paid it for him.
This sort of uncoordinated generosity renews my faith in humanity, which is exactly the feeling I like to have around this time of year.
