Paper Profits on the Death of a Dream Written By: Jeanne Roberts 2008-02-13 16:35:57 As early as 1975, experts were promising us that the personal-computer, or PC revolution, would create a paperless society.
3M and Minnesota: The End of the Affair Written By: Jeanne Roberts 2008-01-14 23:33:19 Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, or 3M (MMM - $78.50), is a Minnesota institution on the order of Milwaukee and beer. Founded in 1902 by a lawyer, a butcher and a locomotive engineer, the company set out to make sandpaper and, 23 years later, came up with a packaging revolution known as masking tape. Along the way, it also spawned an indigenous economy that employed thousands and represented a cultural paradigm of corporate-sponsored creativity which produced such nonpareils as Scotch tape and Post-it® Notes.
Chevron defends their involvment in Myranmar (Burma) and deliniates some of what they are doing to support NGO's trying to help the situation. They also state their support for the people of Burma clearly, "Chevron supports the calls for a peaceful resolution to the current situation in Myanmar in a way that respects the human rights of the people of Myanmar." I'd like to help them follow through on that support.
AIG is First Insurer to Tackle Climate Change Written By: Thomas Chenoweth 2007-02-13 12:25:41 Insurance customers see rising rates and dropped policies. Insurance companies, according to Ceres , experience insured losses multiplying 15-fold in three decades: far faster than inflation, population or growth.
Climate change affects nearly every industry in at least three ways: directly (i.e. drought, sea level rise), through increased regulations, and through market perception that climate change is a problem. The difference is that the insurance industry needs to address climate change much more quickly. On one hand, the market for climate-change related products is growing. On the other claims from damage from 500-year floods every few years, a multi-year drought, or another Katrina would be daunting.
American Apparel: Fashionably Wrong? Written By: Nina Smith 2007-09-11 18:50:12 “On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.” – Thomas Jefferson
Kristina Dell at Time noted the Real-World Problems of Second Life when shoppers at American Apparel were gunned down by a group called the Second Life Liberation Army last year. The act, albeit it virtual, probably had something to do with dissatisfaction about the site’s increasing commercialization, but Meghan Daum might beg to differ.
Meghan Daum writes a fantastic column at the Los Angeles Times and recently opined on the ick factor of American Apparel. She writes:
I’ve been looking at American Apparel’s advertisements for years now, and I’m still not sure what I think about them. My feelings are another story. I loathe them -- and not just because the super-hip, low-fi, can’t-be-bothered-to-look-professional-because-that’s-so-uncool aesthetic is emblematic of everything that’s irritating about a certain segment of contemporary urban youth culture. I loathe them because I believe they’re meant to evoke pornography, sometimes even child pornography. The fact that a) this cannot be proved, and b) you can’t say it without sounding like a prudish old biddy, drives me crazy.
