We go inside Cereal Killer Cafe on Brick Lane, the first café in London dedicated to milk-drenched breakfast fare.
Shot and edited by David Clack — via Youtube
— via Youtube
Late night shopping may never be the same again after you watch IKEA’s homage to Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic, The Shining — via Youtube
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour working week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people in the Western world spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes’s promised utopia — still being eagerly awaited in the 1960s — never materialise? The standard line is he didn’t predict the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the 1920s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones or fancy sneakers.
Huge swathes of people in the Western world spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture. Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers
tripled, growing from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment
. In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the service
sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries such as financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors such as corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza-delivery drivers) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call bullshit jobs
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
KLM’s dedicated Lost & Found team at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is on a mission to reunite lost items as soon as possible with their legitimate owner. From a teddy bear found by the cabin crew to a laptop left in the lounge. Locating the owners can sometimes be a challenge, so special forces have been hired… — via Youtube
Everything you need to know about Beats by Dre — via Youtube
You might have thought that Australia’s debate
over online copyright infringement couldn’t get any sillier. But this week the journalists’ union came out as a fan of internet censorship, only to withdraw when they realised what they’d done. And Village Roadshow equated copyright infringement with terrorism and paedophilia, and came out in support of, oh, moonbats or something. Hard to say.
Village Roadshow’s submission (PDF) to the government’s copyright infringement discussion paper is the loopiest, with so much shouting and whining that it’s hard to take their hyperbole seriously.
The dangers posed by piracy are so great, the goal should be total eradication or zero tolerance. Just as there is no place on the internet for terrorism or paedophilia, there should be no place for theft that will impact the livelihoods of the 900,000 people whose security is protected by legitimate copyright,
the submission says.
Oh get a grip.
The tone is clearly that of Village Roadshow’s co-CEO Graham Burke, whose manner at the best of times can most generously be described as eccentric. But to equate the abstract problem of a reduction in your profit margin with the damage done to the victims of child sexual abuse and the slaughter of innocents? That takes some chutzpah — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Widely regarded as an eccentric bureaucrat, Kent ‘Battle’ Martin approves essentially every beer label in the United States, giving him awesome power over a huge industry.
For years, one man has approved virtually every beer label design in the United States. Among brewers, he’s a tyrant. A legend.
A pedantic pain in the ass.
Brewers and legal experts speak of him in hushed tones, with equal parts irritation and reverence.
He’s the king of beer. His will is law,
said one lawyer who works with him regularly. The lawyer asked to remain anonymous, for fear of crossing the beer specialist. There’s one dude in the government who gets to control a multibillion-dollar industry with almost no supervision.
And he goes by the name Battle
.
Any brewery that wants to market its wares in this country needs to get it through Kent Battle
Martin, giving the federal official extraordinary power. With only vague regulations outlining what is and isn’t permissible, he approves beer bottles and labels for the Tax and Trade Bureau, or TTB, a section of the Treasury Department.
Those who have interacted with him describe him as brusque, eccentric, clenched. He is tensely and formally dressed on all occasions, with an encyclopedic memory of beer labels. He is bespectacled and somewhat awkward.
This year, Battle has singlehandedly approved over 29,500 beer labels, the only fact his press handler would provide. The TTB would not even provide basic biographical details about the famed regulator, much less make him available for an interview — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The longer one lurks in the Internet underground, the more difficult it becomes to ignore the harsh reality that for nearly every legitimate online business there is a cybercrime-oriented anti-business. Case in point: Today’s post looks at a popular service that helps crooked online marketers exhaust the Google AdWords budgets of their competitors.
AdWords is Google’s paid advertising product, displaying ads on the top or the right side of your screen in search results. Advertisers bid on specific keywords, and those who bid the highest will have their ads show up first when Internet users search for those terms. In turn, advertisers pay Google a small amount each time a user clicks on one of their ads.
One of the more well-known forms of online ad fraud (aka click fraud
) involves Google AdSense publishers that automate the clicking of ads appearing on their own Web sites in order to inflate ad revenue. But fraudsters also engage in an opposite scam involving AdWords, in which advertisers try to attack competitors by raising their costs or exhausting their ad budgets early in the day.
Enter GoodGoogle
, the nickname chosen by one of the more established AdWords fraudsters operating on the Russian-language crime forums. Using a combination of custom software and hands-on customer service, GoodGoogle promises clients the ability to block the appearance of competitors’ ads.
Are you tired of the competition in Google AdWords that take your first position and quality traffic?
reads GoodGoogle’s pitch. I will help you get rid once and for all competitors in Google Adwords.
The service, which appears to have been in the offering since at least January 2012, provides customers both a la carte and subscription rates. The prices range from $100 to block between three to ten ad units for 24 hours to $80 for 15 to 30 ad units. For a flat fee of $1,000, small businesses can use GoodGoogle’s software and service to sideline a handful of competitors’s ads indefinitely. Fees are paid up-front and in virtual currencies (WebMoney, eg), and the seller offers support and a warranty for his work for the first three weeks — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Chilling Effects is the largest public repository of DMCA notices on the planet, providing a unique insight into the Internet’s copyright battles. However, each month people try to de-index pages of the site but Google has Chilling Effects’ back and routinely rejects copyright claims — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Arthur Swissbank, Senior Protocols Advisor to FIFA
Originally aired on ABC TV: 19/06/2014 — via Youtube
Small wind turbines scaled to the right size for residential and urban areas have so far lived in the shadows of their larger wind-farm-sized counterparts. The power output has been too low for a reasonable return on investment through energy savings and the noise they produce is louder than most homeowners can deal with.
A Dutch renewable energy start-up called The Archimedes is working to solve both of those problems in a new class of small-scale wind turbine — one that is almost silent and is far more efficient at converting wind into energy. The company states that the Liam F1 turbine could generate 1,500 kWh of energy per year at wind speeds of 5m/s, enough to cover half of an average household’s energy use.
When used in combination with rooftop solar panels, a house could run off grid. When there is wind you use the energy produced by the wind turbine; when the sun is shining you use the solar cells to produce the energy,
The Archimedes CEO Richard Ruijtenbeek said.
The Liam’s blades are shaped like a Nautilus shell. The design allows it to point into the wind to capture the most amount of energy, while also producing very little sound. The inventor of the turbine Marinus Mieremet says that the power output is 80 percent of the theoretical maximum energy that could be harnessed from the wind — via treehugger
The main motivation behind rising online security attacks in Australia is competitors seeking commercial information and advantage, according to the latest Cyber Crime and Security Survey Report by Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) — part of the Attorney-General’s Department.
The main motivation for cyber-attacks is considered to be competitors seeking commercial advantage,
said George Brandis, Australia’s Attorney General and Minister for the Arts. This aligns with the cyber threat of most concern to businesses, which is theft or breach of confidential information or intellectual property.
This of course has recently come to prominence through the US indicting Chinese officials for the theft of IP from US companies by cyber means.
While many of the companies surveyed reported the computer security incidents, others didn’t, raising concerns they don’t know what’s really happening on their networks — via redwolf.newsvine.com
I was a bit skeptical when I landed in Detroit. This is where Shinola, purveyors of everything from bicycles to leather goods to watches, calls home. Enough has been said about Detroit, from its slow decline amid the waning American manufacturing landscape, to its current prospects for revitalization and urban renewal. But in a relatively short period of time, Shinola has been both lauded and maligned for its relationship with the city. Supporters praise the company for its local hiring practices and support of scalable business models, while detractors cite everything from a skewed perception of American manufacturing
to ethically questionable marketing practices. But, before we get into those deeper questions, let’s first take a look at exactly what’s going on in Shinola’s brand new leather strap facility — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Bacardi Leaving from Luke White on Vimeo.
The first campaign I [Luke White] created for Bacardi with Martyn Smith was an attempt to bring Bacardi up to date and make it more relevant and masculine. The campaign featured DJ Ray (played by Jeff Kober) a cool Bacardi drinking expat who ran Reef Radio, a small island radio station somewhere in the Latin Caribbean. The first two ads were shot in Bahia in Brazil by Gerard de Thame and involved taking over a whole town for two weeks, which was very cool. The third as Leaving
was shot by Andy Morahan in Mexico and again was an amazing experience. The campaign ran for 3 years in the UK and English speaking markets around the world and helped pave the way for the Latin Quarter campaign — via Behance
Almost one in five working mums lost their job before or after having a baby, a report says.
Half of Australia’s working mothers report discrimination during pregnancy, parental leave or when returning to work.
Pregnant workers say they have been sacked, threatened with sacking or didn’t have their contract renewed, according to an Australian Human Rights Commission report.
The report found 18 per cent of mothers had been made redundant, dismissed, had their job restructured or not had their contract renewed, either during their pregnancy, when requesting or taking parental leave or when they returned to work.
Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick said women had their salaries cut and missed out on training, professional development and promotional opportunities.
The most common types of discrimination … included negative comments about breastfeeding or working part-time or flexibly and being denied requests to work flexibly,
Ms Broderick said on Monday.
The vast majority of mothers who copped discrimination — 84 per cent — said it had a negative impact on them — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The chief executive of Mozilla — the company best known for its Firefox browser — has stepped down.
Brendan Eich was appointed just last month but came in for heavy criticism for his views on same-sex marriage.
Mozilla’s executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker announced the decision in a blog post.
Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it,
she wrote.
We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves.
“We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.
Mr Eich has also stepped down from the board of the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organisation which owns the for-profit Mozilla Corporation — via redwolf.newsvine.com
World Vision Australia has issued a statement today that re-affirmed its pro-LGBTI workplace policies and differentiated the organisation from its US counterpart following the criticism the latter faced when it reversed an inclusiveness policy.
Midway through last week, the US branch of World Vision announced a workplace policy that would’ve allowed openly-LGBTI job seekers with the appropriate qualifications to apply for jobs. However, it was soon reversed.
According to World Vision US president Richard Stearns in a statement to Associated Press, the initial policy change had caused numerous major donors and other prominent supporters to threaten to withhold their support for the organisation’s child support, education and welfare programs if they didn’t revert back to their initial policy of requiring celibacy outside of marriage and maintaining faithfulness within the Bible covenant of marriage between a man and a woman
.
While the policy rollback caused a public relations nightmare for World Vision in the US, other branches of the global Christian relief agency, such as World Vision Australia, have been operating successfully under fully inclusive workplace policies for years.
In a statement today to the Star Observer, World Vision Australia chief executive Tim Costello reassured that his organisation was different to that of its American counterpart when it came to LGBTI recruitment, engagement and workplace rights — via redwolf.newsvine.com
El Reg readers of a more fatalistic disposition may be dismayed, but probably not surprised, to hear that Cyberdyne — the company that invented Skynet and ultimately the murderous Terminator machines – has just listed on the Tokyo stock exchange.
Of course, it’s not the shadowy defence firm of the iconic Arnie films, which unwittingly brings about the virtual destruction of mankind.
No, this one is a maker of exoskeleton suits
and supports designed to help those with serious muscular, nerve or cerebral damage recover movement.
The firm also produces support gear which can be worn by carers to lift heavy loads and even markets a radiation-shielding disaster recovery
suit for emergency workers.
Innocuous enough, you may think, although so were the origins of the cybermen — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Bacardi Hernandez from Luke White on Vimeo
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