Surge pricing goes universal: some effects

Here's something I learnt today in an article which definitely deserves pondering by those concerned with culture, social justice and keeping an eye on corporate tactics.

In 1861 a shopkeeper in Philadelphia revolutionised the retail industry. John Wanamaker, who opened his department store in a Quaker district of the city, introduced price tags for his goods, along with the high-minded slogan: “If everyone was equal before God, then everyone would be equal before price.” The practice caught on. Up until then high-street retailers had generally operated a market-stall system of haggling on most products. Their best prices might be reserved for their best customers. Or they would weigh up each shopper and make a guess at what they could afford to pay and eventually come to an agreement.

Now, I never knew that history, though I suppose any of us would have guessed that perhaps there had to be a first place to move from haggling (and the personalised pricing that must have meant) to fixed ticket pricing. I am intrigued and delighted by the insight into how a simple change alters a whole culture for a couple of centuries across the globe. I note how it plays well with massification and the then-developing ideology of free trade.

Downsides not mentioned: this would blow a hole in rpi calculations and render difficult or impossible inflation calculations and thus problematise things like index-linked pensions or other payments relying on rpi systems (note the comment in the article "Increasingly, there is no such thing as a fixed price from which sale items deviate"). There's an interesting feed-back loop potential in that. And then there is the hint in the article that poorer people might not come out well, that they would be given higher quotes on the basis that they are less likely to buy lots.
It might also become difficult to argue for the price-lowering effects of the Market (capitalisation intended) if in fact such selective pricing is taking place. Interestingly this exposes, possibly, the reliance that market economics may have on fixed pricing as its ideological support. Now I understand that 'surge pricing' or whatever does rely on free-market justification but I suggest that offering a price based purely on demand at a particular point is not the same as offering personalised prices based on what the algorithm suggests that you are willing or able to pay. If the algorithms are using the same or similar digital shadows for you or me, they will all tend to offer similar 'deals' to us. Thus the possibility of shopping around with the consumer power that commands is nullified: this could become a sort of cartel/oligarchy arrangement powered by algorithms. This would create its own algorithmic feedback loop having the effect of ratchetting up prices over time. And I say that in contradiction to the article's assessment towards the end:
This looks a lot like the beginning of the end of John Wanamaker’s mission to establish “new, fair and most agreeable relations between the buyer and the seller” and to establish something closer to a comparison site that works both ways – we will be looking for the low-selling retailer, while the retailer will equally be scanning for the high-value customer.
I'm not sure that the algorithm's will be sufficiently differentiated. If you want a sense of how this might work, spend half an hour looking at the prices of rarer second-hand books on a variety of sites, asking yourself the question about who would buy at that price -yet probably the prices have been set by an algorithm: the idea that second hand means cheaper in most cases has been blown. Unless of course someone creates price-busting algorithms that have the consumer's better price interests at heart. Algorithm price-wars, anyone?

My own response is surprisingly visceral at a personal level. I feel that somehow this seems like a violation of natural justice -I resonate with Wanamaker's slogan about equal before God and price. And yet I find myself questioning how far that gut feeling is actually an artefact of a lifetime's exposure to fixed pricing and the way that it has become part of the way that I calculate swathes of everyday life.
Perhaps this kind of response is why "Horgan suggests that British retailers are still a bit terrified that customers will be put off by changing prices ".

I'm also thinking that it is likely to bring to the fore questions of profit; charging what the market /consumer will bear may increase an awareness of how questions of relative power are framed. Is the retailer really adding "that much" value to the product? Is the price of status projection really that high? Most of us don't quibble about the idea of a reasonable mark up for costs and a living wage, but some 'surge pricing' seems to be sheer profiteering and this would be a mechanism for that. 

So, I'm wondering whether we need to have a set of standards for algorithms which give a quality assurance which guarantees the protection of consumer interests?

Why our plutocrats aren't bothered by climate change

Of course! the reason for lack of real motivation and action on the part of our governments is that those in government are pretty much networked into the class of those who are making money by the current financial system.

Now, they might still be interested in stopping the worst and costly effects of the changes that climate change would bring about were it not for the fact that the way things are set up, there is a greater incentive to make money out of selling new stuff to those affected. You see, if you own the means of production, then producing more is more profitable. New homes, new crops, new clothing choices, and all changing rapidly as we work through the succession of effects. All of that means opportunities for selling stuff especially for those with the capital to invest in the new products. It's the same problem at base as with the way we count GDP: it shows up as 'better' for the economy measured by GDP to clean up pollution, for example, than to prevent it; cleaning it up produces measurable economic activity where as stopping it doesn't. And where do the profits from that measurable economic activity go?

In most cases these are people working with organisations, businesses, which do things like scenario planning. The scenarios will certainly include the cases of greater amounts of climate change (above two degrees C). These will then have sophisticated SWOT style planning applied to them. So I conclude that this planning has shown them that there are, from the point of view of profit, greater opportunities than threats in the scenarios which bear down on the poorer members of our global society. As a Friends of the Earth spokesperson said:

“Compensating coastal communities affected by climate change is simply a matter of social justice, ... At the moment, the government is dumping these costs on individual households and vulnerable communities.”Almost 7,000 UK properties to be sacrificed to rising seas | Environment | The Guardian:

This is just the pattern that we are already seeing: the cuts are being made at the expense of the poorer and more vulnerable and letting off the richer (and financially more resilient) from doing their fair share: we are not all in it together. Trickle down economics doesn't work but we are left with the attitude that once was justified by it: that enriching the 'entrepreneurs' is a Good Thing. Of course most of the entrepreneurs turn out to be rentiers not particularly adding any value to the economy as a whole and removing money from the economy by salting it away offshore.

The point we need to grasp is that if you are wealthy enough, you will feel that you can spend enough money to make sure you are shielded from the worst effects: it's easy to move home, easy to buy the stuff you need to deal with the effects, even relatively easy to employ private armies security to keep you safe from the civil strife. They can survive in a new medieval economy by becoming barons.

All Give and No Take -the dangers of TTIP

 On the basis of this article: All Give and No Take | George Monbiot.

On the basis of it I have just written to my MP. You might do the same, perhaps.

I was pleased to receive your response to my concerns
about TTIP and to learn that you share something of my concern. I would
also not wish to lightly turn down a potentially large amount of
investment and income for British industry and commerce. I am also
pleased to know that you are concerned enough to keep a watch on the
process and its outcomes. However, I remain a little concerned and would
like to mention to you a more precise concern which I didn't think I
saw represented in your response. I hope you'll feel able to comment
further and perhaps reassure me about your own concerns with the TTIP
negotiations.



My concerns arise from the investigations of George Monbiot
(reported here )
in which he says "The most dangerous aspect of the talks is the
insistence on both sides
on a mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS)(10).

ISDS allows corporations to sue governments at offshore arbitration
panels of corporate lawyers, bypassing domestic courts. Inserted into
other trade treaties, it has been used by big business to strike down
laws that impinge on its profits: the plain packaging of cigarettes;
tougher financial rules; stronger standards on water pollution and
public health; attempts to leave fossil fuels in the ground" This forms
the heart of my concern as it seems to form an effective trump card for
corporations over democratic governments who may wish to steer away from
a corporatist interpretation of neo-liberalism (a kind of government I
would like to help to elect, in fact).



Monbiot goes on to question the value of a clause/section designed
for situations where the rule of law might be inconstant: "what is it
doing in a US-EU treaty? A report commissioned by the UK
government found that ISDS “is highly unlikely to encourage investment”
and is “likely to provide the UK with few or no benefits.”(15)
But it could allow corporations on both sides of the ocean to sue the
living daylights out of governments that stand in their way."



My concern is for proper democratic scrutiny of the TTIP and I
support Monbiot's proposals for that: (1) all negotiating positions, on
both sides, would be released to the public as soon as they are tabled.

(2) every chapter of the agreement [sh]ould be subject to a separate vote in the European parliament.

(3) TTIP would contain a sunset clause. After five years it would be reconsidered

I wonder whether you would be prepared to help press those propositions upon the negotiators?

I'm sorry for the late running of this service

I've noticed a few times in the last year or three that announcements at some rail stations and on some trains have surprised me a little with their automated announcements which apologise for delays or other inconveniences in the service. I guess I have tended to expect -because it would be what i'd do- that they might say things like, "Broad Acres Railways regrets any inconvenience ..." but what catches me by suprise is the first person singular: "I apologise" or "I am sorry ....".

Perhaps it doesn't strike you as odd, but for me there are two questions spring to mind. One question is, knowing that it is an automated announcement, who is this 'I'? And the second question is, assuming that somehow it is the company being represented, how seriously can we take expressions of regret, remorse or penitence on the part of a company?

With regard to  who the 'I' might be, the recording carries the trace of a real human 'I' who is/was the voice actor who recorded the various components that the computer algorithm uses to assemble the panoply of announcements. Clearly that person is not apologising, it is merely their voice that has been rented to express some other's messages. However, what their voice does is to give an illusion of a human subject making the apology (or whatever else it might be) and presumably the company is interested in the sense of rapport that this creates in their customers, establishing a friendly, humane, presence in our psyches.

So the literal or direct referent for the 'I' could be the algorithm that generates the messages in response to whatever inputs to the computer system that is running the program that the algorithm is part of. The "I' in this case is the output of data processing -though that might, in a wider context, be too reductionistic a statement: just because this 'I' is produced most proximately by loudspeakers driven by electrical signals which are patterned in turn by a computer algorithm, does not mean that the 'I' so produced is meaningless in the sense of there being no person 'behind' it. If we adhere too strongly to that, then we risk denying personal meaningfulness behind the output of the voice synthesiser used by Stephen Hawking. Come to that, we could notice that our own voice production is in many ways a biological reflex of the electro-mechanical systems just mentioned: we have neuronal patterns which perform a similar function to the computer algorithm in respect of producing syntactically and phonologically (though often not prosodically) well-formed utterances and translate those into speech.

Now, thinking about the corporate expressing regret etc, it is tempting to deny personal meaningfulness to the train or station announcement on behalf of Broad Acres Railway Company but we might want to pause. Is it possible that a company could desire, intend, regret? And could it do those things at least in part in relation to human persons?

We readily acknowledge, of course, that those who lead the company may have desires, intents and relational-motives in common. We can acknowledge that more lowly members of the company might also do those things on a one-to-one level (though it's an interesting question to wonder how far they might do so in their own persons and how for as representative persons -or if that is a meaningful distinction). And the question is whether that is all that there is to say: a bunch of individual humans happen to agree that it is regrettable that the train is late or whatever. Or is it possible that it is more than an aggregated, collective, emotion? That, at least sometimes, the company is a collective being-in-itself and capable of something analogous to human emotions like desire, fear, anger, loyalty?

This would mean that in some way the confluence of legal instruments, financial flows, contracts, mission statements, human affectivity (of a variety of 'stakeholders') become synchronised and feedback-reinforced such that while the machinery, software and human agents which form the infrastructure are in place 'performing' the company, then the company is real and has some degree of agency. It impinges on the human social world as an actor with analogues to personality (ethos?), intentions (mission statement and other direction-setting instruments) and a certain degree of vulnerability to what others 'think' of it (reputation, image, brand etc).

What makes it hard for us to go with that is often that we are tripped up by the fact that a company (or whatever) is made up of human beings and we are by instinct and habit disposed to relate to other humans. We can accommodate, usually by analogy, 'lesser' creatures into our relating or we can treat things as mere instruments of our will. What we are less equipped to do is to relate to something that is made from us and which might use our intelligence and affectivity as part of its own life -a little like our brains use the electro-chemical and biological capabilities of the cells we call neurons which go about their own business but collectively help create a mind. And of course, such a thing is so alien to what we are disposed to relate to and we have few everyday experiences on which to draw to give analogues which could help us.

So, I think it is possible that the 'I' can refer, at least sometimes, to a real entity which has agency and a 'self' to refer to within human language-games. We actually do refer to companies in an agentive way at times: "the college should know..."; "that company thinks it can ..." etc are all acceptable clause openings. The issue in interpreting them is more to do with whether the company or the college or the organisation is being personified or whether there is something more to it than merely a way of speaking.

I started writing this thinking I might be producing something that might send-up the companies' affectation. I've ended by thinking it may be an affectation at the level of the commissioning group and the PR departments but that it might actually be accurate in a way.

Did my moral compass just become demagnetised?

 I've been watching Continuum and finding it fascinating. The brain-bending to do with whether the future can be changed, the sci-fi fun with tech. But the more I watch, the more it seems I gain sympathy with those who are being presented as the 'baddies' and feel that the character presented as the heroine (Keira) may not be a goody. One of the viewer comments says it well:

 Should the viewers really like Kiera and what she stands for ? Do you honestly have no problems with the future she comes from and which she uncompromisingly defends ? She reminds me of Gestapo officer. They also had families they loved, feelings like Kiera, friends/family members who got killed by rebels (Kiera mentioned this as a justification) but they stand for something utterly wrong like Kiera does. And until now I have not seen Kiera doubt that fascist dictatorship, she defends so much, one little bit. .... Liber8 stands for the right cause but they try to achieve their goals with the wrong means.Kiera and her background does not get m... - IMDb:

 From about episond two or three I've been thinking that the ideals of the group Liber8 seem more aligned with mine -apart from blowing people up: undermining and working against corporate interests that seem to be content, over the arc of the future we catch glimpses of, to trample on people's rights and to exploit people unmercifully. The more it goes on, the more it looks like Keira is simply defending her chance to get back to the life she once knew. We have been taken through the story in such a way as to be sympathetic to that. But what of those for whom the future seems to be one of brutality and tyranny where a corporate-led big-brother society dominates. Keira seems to have been 'fortunate' to have been able to be on the side of money which gives her a personal and family stake in the system as it is/will be but what I'm seeing suggests that perhaps there's a further development perhaps as we realise that the comment above likening Keira to a Gestapo officer may be on the mark. But we'll see.

We've just been seeing an episode where debt is used to enslave people who are set to work on production lines having had their minds removed in effect by the implantation of a sub-dermal chip. Somehow the 'baddies' don't look so bad and the 'goody' seems to be defending the real baddies.

Corporations are not people, money is not speech -or maybe not

I've recently come across a campaign in the USA about corporate rights. I gather from various things that I've read that Mitt Romney produced a soundbite which appeared to say that corporations are people -which seemed to support the idea that they should have the same constitutional rights as actual flesh-and-blood individual humans. In actual fact, the quote with context was actually saying in a sense that corporates don't exist except as instantiated in the human being that make them up. However, the soundbite is being used as a jumping-off point in a campaign to move ...

an amendment to the US Constitution to make it clear that corporations do NOT have the same rights as people and that money  is NOT speech for purposes of election-related spending (see here)

I was taken by one of the campaign images featuring the words I chose for the title of this post.

But I am intrigued. On the one hand, knowing the context I agree with its aims: speaking from a theological perspective we need to be clear that these entities are not to overmaster human beings, they are supposed to serve human welfare and promote human flourishing rather than extract value from the many for the advantage of a small few (for example, though are other malfeasances they could enact). And freedom of speech should not be be interpreted as freedom to spend money into political process and so distort it to the detriment of ordinary human agents.

However, I've been struck by contrarian reading which is actually a way of characterising what I'm coming to believe about 'corporisations'. And in this way of looking at them corporations need to be recognised as person-like in some respects: they have a degree of agency which supervenes that of the human agents that compose them. They are people, in a way (though not one that should give them human rights): they can be held responsible for things and suffer social, financial and legal penalties for wrongdoing.

And there is a sense in which money is speech, or at least communication. These entities are constituted in such a way that financial flows send them messages in ways analogous to chemicals in the environment do with various organisims (ourselves included) and/or in analogous ways to hormones within a body. Financial flows can encourage development of structures or behaviours or discourage them. Finance is sometimes how we get their attention.

Why churches are stupid

Because of my interest in corporisations -the notion that human corporate entities have a spiritual identity of their own- I'm reading from time to time, research and ideas about the way that corporations etc work. One of the things I'm reflecting on is the issue of intelligence. I seem to recall research showing, for example, that beehives collectively have the problem-solving intelligence of a human child. By analogy, it seems to me that human corporisations will have intelligence.

So it's interesting to see this Edge article: Collective Intelligence | Conversation | Edge, where this is precisely the point at issue. One of the intriguing things it says is this:

The most intelligent person is not the one who's best at doing any specific task, but it's the one who's best at picking up new things quickly. That's essentially the definition we used for defining intelligence at the level of groups as well.

If that's right in probably indicates churches to be pretty unintelligent given that they don't seem to learn very quickly. If that is right, then some of the other things in the article would be useful to consider (assuming we think it would be a good thing if churches as corporate entities were intelligent). The findings of the research indicate three things would need to characterise in-church interactions:

The first was the average social perceptiveness of the group members.... When you have a group with a bunch of people like that, the group as a whole is more intelligent.

The second factor we found was the evenness of conversational turn taking. In other words, groups where one person dominated the conversation were, on average, less intelligent than groups where the speaking was more evenly distributed among the different group members.

Finally,...t the collective intelligence of the group was significantly correlated with the percentage of women in the group. More women were correlated with a more intelligent group.

Explains a lot, doesn't it? Of Course much of this comes down also to the way power and hierarchy work in the organisation. If you think about those factors, they tend to die back in groups where there are 'strong leaders' operating a hierarchical top-down culture. 

Why the government should act to close corporate tax loopholes

The title of the article says a lot: John Lewis chief calls on government to tax multinational companies properly:
The John Lewis Partnership boss, Andy Street said that there is an unfair advantage exercised by TNC's who are 'domiciled' abroad -often in tax havens and certainly for the purposes of aggressive tax avoidance. They have an unfair advantage over British-based rivals because of the foreign companies have low tax bills meaning that they can spend more on investment in research and development and begin to steal a march.

So if we want there to be British based employment, manufacturers etc, it would be because we'd like for our wealth not to be constantly being expatriated to tax havens and the global 'few'. If we allow this expatriation to continue, it is to consent in our own impoverishment. If we let it continue,  we're allowing corporate asset stripping of the nation.

The business case is the other side of this observation. If we value SMEs, we need to plot against the unfair advantage the combination of tax rules and existing wealth delivers to  the TNC's.  In principle it's the same as anti-monopoly legislation and policies: countering the accumulation of economic power because it tends towards rentier behaviour and the exploitation of others.

University as corporation

In my university, Northumbria, the VC (who also bears, significantly, the title Chief Executive) has just completed a round of staff briefings to present 'Vision 2025'. I was intrigued to not that he and the governors have clearly been considering things in the kind of way that this article
Focusing a Corporate Lens on Global Universities - Planet Academe - The Chronicle of Higher Education envisages:

when universities overcome their natural resistance to comparing themselves to multinational corporations, they can think in new and useful ways. And learning to think differently is, after all, what universities are all about.

In particular these things from the article resonate:

Universities need to make it someone’s job to manage international partnerships, to sustain relationships, to make sure the institution and its partners are getting what they want from relationships

I think that 'we' can tick that box: over the last couple of years or so there have been appointments in this area in its various dimensions. Or at least so it seems to me.
And how about this? 

Universities, like companies, may need to make the transformation from being a national brand to being a global one.

This was, essentially, one of the big themes in the VC's briefing. Except that, perhaps, the leap is even bigger: from a regional to a global 'brand'. The demographics are a clear indicator of what needs to happen: today's 1-5 year olds will only number about 3.5 million in 2025, which is not a lot to share between 140 or so institutions as they exist today in GB. But look at the comparable figures for China, India, Indonesia and you'll see which are the big markets to reach for. Go figure...
And I think I discern the basis in the way that I hear university managers talking for this being taken seriously, especially as the university already has very good employability ratings and a big focus on professional education.

An organization, whether it is a company or a university, can identify two arrows. One is what people are looking for in jobs, and the other is what the institution has to offer. An organization that can find the intersection of those arrows can build powerful, long-term success.

And I suspect that the recent de-merging of Careers from Student Support and Wellbeing in the University -and it seems to be a very good careers service- may be about freeing them up to help in this process, but I may be over-interpretnig. If so, then it certainly won't harm the Uni to be doing this in the light of this remark.


Of course, the wider issue is how far we 'like' the idea of university as corporation, but it does seem that survival and thriving have a financial dimension and this does indicate that attention to matters that enable thriving in financial terms. The problems with the model are not at that level, but whether the mentality associated with the business model is compatible with or noxious to the main 'missions' of a university. I think that this is analogous to individual human beings experiencing some tension between various aims in life. We sometimes express this in phrases such as 'Am I eating to live or living to eat?" or 'Are we working to live or living to work?'. For a university, I suspect,  this may be something like 'Are we making money to learn and teach or are we teaching and learning to make money?' And, as with human individuals, it is easy to slip from the healthy  '-ing to live' to the soul-destroying 'living to -', so it may be be universities, I would suggest.


With human individuals we know or suspect that they/we have veered into the unhealthy relationship with work or money when relationships are damaged, physical health is compromised and mood falls into depression and irritability which may also show up in poor decision-making.


I would suggest that similarly with universities. Relationships with partners, employees, government and the environment are damaged (and this may involve fraudulent and abusive patterns of behaviour); organisational dysfunction becomes prevalent; employee satisfaction falls and morale plummets. Now those things need to be read off in terms of people being part of the enterprise of HE because they believe in something of the 'mission' of a university (and, theologically, I'd say that has something to do with the providential purposes 'under God' which is strongly related, I would suggest, to the vocation of an HEI) and that would have a relation to the issue of morale.


Hmmm. It'd be great if there were comments on what other uni's are doing, but I' don't know how many of my readers are likely to be in a position to do so...

Stress-related conitive bias leads to optimistic decisions

A very intriguing piece of research which has important ramifications for governance at all levels and in all sectors if it is considered robust. See here for the fuller report: Stress changes how people make decisions:

"Stress seems to help people learn from positive feedback and impairs their learning from negative feedback," ... This means when people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they're considering and less to the downsides.

Just transfer that dynamic to Tony Blair (or whover) deciding whether to send troops to uncover WMDs or to remove a nasty dictator...
How should this affect the way we do governance? I think we needdecision-makers who are less stressed or checks and balances to offset their stress-related conitive bias.

Evolution of Collective Violence

I've been aware, as I've been collecting and reflecting on the corporisation of human agglomerates that the phenomenon of mobs may be a significant dimension of the matter. So it was interesting to find an article specifically referring to this.

Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence | The Primate Diaries, Scientific American Blog Network:

From a crowd made up of individuals, each possessing the ability to make a free choice, something more powerful had been unleashed in which normal rules of conduct seemed not to apply.
“For some reason some kind of force filled me,” testified one of the rioters during his trial. “Until this day, I do not understand how I got into this. What kind of devil was it that asked me to go and forced me to enter into the police department?”
Collective violence, extending from riots to warfare, presents a challenge to our ordinary understanding of free will. Actions that would rarely be taken by an individual on their own seem to be embraced when supported by a larger group.

I'm interesting in two dimensions of this: one is the way that the individual feels their personal subjectivity is subsumed by a 'bigger' entity and the other is the issue of responsibility. The latter, certainly, is a dimension that others such as McFadyen have explored. Now I wrote 'subsumed' above as if there were a kind of loss of identity; on the other hand it could be interpreted in another way:

“You didn’t lose your identity,” says Bell, “you gained a new one in reaction to a threat.” As Bell points out in the case of riots, that threat is often excessive force from the police that turns a disgruntled crowd into an angry mob.

The new identity is a solidary one. And much of what follows in the article is an examination of how social stresses seem to be flashpoints for the emergence of a (violent) social solidarity. The point for me is that there is a function in human make-up which is clearly 'meshable'. The interesting thing (which lies beyond the scope of this article) is the possibility that this meshable-ness can be evoked and harnessed in other ways -including the emergence of corporisations with less violent modi operandi or raisons d'etre.

Governance gaps and international Labour rights

Some shocking details about suppliers for some western products. Governance gaps -failed or tes, to be less euphemistic, allow slave labour to flourish. Underregulated markets do the equivalent of sending children up chimneys if we let them ...
Part of the problem is that some firms simply go round regulation by stepping into a governance gap or allowing a proxy to do so for them. We need an international response to a global set of problems -otherwise globalisation is a race to the bottom. Outsourcing has been a way for manufacturers and marketters to evade responsibilities. So contracts now increasingly embody human rights standards and these are more effective than 'police actions' by global HR agencies.
Building trust, partnership and co-operation can create the basis for a progressive 'strange new world' where TNC's actually offer the basis for human rights; listen to this mini-lecture to find out how ...
Ono of my recently-written liturgies has added agencies and corporations to praying for those who rule the world, this video gives a sense of why.
AuretvanHeerden_2010G.mp4 (video/mp4 Object)

Just when you thought it was safe to eat Kit Kat ...

They've put fair traded chocolate on Kit Kat. Great. However ... "Nestle, maker of Kit Kat, uses palm oil from companies that are trashing Indonesian rainforests, threatening the livelihoods of local people and pushing orang-utans towards extinction. We all deserve to have a break - but having one shouldn't involve taking a bite out of Indonesia's precious rainforests. We're asking Nestle to give rainforests and orang-utans a break and stop buying palm oil from destroyed forests."
Greenpeace | Ask Nestle to give rainforests a break:

Justifiable cynicism

Is it just me or does the idea of men from the world’s largest and most powerful corporations and banks discussing climate change make it seem like they are figuring out how to make more money from environmental degradation (probably figuring out what will be beach-front property in fifty years from now, or how to get more tax dollars to pay for cleaning up their blunders)?

Hmmmm. And why do I think that there may be more truth in that than I'm comfortable with?

being real about market distortion: big pharma

One of the big arguments about the possibility of patenting genes is to do with incentives to develop technologies. Well, no doubt there is some of that. But we should be wary as the perhaps unsurprising results of a study into relative investments in research and marketing by big pharma companies shows that probably about twice as much goes on the latter as the former. "the study’s findings supports the position that the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is marketing-driven and challenges the perception of a research-driven, life-saving, pharmaceutical industry, while arguing in favour of a change in the industry’s priorities in the direction of less promotion,"
Now I know it's complicated, and I'm not calling for easy answers, but I am saying that we should be real about the possible distortions.
Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development, Study Finds:

The wiki way or how the internet changes things

Previewing a new book, we learn of this case-study in internet business. "

Goldcorp did use the internet to mine gold: in 2000, it abandoned the industry's tradition of secrecy, making thousands of pages of complex geological data available online, and offering $575,000 in prize money to those who could successfully identify where on the Red Lake property the undiscovered veins of gold might lie. Retired geologists, graduate students and military officers around the world chipped in. They recommended 110 targets, half of which Goldcorp hadn't previously identified. Four-fifths of them turned out to contain gold. Since then, the company's value has rocketed from $100m to $9bn, and disaster has been averted.

Now the really intriguing and insightful thing is this:

The received wisdom, among western economists, was that individuals should compete in a free market: planned economies, such as Stalin's, were doomed. But in that case, why did huge companies exist, with centralised operations and planning? The Ford Motor Company was hailed as a paragon of American business, but wasn't the Soviet Union just an attempt to run a country like a big company? If capitalist theory was correct, why didn't Americans, or British people, just do business with each other as individual buyers and sellers in the open market, instead of organising themselves into firms? The answer - which won Coase a Nobel prize - is that making things requires collaboration, and finding and linking up all the people who need to collaborate costs money. Companies emerge when it becomes cheaper to gather people, tools and material under one roof, rather than to go out looking for the best deal every time you need a few hours' labour, or a part for a car. But the internet, Tapscott argues, is radically lowering the cost of collaborating. Companies - certainly big companies - are losing their raison d'etre.

An example is given of the Chinese motorcycle industry:

A "self-organised system of design and production" has emerged - the kind of system we usually associate with phenomena in cyberspace, like Wikipedia, or software released without copyright, so that others can tweak and improve it, such as the web browser Firefox. The Chinese motorcycle industry, in other words, is "open source".

A really intriguing article which may just be flagging up an important future trend of some significance. Me? I'm looking at getting the book.

The wiki way | Technology | Guardian Unlimited:

McLibel: now inStrasbourg

McLibel: story: "May 2004, five years after the McLibel 2 last appeared in Court for their appeal, Helen and Dave were notified that the European Court had declared admissable their claim that the McLibel trial breached their Article 6 right to a fair trial and Article 10 right to freedom of expression."

Basically they are asserting that the disparity of funding capability between themselves as private and poor citizens and a coprporation like McDonald's means that British libel laws are in effect a violation of their rights ... many of us know that laws on defamation in Britain are a bit creaky, perhaps this will begin to srot things out. Certainly the disparity between the parties in the 'McLibel' case was marked and a disincentive to the financially weaker parties pursuing their case for justice. The story of the case is referenced, should you need a refresher.