When most people think of the Arabian peninsula, they think of the opulent man-made islands of Dubai and that city’s sparking, futuristic towers, or the World Cup stadiums rising from the desert in Qatar. But with his series Crossings, Arko Datto shifts the attention to the millions of migrant workers from throughout Asia who are building these structures.
Datto used Google Maps and Google Earth to capture the vast highways, sprawling landscapes, and grand projects that laborers have built under conditions that border on slavery.
Though it might seem more obvious to make portraits of workers, Datto finds the results of their labor equally ominous. The somewhat abstract aerial images highlight the extent of their contributions—and the exploitation so integral to the region’s growth. It’s also a metaphor—Datto didn’t photograph the workers individually or document their living conditions because they are essentially unseen by the society so thoroughly reliant upon them.
Back in 1999, Sony released a robotic dog called Aibo, a canine companion that didn’t crap everywhere and only ate electricity. It sold pretty well — 150,000 units, despite the $2,000 price tag. Some owners became remarkably attached, which makes it even more sad that Sony has stopped repairing Aibo. Slowly but surely, they’re all dying.
The only reason I wouldn’t turn in a friend who I know is planning on killing a bunch of innocent people is if I agree with what they’re doing.
Birds of a feather flock together. Don’t fall for the okey-doke. Dalton Tyler knew what his roommate was planning but didn’t say a word for one very simple reason.
“And he voted against concealed-carry. Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”
A National Rifle Association board director has blamed the deaths from the mass shooting at a mostly African-American church in South Carolina on the pastor’s anti-gun stance.
A 21-year-old man, who has now been arrested, opened fire midway through a bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal in Charleston on Wednesday night, reloading several times and reportedly telling his victims, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” The church’s pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney, also a state senator, was among the nine people killed.
The gun advocacy group has issued no public statement since the shooting, but NRA board member Charles Cotton contributed this comment about Pinckney to a discussion thread on a firearm forum that he moderates:
“And he voted against concealed-carry. Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”
Pinckney was known for introducing legislation for stricter background checks on gun owners and last year voted against a South Carolina law allowing the concealed carrying of weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol. Under state law, guns are not allowed to be brought into churches.
“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency… I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.”
Cotton’s comment about self defense is similar to the argument the lobbyist group made after 20 children were shot dead in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut—schools, and perhaps now churches, should be armed.
The NRA is known for its less-than-sensitive approach to mass shootings. Last year, the group chose a reverend who blamed the Connecticut elementary school shooting on the separation of religion and public education to lead its annual prayer meeting. “This is what happens when a society turns its back on God,” the reverend said at the time.
In honor of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, here are some inspiring words from Mia Hamm. What would you say (or do!) to encourage and empower girls around the world?
Learn more about the U.S. Department of State’s commitment to supporting women and girls through sports diplomacy by checking out the Empowering Women and Girls through Sports Initiative: http://ift.tt/1ekQAuK
Everytime I see cher now im gonna think about her saying “ I thought black was beautiful since I was 9. My moms best friend had a black boyfriend 60 years ago”
“Who doesn’t want black COOL” ugh Cher peak embarrassing white mom. Inevitable but terrible.
In the year 2000, some European countries were already pioneering the big build of one renewable energy technology, onshore wind. The UK wasn’t one of them. Instead, German, Danish, and Spanish turbines accounted for 85% of the wind energy (pdf) produced in the EU, supported by national subsidy regimes.
But in 2002, the UK began in earnest to build. The driver was one particular subsidy: the Renewables Obligation, or RO, introduced that year. The money came from consumer bills, and was targeted at the construction of wind farms and other moves toward less polluting sources of electricity. This is what happened, and what has made the UK the third-largest producer of onshore wind energy today:
(The UK is also by far the largest producer of offshore wind power in the world.)
But Britain’s Conservative government now says that new onshore wind projects will no longer be able to access the RO as of April 2016. It’s part of a move towards reforming the country’s entire electricity market, and is in line with European guidelines designed to wean the industry off support.
The problem, as the UK wind industry sees it, is the sudden change in tack. In the autumn of 2014—before the government won a new term in office at May’s general election—it promised the RO subsidy would continue for new onshore wind until March 2017 (pdf, page 37).
More than money, the industry says it craves certainty. Because investment decisions on large infrastructure projects must be made far in advance, a stable regime—one in which the government keeps its promises—is vital to securing commercial investment: the very thing that will allow the subsidies to be removed without leading to a collapse.
Amber Rudd, the energy and climate change secretary who replaced Liberal Democrat Ed Davey after the election, said in a statement that the government wants “to help technologies stand on their own two feet, not encourage a reliance on public subsidies.” The attitude is, essentially, that the subsidy worked and now it’s time to move on. It’s seeking to soften the blow by allowing some projects a period of “grace.”
But what the industry fears is a reversal like that in Spain, where a cash-strapped government removed solar subsidies so suddenly that the industry, and the investment climate, collapsed.
Renewable UK, the wind industry trade body, thinks that’s a possibility. Its head Maria McCaffery called the move “a chilling signal”, not just to wind power, but to investors in general.
The Light was officially lit on January 21, 1881. At the time, it was the most expensive West Coast lighthouse ever built. Due to the erratic weather conditions, and the dangerous commute for both keepers and suppliers, the lighthouse was nicknamed "Terrible Tilly" (or Tillie). Over the years, storms have damaged the lighthouse, shattered the lens, and eroded the rock. It was decommissioned in 1957, and has since been sold to private owners. It is now an unofficial columbarium, and is privately owned.
“And what we also have to remember too is that this isn’t just a murder of nine people. This was the assassination of a US elected official. And so we need to use real language.”
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Christina Greer on The Nightly Show, spilling all the tea about why we have no choice but to call this domestic terrorism. She went further in pairing it up to the actual legal definition.
Please never forget that Reverend Clementa Pinckney was a South Carolina State Senator, and has served in public office since the age of 23. The media is already working overtime to humanize the terrorist over the many victims of his heinous acts. Even the articles about Rev Pinckney seem to only mention his elected position as a footnote. He was a staunch political activist. Also, remember that the terrorist drove over hours from his home specifically to Emaneul AME.
'The text border on the sheets is so dorky and ill-advised that no other company could pull it off.'
Spaceship Type
Established in 1948, Dr. Bronner's is a manufacturer of certified organic and fair trade soaps and personal care products that in 2014 had a total revenue of $80.3 million with their popular liquid soaps accounting for 67% of it. The company is well-known for treating their 130-plus employees exceptionally well and for their philanthropy, contributing up to $8 million worth in financial, in-kind, and direct action contributions. Their products and overall brand have a cult status and a lot of it has to do with the company's unconventional origin story and text-filled packaging, which I will quote below from our book, Graphic Design, Referenced:
The descendant of three generations of German soapmakers, Emmanuel Heilbronner immigrated to the United States in 1929 at the age of 21, working with various soap companies in the East before establishing himself in the 1930s in Milwaukee and dropping the first syllable from his last name. In the 1940s, now a self-titled doctor, Bronner began to draft and persistently share a plan for world peace in "Spaceship Earth" through unity of religion. In 1945 Dr. Bronner was arrested for speaking without a permit at the University of Chicago and institutionalized in the Elgin State Insane asylum. He escaped six months later and fled to Los Angeles. There, in his small apartment, he began mixing soap with a broom handle, which he sold while expounding on his theories at the Pershing Square public park. When he noticed people bought his soap but did not bother to listen to him talk, he started writing his philosophy on the labels.
In the late 1960s, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps gained popularity with the hippie culture because of its all-natural ingredients, durability, and its equal effectiveness in cleaning groovy locks of hair, bell-bottom jeans, and Volkswagen vans. Packaged extremely simply in brown plastic bottles with one-color labels--the text on Dr. Bronner's products became evolving soliloquies on its founder's philosophy, referred to as "The Moral ABC." The labels of the 32-ounce soap package each carry as many as 3,000 words expressing Dr. Bronner's thinking, which references everything from Mao Tse-tung to Albert Einstein, Joseph Stalin, and Halley's Comet. Dr. Bronner passed away in 1997, but his sons maintain his legacy and are overseeing their increased popularity. The Bronners have declined purchase offers, and while sale may still be a possibility, the labels will be safe: A provision in the company's charter states they must remain the same.
This March, the company introduced a revised version of their packaging. No design credit given.
In 2014, Dr. Bronner's added 13 stars to our corporate logo in reference to the cosmos, which inspired Dr. Emanuel Bronner's ALL-ONE vision, and continues to inspire the company. The stars acknowledge that all our work happens within a larger cosmological context.
The smaller stars can be seen as representing the 12 constellations of the zodiac or the 12 tribes. The brightest star represents our sun or the Eternal father.
Together the stars add up to 13, a number with mystical meaning in Judaism as well as other religious traditions. The placement of the stars uses a pattern from Metatron's cube, an ancient geometric figure which uses 13 circles to create all the platonic solids, and which represents completeness, perfection and wholeness.
Logo detail.Logo grid. Damn. That's how you use an underlying grid!
We will start with the logo, redesigned a few months before the packaging, it seems. A fairly simple evolution, the logo keeps the globe shaking hands but with a slightly better drawing of the elements. I never I thought I would say this but the swooshes in the new logo are much better. Gone is the Medicine Man typography and in its place is a combination of Futura and… Trade Gothic Condensed (?) that looks quite well with the bold amounts of blue of the icon. The 13 added stars looked completely randomly placed but, like all things Dr. Bronner's, the rationalization and grid blew my mind. It's not a good logo by any means but at least now it's a much tighter unit.
Modeled after the aesthetic of the original labels on bottles of soap first created by Dr. E.H. Bronner in 1948, the "Old & Improved" labels preserve and affirm the authenticity and history of the brand, as well as reflect the modern ethos and style of the current generation of the Bronner family and the products' contemporary customers and fans.
"Our new product labels honor the legacies of our grandfather, Dr. E.H. Bronner, my father Jim Bronner, and my Uncle Ralph who have each helped shape this company into what is today," says David Bronner, President of Dr. Bronner's. "Each label contains this special pledge that represents a distillation of my grandfather's philosophy that adorns our labels, while summarizing our mission and purpose as a company: In all that we do, let us be generous, fair & loving to Spaceship Earth and all Its inhabitants. For we're ALL-ONE OR NONE! ALL-ONE!"
Evolution of the iconic liquid soap bottle.Liquid soap, before and after.
Most people know Dr. Bronner's from the serif packaging so, at first, seeing them go to an all sans approach would seem like sacrilege but the evolution image shows that the serif version is the odd one out. What made the previous labels so great was that they were utterly un-designed. All the text was justified and although there was some hierarchy it wasn't as didactic as we've all been doing it through our careers. The new labels are definitely designed by someone concerned with spacing and legibility. You could argue that some of its soul has been sucked out but in terms of doing a meaningful evolution without sacrificing the original intent, this succeeds quite well. These products are instantly recognizable on the shelves of the grocery store because of their typographic texture and this new version keeps that initial impact and then keeps you hooked with the onslaught of text. Also, the revised visual language extends perfectly to whatever product the Dr. Bronner's team puts out.
Soap, product detail.Toothpaste, product detail.Coconut oil, product detail.Sal Suds, product detail.Advertise-y images.New packaging in the wild, photographed by BN reader Eric Doctor.Soap varieties. Photo by Whole Foods Market (Plymouth Meeting, PA).
There are a few more of those product sheets here and they are all equally awesome. The text border on the sheets is so dorky and ill-advised that no other company could pull it off. I've always found Dr. Bronner's fascinating and I think this change makes their products even better and more convincing while at the same time demonstrating a keen sense of brand continuity and consistency that few other consumer products have. All-one!
Your host here at Alcademics, Camper English, is once again up for the Best Cocktails & Spirits Writer award at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans this July. I won this award in 2011 and have been nominated a few times before and after.
itwbennett writes: GitHub, the most popular Git hosting site, is reportedly seeking $200 million in an upcoming private funding round that values the company as high as $2 billion. "GitHub is an interesting company," said analyst Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics. "It is partly a hosting service for developers and partly a social media site." And it's a great place to recruit developers. But company-specific factors aside, there's also a lot of money in the market "looking for homes," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group.
what's worse, Apple wielding licensing powers to punish third parties, or Apple ever certifying Monster Cables
An anonymous reader writes: Since 2005, Monster cables have been licensed under Apple's "Made For iDevice" program, which lets cable manufacturers put a logo on their product signifying they work with Apple products. Now, Apple has revoked that certification. In January of this year, Monster sued Beats, accusing its founders of fraud. Beats was acquired by Apple in 2014, and Monster is accusing Apple of bullying them by terminating the licensing deal. Monster's general counsel said the move would "significantly disrupt Monster's business and that the two companies had worked well for years, with Monster paying Apple more than $12 million in licensing fees since 2008."
all carriers suck forever but oh god not Comcast anybody but Comcast
Updated @ 10:47 EST, 15:47 BST: A source familiar with Comcast's thinking told Ars after this article published that it is not interested in buying T-Mobile. The source requested anonymity because the company tries to avoid making official comments on rumored mergers.
Since 2012, Comcast has has a commercial partnership with Verizon Wireless that allows it to sell Verizon Wireless products in bundles with Comcast cable services. This partnership would also allow Comcast to resell Verizon Wireless service under its own name beginning next year.
"Four years from signing, Comcast could become a reseller of Verizon Wireless' service through a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) agreement. Comcast could purchase Verizon Wireless' service at wholesale rates and then market and sell its own, branded wireless service in connection with our bundled offerings, creating more choice for consumers," Comcast's December 2011 announcement of the agreement said. The deal was approved by the FCC with some conditions in 2012.
We liked Amazon's high-end Kindle Voyage e-reader when we reviewed it last year, but our biggest concern was that the $199 dedicated reader didn't do enough to distance itself from the $119 Kindle Paperwhite. Today that extra purchase gets even harder to justify, since Amazon just added the Voyage's 1448×1072, 300 PPI E-Ink Carta screen to the Paperwhite without raising its price. The new version is still $119 with Special Offers advertising and $139 without. Adding 3G boosts the price to $189 with ads and $209 without.
The Kindle Voyage still offers a handful of benefits over the Paperwhite—it has an automatic brightness sensor, a screen that sits flush with the surrounding bezel, and capacitive buttons in the bezel for page turning. But none of those features affected the reading experience as much as the screen, which used its extra sharpness to make E-Ink text look as much like actual printed text as possible. Putting that same excellent screen in something that costs $80 less makes the Voyage difficult to recommend.
Otherwise the new Paperwhite doesn't change much. The Wi-Fi version weighs 7.2 ounces (205 g) and the e-reader is 0.36 inches (9.1 mm) thick. 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi is used to download books to its 4GB of internal storage. The touchscreen is the only way to turn pages and type, since it lacks both the physical buttons of older models and the capacitive buttons of the Voyage. And the E-Ink Carta screen technology, while not new to the Kindle lineup, still offers better contrast and less ghosting than the E-Ink Pearl screens used in older and cheaper Kindles.
jones_supa writes: Former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and "Scroogled" mastermind Mark Penn are leaving Microsoft as part of a fresh company reorganization. "We are aligning our engineering efforts and capabilities to deliver on our strategy and, in particular, our three core ambitions," says CEO Satya Nadella in an e-mail to employees today. Alongside Elop and Penn, Microsoft executives Kirill Tatarinov and Eric Rudder will also leave as part of a transition period. Tatarinov used to head up Microsoft's business solutions group, and Ruder was responsible for the company's advanced strategy. The reorganization will see Windows chief Terry Myerson take on more responsibility. Myerson will take over a new team called Windows and Devices Group. He will be focused on Microsoft devices and the engineering of Windows.
'the only change that has happened is that data has moved to being held by phone companies, and the government can get it under a court order.'
The former director of the National Security Agency isn’t particularly concerned about the loss of the government’s bulk metadata collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
As Gen. Michael Hayden pointed out in an interview at a Wall Street Journal conference on Monday, the only change that has happened is that data has moved to being held by phone companies, and the government can get it under a court order.
New submitter Wargames writes: According to the article in the New York Times, AT&T is getting fined $100,000,000 for its doublespeak redefinition of the word "Unlimited". The FCC says AT&T failed to adequately notify its customers that they could receive speeds slower than the normal network speeds AT&T advertised and that these actions violated the FCC's 2010 Open Internet Order. “Unlimited means unlimited,” Travis LeBlanc, the F.C.C.’s chief of the enforcement bureau, said in a statement on Wednesday. “As today’s action demonstrates, the commission is committed to holding accountable those broadband providers who fail to be fully transparent about data limits.”
Judge Harold Kahn issued a tentative ruling (PDF) today awarding Kleiner Perkins $275,996.63 (~£175,000) in costs after it won a high-profile gender discrimination case against former employee Ellen Pao. That's far less than the nearly $1 million (~£630K) that Kleiner had sought, although still more than Pao wanted to pay.
In 2012, Pao sued her former employer for gender discrimination, saying that she had been passed up on promotions because of her gender. She also alleged that when she began to complain about her treatment, she was retaliated against and eventually fired. A jury disagreed with Pao in March and ruled in favor of Kleiner Perkins on all counts. In April, the venture capital firm requested $972,814 from the plaintiff, but Pao contested the bill, saying it was “improper under the law” and “grossly excessive and unreasonable.”
Pao's lawyers argued in April that a recent California Supreme Court ruling suggested that expert witness costs could not be recovered from plaintiffs unless they had acted in bad faith—and $864,680 of Kleiner's fees request was expert witness costs. Pao also argued that Kleiner's original settlement offer was not made in good faith. Kleiner, for its part, argued that Pao was out of line in not accepting its settlement offer.
Super Opinionated.
