We’ve all had fun hating Goldman Sachs again after one of their own sold them out . Mr Smith says that ‘culture was the secret sauce that made [Goldman] great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years’ whereas now Goldman pursues its own interest rather than its clients’ due to a ‘decline in the firm’s moral fibre’…. Hold on. Yes, I know its hard not to burst out laughing.
The High Pay Commission today published a report denigrating the salaries of executives in the city. This isn’t unusual: it’s common to see the high pay of bankers and other city workers is reviled in the media. But there’s a flip side to bankers’ earnings, which often gets neglected. Wealth, of course, can be spent… Read More »Banking as an ethical career
The biggest political question this year might not be national debts or the Arab Spring, but what form identity will take on the Internet in the future. As the Google+ service began demanding that people sign in with their legal names and suspending accounts believed to be in conflict with this policy, the “nym wars” broke out. Google is not alone in wanting to keep online identities strongly tied to legal identities: the National Geographic Society demands that comments on ScienceBlogs may no longer be pseudonymous, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has stated:
“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
But can we live a human life with just one identity?
Gordon Brown has just said that he made a big mistake about financial regulation. His remarks are in line with many politicians on the financial crisis: regulation failed therefore we need more regulation. But do we?
Frideswide Square is a notorious traffic junction in Oxford, and it’s a nightmare. It has about 20 sets of traffic lights and small problems here lead to long tailbacks in many directions, tripling journey times for many otherwise short trips. So you can imagine how awful it was when the traffic lights all broke down recently.
Except it wasn’t.Read More »Banks: Liberty or Regulation
The Icecreamists, an ice cream parlour in Covent Garden began selling a human breast-milk based ice cream last month, only to have it confiscated recently by Westminster Council in order to check that it was “fit for human consumption”. New York chef Daniel Angerer was reported as served human cheese (he didn’t, but see his blog for the recipe). He was advised by the New York Health Department to stop, since although there were no departmental codes forbidding it they claimed “cheese made from breast milk is not for public consumption, whether sold or given away”. What is it exactly that is disturbing with a human milk ice cream or cheese? And are there any good reasons to hinder selling it?
When is a little dioxin too much dioxin?
Dioxin is a persistent organic pollutant (POP) that accumulates in the food chain and is highly toxic to living systems. The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants commits signatories to ‘reduce or where feasible, eliminate the production and environmental release’ of dioxin.
So we know that dioxin is not a good thing to be releasing into the environment. And we also know that particular human activities, such as the smelting process that produces certain metals and chlorine bleaching of wood pulp in the paper industry produce dioxin. The question is when is it ‘feasible’ to eliminate the production and environmental release of dioxin?Read More »Pulp Friction in Tasmania: when is a little dioxin to much dioxin?
Earlier this month German authorities closed around 4,700 farms following the discovery that pigs and poultry had been given feed contaminated with dioxins, which are thought to be among the most carcinogenic environmental pollutants. Yesterday Russia banned the import of untested pork products produced in Germany after 1 November 2010. This follows earlier import bans on some German food products in Slovakia, China, Belarus and South Korea.
Evidently the North German firm Harles und Jentzsch added a contaminated oil, possibly intended for industrial paper production, to an ingredient for animal feed that was then sold to 25 different feed manufacturers. Tests showed that the oil contained dioxin at 77 times the permitted level. Around 150,000 tons of feed incorporating this oil was reportedly fed to poultry and pigs across Germany, and affected eggs were sold in Germany, The Netherlands and the UK.
Internal tests at the Harles und Jentzsch plant revealed elevated dioxin levels in feed ingredients as early as March last year, suggesting the possibility that the human food supply may have been contaminated for months. And of course, this is nothing new. There were similar dioxin scandals in Ireland and Italy in 2008, Belgium in 1999 and 2006, and Germany in 2003.
How can such practices go unnoticed so often and for so long?
by Anders Sandberg
Is mathematics the Christmas present of the year? TheoryMine is a company that uses automatic theorem discovery and proof to generate new theorems via computer, which customers can then buy the naming rights for (for a paper describing the method, see The Theory behind TheoryMine). Is this a scam? Or does it devalue pure mathematics? Or is this a great new way of acknowledging its beauty?
Read More »Is mathematics the Christmas present of the year?
A new company, Internet Eyes, promises to crowdsource monitoring of surveillance cameras by using online users to watch footage and report suspicious activity. They would get rewarded 'up to £1,000' if they press the alarm button to report something useful. Not unexpectedly the anti-CCTV groups really dislike the idea. The Information Commissioner is somewhat sceptical but allowed a beta test to go ahead, as long as users had to pay for using it – this would allow their details to be checked and would reduce risks for misuse. However, at least one subscribe "thought it was his civic duty to sign up". Civic duty or profit-making voyerism?
The failing of economics have been widely discussed in the last few years, and now Professors Kim and Yoon have suggested in the Financial Times that ‘an eminent philosopher…should be appointed to take charge of economics’ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/32c10a50-a8c3-11df-86dd-00144feabdc0.html. Don’t all rush at once. I doubt they really mean it. And even if they do, we mustn’t fall for our own propaganda: philosophers don’t exactly have a good track record on practical matters.
The grounds for their suggestion is that economics is ‘not a science that only describes, measures, explains and predicts human interests, values and policies – it also evaluates, promotes, endorses or rejects them’ and for these kinds of reasons ‘economics is a dimension of ethics’ and ethics should be ‘organically incorporated into economic discourse’. This all sounds very exciting but I fear it is misleading.
