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Simms et al (2006) in The Transition Handbook By Rob Hopkins |
“ In 2004 the UK imported 17.2 million kilos of chocolate-covered wafers and exported 17.6 million kilos; we imported 10.2 million kilos of milk and cream by weight, from France and exported 9.9 million. The figures for the same trade with Germany were 15.5 million kilos and 17.2 million. Germany sent us 1.5 million kilos of potatoes and we sent them, yes, 1.5 million kilos of potatoes. We imported 43,000 scarves from Canada and exported 39,000. Drink is swilling around the international markets. The UK imported £310 million worth of beer in 2004 and exported £313 million worth. For spirits the figures were £344 million and £463 million respectively. Just as we imported 44,000 tonnes of frozen boneless cuts of chicken, we exported 51,000 tonnes of fresh boneless chicken.” Awesome - the consumer pays more than they would need to if these commodities were sourced locally and gets the additional penalty of the transportation costs and fossil fuel impact on the climate. Come on Supermarkets, brewers, etc. - get your act together please! |
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RedNemesisDog February 2011 |
‘Thank You’ Pipex Opal TalkTalk - (whoever you really are!?) for the worst customer experience ever... after over 10 years as a Pipex client... ‘Thank You’ for wasting more than 20 hours of my time passing me from Technical Support, to Customer Services, to Billing, to Accounts... ‘Thank You’ for sending me gratuitous Invoices and wasting hours of my time to say it was your mistake... ‘Thank You’ for resolving problems for at least an hour before making me have to start the process all over again because your inter-departmental systems don’t update... ‘Thank You’ for employing people who don’t understand what I am saying despite being able to read a script and who appear to be ‘trained’ to pass me to another department when they can’t sort out simple problems or can’t get your systems to work.... ‘Thank You’ for the last ‘invoice’ of £11.43 after taking ‘Full and Final payment’ off me in 2010 and especially for all the threatening letters telling me that I will have a call bar, no service, court proceedings etc. when I have been with another provider for 2 months... And a huge ‘THANK YOU’ for getting your nice UK debt collection agency to send me a ‘Notification of Legal Proceedings’ and a bill for £111.64 for solicitor and court fees for collection of the £11.43 which I absolutely and positively did not owe you because I had been worn down so much having to deal with you that I had already paid anyway having calculated that it would cost me less to send a cheque than lose 2 or 3 more hours on the phone to the ‘customer services/ billing/ accounts/ technical support’ departments of a company I was no longer a client of... But most especially ‘thank you’ for being so very bad, because in this competitive world where customers vote with their feet and communication providers are numerous there will be one less time wasting company to deal with if you don’t get your act together... All of which is a real shame as not so long ago Pipex were probably one of the best service providers in the UK... Just type “Pipex Opal TalkTalk “into google and see what you get.... |
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RedNemesisDog February 2011 |
Shouldn’t Government Department web sites be non-political? The new (since the coalition) UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) website has this ‘Myth buster’ set of pages which come over as a bit paranoid, especially given that anyone questioning Defra issues can (usually) just go and look at the original document... How Odd. Or are there spin-doctors at play? Defra is a solid institution which adds a lot of value to the quality of life in the UK, so why do they need to get involved in ‘play ground fights’ with a litany of responses to what someone in control clearly feels is ‘mis-representation’ in the press. It seems to devalue and undermine the credibility of the department which is a real shame as their output and value-add speaks for itself.. |
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Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, |
“You took all that North Sea oil and you did very well, for that period, because you were living off your wealth. And you mistook the success of the Thatcher era as a success based on good economic policy when it was really a success based on living off your wealth, leaving future generations impoverished. […] You should now realise the mistake of the past. You don’t have that asset and you have to make up for lost time”. (Newsnight interview, BBC Scotland, 24 August 2010). Will the next cash-cow/hide the problem for bad economic management by government be the offshore renewable energy sector? |
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Paul Hawken 2007 From ‘Blessed Unrest’ |
“Luddites were, highly skilled workers steeped in craft traditions who took great pride in the textiles that they produced. The fundamental question posed by these weavers and croppers was, “what is progress without full employment?” “When the movement spread to France, it gave us the word sabotage, derived from the practice of tossing wooden shoes (sabots) into moving machinery” “Native Americans remind us that “you cannot discover an inhabited land” “The earth is not dying - it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses: U. Utah Phillips” “The world's top 200 companies have twice the assets of 80% of the world's people, and that asset base is growing 50 times faster than the income of the world's majority." |
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Womack and Jones, 2003 in: Lean thinking: |
“Compete against perfection”
“Flow in work; work as flow” |