» Archive: Features
July 31, 2003
The Conceited Empire
The Interview with Emmanuel Todd from the most recent issue has been getting a lot of attention. Notably, a discussion at Metafilter and a few other weblogs.
June 22, 2003
Interview with Duff Conacher
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Duff Conacher of the Canadian Community Reinvestment Coalition about the increasing fees charged by banks for basic services. Dru Oja Jay conducted the interview.
Conacher has just explained that though there are many banks in the Canada that are nominally competitors, these banks do not actually compete with each other. Canadians choose their bank based on convenience, he says. According to Conacher, if competitors can not steal each other's customers by improving services, then they are not really competitors. According to a poll done by the Competition Bureau, less than 1% of Canadians have ever switched banks. "The polls have shown that people bank based on convenience; what's close to home, school, or work: that's where they have their bank; you're not going to switch to save $10, if you have to drive ten minutes to get to your branch." Banks know this, and are gouging customers.
May 20, 2003
Rethinking Famine
From the recent issue of Netfuture:
People can starve when the grain elevators are full; they can have enough to eat when crop yields are disastrous. India, for example, has in recent years faced dual crises of both overproduction of food and profound malnutrition. By December 2000, millions of tons of wheat and rice stocks were rotting in India's granaries, while 1.5 million children were dying annually of diseases linked to malnutrition. Promoters of genetically modified organisms often claim that anyone opposed to transgenic crops is turning a blind eye to the needs of those who are starving. But the anthropologist Glenn Davis Stone has suggested that the real moral outrage is the strategic use of hungry people to justify corporate programs to develop these crops. "Malthusian biotechnologists need to explain why crop genetic modification will feed hungry Indians when 41.2 million tons of excess grain will not".