Watch out! Phony mobile roaming charges can cost you THOUSANDS!

A bad experience recounted by Henry Curteis of The Tap blog: a bill of £4,000 for emails to a switched-off mobile phone.

I've had pay-as-you-go for years, not just because I'm a low user but as a protection against those telephone scams that instantly charge you hundreds when you hit "reply".

"Basket of currencies" a solution for Zimbabwe

According to this blog, stocks in the shops have improved since they have started to accept currency from the USA, South Africa and Botswana. Though there is a problem with small change...

New Olympic sport: pole dancing

Drop the louche allure and put on the whites, and this'd challenge the men on the pommel horse:

To all college students everywhere

How true!

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/laundry.png

China's foreign farmland acquisitions

Back in March (Broad Oak Blog), I argued that the USA's future is not so bleak, when you consider her natural resources, especially farmland:

You can see that China's ratio is very low, and what with an expanding population, an improving diet, the grabbing of rural land by corrupt regional officials for speculative building projects, growing air and water pollution etc the demand for farmland is intensifying.

And China is doing something about it. In January, its Hong-Kong based Phoenix Weekly publication announced that 8,000 square kilometers of foreign arable land have been acquired so far, some recently in Australia (where cattlemen are arguing that the latest 400 sq mile project won't work) and New Zealand. As with all tussles over limited resources, this is bound to be controversial, so the next step is attempts to avoid scrutiny of the process.

Food prices and shortages are moving up from a Third World to a First World issue - see farmlandgrab.org for ongoing coverage from around the world. And if China should begin eyeing Russia's fertile soil? 

Then there's the world of professional investment - one of the longer running funds being the CF Eclectica Agriculture Fund. This is yet another area fraught with moral dilemma - making money for you and yours (or your clients), but at the price of soaring food costs and ultimately, starvation for many. If we make a fuss about "blood diamonds", how much more so should we raise objections to "blood farmland"?

Greed, and suffering. The sooner we move away from the over-financialised economy and back to sound money, making things and exchanging our surpluses, the better.

Post-it animation

Via Cartoon Brew.

The Bilderberg Jubilee

Today marks the end of the 60th Bilderberg Conference.
The Alternative Action blog lists the attendees. Usefully, you can copy and paste into a spreadsheet and re-order, so that you can see how each country is represented.

Here's the GB contingent (I've added an indication of current or former interests in the right-hand column) - the two in red were the appointed "rapporteurs"for this conference:

Bearing in mind that Bilderberg is about European-North American dialogue and cooperation, do you think these people are the best to represent British interests here? Is there any voice you think should (or should not) have been included?

Or do you get the uneasy feeling that it's a convocation of cats to decide what to do about mice?