On Monday 12. January 2015 02.00.29 Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross wrote:
thx paul boddie. I find your articles most helpful to me, broadening my view, examples of how to write, explaining things really well - gives me something to link too that explains thinks i've been thinking on or havn't been thinking about but you hit the nail on the head and write up clearly.
That's very kind of you! I think I'm probably too verbose - I even got told this once by a former colleague and he was talking about me when I'm talking, never mind when I'm writing stuff down - and thus there's always scope for some editing.
One of my more useful recent experiences involved editing myself down to meet a submission limit, and that really forced me to focus on the most important parts of the message, even though I thought there were some nice things that had to be dropped. It was also in another language, and so it was also a useful exercise in being concise and still coherent, which I hope I managed.
Editing stuff can be infuriating because it means spending even more time on something that you want to just write, publish and be done with, so I guess I'm not really much of a blogger. ;-)
I think "fair"phone deserve a slap,nuge,etc. I've been most frustrated with them and completely disappointed in them. while I thank them for making the sources of the minerals not (so?) evil. there thinking,policy about software has been bs :(. it still status quo of a new hole product each year or 2 to replace what could be a perfectly good working one if it wasn't for the software. it's like there just another group vs group and with this group there aim so to keep miners employed at all costs. while claiming the better morals :(
I don't think the miners really want to keep doing their jobs if they could be doing something nicer, but that leads to the problem of economic development in those countries. And that's not a developed versus developing world issue: mining was big in places like the UK for a long time, but you have to ask whether sufficient opportunities were created when those industries were run down a few decades ago. Still, I'm going a bit off-topic here and will exercise restraint to keep the message short. ;-)
so thats why i will never get a unfair-to-me-phone.
One thing Fairphone has arguably managed to achieve is a very public focus on sourcing, as we saw recently with accusations (the Panorama programme on the BBC, I think) about Apple's tin sourcing from Indonesia, with the apparent need for a response by Apple's CEO and assertions (like we've seen around fair employment) that Apple is supposedly improving the situation.
But on matters of privacy, ownership of devices, and competition issues, the situation is as dire as it was for the personal computer industry, if not worse. Here, it's no longer sufficient to deliver an unfair device that's produced in a relatively fair way, and then to claim that it is "fair".
Paul