Interesting Links for 29-07-2015

[andrewducker]

• The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry’s (Worth reading if you have any interest in running a company ethically)
  • (tags: business society IceCream )
• Which oils are best to cook with? (I'll be sticking to Lard)
  • (tags: cooking fat viaPatrickHadfield )
• Paolozzi underground mosaics on move to Edinburgh
  • (tags: art tube Edinburgh )
• The US Navy is planning

Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

That's lovely news about the Paolozzi mosaics. From what I'd read so far in the news, the ones they were taking down were just going to be trashed. And it's a super idea that restoring them will be used for teaching

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I agree. When we were down in Coniston we took a look at the steam boat there. After it sank The National Trust basically rebuilt it from scratch - and they used it as a teaching exercise for the apprentices at the local shipyards, which I thought was a great way of doing things.

[cartesiandaemon]

That's fascinating about Ben and Jerrys. I think it's really hard to maintain that sort of shared responsibility because whichever party has more power can often end up judo ing the other out. But I think it's very good to explicitly agree this sort of thing. It's too easy to make business deals on shared understanding that aren't enforcible.

"Company shall always pay living wage according to x" is the sort of thing that's somewhat objective and could be in many charters!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I think that if you want the company to have explicit non-profit goals then they need to be enforced as part of its charter in some way. Otherwise they'll end up being twisted or dropped.

Vegan burger

[cartesiandaemon]

Although, i think they didn't explicitly compare to meat burger, tho i can see the answer is "ingredients are a small proportion of the cost". (And maybe, they hold themselves to higher standards in other ways, though i don't know how other street food compares.)

RE: Vegan burger

[andrewducker]

I suspect they do.

And yes, it wasn't explicit, but the question does seem to frequently come up of "It's just veg, why is this so expensive?"

[kalimac]

I'd query the rosy picture of Australian governance in this article. It was the Senate getting huffy over a budget and the government in the House concluding that they were just bluffing that kicked off the great Australian constitutional crisis of 1975. Have the rules been changed since then, to prevent this from happening again?

Also, the reason for the Senate not having equal primacy is said to be its longer terms and hence less responsiveness to the electorate. In the US, our Senate has terms three times as long as the House, has grotesquely disproportionate constituencies, and is quite unresponsive in many ways, yet nobody ever suggests it should be considered anything but co-equal. It used to be said, in fact, that these constituted the Senate's virtue.

Similar queries about Ben and Jerry's, albeit this is more open. If this deal works so well, why are Ben and Jerry themselves so unhappy?

[andrewducker]

To be honest, things that happened in 1975 seem fairly irrelevant to how well it's functioning now. The political culture will almost certainly have changed significnatly in-between.

If I was in Ben or Jerry's shoes then I'd probably find working somewhere that I used to be the supreme ruler of painful, no matter how well it worked. But that may just be me.

[kalimac]

But political culture doesn't change by rules. It's not a controllable factor. It may change again in some alarming new direction. Only a rules change can deal with the fundamental issue.

[steepholm]

On children and politicians, I remember cringing when Yvette Cooper ruled herself out of running for the Labour leadership in 2010 on the grounds that she had young children - despite the fact that Ed Balls, the father of those children, was himself running. This didn't seem to be an issue for her, or for him.

[andrewducker]

I always feel conflicted by this.

Because it is totally up to the pair of them. And on the other hand, it's nearly always the woman who takes the time with the children, and I'd rather societal pressure wasn't the major cause of that.