Lifestyle topics
Africa’s lions are disappearing at an alarming rate, owing to the degradation of their grassy woodland habitat. Using high-resolution satellite data, researchers from Duke University in North Carolina have calculated that Africa’s savannah has shrunk by 75% over the past 50 years, and that what remains is more degraded and fragmented than previously believed. In …
Almost two dozen people from huge suppliers of oil, gas and electricity. have been seconded to work in the UK’s Department of Energy. Among them is the atrociously run British Gas, along with Shell Oil and ConocoPhillips. The government is paying them! This despite the fact that the policies of these companies are in …
Loyalty these days is big business: “you know something’s afoot when corporations appoint vice-presidents of loyalty” and pat themselves on the back at annual “Loyalty Awards”. And most of us are now fluent enough in marketing speak to know that actual loyalty is “the last thing the company is peddling”. What these programmes are really …
A computer programmer in the US paid a woman $8.00 an hour to slap him every time he tried to check in to Facebook. Maneesh Sethi advertised the role after calculating that he was wasting 19 hours a week on social media sites. After hiring his “slapper”, he reckoned his productivity more than doubled. Money …
The glaring drawback of America’s war on drugs is that the war has become a bigger problem than the drugs. (James Meek , commenting in the London Review of Books on a show called “Breaking Bad”: Complete Seasons 1-4) Is it not true that some people have genes that pre-dispose them to addiction? They will …
