Real Progress

Colin Beavan ("No Impact Man") discusses progress:

2009 had cooler cell phones than 2008. 2010 has cooler cell phones than 2009. 2011 will have even cooler cell phones than 2010.

That won't be progress. Year in, year out, we have cooler cell phones. If it's the same year in, year out, how can it be progress? Because it's not actually progress. It's more of the same . . .

Far away from us, one billion people in the world have no access to clean drinking water. Because of this, far away from us, a child dies of diarrhea every 15 seconds . . .

Ask the average person: Do you want to watch TV on your cell phone or save the world's children from dying of diarrhea? I know what they'd say. People are good . . .

What would be real progress? . . .

When we find a way to concentrate on bringing clean drinking water to the billion people who don't have it instead of looking for a way to bring better TV reception to our cell phones.

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The sad modern purpose of government

Monbiot.com points out what "progress" has come to mean for government:

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions which sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

Related topic: Down with the GDP!

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DI is still under construction, but now there’s artwork in our header

Although more work remains to be done, DI is making progress on its site reconstruction, as you can see. Many of our navigation features are now functional and the site mostly "works." Tonight, "Alistair" of Solostream (the company that created WP-Vybe, the WordPress template I'm using) helped me figure out what I had been doing wrong, thereby enabling the artwork to pop into the header. That artwork really helped to class the joint up, I'd say. I do want to mention that Solostream is a terrific company that provides first rate support. They offer several "magazine" style templates for WordPress websites, and their prices are incredibly reasonable. Check out Solostream's website for details and tutorials. I'll end with a bit of trivia: the "dangerous intersection" you can see in the header is a real-life intersection located at 8th and Cerre, downtown St. Louis, just south of the baseball stadium.

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The silver lining offered by a no-growth economy.

Many people with whom I speak are somewhere between scared and terrified about the economic meltdown. They are wondering how it would be possible to get by with less. Their budgets are already at bare bones. It’s long past time to start considering, in detail, how we can deal with…

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No progress defining “progress” in Iraq

Four years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, politicians are still working hard to define success in Iraq as . . . well . . . nothing in particular.   According to many (though not all) Republicans, many thousands of deaths and injuries, lack of basic infrastructure, massive displacement of Iraqis…

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