(At least when it comes to commercial goods and services. A lot of the really good stuff about is still free!)

It seems obvious doesn’t it?

Clients agonise over cents. They will choose a sweatshop manufacturer over one that employs people with Downs Syndrome. And yet at the same time, they will splash out obscene amounts to use some celebrity’s face in their product endorsements.

Maybe customers prefer the cloying …

Facebook and Radical Transparency – A Rant
Via Andrew Boyd on Facebook.

Given my recent annoyance with Facebook forcing me to share it or lose it, I am not surprised.

This definitely goes against what CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent Time magazine article “What people want isn’t complete privacy … It’s that they want control over what they share and what they don’t.”

With the Internet, …

Beware the people your passion attracts!

When I first read what Hugh MacLeod wrote in his book Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, it struck a deep deep chord:

“…as soon as they get a foothold inside the inner circle, you soon realise they never really understood your idea in the first place… And the weirdest part is, they don’t seem to mind sabotaging your original idea …

I just got pissed off with Facebook trying to make me do something I don’t want to do.

I log on and get this message.

“We have improved the Profile … so it links to Pages instead.” Yeah yeah so what, let me get to what I am here to do.

“Remember, your Pages are Public” Ok fine thanks for the warning I don’t have …

This frightening mountain of bottled drinking water was snapped at my local supermarket on the weekend.

Surely this a sign of a truly spoilt and self-obsessed society?

Singapore provides perfectly safe, high quality, world-class drinking water straight from the tap. And yet we continue to “enjoy” this appalling “choice” of bottle drinking water.

And people BUY this stuff. In large quantities. They grunt and groan to …

Does this affect what you buy at the supermarket?

Source: wikipedia

Big Oil hires PR agencies to spread lies about climate change. Phillip Morris used PR to spread lies about how cigarette smoking is healthy. The Hawthorn Group PR agency as well as other “service providers” are named in this concisely written Yes Magazine article.

It is appallingly bad behaviour. And yet no one seems to give a damn. “It’s just business…” It seems like the religion of …

In Douglas Ruskoff’s book Life Inc he described how a Hollywood personality developed hairstyles that deliberately damaged women’s hair, so as to create a whole new market to sell hair-repair products.

I know the cosmetics industry has long played on, and played, the insecurities of women in the name of profits. I know this is all acceptable in the world where money is god. Nonetheless, this sort of stories …

“Design can take a moral position. But the moral position should not be to go on strike. The best way to pursue your arguments is to be inside the system.” Konstantin Grcic.

Which tied in nicely with the recent comments on one of my older blog posts Toilet designed by a fashion designer.

I thought this quote neatly summed up the challenge to the next generation of fashion designers …

Designers should be advocating for end users; these being the users of the actual final outcomes (a product, a process, a services etc), and not the users of the designer’s services.

It can be all to easy to get caught up in advocating for the users of the designer’s services – also called the client. Especially if the client is the noisier wheel. Doing so is detrimental to the …