De waanzin van de consumptiemaatschappij - blijf kopen tot je er bij neervalt

 We leven in een consumptie gerichte maatschappij, waarin alles de “perfecte” kleur, de “perfecte” geur, het “perfecte” uiterlijk etc. moet hebben. Onze maatschappij is verwend en staat totaal niet meer in contact met de echte realiteit; de natuur en onze natuur. Alles wordt met behulp van de zogenaamde (Westerse) “perfectie standaard” beoordeeld.

Read more: De waanzin van de consumptiemaatschappij « Groene Nationalisten

Dutch language posts in Almere Digest

Almere Digest has  started publishing some of its posts in Dutch to meet a growing number of requests for this by some of our local readers.

For those of you who don't know Dutch and want to read the post in their own language just go to the right hand column of Almere Digest  and click on the symbol of the man who is puliing the light cord and copy past what you want translated from this blog. The translator is self explanatory.

We hope this tool will shed some light on all your translations requests.

Almere-Digest

Woede om VVD-gegraai .....

VVD-fractieleider Halbe Zijlstra heeft zich uw woede op zijn hals gehaald door een mooi verhaal op te hangen over uw loon, terwijl u flink wordt gekort op uw vakantiegeld.

Zijlstra liet gisteren weten dat u maandelijks meer nettoloon zult ontvangen. Met die uitlating probeerde de liberaal op slinkse wijze een nieuwe nivelleringsoperatie van het kabinet te verbloemen. U krijgt namelijk beduidend minder vakantiegeld.

Uiteindelijk moest minister Henk Kamp van Economische Zaken met de billen bloot tijdens het vragenuurtje, meldt De Telegraaf.

Middeninkomens zien tot ruim 250 euro vakantiegeld verdwijnen. De VVD  benadrukt echter dat er gekeken moet worden naar het "totaalplaatje".

"Wat een 'gebrabbel' van Halbe Zijlstra .......

Read more: PowNed : Woede om VVD-gegraai

'Nederlanders willen ziekenfonds terug' - privatisering kost belastingbetaler altijd meer geld

60 procent van de Nederlanders wil de zorgverzekeraars afschaffen en in plaats daarvan een publieke
basisverzekering invoeren. Dat blijkt uit een peiling die de SP heeft laten uitvoeren.

De regerings partij VVD voelt weinig voor het SP-plan. En dat terwijl uit de peiling blijkt dat een meerderheid van de VVD-stemmers ook voor afschaffing is.

Read more: 'Nederlanders willen ziekenfonds terug' | RTL Nieuws

Energy Renewables and the Private Sector: IKEA a shining star when it comes to efforts made by the private sector

The lion’s share of debate about the progress of renewable energy is missing an important dimension. It seems that the media, banks and NGOs largely value the worth of each renewable source by their rate of adoption at the national and international level. These measurements seem to rely on macro-economic indicators or on agreements such as that made last week by the U.S. and China. However, the efforts of private corporations to go green, while not wholly unnoticed, do not seem to weigh in. It would make no sense in most other industries to measure their health purely by public efforts. In fact, many renewable energy developers today are seeking to change their industry’s reputation as being dependent on government subsidies and costly to the taxpayer with little return. One way to fight this reputation is to show concrete evidence of global corporations going renewable. This week has given plenty of evidence of just that, with IKEA, Google and Amazon all making real commitments.

Back in March, IKEA acquired the Hoopeston wind farm in Illinois, which is set to produce more than enough energy to power all its stores and distribution stores in the country. 65% more. But this energy will not be sent to IKEA’s stores, instead, the Swedish retailer will sell it off as part of a strategy to offset its entire consumption by 2020. This week, an ever bigger announcement came. IKEA has purchased a 165MW wind farm in Cameron County, Texas, marking “the single largest renewable energy investment made by the IKEA Group globally to date.” IKEA goes on to say that it will invest $1.9 billion in renewables by the end of 2015.

Where IKEA is investing in renewables to offset its energy usage, Google and Amazon are doing so for a far more practical reason: data centers have incredibly high energy consumption and renewable projects can be a good way to reduce that burden. To power its new 600 million euro data center at Eemshaven in the Netherlands, Google has agreed to buy a wind farm being built by Eneco near Eemshaven. The 19-turbine 62MW wind farm will power the data center from day one, and comes on the heels of Google buying two other wind farms in Sweden to provide for its data center in Finland.

Other tech and retail leaders are making forays in the same direction, albeit with less emphasis. After being slammed on Greenpeace’s ranking of the green track records of IT leaders, Amazon seems to want to become more sustainable. Amazon Web Services, responsible for cloud computing, stated that it was taking a “long-term commitment to achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint.” Unlike Google and IKEA, though, Amazon has not stated any outright investments it is planning on making. It will likely take years for Amazon to become fully renewable, but even doing so for its cloud computing needs would be a major achievement, given how the likes of Pinterest, Netflix and Spotify rely on Amazon’s cloud.

On the negative side of the equation, Walmart is slipping backwards, having used renewables for 3 percent of its energy needs in 2013, as opposed to 4 percent in 2011. Although long identifying itself in its corporate branding as a green leader, a new think tank has revealed that Walmart is relying on coal for 40% of its energy needs in the U.S. This is a particularly damning accusation since Walmart’s stores use more power than Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont combined, according to the report. Walmart immediately rebutted the report, saying it gets 24 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources—and that it would “expand its renewable energy projects and procurement to reach 7 billion kilowatt-hours of wind, solar, hydroelectric and biogas globally by 2020, up from 2.2 billion kilowatt-hours today.”

Whether companies are making quantifiable commitments to renewables or are fudging the statistics to look sustainable, it is becoming increasingly nonsensical to weigh up the value of renewable energy sources through public investment alone.

EU-Digest

Turkey's President Erdoğan Says Women's Position In Society Is For Motherhood

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Monday at a women's rights summit in Istanbul that women and men cannot be equal because it is "against nature," claiming that women and men have inherently different roles in society. Erdoğan, a devout Muslim, made statements during his time as prime minister that suggested he held conservative ideas about women's rights, but his speech Monday underscores just how strongly he rejects the notion that women should have the same civil liberties as men.

"You cannot get women to do every kind of work men can do, as in Communist regimes," he said. "You cannot tell them to go out and dig the soil. This is against their delicate nature."

Erdoğan attacked feminists in his speech, claiming they "reject the concept of motherhood."
"Our religion (Islam) has defined a position for women (in society): motherhood," Erdoğan said. "Some people can understand this, while others can't. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don't accept the concept of motherhood."

Erdoğan expanded his message, saying that women should each have at least three children and that abortion was "murder." He also said he was against the morning-after pill.

Opponents of Erdoğan took to Twitter to protest the president's statements, some claiming that he is "backwards," others saying he "is digging himself a grave."

Read more: Turkey's President Erdoğan Says Women's Position In Society Is For Motherhood

Internet: The Cloud -No, your data isn't secure in the cloud - by Lucas Mearian

While online data storage services claim your data is encrypted, there are no guarantees. With recent revelations that the federal government taps into the files of Internet search engines, email and cloud service providers, any myth about data "privacy" on the Internet has been busted.

Experts say there's simply no way to ever be completely sure your data will remain secure once you've moved it to the cloud.

"You have no way of knowing. You can't trust anybody. Everybody is lying to you," said security expert Bruce Schneier. "How do you know which platform to trust? They could even be lying because the U.S. government has forced them to."

While providers of email, chat, social network and cloud services often claim -- even in their service agreements -- that the data they store is encrypted and private, most often they -- not you -- are the ones who hold the keys. That means a rogue employee or any government "legally" requesting encryption keys can decrypt and see your data.

Even when service providers say only customers can generate and maintain their own encryption keys, Schneier said there's no way to be sure others won't be able to gain access.

For example, Apple's SMS/MMS-like communications platform, iMessage, claims both voice and text are encrypted and can't be heard or seen by third parties. But because the product isn't open source, "there's no way for us to know how it works," said Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "It seems because of the way it works on functionality, they do have a way to access it. The same goes for iCloud."

Note EU-Digest: The Cloud services are also offered to European Internet users. Given that  the storage data banks of  Google, and Apple for Cloud and other similar systems are kept in the US by American companies, and consequently  fall under US jurisdiction, it probably would not be a good idea for EU citizens and businesses to store sensitive material on these data bank services.

Read more: No, your data isn't secure in the cloud | Computerworld