The list of freelance writing gigs on Craigslist goes on and on. Trails.com will pay $15 for articles about the outdoors. Livestrong.com wants 500-word pieces on health for $30, or less. In this mix, the 16 cents a word offered by Green Business Quarterly ends up sounding almost bounteous, amounting to more than $100 per submission. Other publishers pitch the grand opportunities they provide to ‘extend your personal brand’ or to ‘showcase your work, influence others.’ That means working for nothing, just like the sailing magazine that offers its next editor-writer not a single doubloon but, instead, the opportunity to ‘participate in regattas all over the country.’ What’s sailing away, a decade into the 21st century, is the common conception that writing is a profession — or at least a skilled craft that should come not only with psychic rewards but with something resembling a living wage. Freelance writing fees — beginning with the Internet but extending to newspapers and magazines — have been spiraling downward for a couple of years and reached what appears to be bottom in 2009. The trend has gotten scant attention outside the trade. Maybe that’s because we live in […]
Churches in Malaysia were bracing themselves for further attacks by Muslim protesters today, hours after two arson attacks, apparently provoked by a controversy over the use by Christians of the word Allah. Police were increasing their patrols of areas around churches and Christian communities were hiring security guards, after a Protestant church in the capital Kuala Lumpur was set on fire by a petrol bomb in the early hours of the morning. Muslim organisations have promised street protests today over a court decision which would allow use of the Allah as the Malaysian language term for the Christian God. The word has been used for centuries in Malaysia, as well as by Christians in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Indonesia as the equivalent of the English word God. But many Malaysian Muslims in Malaysia, who make up 60 per cent of the population, say that the word Allah should be reserved to refer exclusively to the Muslim deity and that use of it in a Biblical context encourages conversion to Christianity, a crime under the country’s sharia laws. The Herald, a Catholic newspaper which published in Malaysian, won an appeal last week against a ruling which banned use […]
The U.S. government’s biofuels policy needs a makeover, according to researchers from Rice University. In a new study published by the university’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, the team says that the economic, environmental and logistical basis for the billions of dollars in federal subsidies and protectionist tariffs that go to domestic ethanol producers every year is seriously flawed and urge lawmakers to fundamentally rethink the policy of promoting ethanol to diversify America’s energy sources. As an example of the unintended economic consequences of U.S. biofuels policy, the report notes that in 2008 ‘the U.S. government spent $4 billion in biofuels subsidies to replace roughly 2 percent of the U.S. gasoline supply. The average cost to the taxpayer of those ‘substituted’ barrels of gasoline was roughly $82 a barrel, or $1.95 per gallon on top of the retail gasoline price (i.e., what consumers pay at the pump).’ The report questions whether mandated volumes for biofuels can be met and whether biofuels are improving the environment or energy security. Based on analysis by environmental scientists, the paper highlights the environmental threats posed by current biofuels policy. ‘Increases in corn-based ethanol production in the Midwest could cause an increase in […]
Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida’s orange groves and beaches. Whatever happened to global warming? Such weather doesn’t seem to fit with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But experts say the cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming at all - it’s just a blip in the long-term heating trend. ‘It’s part of natural variability,’ said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, ‘we’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.’ Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880. Scientists say man-made climate change does have the potential to cause more frequent and more severe weather extremes, such as heat waves, storms, floods, droughts and even cold spells. But experts interviewed by The Associated Press did not connect the current frigid blast to climate change. […]
Britain has dropped to 25th place on a list of the best places in the world to live – behind countries such as the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Uruguay. While France tops the poll for the fifth year running, the UK’s climate, crime rate, cost of living, congested roads and overcrowded cities have pushed it even further down from last year’s ranking at 20. The Quality of Life Index, published by International Living magazine for the 30th year, says the French live life to the full, while Britons are over-worked. dolce In all, 194 countries are surveyed on nine criteria, including the cost of living, culture and leisure, environment, safety, culture and weather. Australia is placed second after France, followed by Switzerland, Germany and New Zealand. Even former communist countries where unemployment is still rife are considered better places to settle down in than Britain, with Lithuania and the Czech Republic coming in at 22nd and 24th place respectively. The magazine says the French enjoy everything from Riviera beaches and Alpine ski resorts to what it describes as ‘the best health service in the world’. Cars near high-rise flats in Vilnius, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
