Thinking Ethics

50 Freegan living blog posts

And here is another submission from Online Colleges: Carrie sent in this article from her blog entitled 50 Freegan living blog posts we can all learn from.

10 Business heros we can still look up to

Kaitlyn sent in this link about 10 business heros we can still look up to.

New ISO standard for safer water

The International Standards Organisation ISO has just come out with a new standard, ISO19250:2010, for the detection of the pathogen salmonella bacteria. The UN states that safe and clean drinking water and sanitation are basic human rights. Their statistics show that 884 million people do not have access to clean drinking water and 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation. A flurry of articles were published in April after the UN came out with the report that India has more cell phones than toilets. Check out the article in The Guardian here. Could it be that India has different priorities ? Or that somehow cell phones have become a basic necessity and have displaced sanitation in the Maslow pyramid...

Chinese philanthropy

Given the difference in culture, it would be expected that Chinese philanthropy will be different from philanthropy in the West. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are going to China to meet with the billionaires in that country. Given the lack of transparency, it is not always clear how people made their money, or if and how they might give it away. Since the natural disasters of 2008, the Chinese government is letting the private sector help out more. I suspect that most of Chinese philanthropy will be aimed at situations in China, and not on the world level. But time will tell. Meanwhile, here is an article from the New York Times on the subject.