The story was originally published on Pandeia. The internet and its technologies have opened up endless possibilities and changed profoundly the way we structure our lives. The recent and ever growing phenomenon of the sharing economy has generated new online platforms like Airbnb, BlaBlaCar and Jobbatical, just to name a few. However, sharing has always been part of our social life.
Think about all those cookies you shared with friends at school or the many lighters you have used from strangers not to give up smoking that one last cigarette. According to Sharing Economy expert April Rinne "own less, embrace more" represents the slogan of the future. The potential of the 'sharing economy' might be enormous with benefits for all classes, if it is integrated within the legal market. Policy makers are warned: play it smart and take it to the next level.
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When Felicitas Famulla stopped adding milk to her coffee, she knew her diet had gone too far. Three years before, little by little, she had started to eliminate carbs from her diet. "Carbs are bad for your body," she had read in health-blogs, and that reducing carbs would help her lose weight. At first, she only banned carbs in the evening. Soon after, carbs for lunch followed. Finally, Felicitas decided to cut out even the few remaining carbs for breakfast. What had started as an attempt to lose weight soon developed into an obsession about food and ultimately orthorexia, a severe eating disorder. The result was not a healthy body, but deficiency symptoms she still hasn’t fully overcome. Looking back, the 21-year old student and blogger from Wiesbaden now calls no-carb diets "the worst thing you can do to the body."
Felicitas’s story is different from the stories many other health-bloggers tell. "Going wheat-free has given me the opportunity to live a normal, active life again," reads a success story on William Davis’s "Wheat Belly" blog. "With paleo, I’ve lost 17 kilos and my aches and pains have disappeared," paleo-devotee Constantin Gonzalez assures. Even Gwyneth Paltrow, famous actress and founder of the ‘detox blog’ "Goop", shares her miraculous experience with us: "I feel pure and happy and much lighter. This thing is amazing." Circulating less cash might help Denmark’s economy, but will not eliminate the informal market.Besides studying in Denmark’s second city Aarhus, Mathias works from time to time helping friends renovate apartments. It allows him to earn some money, which he usually spends quickly. Doing that kind of work – which Danes call ‘sort arbejde’ or black work – Mathias gets paid in cash, and consequently does not pay taxes on it.
Reading reports that Denmark is moving towards being a cashless economy, Mathias is not worried that he will not be able to do this work, nor is he worried about the next generations. The 27-year-old student expects that people will find a way or another to go through it. First Pan Am, then ValuJet. Malaysia Airlines was the latest example of an airline that went bankrupt because of a deadly accident – among others. And now even Lufthansa, or more precisely it’s 'budget' subsidiary, Germanwings, has to face and master the challenge that the three mentioned airlines could not: To stay in the black after the most fatal tragedy the airline has ever experienced.
On March 24 this year the Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz allegedly committed suicide by crashing a A320 airplane into a mountainside of the French Alps. 149 people, including five crew members, died with him. The event caused widespread media coverage and international outcries ranging from postulating stricter psychological evaluations for pilots to demanding a change in the safety measures for cockpit doors. Investigators assume that the 27-year old man had locked the door while in the cockpit alone – recordings found on the black box opened up assumptions that the pilot of flight 4U 9525 had tried to open the cockpit door from the outside just before the crash to no avail. People around the world seem to be hit hard by the tragedy, but Germans appear to be a special case. This plane crash seemed to evoke unusually dramatic reactions – possibly because it is connected to Lufthansa. The award-winning airline had enjoyed a nearly impeccable reputation for more than sixty years, "safety" being their brand recognition feature and always played a large role in how they branded themselves. It had also been unaffected by any accidents for more than two decades. Now the question, if one person's actions are sufficient to blacken Lufthansa's spotless sun-yellow image and which are the contributing factors, may be posed. Not a brand new story of Chinese immigrants.By Shulun Huang It is an usual Sunday, December 1st, 2013. Many people are enjoying the weekend with their family. But the fire accident in a Chinese-owned factory snatched seven Chinese immigrant workers’ lives. The factory is located in Prato, Tuscany. Those Chinese workers both lived and worked at the factory, some have no identity authority to live in Italy. This accident has been widely reported, attracting worldwide attention.
The Italian authority, local procurator in Prato, started to investigate the accident immediately. After one year, reported by The Local, Lin You Lan, the manager of the factory was sentenced 8 years and 8 months in prison. Her sister Lin You Li was also found guilty. But this accident has been described as foretold as Roberto Pistonina from Italian Confederation of Worker’s Trade Unions, posted on his Facebook page to describe that hundreds of Chinese immigrant workers were "living and working in conditions of near-slavery." Many hard-working Chinese work day in and day out in Prato with a lack of enough concern about production safety. "Made in Italy" is actually mostly made by Chinese, the clothing produced by Chinese cheap labor is "at a lightning pace for sale at rock-bottom prices" to occupy large quantity of the European garment market. Alongside with the terrible accident, competition, conflicts between Chinese immigrant group and native Italian group have been surfaced distinctly. |
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