If you go on vinted/gumtree/ebay you'll find 10, 15 year-old, older tech with swapped out, modern parts. Gameboys with modern LCDs, older mini PCs with SSDs, game controllers with Hall effect sticks - better and cheaper than the original

Very happy to see the #circulareconomy promoted by @green-alliance.org.uk . Refurbished products are often better than new. Could often be called 'upgrades' instead - repair/refurbish almost a misnomer sometimes.

I think large companies suing their government is enough to boil anyone's blood

Agreed ISDS not a sexy term. But the crux of it - that companies are able to sue governments - incensed me enough that I went into global health as a result. Specifically Phillip Morris moving their headquarters to Hong Kong so they could sue the Aussie government over a plain packaging law

There's a reasonably well-known adage, in global health law at least - 'it's not rule of international law, but rule of international lawyer'

Some of the best paid lawyers in the world are experts on treaty/trade law and paid enormous sums to help multinationals extract concessions and payments from nations using ISDS, TRIPS+ etc. (And send a message to other nations with the temerity to consider laws to protect public health)

ISDS is the tip of the iceberg of the structural power that's been granted through democratically unaccountable, complex legal bullshit

It must have been difficult to imagine a more unjust international trade system to follow the WTO. But now, as the WTO dies a slow death, the "spaghetti bowl" of overlapping bilateral and multilateral treaties has somehow outdone it

Literary works are being pirated then scraped to train GenAI models.

59% of novelists reported they knew their work had been used to train GenAI models. Of these, 99% said they did not give permission and 100% said they were not remunerated for this use.

➡️ www.mctd.ac.uk/impact-of-ge...

We don't avoid gun laws because there are ways around it (3d printing). Why do we avoid making laws against wealth hoarding?

I think wealth taxes have sometimes been framed poorly. The argument I've read is a bit more abstract than raising funds per se, it's about reducing the rising inequality in wealth and power