Comments swag has made

Single-mindedness comes in many forms

@hoppekat re: "Let's be careful not to create unnecessary wedges between the two movements who at their hearts and souls are trying to achieve the same goals. We need to work together, build one movement, and come up with creative and effective strategies."

While I clearly understand the political importance of bridging different interests to form a more powerful coalition, I don't buy the "same goals" argument. You could say that George Bush has the same goals in common with many members here in a number of contexts -- most of the arguments and differences stem in debates over means and not ends.

And I personally resent the idea that anyone with a form of social or environmental empathy has to subscribe to some monolithic order requiring one to sign up for a combination platter of causes. For 16 years I've felt Fair Trade was always well intended but a failure in execution until something better comes along. And I'm not about to change my opinion on that in order to support environmental causes, and I'm not willing to forgo those environmental causes to rail against the problems of Fair Trade. It cannot be an all or nothing deal.

The monolithic "green" is a myth. It creates a tyranny of opinion and does not allow for the fact that many people find some issues to be bogus and yet can wholly support other causes that may be inconveniently packaged together.On Dean's Beans founder on the good effects of trade posted 1 year, 3 months ago 13 Responses

Keeping perspective in a world of hyperbole

First of all, let's not fool ourselves into thinking that Blue Bottle's siphon bar is anything more than an update to 1830s technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_coffee

Secondly, that price tag was the fabrication of a New York Times' writer who was at a loss to describe the nuances of premium coffee and thus pumped up a price tag to make his piece stand out. The truth is that that $20k includes the individual vacuum pots (each cost hundreds), other parts, training, and perhaps even shipping and installation for that matter. In the end, it starts to make La Marzocco's new GS/3 model (which they've designed more for home use, mind you) at $7,500 seem like much less of an extravagance.

And to say that few world workers benefit from the global coffee trade -- second only to oil in world trade commodities -- is a rather näive statement. Some people prefer to obsess over the pennies paid to growers in third world economies while conveniently putting the blinders on for international disparities in labor costs that surface for truck drivers, storage space, marketing middlemen, retailer store shelf space, etc., in industrialized, consumer economies.

The sustainability of growers is something to obsess about. But as with every delivery system involved with food production and consumption in industrialized nations, there's a lot of gross oversimplification of where the problems are and how to solve them.On Blue Bottle generates more than just a caffeine buzz, but what does it mean? posted 1 year, 10 months ago 4 Responses