Markets not in Everything

This morning I stopped by the side of the road to put some air in my car tyres. The mechanic asked me if I would know how to sell his kidney in the UK. Erm..

HELLISH JOURNEY TO JOB YOU DESPISE TO COST MORE MONEY THAN EVER

I’ve got nothing to say today. I have a strange chronic fatigue, perhaps heat-related, which doesn’t seem to be abated by sleep. So Here’s the Daily Mash.

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THE horrific, soul-destroying journey you make every morning to the job that makes you want to die will soon cost a record breaking amount of money.

Yes, you can

Something called the AA said that by the end of the week the price of turning the only life you have into an empty, meaningless process of breathing in and out, interspersed with the joyless consumption of shaped meat will reach a new high of £1.20 a litre.

They said you would be angry about it because the price of the thing they use to make the stuff that goes into the machine you use to get to the place you hate had gone down, in what you described as a spectacular example of completely missing the point.

Tom Logan, who endures roughly 220 minutes of hell a day between Grantham and Peterborough so that he can do something that does not involve music or art or spaceships, said: "What do I care about the price of the thing they use to make the stuff?

"I don't want to be here. Do you understand that? If the price of the thing was linked to the price of the stuff would I be able to spend all day designing spaceships, playing the bongos and baking lovely pies in the comfort of my own shed? I suspected as much.

"So instead of spaceships and bongos and pies I'll be spending slightly longer at my desk so that I can continue to afford the journey to get to my desk.

"You see, on the one hand you're asking me whether something must be done about the price of the thing in relation to the price of the stuff and on the other hand I'm saying that everything about the way we live our lives is completely and utterly wrong in every conceivable way."

He added: "I'm not even sure what I do here. I think it might be something to do with mobile phone tariffs."

Barack Obama reads rovingbandit.com

Is the only possible explanation I can come up with for the fact that he has just decided to:

allow technology companies to export Internet services to Iran, Cuba and Sudan in a bid to exploit their libertarian potential.

Clearly he saw how my libertarian potential was being thwarted by those restrictions on the purchase of little blocks of pixels on Facebook, and decided to change his mind.

Well, thank you Barack.

Markets not in everything

Not content with blocking MSN messenger, facebook gifts, oh, and my linkedin account...

The U.S. Government has in place export control and economic sanctions laws and regulations, which prohibit U.S. companies, like LinkedIn, from engaging in certain transactions with persons from several designated countries, including <<INSERT COUNTRY HERE>>.

...it seems US sanctions have now blocked Ethiopian Airlines from accepting online credit card payments from Southern Sudan (I managed to do this in March). So I can't book my flight home to the UK for christmas.

Thanks America. Happy Christmas to you too. I hope those sanctions are working.

America, with a population of 300 million, is one of the fattest countries of the world, with a frighteningly awful perception of poor countries, aggravated by a befuddled, profit-driven media.

Markets not in everything

DHL are being fined almost $10m for breaching sanctions to Iran, Syria and Sudan.

Companies are allowed to ship "documents and informational material" but heinous, evil, nasty, DHL, slipped in some "personal items or consumer goods."

That is clearly the rational response to nasty undemocratic governments, punish their citizens by stopping their engagement with the outside world. Wait...

More Markets Not in Everything

I'm trying to put a facebook gift on Karuna's wall (a pie - she likes pie. This is a direct quote from the invitation to her birthday barbecue: "Friends are welcome as long as they're cool (pie may be accepted in lieu of coolness)".

Bizarrely, Facebook is telling me that "This action cannot be completed due to international trade restrictions."

!&*%?!#*!!

Happy Birthday Karuna xxx

Sorry there was no pie, in either actual pie-form or in facebook picture-form. I owe you 1 pie.

Markets Not in Everything

The global economy is a wonderful thing. Even in Southern Sudan it is possible to buy an amazing array of goods produced all over the world.

However this week Juba ran out of Zain airtime. The whole town. Nobody has any. Apparently the latest supply from Khartoum never arrived. A little intrusion of chaos into the cosy cocooned life of the expat.

Previously underexplored methods of displacing evil dictators #42

Stop teenagers from chatting online to each other.

Its so obvious, its brilliant. How did nobody come up with this before? Give it half an hour and there'll be a new wave of democracy and freedom and openness and joy and light, spreading out across the world, just wait and see.

"A US computer industry giant [Microsoft] has moved to prevent Sudanese from using a messaging service [MSN], citing its obligations under the US sanctions regime against Sudan." Sudan Tribune