Shareable Magazine

via Shareable: How to Raise Urban Chickens

Let me give you a bit of background. In 1972, the King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, remarked that, instead of gross national product (GNP), the nation should strive for “gross national happiness” (GNH). I believe he meant merely to point out that GNP (or GDP, as is more commonly used today) is a poor indicator of a nation's well-being. The concept of gross national happiness had traction, though, and it wasn't long before psychologists and economists were trying to come up with metrics to put a number on the concept. Adding impetus to this effort was a growing awareness among social critics that GDP is a very poor indicator of a people's well-being. In the United States, real per-capita GDP has risen three-fold since the 1950s, but people are not three times happier by any measure. If anything, they are less happy.

Barely five years out of college, Jessica has become well-known for her wildly popular “procrastiworking” projects such as the Daily Drop Cap, the Should I Work for Free? flowchart, 52 x 52 and Don’t Fear the Internet. Her philosophy is that we should pay attention to the things we do when procrastinating: those are the things we should probably be doing for a living because we actually enjoy them the most.

Shareable: Seven Shareable Ways to Deal With Depression [VIDEOS]

>The biggest issue the new sharing economy is currently facing is one of trust. After issues like the Airbnb debacle and high-end car sharing service HiGear’s closure due to theft, it's clear that trust issues are the main barrier preventing sharing from becoming mainstream. >The answer that everyone seems to be looking for is a some sort of global reputation system. There has been a lot of talk about a single "reputation score" that you could take with you in any new service. At a first glance the idea seems like a winner: with every action you do in the web affecting the score, it would be easy to find the rotten apples. >However, it turns out this idea is fundamentally flawed. Do current reputation systems like Klout or Trustcloud do an effective enough job of establishing trust to work for collaborative consumption services? Shareable: Aggregation, Not Algorithms, Is The Key To Establishing Trust Online

>I’ve been following Mike Daisey’s work for quite some time, and was bummed that I missed his one-man show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, when I visited New York this past November. Despite my weariness with This American Life, this week’s Daisey-centric episode is a must-listen. It includes an interview with Daisey, as well as excerpts from his show, in which he evocatively, shockingly, and at times hilariously details his trip to China to view the factories where Apple devices are made. The unethical labor practices that produce our iDevices are modern atrocities, and Apple plays an outsized role in perpetuating them because of the company’s skill at dominating the supply and manufacturing chain. >Don’t own Apple devices? You’re not off the hook, and neither are the makers of your devices. A truncated list of the other companies that also manufacture their products at the same plants as Apple: Acer, Amazon, Dell, HP, Intel, Logitech, Microsoft, Nintendo, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and Toshiba. Apple’s Devices Are Made of Blood and Misery. As Are All The Rest. So Do Something About It. | 12 Pt. Plan

>Apple and other famous technology companies and their millions of customers don’t have blood on their hands. Well, maybe. >After reading a piece by Nick Kristof in the Times last year – “Death by Gadget” – an Apple fan fired off an email to Steve Jobs asking how Apple ensures that its materials aren’t coming from a conflict hot zone, much like the “blood diamonds” that became infamous in recent decades. About an hour later, a reply showed up in his inbox: >>Yes. We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few [free] materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem. >>Sent from my iPhone >As Suroosh Alvi and Jason Mojica reported in their trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this year for Vice / Motherboard (article here, and the video is at the bottom of this post), the source of the materials used to make these pretty things – materials like tungsten, tantalum, tin, and gold – aren’t pretty. For decades, they’ve helped to fund a terrible, now smoldering, civil war. [Can We Have Gadgets That Are Not Made of Blood | Motherboard](http://www.motherboard.tv/2012/1/4/can-we-have-gadgets-that-are-not-made-of-blood?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Motherboard+%28MOTHERBOARD%29) From the Shareable archives: [Demanding Ethical Gadgets](http://shareable.net/blog/demanding-ethical-gadgets)

What Hacker Apprenticeships Tell Us About the Future of Education - Joe Moon - Technology - The Atlantic

>We can not have a real democracy if every public meatspace is converted into malls and privately owned parks, where the wish of the owners are the security guards demand, and every public cyberspace is converted into Facebook, with one ToS to rule them all. Our free society is dependent on the freedom to debate any issue and pursue any knowledge, no matter how damaging it might be to the ad revenues. We live in a society, not a corporation. We must keep it that way. Shareable: Think Like the Internet: How to Beat Facebook