There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
Apple has been in hot water for years about the ethics of the manufacture of their devices. Yet iPhone fans gleefully fork out more money every September when the next version is ceremoniously revealed. This circus has become so normalised, most of us hardly blink an eye. How many people ask themselves whether the upgrades in the technology are worth getting a new phone every year? More importantly, how many people question the real-world costs that their purchase entails?
How do good people sink to this? The answer lies in the mutation of economic ideology from the crude buccaneering spirit of doing whatever it takes to get rich into a more urbane form. People see themselves as competing, not only for their own economic benefit, but for that of the company. This means greed can mask itself as altruism in serving a larger good. And as in the case of churches, identification with the company provides reason for protecting the company's reputation at all costs.
Where were you? Not in the dark car, inside that shrunken space, on its slow glide to the boneyard. Perhaps in the white lineage of your brothers at the altar, or traced on your crucifix — your DNA, your trust.
Ahead of his Australian visit earlier this year, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak criticised the company for subjecting local consumers to 'horrible' price-gouging. Last week's release of the iPhone 5 has reinforced perceptions of Apple as an odious corporation that exploits consumers, alongside the likes of tobacco companies, big banks, McDonald's, and Coles and Woolworths.
Both the Apple iPad and the MySchool website will improve our lives if we overcome the urge to deify or demonise. The iPad is priced to appeal to the mass market rather than an elite, and it could hold the key to a manageable large-scale transition from printed books and newspapers.
New features, whether we need them or not, have become the hook used to capture new customers. The past fortnight's scramble for the iPhone in the US has shown that consumers are only too willing to pay for features they will probably never need.
The social policies of the Australia's past worked reasonably well in protecting people from serious poverty. But now we require new policies providing a similar sense of security and contemporary relevance.
It is one of the ironies of Australian political history that a policy that has profoundly benefited this country’s version of capitalism came, not from the right, but from the Labor party and unions. The mandating of superannuation payments in 1992 under the Keating government has profoundly changed Australia’s financial system.
There are many gems and reflections on ‘fathering’ in Pope Francis’s apostolic letter, Patris Corde ‘With a Father’s Heart’, in which he nominates 2021 as the year to honour the fatherhood of St Joseph. Francis’s letter is inclusive, encompassing the scope of fatherhood and the responsibilities fathering entails. ‘Fathers are not born, but made’, Francis says.
Continuing the Journey, the working document (or instrumentum laboris), is another stepping stone towards the Plenary Council (PC). How you view this document, provided explicitly both to those few hundred called to be PC participants and to the whole Catholic community, depends very much on your expectations.
What does Christmas mean for you? What does it have in store? Preceding and in the midst of the annual celebration of life and hope that is Christmas, we will always have those, as H L Mencken noted, are obsessed with the ‘haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.
The work of Catholic social service agencies should be celebrated within the church. Its peak body, Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA), which has been savagely cut recently, has successfully matched wits with governments for over sixty years and its member agencies continue to serve the community selflessly.
1-12 out of 200 results.
x
Subscribe for more stories like this.
Free sign-up