Showing posts with label egypt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label egypt. Show all posts

14 February 2023

Moody: the works

A list of links to all my non-tech writings:

Essays

Glanglish
 - with audio versions new post

Travel writings

Novels

09 November 2020

Egyptian Romance: a novel about travel

Once again, many people are under lockdown.  Once again, travel is hard, or impossible.  During the first lockdown, I published my black notebooks recording most of my travels over the last thirty-odd years.  So I thought this second lockdown might be a good moment to publish some more travel-related writing.

"Egyptian Romance" is a novel, but one based on information I gathered during my own trip to Egypt in 1990, which I published as a series of four posts earlier this year.  It represents a re-working of my black books from that trip in a form that some may find easier to read.  It can therefore be seen as part of a series, which includes A Partial India - a re-working of my travel notebook for India, and Walks with Lorenzetti, which re-visits a 1988 trip I made to Venice

Empire's End

or

The Tale of a Tourist


16 April 2008

The Coming Shift: China Starts Outsourcing

Here's another straw in the wind:

MOBILE PHONE builder China Techfaith said Wednesday that it has signed up Egyptian firm Quicktel to develop and assemble low cost handsets there.

Once therer are cheaper places to build stuff than China, the latter's role as the workshop of the world will diminish, and with it the economic and ecological imbalances that has led to.

Of course, the West - and China - will need another cheap workshop to keep their unsustainable lifestyles going, and to soak up all the outsourced pollution. My money's on Africa, and it looks like Egypt is leading the way....

06 April 2008

Bye-Bye Biofuels...

When are people going to wake up to the fact that biofuels are not the solution, but actually exacerbate the world's problems?


A global rice shortage that has seen prices of one of the world's most important staple foods increase by 50 per cent in the past two weeks alone is triggering an international crisis, with countries banning export and threatening serious punishment for hoarders.

With rice stocks at their lowest for 30 years, prices of the grain rose more than 10 per cent on Friday to record highs and are expected to soar further in the coming months. Already China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia have imposed tariffs or export bans, as it has become clear that world production of rice this year will decline in real terms by 3.5 per cent. The impact will be felt most keenly by the world's poorest populations, who have become increasingly dependent on the crop as the prices of other grains have become too costly.

...

Analysts have cited many factors for the rises, including rising fuel and fertiliser expenses, as well as climate change. But while drought is one factor, another is the switch from food to biofuel production in large areas of the world, in particular to fulfil the US energy demands.

And this is just the beginning....