In domestic relationships, one of the quickest ways to butter up your partner is by taking out the trash. In business, removing festering piles of waste also makes you the sort of person who’s gets missed when you’re not around.
In 2009, Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez were recent graduates of the University of California at Berkeley who had both been offered positions in consulting and investment banking. Yet both were stuck on an idea they came across in their business ethics class: Gourmet mushrooms grow and flourish in recycled coffee grounds; thus, waste from one industry could be fertile ground for another. Trash, if not treasure, could be a sustainable and cost-free raw material.
The two set to experimenting with growing mushrooms in coffee grounds in the basement of Velez’s fraternity. They managed one crop in an old paint bucket and immediately charged out to their local Whole Foods, where they showed their harvest to the first person they saw in the produce department: “Hey, look, we grew these mushrooms.”
The two were sent from department to department by managers who were curious—and more than a little bemused—by the two college kids and their bucket of mushrooms. Two weeks later, they received a call from the regional produce manager for Northern California Whole Foods stores. They were told that if they could figure out how to do it on a larger scale, “we can blow this up in stores.”
So Arora and Velez turned down their corporate job offers and, learning from YouTube videos, trained themselves as urban mushroom farmers. “We both believe to our core that business doesn’t have to be something where for-profit is bad and nonprofit is good,” Arora says. “It’s an awesome tool, if leveraged correctly, to really make a quick difference.”
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What started as a small-scale farm supplying local restaurants and a few groceries expanded to include the mushroom kits, which now sell at 1,000 retail centers nationally. Since its founding, Back To The Roots has repurposed 1 million pounds of coffee grounds. After one year, the company had revenue of a quarter-million dollars; last year, it increased that number to $1.4 million. The company forecasts $5 million in revenue this year.
What is ACTA? ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. A new intellectual property enforcement treaty being negotiated by the United States, the European Community, Switzerland, and Japan, with Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada recently announcing that they will join in as well.
Why should you care about ACTA? Initial reports indicate that the treaty will have a very broad scope and will involve new tools targeting “Internet distribution and information technology.”
What is the goal of ACTA? Reportedly the goal is to create new legal standards of intellectual property enforcement, as well as increased international cooperation, an example of which would be an increase in information sharing between signatory countries’ law enforcement agencies.
Read the authentic version of the ACTA text as of 15 April 2011, as finalized by participating countries here: ACTA Finalized Text
Follow the history of the treaty’s formation here: ACTA history
Read letters from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden wherein he challenges the constitutionality of ACTA: Letter 1 | Letter 2 | Read the Administration’s Response to Wyden’s First Letter here: Response
Watch a short informative video on ACTA: ACTA Video
People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.
Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counter-productive but trivial.
Most people find the word Apocalypse, to be a terrfying concept. Checked in the dictionary, it means only revelation, although it obviously has also come to mean end of the world. As to what the end of the world means, I would say that probably depends on what we mean by world. I don’t think this means the planet, or even the life forms upon the planet. I think the world is purely a construction of ideas, and not just the physical structures, but the mental structures, the ideologies that we’ve erected, THAT is what I would call the world. Our political structures, philosophical structures, ideological frameworks, economies. These are actually imaginary things, and yet that is the framework that we have built our entire world upon. It strikes me that a strong enough wave of information could completely overturn and destroy all of that. A sudden realization that would change our entire perspective upon who we are and how we exist.
WYBM: What You’ve Been Missing! Exposing The Noble Lie
‘What You’ve Been Missing was created to fill the massive gap created by corporate media, between itself and reality.
A virtual variety show with a point, WYBM helps you learn how to outgrow the status quo; through a systematic process of critical thinking supplemented with comedy.’
‘At a major juncture in his life, Rob in the Pagé family began down a road less traveled to free himself from fear, government control, and reliance on public energy and food supply, and shares his journey that led him “off the grid”.
Ben: Stewart and Dan Stewart, creators of Esoteric Agenda and KYMATICA, focus the essence of this film around the journey through transitional and groundbreaking moments in a human’s life.
The purpose of this film is not to provide legal advice, nor is it to simply educate, but rather as inspirational fuel. To become more of what we already are.’
‘Mainstream media is thrown into a tailspin after an independent trader tells the BBC how the world of big money and politics looks from the inside. Here’s our report from Washington on why this was such an eye opener.’
‘DIRTY PICTURES (2010) is a documentary about Dr. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, the rogue chemist who discovered the effects of MDMA (aka Ecstasy) and over 200 other mind-altering drugs. Shulgin’s alchemy has earned him the title “The Godfather of Psychedelics,” and a reputation as one of the great chemists of the 20th century.
Working from a lab in his home, and using himself and his wife Ann as test subjects, Shulgin’s discoveries have brought him into conflict with the law but made him a worldwide underground hero. The two books they co-authored, “Pihkal” and “Tihkal”, have built a foundation for cutting-edge neuroscience and medical research. DIRTY PICTURES examines the impact of Dr. Shulgin’s lifelong quest to unlock the complexities of the human mind.’
