Freakonomics!

  

CAN YOU HEAR ME BLING?

Many of us own cell phones. They range in price from inexpensive to iPhone price (about $400.00, last I checked).
Yet some of us just can't have a phone that is just a cell phone (or a smart phone, or a Blackberry, etc.); it must be so much more that it has to be custom-made.

Enter in an Australian businessman, a regular iPhone 3G and designer Stuart Hughes - and you get this:

The World's Most Expensive Phone.

Called the iPhone 3GS (S meaning "Supreme" - woohoo), it contains over 200 diamonds, and the case is made of 22-carat gold. The navigation button is a rare 7-carat diamond that took nearly a year to procure.

How much did it cost? Hughes paid about 3.2 million dollars to put this thing together, which may or may not include the cost of the phone.

One wonders if they were blood diamonds...which leads us to a horribly revealing new list - after the jump.

 SOFT HANDS MAKE CHEAP GOODS

The Department of Labor has released a new list on goods made with child and slave-labor, and you'll be hard-pressed to find items in your home that are NOT made with any of the above. (read here)

Your house....

...and the kid who produced its furnishings

At 194 pages of depressing reality, change.org's Amanda Kloer mentioned some powerful highlights:

"...

• The most common goods which have significant incidence of forced and/or child labor are cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, coffee, rice, and cocoa in agriculture; bricks, garments, carpets, and footwear in manufacturing; and gold and coal in mined or quarried goods.
• 122 goods in 58 countries are produced with a significant incidence of forced labor, child labor, or both.
• More goods were found to be made with child labor than forced labor.

Here are some of the worst offenders for forced labor or slavery specifically:

• Bolivia: nuts, cattle, corn, and sugar
• Burma: bamboo, beans, bricks, jade, nuts, rice rubber, rubies, sesame, shrimp, sugarcane, sunflowers, and teak
• China: artificial flowers, bricks, Christmas decorations, coal, cotton, electronics, garments, footwear, fireworks, nails, and toys
• India: bricks, carpets, cottonseed, textiles, and garments
• Nepal: bricks, carpets, textiles, and stones
• North Korea: bricks, cement, coal, gold, iron, and textiles
• Pakistan: bricks, carpet, coal, cotton, sugar, and wheat

..."

All so that someday, all citizens of first-world nations can enjoy a garage as useless as this:

Hey! You can't change your oil on carpet!