France Archivi - Keep Calm and Drink Coffee

ONE MORE CUP OF COFFEE

Mar 4, 2022 | ENVIRONMENT, CULTURE, CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT

One more cup of coffee is the Bob Dylan song that Lorenzo recommended me.

One more cup of coffee in this case for me represents the symbol of a new pleasant meeting, albeit online.

Before talking about it, a premise is necessary: when I wrote about Keep Calm & Go Volunteering in the comments Olivia asked:
Not wasting food is a very good idea. I never heard about this project before. How can young people be stipulated to waste less, to lead a more natural lifestyle? Could you tell us a bit more about it?

And Laura wrote:
Beautiful idea. I have the feeling that young people are victims of consumerism and therefore not inclined to recycle and recover. We hope that initiatives of this kind can break through.

So I turned the question straight to them, who were kind and nice enough to invite me for a chat.

In this way I was able to meet Ariela, who is the coordinator in charge, Edisona, Sophie, Veronic, Mehdi and Lorenzo.

“The” Lorenzo who recommended me Bob Dylan’s song as well as other interesting and precious tips on cinema, books and theater, mentioning Questi fantasmi

as Laura also told us .

And these young people, volunteers from the Europe Area of the Belluno CSV, also taught me a lot.

How to promote anti-waste culture in young people?

Going to schools, as they do, talking to children and teen-agers to spread not “lessons” but workshops, and returning several times to follow and see that the concept sown grows.

Stimulating to invent special recipes that have as a common denominator the idea of cooking without wasting based on the concept of giving, but also receiving advice.

Planning to create a blog where to publish these recipes to increase the interchange as much as possible.

Organizing events and celebrations on the occasion of international days.

By proposing linguistic tandems, or great opportunities thanks to their multiculturalism: informal conversations in English, French and Spanish, free and open to people of all ages led by Edisona , Sophie , Mehdi and Hamudi . with the aim of meeting the community, socializing and practicing languages.

And still broadcast their work through a web radio.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really excited and one thing is certain: there will be one more cup of coffee.

ANTI GASPILLAGE

Feb 27, 2022 | ENVIRONMENT, FASHION, WORLD

Regarding waste in France has entered a law in force as part of the anti-waste and reuse plan.

More precisely: Loi Agec or Loi Anti Gaspillage et Economie Circulaire.

After the significant step in the matter of Copyright against Google, our cousins from beyond the Alps have a further primacy: prohibit the disposal, or the landfilling and incineration, of unsold non-fueling items.

According to an estimate, textile products are destroyed every year in France in an amount equivalent to the weight of the Eiffel Tower.

From January 1st, however, companies will have to donate or recycle their unsold products.

The provision currently affects products covered by the EPR regime, i.e. with producer responsibility, and will be extended to all other products no later than December 2023.

But what are the EPR products?

It is an environmental policy that makes producers responsible for the entire life cycle of the products they place on the market, from their design to the end of their life cycle, including the collection and recycling of waste.

In reality this legislation also applies to Germany, why am I referring especially to France?

What do the fabrics I mentioned earlier make you think?

Exactly, a particular sector: fashion.

We had already talked about Looop or jeans for rent, but what could be new solutions?

For example, the birth of platforms such as Heuritech which, using artificial intelligence advanced (AI) to translate real-world images shared on social media in meaningful insights, allows fashion brands to predict demand and trends more accurately.

Or ReValorem which instead takes care of disassembling the products to restore the materials where possible and counts Dior among its customers.

Or also Nona Source, created by LVMH, which uses the concept of Looop and through a startup like WeTurn offers exclusive patterns with new regenerated yarns.

Speaking of fabrics: I will never forget the Marché aux Tissus in Paris.
Have you ever been there?

KEEP CALM AND GO VOLUNTEERING

Feb 11, 2022 | ECONOMY, ENVIRONMENT, ITALY

Keep Calm and Go Volunteering!

In this case keep calm is not for the coffee but for an interesting as well as admirable volunteer project.

The general objective is to sensitize young people to the adoption of sustainable and responsible lifestyles, in contrast to the increasingly widespread “culture of waste” and disposable use.

The active promoters are four young people from different backgrounds: Edisona Xhani from Albania, Sophie Anvroin from France, Hamudi Salama Batah from Spain and Mehdi Meddeb from Tunisia who are involved in sharing information and promoting initiatives by working in the fabric of the community to combat food waste.

Keep calm and go volunteering therefore consists of a European Solidarity Corps that is funded by the National Youth Agency and promoted by the Europe Area of the Belluno Committee of Understanding.

In fact, on Sunday a flash mob took place in Belluno to involve more people with the aim of raising awareness the population.

And speaking of the fight against food waste, I suggest you follow Paola who through her book ll gusto di non sprecare, her blog Primo non sprecare for years has been diligently and deeply involved in the fight against waste.

It was nice to discover that many of us use coffee grounds, so I trust in just as many precious suggestions for food as well.

What do you think?

GAIA X

Jun 6, 2021 | ECONOMY, ENVIRONMENT, INTERNET, ITALY, WORLD

Gaia derives from Greek mythology and represents the mother goddess of all gods, personification of the earth, but in this case she becomes the engine of digital innovation in Europe.

In September 2020, 22 companies and organizations (11 from Germany and 11 from France) have taken an important milestone and finally transferred the joint project into solid structures: The 22 founding members signed the notarial founding documents in order to establish an international non-profit association (French: association internationale sans but lucratif, in short: AISBL) under Belgian law, the GAIA-X, European Association for Data and Cloud, AISBL.

From reading these words the first thing that emerges, for me, is the absence …

But in November our Ministry also attended the summit and on May 28 Confindustria kicked off the Italian hub by defining it as the moment of starting a shared path, aimed at aggregating and coordinating all the subjects interested in the development of projects that aim to enhance data, and an opportunity to get to know the European project and the methods of implementation in Italy.

What exactly are we talking about?
Gaia X is a federated data infrastructure for Europe.

Talking about:

Energy
Health
Smart living
Industry 4.0
Portability
Interoperability
Interconnectivity
Identity & Trust
Federated catalogue
Sovereing data exchange
Compliance

The main objectives are to develop ecosystems, to bundle national initiatives, and to provide a central point of contact to interested parties on their respective countries.

In fact, it is evident that the amount of data on a digital level is increasing day by day, and it is no coincidence that a whole series of new figures are emerging, among which the demiurge of big data particularly fascinates me.

Not to mention the parallel growth of IoT: Internet of things which involves a further exponential increase in connected devices.

But how important can a European Data Cloud be? How is the data handled now?

It is clear that this is an ongoing situation, and as it happens in a fiscal way for the giants of the web, armed with fragmentary, incomplete, if not non-existent regulations, the companies that manage the server farms act in an almost undisturbed pseudo-monopoly regime.

The need that is underlined is to achieve an autonomy that allows one to no longer have to make use of American or Chinese structures.

For example, I found huge data centers that China has built in a semi-desert area of Mongolia, previously dedicated to the breeding of the famous horses: The Mongolian National Data Center, established by a government resolution issued on June 24, 2009.

Or the Data Foundry in Texas founded in 1994 as one of the top 50 ISPs in the United States.

The aspect that in my opinion is not sufficiently taken into account is that “not everything that glitters is green” …

Servers need to be cooled, and this operation, although it is presented as a continuous search for innovation, consumes large amounts of energy.

Google presents its renewable energy project with a photo gallery, while admitting the following:

the 100% renewable energy milestone means we buy enough renewable energy over the course of a year to cover our entire annual electricity consumption, however it doesn’t mean that all of our facilities are powered by clean energy every hour of every day. To compensate for times and places where the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine, we buy a surplus of renewable energy at other times and in other places. Our ultimate goal is to achieve CO2-neutral energy supply for our operations in all locations, at all times. We are actively exploring strategies to achieve 24/7 CO2-neutral power supply to all of our data centers, closely monitoring our progress towards achieving this goal.

I conclude with the thing that scares me the most: the more we move forward, the more the main operations we carry out, from bank transactions to public certificates, from tax returns, to the signing of contracts, depend on applications and on telematic accesses, without which we would be practically paralyzed.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not calm. Am I wrong?

GOOGLE NEWS SHOWCASE

Jan 29, 2021 | ECONOMY, INTERNET, MEDIA

Googler: googling in French begins to have a different meaning if you enter the field of IPG certified editorial news.

Our cousins from beyond the Alps scored a further small victory against the giants of the web.

In fact, an agreement has been signed between the Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale: APIG and Google France which provides for a remuneration for the license agreements of the publishers of newspapers within a new program: News Showcase.

The remuneration provided for in the license agreements between each newspaper publisher and Google is based on criteria such as, for example, the contribution to political and general information, the daily volume of publications or the monthly Internet audience.

This is also a very important step in the controversial issue of Copyright Law in Europe and sees France as the first country to adopt legal legislation.

The concept on the basis of which Google has always maintained that news does not bring advantages to the search engine, but only an indexing for the newspapers, is overturned.

It is the conclusion of a battle carried out by the French press which turned to the Competition and Market Authority and subsequently to the Paris Court of Appeal and opens the way to the other member states as well.

The Alliance de la Presse tweet speaks of the effective recognition of #droitvoisin or neighborhood law which, as the Irpa explains allows publishers to obtain fair compensation from search engines and online platforms, established through an agreement, resulting from the use of news extracts. These also include previews (snippets) widely exploited by the search engine.

Where do you follow the news?