story of stuff

[gorm]

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

discuss. i realize that this is pretty campy at parts but honestly it is overall a pretty good description of the current capitalist framework in place. obviously the worst parts are exaggerated and it oversimplifies
but the point of sustainability is really an important one.

what do you think about the way we consume, smogon?

and argument i'd mae is that with increasing complexity in technologies will usually demand more waste, but the level to which we have driven it is kind of ridicuouls, and the fact is in a money driven economy, niches open for profitable stuff that aren't necessarily good for us/our planet.

 

[Tangerine]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalities

This concept pretty much sums up every problem the person is talking about in the video. One of the reason this happens is that the Government does not keep up to pace with what the corporations do and make laws. I'm also pretty sure there is international law involved somewhere but I have no idea regarding that.

Also - the consumption model - I believe that is heavily related to the weight put on GDPs to measure the economy - considering more consumption = higher GDP, etc. My professor actually called the US economy the "Madoff" economy (look up Madoff if you don't understand why) - and may have implied that this is a giant ponzi scheme.

When I was in China, I was actually shocked to see junk "made in Korea" items selling there - and they were definitely worse quality than the stuff they sell in Korea. But of course, rather than revamping the factories that make the outtech'd materials - they just keep it running and ship it off to a country. Whoo!

 

[cookie]

Yeah, I stopped buying into our materialistic culture ages ago. I realised this last year when my mp3 player broke down: the more stuff you have the more likely something's going to go wrong with some of it, pissing you off or distracting you from what matters. If you want further evidence of the happiness thing I read in the newspapers that people were slightly happier in the past couple months because people had more time to do stuff and meet people. I'll try to find the article.

As for the economy of it, if we don't switch to a sustainable economic system we're going to crash and burn once our energy production collapses when fossil fuels run out. Energy fuels the entire cycle, and without it we will be forced to return to times when we had to make do with what we have and repair stuff rather than throw things away and get new stuff. So unless economically viable fusion energy comes online or we find some other energy source soon our economies are simply going to die.

 

[McGrrr]

It is a paradox that a fundamentally weak economy is widely accepted as the strongest. From the mid 1990s, investors poured moneys into America despite the fact that it no longer produced real wealth. As long as the illusion continued, growth would remain stable, ergo returns, ergo foreign capital inflows. Moreover, the subsequent artificially strong dollar discounted the real value of resource rich countries abroad; enabling an enormous consumption binge.

America does not produce any more because arguably it does not need to. That is the privilege of empire, and is no more than a mirror image of Britain or Rome from history. America achieved its superpower status in the 19th Century and consolidated that position after WWII. The right of empire is that other people produce and you consume. This is sustainable in theory, but hopeless in practice because people are greedy and policy makers imperfect.

What the video suggests in the "other way" section is bollocks. Suppose that it were realistic; it would still only protect the American empire and fail to address the problem of overconsumption. Foreign resources will continue to be undervalued (by a strong dollar), externalities will continue to be borne by the producers, and Americans will continue to consume. The root of the problem is empire. Everything else can wait.

 

[Anti]

2000 trees a minute

we are a sick, sick people.