Responsibility can't be solely placed on the consumer and their choice, because their choice making ability is guided/influenced in many ways through the often deceptive practice of advertising.
True. But it goes beyond that. Consumerism and capitalism go hand in hand with the concept of economical growth. This is the Biggest Lie of them all; that society needs this growth or it will collapse entirely.
In the current crisis this means there are no alternatives. We need growth- not sustainability. This growth needs to translate into shareholder revenue- not infrastructure or education or any common wealth. And anything that is not yet yielding shareholder revenue must be made to do so- i.e. privatised and turned into a consumption good, marketed etc. e
Otherwise people will stop spending (consumer confidence means people are willing to spend their money, not that they are confident in the products they buy, although some economists actually believe this). And, worse, people will stop lending (in all it's myriad forms).
But this bring along an incredible baggage of assumptions that just do not apply to humans.
Responsibility can't be solely placed on the consumer and their choice, because their choice making ability is guided/influenced in many ways through the often deceptive practice of advertising. Especially in recent years advertising has been moving further into such methodology. A lot of it is based on luck of what sticks with an ever cynical consumer base, but a lot of it comes from studying how to psychologically manipulate people.
I think what Altalicious said earlier is important; that there's not a lot of in depth or reliable ways of measuring this stuff yet as it is relatively a more recent sociological phenomenon. It's certainly not as simple as that 'vote with your dollars' nonsense.
I'm not disputing that everything is a market and that the market advertises with the goal of taking your money, but voting with your dollar makes plenty of sense.
For example, choosing to buy local produce has a very real and positive effect on your neighborhood economy and beyond. It also has a positive environmental impact due to the fact that you're not buying shit that was grown on a factory farm in Idaho and shipped across the country in a refrigerated box truck.
Of course, at the corporate level, this is less true. If you can see an ad for a product on a major TV network, a percentage (a very large one, at that) of your dollar is funding future ad campaigns. But guess what? Not buying mass-produced shit is still voting with your dollar, as you're inevitably choosing to spend that money elsewhere.
Right now, I'm into collecting cash. Watching my savings account go up (albeit pretty slowly) has become much more enjoyable than buying widgets and gizmos.
Responsibility can't be solely placed on the consumer and their choice, because their choice making ability is guided/influenced in many ways through the often deceptive practice of advertising. Especially in recent years advertising has been moving further into such methodology. A lot of it is based on luck of what sticks with an ever cynical consumer base, but a lot of it comes from studying how to psychologically manipulate people.
I think what Altalicious said earlier is important; that there's not a lot of in depth or reliable ways of measuring this stuff yet as it is relatively a more recent sociological phenomenon. It's certainly not as simple as that 'vote with your dollars' nonsense.
I'm not disputing that everything is a market and that the market advertises with the goal of taking your money, but voting with your dollar makes plenty of sense.
For example, choosing to buy local produce has a very real and positive effect on your neighborhood economy and beyond. It also has a positive environmental impact due to the fact that you're not buying shit that was grown on a factory farm in Idaho and shipped across the country in a refrigerated box truck.
Of course, at the corporate level, this is less true. If you can see an ad for a product on a major TV network, a percentage (a very large one, at that) of your dollar is funding future ad campaigns. But guess what? Not buying mass-produced shit is still voting with your dollar, as you're inevitably choosing to spend that money elsewhere.
Voting with your dollar is sort of an illusion of control or consumer impact I believe. You're not damaging/lessening the revenue stream of factory farm produce on a significant scale because you and and others don't purchase goods from their stock. Not many decisions or changes will be made in consumer interest based on their distribution of spending. Other than what else to sell them.
I don't know, the voting with your dollar statement always seemed too close to the invisible hand kind of thing. There's some effect in how consumers spend their money of course, but whether the power they have as consumers can ever negate or deflect what advertisers/marketers foist upon them continuously, I'm not sure. I mean, it's a constant bombardment, always a hand in the pocket so to speak. With that much pressure on the consumer it makes you wonder who is in control and how much feasible power is held by the consumer.
An informed consumer has more power, but how many are informed in things such as your example of factory farming? Is it ever significant enough to affect anything on a noticeable level? I'm sure there are some instances in an outlying sense but when those who are selling have much more organized resource and capital to present their messages and products it makes things seem lopsided.
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VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Voting with your dollar needs to go hand-in-hand with social, political, and/or other actions in order to be effective, this is true. However, the "illusion of consumer control" sounds a little conspiracy theorist to me. It's also a defeatist attitude. How much difference can you really make, you know? So why bother?
Except that history has shown that more and more people are consciously choosing what to buy. It's still not the majority, but this stuff doesn't come from the top down; rather, the ground up.
Responsibility can't be solely placed on the consumer and their choice, because their choice making ability is guided/influenced in many ways through the often deceptive practice of advertising.
True. But it goes beyond that. Consumerism and capitalism go hand in hand with the concept of economical growth. This is the Biggest Lie of them all; that society needs this growth or it will collapse entirely.
In the current crisis this means there are no alternatives. We need growth- not sustainability. This growth needs to translate into shareholder revenue- not infrastructure or education or any common wealth. And anything that is not yet yielding shareholder revenue must be made to do so- i.e. privatised and turned into a consumption good, marketed etc. e
Otherwise people will stop spending (consumer confidence means people are willing to spend their money, not that they are confident in the products they buy, although some economists actually believe this). And, worse, people will stop lending (in all it's myriad forms).
But this bring along an incredible baggage of assumptions that just do not apply to humans.
Well, you actually do need growth to sustain the growth of your population. Jobs need to be on par with people, or you start having massive unemployment problems.
Steam and CFN: Enexemander
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Well, you actually do need growth to sustain the growth of your population. Jobs need to be on par with people, or you start having massive unemployment problems.
The actual key to solving that problem is getting your society to a negative birth rate. Growing your economy at the same rate as your population only works until you run out of resources and usable space.
Well, you actually do need growth to sustain the growth of your population. Jobs need to be on par with people, or you start having massive unemployment problems.
The actual key to solving that problem is getting your society to a negative birth rate. Growing your economy at the same rate as your population only works until you run out of resources and usable space.
You don't get there that way either, because of immigration.
Steam and CFN: Enexemander
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Well, you actually do need growth to sustain the growth of your population. Jobs need to be on par with people, or you start having massive unemployment problems.
The actual key to solving that problem is getting your society to a negative birth rate. Growing your economy at the same rate as your population only works until you run out of resources and usable space.
You don't get there that way either, because of immigration.
Most countries have a decent amount of control over immigration. Regardless, I agree that total population stagnancy can't be uniformly implemented, but you can get fairly close.
In a hypothetical model where there's little incentive to immigrate to a nation permanently, the theory is foolproof. As it stands, it's just a good idea. If nothing else, the incidence of a ebbing and swelling population isn't a good argument for an ever-expanding economy judged to be working by measuring how fast it's expanding.
Well, you actually do need growth to sustain the growth of your population. Jobs need to be on par with people, or you start having massive unemployment problems.
The actual key to solving that problem is getting your society to a negative birth rate. Growing your economy at the same rate as your population only works until you run out of resources and usable space.
You don't get there that way either, because of immigration.
Even without immigration you start to have problems like... more elderly retirees than there are young nurses to take care of them.
See: Japan, Italy.
Honestly, I think "growth" and "sustainability" aren't necessarily mutually exclusive values, but I'm having trouble describing exactly why I think that.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Voting with your dollar needs to go hand-in-hand with social, political, and/or other actions in order to be effective, this is true. However, the "illusion of consumer control" sounds a little conspiracy theorist to me. It's also a defeatist attitude. How much difference can you really make, you know? So why bother?
Except that history has shown that more and more people are consciously choosing what to buy. It's still not the majority, but this stuff doesn't come from the top down; rather, the ground up.
I guess my issue with the voting with dollars idea is that so often it's used rhetorically to dismiss complexity in issues such as consumer affairs. It's just a somewhat shortsighted affectation that doesn't tackle the larger aspects of consumer culture.
Voting with your dollar needs to go hand-in-hand with social, political, and/or other actions in order to be effective, this is true. However, the "illusion of consumer control" sounds a little conspiracy theorist to me. It's also a defeatist attitude. How much difference can you really make, you know? So why bother?
Except that history has shown that more and more people are consciously choosing what to buy. It's still not the majority, but this stuff doesn't come from the top down; rather, the ground up.
I guess my issue with the voting with dollars idea is that so often it's used rhetorically to dismiss complexity in issues such as consumer affairs. It's just a somewhat shortsighted affectation that doesn't tackle the larger aspects of consumer culture.
I generally feel that "voting with your dollar" is a lower priority than other forms of activism & awareness-building. Boycotts don't usually work all that well; a thousand people refusing to buy a product that sells a hundred thousand units in a year is barely a blip, and the company is going to have no idea why their sales figures dipped 1% below projections unless you're very vocal about your grievances. Some companies are so entrenched and ubiquitous that it's extraordinarily difficult to actually avoid them - try boycotting GE sometime. Monsanto. Altria. (Protip: Altria owns Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco.) AT&T.
"Voting with your dollars" once again puts the onus back on the individual. It's an intrinsically capitalist mindset - the idea that each individual is solely responsible for his or her own footprint on the world. It's also a myth. Not in the sense that it's strictly untrue, but in the sense that it's exaggerated. Every person is a product of their environment; you make your choices based on the options presented to you. If the status quo is that it's easier to give money to Altria than not to, you're going to give money to Altria. The deck is stacked - unavoidably so, because civilization is intrinsically a process of stacking the deck to make some choices more attractive to the individual than others. If you don't want to contribute to the stacked deck, you'd pretty much have to find one of the few unsettled patches of wilderness left and build a log cabin and hunt and forage for your food. However, if you want to actually change the way the deck is stacked, that requires interacting with other people, which means in some way you're going to support the status quo. Everybody is a little bit of a hypocrite, and pointing that out doesn't actually change the validity of the iconoclast's argument at all.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I agree that boycotts usually don't work. However, you can make a real difference by choosing where you buy your essentials. At the end of the day, that money may be going to some gigantic corporation like Monsanto, but the channels it goes through matter just as much. Using the groceries example, people who choose to buy local produce and meat whenever possible are investing in their community. People who buy their groceries at Wal-Mart or other gigantic companies are defunding their community.
How so? For every dollar spent at a local business, .80 of it remains within the community. For every dollar spent at a chain, about .20 remains within the community. You can argue about the effectiveness of voting with your dollar, but these are numbers that have shown up in multiple studies.
Want to take it further? The next step is to get involved in local elections. Push for legislation that limits square-footage. This keeps big box stores out and also keeps your town from looking like Levittown. The problem with starting at this level is if you already have an abundance of box stores, you've already lost the battle.
I'm not saying "vote with your dollar" is the best or only way to combat the ill effects of capitalism, but it is where you start.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Basically I'mma just shill Cradle to Cradle again since it's kind of obligated at this point. Next Sal needs to talk about thermal depolymerization (which I can, in point of fact, dig).
Even without immigration you start to have problems like... more elderly retirees than there are young nurses to take care of them.
I think that's a question that actually needs a more nuanced approach, certainly here in the US.
Our retirement ages were set long ago when personal ability and lifespan expectancies were much lower. It's a lot easier to plan for an elderly population's care when the average length for needed care is around 5 years, not 25.
As well, we need to also redress our cultural expectations for elderly care in conditions of indigence. An opinion I've formed from working in the field, I strongly think that indigent care should be coupled with end-of-life care, and we should stop throwing gobs of entitlement money after caring for people who aren't going to improve. To which I'm not implying that people in this conditions shouldn't be cared for, but I do feel that it shouldn't be the government (and taxpayers') obligation to extend needless heroic measures in cases where its objectively not going to help matters, such as Medicaid paying for feeding tubes for vegetative patients.
Even without immigration you start to have problems like... more elderly retirees than there are young nurses to take care of them.
I think that's a question that actually needs a more nuanced approach, certainly here in the US.
Our retirement ages were set long ago when personal ability and lifespan expectancies were much lower. It's a lot easier to plan for an elderly population's care when the average length for needed care is around 5 years, not 25.
As well, we need to also redress our cultural expectations for elderly care in conditions of indigence. An opinion I've formed from working in the field, I strongly think that indigent care should be coupled with end-of-life care, and we should stop throwing gobs of entitlement money after caring for people who aren't going to improve. To which I'm not implying that people in this conditions shouldn't be cared for, but I do feel that it shouldn't be the government (and taxpayers') obligation to extend needless heroic measures in cases where its objectively not going to help matters, such as Medicaid paying for feeding tubes for vegetative patients.
Life expectancy for those that have reached adulthood only rose 2.6 years for men and 4.9 years for women from 1940-1990. So we may have bumped up a few years, but nothing like 25.
Life expectancy for those that have reached adulthood only rose 2.6 years for men and 4.9 years for women from 1940-1990. So we may have bumped up a few years, but nothing like 25.
Try breaking that out by economic class. Here are a couple of graphs from the SSA. This one shows change in life expectancy for 65-year-old males from 1977-2006:
]
The x-axis here shows year of birth:
In 1977, average remaining life expectancy for a 65-year-old was 15-16 years.
In 2006, if you're 65 years old and poor... well, you've still got roughly 16 years left. If you're rich, you have 21-22 years left.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Life expectancy for those that have reached adulthood only rose 2.6 years for men and 4.9 years for women from 1940-1990. So we may have bumped up a few years, but nothing like 25.
Try breaking that out by economic class. Here are a couple of graphs from the SSA. This one shows change in life expectancy for 65-year-old males from 1977-2006:
]
The x-axis here shows year of birth:
In 1977, average remaining life expectancy for a 65-year-old was 15-16 years.
In 2006, if you're 65 years old and poor... well, you've still got roughly 16 years left. If you're rich, you have 21-22 years left.
Fair enough, but given the demographics for rich people versus poor, I'm not sure it really matters in terms of effect on Social Security and the solvency thereof.
Fair enough, but given the demographics for rich people versus poor, I'm not sure it really matters in terms of effect on Social Security and the solvency thereof.
Oh, I wasn't necessarily arguing against your overall point. There isn't a clear conclusion to be drawn from those trends, except that raising the retirement age alone isn't a good tactic (because it regressively hurts poor people more than rich people).
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Fair enough, but given the demographics for rich people versus poor, I'm not sure it really matters in terms of effect on Social Security and the solvency thereof.
Oh, I wasn't necessarily arguing against your overall point. There isn't a clear conclusion to be drawn from those trends, except that raising the retirement age alone isn't a good tactic (because it regressively hurts poor people more than rich people).
Clearly humans just need to be redesigned for planned obsolescence, living past usefulness to society is so wasteful.
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
Wow this thread went a bit over the edge.. I hope no-one was serious about trying to reduce life expectancy. Right guys? Cause you know we expect people who seriously believe that to give the 'right example'.
On topic; those who think 'growth' and 'jobs' are interchangeable need to take a refresher course I'm afraid. There is no economist who can guarantee this- although they do promise it. But there is a strong proven link between economically boosted employment (protectionism) and low wages. Trying to compete with low wage countries only nets you low wage jobs that don't pay taxes and cannot support your society. Low wage jobs do triple or quadruple damage: more money is spend on cheap, imported goods so local business and high paid service jobs disappear, less taxes are paid so there's less money for education and innovation, in short you just push the whole country into a negative spiral.
As for the aging problem, if you look at the economy as a simplified two level system where you have highly educated and low educated employees you can leverage the aging baby boomers' needs to put low educated people to work in the care industry and the highly educated ones to innovate that care industry in pharmaceutical and other medical companies then sell the results of that innovation abroad. People get old and sick all over the world and the pharmaceutical industry is hardly at risk of becoming redundant.
It doesn't solve the entire problem but it'll go a long way- if you're willing to change strategies from one that only makes sense for the people at the top of the pyramid to one that makes sense for the whole thing. People at the top will still get to scrape off their surplus value, just in a way that's antithetical to current conservative economical thinking.
I used to have a modest collection of toys, comics and games, not anymore... these days the iPhone has become my "patch" for my need to have "things." In hindsight I'm better off without the clutter.
Shit, son. If I would have my way, most goods would go back to the way they were a hundred years ago(buy a thing, it'll last a lifetime), or more or less completely biodegradeable/recyclable for stuff that will get obsolote quick, like consumer electronics(the speed at which these things progress is crazy).
Then again, I by nature loathe any sort of waste, especially when something is still functional or could be repaired, but circumstances force me to replace it and dispose of the original thing. This usually leads to me using computers for at least half a decade, as well as mobile phones. If possible, I fix them myself or have them fixed, but sometimes such things are made ridiculously difficult to do to encourage just getting a new one.
On a related tangent, I love my cast iron pan, which I got from my grandmother and which is probably close to a hundred years old.
Shit, son. If I would have my way, most goods would go back to the way they were a hundred years ago(buy a thing, it'll last a lifetime), or more or less completely biodegradeable/recyclable for stuff that will get obsolote quick, like consumer electronics(the speed at which these things progress is crazy).
Then again, I by nature loathe any sort of waste, especially when something is still functional or could be repaired, but circumstances force me to replace it and dispose of the original thing. This usually leads to me using computers for at least half a decade, as well as mobile phones. If possible, I fix them myself or have them fixed, but sometimes such things are made ridiculously difficult to do to encourage just getting a new one.
On a related tangent, I love my cast iron pan, which I got from my grandmother and which is probably close to a hundred years old.
Plenty of old stuff was flimsy and not durable at all, if you read literature or primary sources from the time. People just think it was because the only stuff that has survived until now was, of course, durable as hell.
Shit, son. If I would have my way, most goods would go back to the way they were a hundred years ago(buy a thing, it'll last a lifetime), or more or less completely biodegradeable/recyclable for stuff that will get obsolote quick, like consumer electronics(the speed at which these things progress is crazy).
Then again, I by nature loathe any sort of waste, especially when something is still functional or could be repaired, but circumstances force me to replace it and dispose of the original thing. This usually leads to me using computers for at least half a decade, as well as mobile phones. If possible, I fix them myself or have them fixed, but sometimes such things are made ridiculously difficult to do to encourage just getting a new one.
On a related tangent, I love my cast iron pan, which I got from my grandmother and which is probably close to a hundred years old.
Plenty of old stuff was flimsy and not durable at all, if you read literature or primary sources from the time. People just think it was because the only stuff that has survived until now was, of course, durable as hell.
True, I really should've added the qualifier there. What I meant was the more expensive old stuff, that by today's standards isn't really that expensive. It tended to be quite a bit more durable than today's equivalents. Naturally, it's quite possible to buy things that are as, if not more durable nowadays, but it's often prohibitively expensive, and one needs to hunt down some sort of specialist shops for them, making the whole thing that much more difficult.
Shit, son. If I would have my way, most goods would go back to the way they were a hundred years ago(buy a thing, it'll last a lifetime), or more or less completely biodegradeable/recyclable for stuff that will get obsolote quick, like consumer electronics(the speed at which these things progress is crazy).
Then again, I by nature loathe any sort of waste, especially when something is still functional or could be repaired, but circumstances force me to replace it and dispose of the original thing. This usually leads to me using computers for at least half a decade, as well as mobile phones. If possible, I fix them myself or have them fixed, but sometimes such things are made ridiculously difficult to do to encourage just getting a new one.
On a related tangent, I love my cast iron pan, which I got from my grandmother and which is probably close to a hundred years old.
Plenty of old stuff was flimsy and not durable at all, if you read literature or primary sources from the time. People just think it was because the only stuff that has survived until now was, of course, durable as hell.
True, I really should've added that bit there. What I meant was the more expensive old stuff, that by today's standards isn't really that expensive. It tended to be quite a bit more durable than today's equivalents. Naturally, it's quite possible to buy things that are as, if not more durable nowadays, but it's often prohibitively expensive, and one needs to hunt down some sort of specialist shops for them, making the whole thing that much more difficult.
the problem with talking about being "happy" or finding "pleasure" in things is that these ideas obviously really broad and can include very different things
sure, playing World of Warcraft might make you "happy" in some sense of the word, but is that really the kind of happiness that we should prioritize or value highly? there is "pleasure" in watching 30 Rock on your 42" plasma TV, but is that the same pleasure that you get from the various philanthropic acts mentioned in this thread, or from spending time with your loved ones, or from mastering a new song on a musical instrument? how do these things balance with responsibility, duty, fulfillment, satisfaction, all the other words we use for assigning value to our actions or experiences? obviously there are distinctions to be drawn there, and the pursuit of happiness can describe an unhealthy, selfish lifestyle as much as it can describe a liberated, joyous one. when someone says "why do we spend so much money and time on the consumption of luxuries?" and the answer is "because it is pleasurable," i don't think that's even close a complete answer.
i feel like the way we assign value to what we do with our time is a bit distorted, living as we do in a civilization that is a giant, churning machine of marketing and luxury products and mass communication. in fact the problem might be that we don't really bother to sit down and think about those things - instead, when we sit down to relax, we are reading a book, or watching TV, or playing a video game, or catching up on our feeds, or reading pun trees in forums, or browsing blogs on our smartphones - and so the whole system of electronic entertainment is sort of self-reinforcing. we get a huge burst of easy enjoyment from the items we consume. i can easily spend a whole day moving from one product to another in a sort of ADD orgy of indulgence, and not only is it much easier than reflecting on what I'm doing, it actively prevents it for large blocks of time.
I reject your claims to ephemeral "value". All these things cause the release of certain chemicals in your brain. As such they are all equal.
So, hypothetically, if I'm a real bastard, and slaughtering women using machetes and razorblades releases those certain chemicals in my brain, that's OK? That's not different from watching Buffy at all?
If your system of morality (1) discounts the value of women's happiness and (2) discounts the value of the happiness of your victims then yes.
But that would be a pretty shocking system of morality you monster.
If I take HamHamJ's argument, it would not be a shocking system. The value of women's happiness, and of my victims', would be ephemeral, and since those chemicals are being released in my brain it's all good.
Yes, I am seriously suggesting that companies should genetically modify, by force, the majority of humanity so they keel over and die sometime between the ages of 42 and 48. I mean, after all old people are really just a drain on society and not producing much. Better to get new citizens. One might need to care for them for like 8-16 years just like the elderly, but in the end one can put them to work in the economy!
I am just taking planned obsolescence to a natural conclusion. I mean nature put cancer and age related disabilities there already!
Anyone with a serious injury or disability should also be likewise replaced if it would be more expensive then raising a child to care for the disabled individual.
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
Wow this thread went a bit over the edge.. I hope no-one was serious about trying to reduce life expectancy. Right guys? Cause you know we expect people who seriously believe that to give the 'right example'.
On topic; those who think 'growth' and 'jobs' are interchangeable need to take a refresher course I'm afraid. There is no economist who can guarantee this- although they do promise it. But there is a strong proven link between economically boosted employment (protectionism) and low wages. Trying to compete with low wage countries only nets you low wage jobs that don't pay taxes and cannot support your society. Low wage jobs do triple or quadruple damage: more money is spend on cheap, imported goods so local business and high paid service jobs disappear, less taxes are paid so there's less money for education and innovation, in short you just push the whole country into a negative spiral.
As for the aging problem, if you look at the economy as a simplified two level system where you have highly educated and low educated employees you can leverage the aging baby boomers' needs to put low educated people to work in the care industry and the highly educated ones to innovate that care industry in pharmaceutical and other medical companies then sell the results of that innovation abroad. People get old and sick all over the world and the pharmaceutical industry is hardly at risk of becoming redundant.
It doesn't solve the entire problem but it'll go a long way- if you're willing to change strategies from one that only makes sense for the people at the top of the pyramid to one that makes sense for the whole thing. People at the top will still get to scrape off their surplus value, just in a way that's antithetical to current conservative economical thinking.
Personally, I can't think of anything I'd like to do less than take care of the Boomer generation. I don't have anything against old people in general, but the massive ball of fucking stupid that is the Boomer gen can go hack its lungs off a cliff.
Anyway, my main point is that Health Care is an in demand industry partly because it's not a very enjoyable one to work in, and people would rather not if given the choice.
Man I always like how musical instrument playing is just inherently accepted as being of a different, superior class to all other diversionary activities requiring mastery.
I mean musical instruments are excellent and have unique and awesome properties, but there's about a sliver of difference between getting a song down right and doing a sweet speed run of Golden Eye in practical terms.
VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
What? I'm not saying Golden Eye isn't an impressive achievement, but music is a far less ephemeral pursuit than Golden Eye. There is much more than a sliver of difference.
Personally, I can't think of anything I'd like to do less than take care of the Boomer generation. I don't have anything against old people in general, but the massive ball of fucking stupid that is the Boomer gen can go hack its lungs off a cliff.
Anyway, my main point is that Health Care is an in demand industry partly because it's not a very enjoyable one to work in, and people would rather not if given the choice.
My mother actually teaches care to 16 year olds and it doesn't sound like it's the life dream for any of them. But then again neither is working in a call center which is what the rest of the school will likely end up doing.
Boomers have the money pretty much everywhere, and when they croak it a lot of that money will likely end up with the government. It'll be spend on health care one way or another.
At other end of the spectrum, far away from such practicalities, this means that people will have to start thinking about how they are going to lead their lives in other terms than personal gain.
It *is* incredibly rewarding to work in the care industry- just not in any way our media have defined rewarding in the last fifty years. But psychology is slowly unearthing the numbers and its finding that caring for others is a lot more rewarding than almost any other pursuit.
This also means there is a huge discord between socialised welfare/healthcare where you pay for care you'll never actually give, and the conservative idea of charity where you care directly. One is more likely to deliver care where it's needed regardless of social stigma- but turns people off from the idea of giving care to others. The other boosts people desire to care for others but is likely to overlook a lot of people that need care.
Back to consumerism and the media: if we sell care-giving as a product successfully it is likely to start a surge of 're-connection' within society that will also boost people's tolerance of being taxed for socialized welfare. You'll lower depression rates, boost health all round, end up with a much healthier society.
However, this raises the idea that advertising, which is designed to make you want or expect things you don't have, is directly contributing to unhappiness.
Interestingly, talking to a friend over the weekend who works in advertising, she said precisely this: most marketing / advertising works on the principle of making you unhappy with what you have (or lack), therefore making you want to buy something else.
I agree that identification & diagnosis likely comprise most of the rise, but I'm not sure if we can eliminate genuine increase in prevalence as a contributing cause just yet. As you said elsewhere in your post, a sedentary lifestyle is a major contributing cause to depression, so it stands to reason that if our lifestyle is less active overall than prior generations, there is at least one possible cause for increasing prevalence of depression.
True, my point was that there is currently so much noise which we cannot yet eliminate from the statistics, that it becomes very difficult to pin down any reliable cause/effect between reported rising numbers of depressive disorders and actual rise in the disorders. They might be rising, or they might not, the statistical work isn't firm enough to tell.
Honestly, I think "growth" and "sustainability" aren't necessarily mutually exclusive values, but I'm having trouble describing exactly why I think that.
The really basic economic argument is that supply curves mean that markets agitate against running out of a resource (the resource becomes scarcer; the price rises; it becomes uneconomical to use the resource for whatever it was used for; a new resource / technology is developed which fills the same use). This is generally true - for example, if we still used wood as our primary building material and fuel instead of having moved to concrete / metal / plastics and fossil fuels, we would already have no trees left.
However, in terms of sustainability this assumes a number of things.
First that the resource is naturally renewable in some meaningful timescale: water, wood and foodstuffs are okay, species, uranium and diamonds are not. This can be mitigated against if the resource is generally not consumable, but tradeable (i.e. diamonds). Thus you can degrade the resource to a low point, but it will still replenish. This happens a lot with food stocks of particular animals. We also sometimes get it wrong, and eliminate the animal from an area (e.g. buffalo), so this isn't a perfect automatic process and requires some controls.
Second, that there exists a viable substitute for the resource. In practice, we often rely on technology developing a new option, rather than replacing the resource with a substitute. However, this generally just bumps the consumption problem onto a new resource (for energy: wood to fossil fuels). It's worth noting that what is happening at the moment with fossil fuels is precisely this process - convinced of a forthcoming problem, we are massively investing in alternate energy technology. The problem is whether - for something like energy - you can develop the technology quickly enough to fill the demand. The macro-scale movement of fossil fuel markets at the moment can be traced to this idea: oil is running out (therefore prices are rising) and the markets aren't convinced that we have an alternate energy source yet which can fill the gap (therefore prices are both volatile, and rising).
Third, that the resource isn't unique and scarce. It's quite rare that a vital resource is both unique and scarce (because if that were the case, then it's uneconomical to build a vital capacity around it), but it occasionally happens with some very specific technology related resources. This affects sustainability in that you will exhaust the resource, but due to the above conditions, it doesn't tend to have a massive environmental impact.
The only perfectly sustainable system is an economy in perfect balance (not negative, but zero growth - if it is negative, then the system will exhaust itself and therefore not be sustainable), but currently this is fantasy on any large scale. Alternately, an economy which relies on the first point (renewal cycles) and is based on resources which fulfill the second point (easily substitutable) would be theoretically sustainable with enough higher control or enough redundancy to allow markets to run the cycle naturally. But that perfect set of resource options is currently pretty fantastical as well. I can't think of any examples where that kind of economy has been possible on a macro scale, because for a while we have been reliant on resources which aren't renewable in a meaningful timescale. Also bear in mind that the Soviets tried to do something similar with higher control of a sizeable economy and failed massively.
Man I always like how musical instrument playing is just inherently accepted as being of a different, superior class to all other diversionary activities requiring mastery.
I mean musical instruments are excellent and have unique and awesome properties, but there's about a sliver of difference between getting a song down right and doing a sweet speed run of Golden Eye in practical terms.
Playing the guitar is much more likely to get you laid than being a proficient gamer, however.
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
Consumerism is only a problem if you project an approximation of your own self-value onto people you don't know/have close relations with.
The simplest way to cause consumerism to not be a problem, is to actively decide not to care about anyone but you. All other people are part of groups that you are not, and no individual has any rights other than those they can take.
I don't know if anybody here likes Louis CK, but he goes on this radio show Opie and Anthony occasionally, and it's usually really interesting and funny simultaneously.
Anyway, this is a really good bit from one appearance about his thoughts on consumerism and how things have progressed over the past 50 or 60 years. If you have the time, I'd listen to all of it. He makes some very good points.
Man I always like how musical instrument playing is just inherently accepted as being of a different, superior class to all other diversionary activities requiring mastery.
I mean musical instruments are excellent and have unique and awesome properties, but there's about a sliver of difference between getting a song down right and doing a sweet speed run of Golden Eye in practical terms.
Playing the guitar is much more likely to get you laid than being a proficient gamer, however.
There's a mountain of difference between "getting a song down" and being proficient in musical theory to the point of being able to apply that theory and understanding across multiple instruments and media. Most people who are talented and/or famous musicians fall into that latter category. There's no job postings that say:
"Lead guitarist needed. Must be able to play "Battle of Evermore" by Led Zeppelin and "What I Got" by Sublime. No other skills or experience needed."
What "mastery" does a speed run of a video game require? More importantly, what does it create?
Posts
In the current crisis this means there are no alternatives. We need growth- not sustainability. This growth needs to translate into shareholder revenue- not infrastructure or education or any common wealth. And anything that is not yet yielding shareholder revenue must be made to do so- i.e. privatised and turned into a consumption good, marketed etc. e
Otherwise people will stop spending (consumer confidence means people are willing to spend their money, not that they are confident in the products they buy, although some economists actually believe this). And, worse, people will stop lending (in all it's myriad forms).
But this bring along an incredible baggage of assumptions that just do not apply to humans.
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
I'm not disputing that everything is a market and that the market advertises with the goal of taking your money, but voting with your dollar makes plenty of sense.
For example, choosing to buy local produce has a very real and positive effect on your neighborhood economy and beyond. It also has a positive environmental impact due to the fact that you're not buying shit that was grown on a factory farm in Idaho and shipped across the country in a refrigerated box truck.
Of course, at the corporate level, this is less true. If you can see an ad for a product on a major TV network, a percentage (a very large one, at that) of your dollar is funding future ad campaigns. But guess what? Not buying mass-produced shit is still voting with your dollar, as you're inevitably choosing to spend that money elsewhere.
Holy crap, I think I'm getting old.
PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
I don't know, the voting with your dollar statement always seemed too close to the invisible hand kind of thing. There's some effect in how consumers spend their money of course, but whether the power they have as consumers can ever negate or deflect what advertisers/marketers foist upon them continuously, I'm not sure. I mean, it's a constant bombardment, always a hand in the pocket so to speak. With that much pressure on the consumer it makes you wonder who is in control and how much feasible power is held by the consumer.
An informed consumer has more power, but how many are informed in things such as your example of factory farming? Is it ever significant enough to affect anything on a noticeable level? I'm sure there are some instances in an outlying sense but when those who are selling have much more organized resource and capital to present their messages and products it makes things seem lopsided.
Except that history has shown that more and more people are consciously choosing what to buy. It's still not the majority, but this stuff doesn't come from the top down; rather, the ground up.
Well, you actually do need growth to sustain the growth of your population. Jobs need to be on par with people, or you start having massive unemployment problems.
The actual key to solving that problem is getting your society to a negative birth rate. Growing your economy at the same rate as your population only works until you run out of resources and usable space.
You don't get there that way either, because of immigration.
Most countries have a decent amount of control over immigration. Regardless, I agree that total population stagnancy can't be uniformly implemented, but you can get fairly close.
In a hypothetical model where there's little incentive to immigrate to a nation permanently, the theory is foolproof. As it stands, it's just a good idea. If nothing else, the incidence of a ebbing and swelling population isn't a good argument for an ever-expanding economy judged to be working by measuring how fast it's expanding.
Even without immigration you start to have problems like... more elderly retirees than there are young nurses to take care of them.
See: Japan, Italy.
Honestly, I think "growth" and "sustainability" aren't necessarily mutually exclusive values, but I'm having trouble describing exactly why I think that.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I generally feel that "voting with your dollar" is a lower priority than other forms of activism & awareness-building. Boycotts don't usually work all that well; a thousand people refusing to buy a product that sells a hundred thousand units in a year is barely a blip, and the company is going to have no idea why their sales figures dipped 1% below projections unless you're very vocal about your grievances. Some companies are so entrenched and ubiquitous that it's extraordinarily difficult to actually avoid them - try boycotting GE sometime. Monsanto. Altria. (Protip: Altria owns Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco.) AT&T.
"Voting with your dollars" once again puts the onus back on the individual. It's an intrinsically capitalist mindset - the idea that each individual is solely responsible for his or her own footprint on the world. It's also a myth. Not in the sense that it's strictly untrue, but in the sense that it's exaggerated. Every person is a product of their environment; you make your choices based on the options presented to you. If the status quo is that it's easier to give money to Altria than not to, you're going to give money to Altria. The deck is stacked - unavoidably so, because civilization is intrinsically a process of stacking the deck to make some choices more attractive to the individual than others. If you don't want to contribute to the stacked deck, you'd pretty much have to find one of the few unsettled patches of wilderness left and build a log cabin and hunt and forage for your food. However, if you want to actually change the way the deck is stacked, that requires interacting with other people, which means in some way you're going to support the status quo. Everybody is a little bit of a hypocrite, and pointing that out doesn't actually change the validity of the iconoclast's argument at all.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
How so? For every dollar spent at a local business, .80 of it remains within the community. For every dollar spent at a chain, about .20 remains within the community. You can argue about the effectiveness of voting with your dollar, but these are numbers that have shown up in multiple studies.
Want to take it further? The next step is to get involved in local elections. Push for legislation that limits square-footage. This keeps big box stores out and also keeps your town from looking like Levittown. The problem with starting at this level is if you already have an abundance of box stores, you've already lost the battle.
I'm not saying "vote with your dollar" is the best or only way to combat the ill effects of capitalism, but it is where you start.
Since we all apparently have a role to play, I'll just add that: Peter Singer is mandatory.
I think that's a question that actually needs a more nuanced approach, certainly here in the US.
Our retirement ages were set long ago when personal ability and lifespan expectancies were much lower. It's a lot easier to plan for an elderly population's care when the average length for needed care is around 5 years, not 25.
As well, we need to also redress our cultural expectations for elderly care in conditions of indigence. An opinion I've formed from working in the field, I strongly think that indigent care should be coupled with end-of-life care, and we should stop throwing gobs of entitlement money after caring for people who aren't going to improve. To which I'm not implying that people in this conditions shouldn't be cared for, but I do feel that it shouldn't be the government (and taxpayers') obligation to extend needless heroic measures in cases where its objectively not going to help matters, such as Medicaid paying for feeding tubes for vegetative patients.
That's not actually true, really.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html
Life expectancy for those that have reached adulthood only rose 2.6 years for men and 4.9 years for women from 1940-1990. So we may have bumped up a few years, but nothing like 25.
Try breaking that out by economic class. Here are a couple of graphs from the SSA. This one shows change in life expectancy for 65-year-old males from 1977-2006:
The x-axis here shows year of birth:
In 1977, average remaining life expectancy for a 65-year-old was 15-16 years.
In 2006, if you're 65 years old and poor... well, you've still got roughly 16 years left. If you're rich, you have 21-22 years left.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Fair enough, but given the demographics for rich people versus poor, I'm not sure it really matters in terms of effect on Social Security and the solvency thereof.
Oh, I wasn't necessarily arguing against your overall point. There isn't a clear conclusion to be drawn from those trends, except that raising the retirement age alone isn't a good tactic (because it regressively hurts poor people more than rich people).
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
On topic; those who think 'growth' and 'jobs' are interchangeable need to take a refresher course I'm afraid. There is no economist who can guarantee this- although they do promise it. But there is a strong proven link between economically boosted employment (protectionism) and low wages. Trying to compete with low wage countries only nets you low wage jobs that don't pay taxes and cannot support your society. Low wage jobs do triple or quadruple damage: more money is spend on cheap, imported goods so local business and high paid service jobs disappear, less taxes are paid so there's less money for education and innovation, in short you just push the whole country into a negative spiral.
As for the aging problem, if you look at the economy as a simplified two level system where you have highly educated and low educated employees you can leverage the aging baby boomers' needs to put low educated people to work in the care industry and the highly educated ones to innovate that care industry in pharmaceutical and other medical companies then sell the results of that innovation abroad. People get old and sick all over the world and the pharmaceutical industry is hardly at risk of becoming redundant.
It doesn't solve the entire problem but it'll go a long way- if you're willing to change strategies from one that only makes sense for the people at the top of the pyramid to one that makes sense for the whole thing. People at the top will still get to scrape off their surplus value, just in a way that's antithetical to current conservative economical thinking.
Team Fortress 2 Backpack: Someone you love
Then again, I by nature loathe any sort of waste, especially when something is still functional or could be repaired, but circumstances force me to replace it and dispose of the original thing. This usually leads to me using computers for at least half a decade, as well as mobile phones. If possible, I fix them myself or have them fixed, but sometimes such things are made ridiculously difficult to do to encourage just getting a new one.
On a related tangent, I love my cast iron pan, which I got from my grandmother and which is probably close to a hundred years old.
Plenty of old stuff was flimsy and not durable at all, if you read literature or primary sources from the time. People just think it was because the only stuff that has survived until now was, of course, durable as hell.
True, I really should've added the qualifier there. What I meant was the more expensive old stuff, that by today's standards isn't really that expensive. It tended to be quite a bit more durable than today's equivalents. Naturally, it's quite possible to buy things that are as, if not more durable nowadays, but it's often prohibitively expensive, and one needs to hunt down some sort of specialist shops for them, making the whole thing that much more difficult.
If I take HamHamJ's argument, it would not be a shocking system. The value of women's happiness, and of my victims', would be ephemeral, and since those chemicals are being released in my brain it's all good.
I am just taking planned obsolescence to a natural conclusion. I mean nature put cancer and age related disabilities there already!
Anyone with a serious injury or disability should also be likewise replaced if it would be more expensive then raising a child to care for the disabled individual.
Personally, I can't think of anything I'd like to do less than take care of the Boomer generation. I don't have anything against old people in general, but the massive ball of fucking stupid that is the Boomer gen can go hack its lungs off a cliff.
Anyway, my main point is that Health Care is an in demand industry partly because it's not a very enjoyable one to work in, and people would rather not if given the choice.
I mean musical instruments are excellent and have unique and awesome properties, but there's about a sliver of difference between getting a song down right and doing a sweet speed run of Golden Eye in practical terms.
My mother actually teaches care to 16 year olds and it doesn't sound like it's the life dream for any of them. But then again neither is working in a call center which is what the rest of the school will likely end up doing.
Boomers have the money pretty much everywhere, and when they croak it a lot of that money will likely end up with the government. It'll be spend on health care one way or another.
At other end of the spectrum, far away from such practicalities, this means that people will have to start thinking about how they are going to lead their lives in other terms than personal gain.
It *is* incredibly rewarding to work in the care industry- just not in any way our media have defined rewarding in the last fifty years. But psychology is slowly unearthing the numbers and its finding that caring for others is a lot more rewarding than almost any other pursuit.
This also means there is a huge discord between socialised welfare/healthcare where you pay for care you'll never actually give, and the conservative idea of charity where you care directly. One is more likely to deliver care where it's needed regardless of social stigma- but turns people off from the idea of giving care to others. The other boosts people desire to care for others but is likely to overlook a lot of people that need care.
Back to consumerism and the media: if we sell care-giving as a product successfully it is likely to start a surge of 're-connection' within society that will also boost people's tolerance of being taxed for socialized welfare. You'll lower depression rates, boost health all round, end up with a much healthier society.
Interestingly, talking to a friend over the weekend who works in advertising, she said precisely this: most marketing / advertising works on the principle of making you unhappy with what you have (or lack), therefore making you want to buy something else.
True, my point was that there is currently so much noise which we cannot yet eliminate from the statistics, that it becomes very difficult to pin down any reliable cause/effect between reported rising numbers of depressive disorders and actual rise in the disorders. They might be rising, or they might not, the statistical work isn't firm enough to tell.
The really basic economic argument is that supply curves mean that markets agitate against running out of a resource (the resource becomes scarcer; the price rises; it becomes uneconomical to use the resource for whatever it was used for; a new resource / technology is developed which fills the same use). This is generally true - for example, if we still used wood as our primary building material and fuel instead of having moved to concrete / metal / plastics and fossil fuels, we would already have no trees left.
However, in terms of sustainability this assumes a number of things.
First that the resource is naturally renewable in some meaningful timescale: water, wood and foodstuffs are okay, species, uranium and diamonds are not. This can be mitigated against if the resource is generally not consumable, but tradeable (i.e. diamonds). Thus you can degrade the resource to a low point, but it will still replenish. This happens a lot with food stocks of particular animals. We also sometimes get it wrong, and eliminate the animal from an area (e.g. buffalo), so this isn't a perfect automatic process and requires some controls.
Second, that there exists a viable substitute for the resource. In practice, we often rely on technology developing a new option, rather than replacing the resource with a substitute. However, this generally just bumps the consumption problem onto a new resource (for energy: wood to fossil fuels). It's worth noting that what is happening at the moment with fossil fuels is precisely this process - convinced of a forthcoming problem, we are massively investing in alternate energy technology. The problem is whether - for something like energy - you can develop the technology quickly enough to fill the demand. The macro-scale movement of fossil fuel markets at the moment can be traced to this idea: oil is running out (therefore prices are rising) and the markets aren't convinced that we have an alternate energy source yet which can fill the gap (therefore prices are both volatile, and rising).
Third, that the resource isn't unique and scarce. It's quite rare that a vital resource is both unique and scarce (because if that were the case, then it's uneconomical to build a vital capacity around it), but it occasionally happens with some very specific technology related resources. This affects sustainability in that you will exhaust the resource, but due to the above conditions, it doesn't tend to have a massive environmental impact.
The only perfectly sustainable system is an economy in perfect balance (not negative, but zero growth - if it is negative, then the system will exhaust itself and therefore not be sustainable), but currently this is fantasy on any large scale. Alternately, an economy which relies on the first point (renewal cycles) and is based on resources which fulfill the second point (easily substitutable) would be theoretically sustainable with enough higher control or enough redundancy to allow markets to run the cycle naturally. But that perfect set of resource options is currently pretty fantastical as well. I can't think of any examples where that kind of economy has been possible on a macro scale, because for a while we have been reliant on resources which aren't renewable in a meaningful timescale. Also bear in mind that the Soviets tried to do something similar with higher control of a sizeable economy and failed massively.
Rigorous Scholarship
The simplest way to cause consumerism to not be a problem, is to actively decide not to care about anyone but you. All other people are part of groups that you are not, and no individual has any rights other than those they can take.
See? Its easy!
Anyway, this is a really good bit from one appearance about his thoughts on consumerism and how things have progressed over the past 50 or 60 years. If you have the time, I'd listen to all of it. He makes some very good points.
There's a mountain of difference between "getting a song down" and being proficient in musical theory to the point of being able to apply that theory and understanding across multiple instruments and media. Most people who are talented and/or famous musicians fall into that latter category. There's no job postings that say:
"Lead guitarist needed. Must be able to play "Battle of Evermore" by Led Zeppelin and "What I Got" by Sublime. No other skills or experience needed."
What "mastery" does a speed run of a video game require? More importantly, what does it create?