Planned Obsolescence

The economic idea of engineering a product in such a way that it fails after a short amount of time to support economic growth. There is the famous example with the Apple Ipod battery; if the battery died (which it, with-in a year, undoubtedly had,) Apple support would tell customers to purchases an entirely new Ipod instead of just replacing the shoddy battery. Now after a widely publicized court case, Apple has altered this design flaw, but instead to create and maintain the idea of a "newer" "better" " hip" in the minds of consumers they push a new Ipod, or Iphone, or Iwhatever every new year, and attempt to make the older versions of their products seem dysfunctional and outdated...

Here is a youtube clip that I watched recently that refuses to imbed in the blog post:

Planned Obsolescence video

What do readers think about this? Should we maintain this philosophy to continue economic growth? Or should we as a people work towards a different business model not centered around rampant wasteful consumerism?

Meat Grown in a lab

I just read an article on cnn about lab grown meat – meat grown in a petri dish. This is something I remember hearing about a long time ago. I don’t know if it was in National Geographic or American scientist or whatever, but growing meat from stem cells I do not think is a new revolutionary concept. Now, finally, someone in Europe is being paid 300 million dollars to create an edible stem-cell burger in a petri dish.

I don’t know how I feel about this. The first thing I think of when I heard this was,….”…mcky D’s is all over this aren’t they” there has got to be a huge corporate push for making more food products  cheaper right…greater population needs more food, means more customers and more money so find an efficient way to quickly grow meat to order and as long as people eat it, it can be very profitable. I bet the FDA would not even demand labeling of products with lab grown meat as an ingredient like they do not demand the labeling of cloned animals or GMOs. So with this track record, maybe people are already eating meat grown in a petri dish and they don’t even know it.

I start to think about sustainability. Would this be sustainable? Where are they getting the stem cells? The article goes on to say that they “harvest” them from slaughter houses. So probably not sustainable.

Can it feed the world? My understanding of the world hunger crisis is not that there is not enough food…it’s that the food management is disgusting, and the more wealthy in impoverished nations horde food and wealth, and use it as leverage to control the rest of population. There are a lot of people…and the projected population growth in the next 20-30 years can result in some major problems.  But right now this is not the solution.

Comments on even mildly controversial topics are full of overly dramatic internet warriors. These were what you would expect them to be. Not very interesting, not very intelligent. Bah

What to Do What to do?

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

.

I am being constantly torn between two extremes.

1.) I want to leave society. I have had enough, and want no part in it. People are morons. I want my cave, my vegetable garden, fresh mountain air, and that's it.

I am sick and tired of the nature of this civilization. It feeds off of the slave-grinding of the poor while the wealthy sit in their palaces and explore the desensitizing joys of chronic masturbation. Its' industries are massive monopolies that, with their billions of revenue, lobby within governments to sway the political language so that they may  grow their fiscal efficiency...even if that means destroying or ruining land, water, air, and the lives of thousands of people.

 If Exxon could make 2 billion dollars for killing your grandmother... what do you think would happen?

2.) Instead of abandoning society and leaving no impact on the lives of others, I want to work from within to change it for the better.

This is great right. The whole noble, not completely altruistic, idea of sacrificing what you would otherwise want for the philosophical "greater good". But that isn't easy. And I don't just mean that it isn't easy to bring yourself to do it emotionally. It is difficult to implement in all directions. If you work as a social worker, you make just barely enough money to scrape by. Sometimes you might not even make that and in the end you have no one to support you. So what would work... spend 1/2 your life building riches so that you can afford to then set your life against what you have been actively supporting for a couple decades? Does it have to be that way?

Where will the most change be felt? Without being a direct political power, for as much as I can tell, one is going to make the biggest impact on individuals. Small groups of organized individuals can work to make a difference by being an influence and building communities that foster progressive ideas.

Check out Tamera, an alternative community in Portugal who are doing some really cool things with community building that challenges the way we view our relationships and responsibilities towards each other and our biosphere.

Still... can't decide. ...but leaning towards 2.