The Observation Deck

A pretty eye-opening view into Consumerism:

http://storyofstuff.com/

This is a really cool video, my kids were forwarding to everyone they knew last year. And my oldest son's science teacher even showed it to the class. It's pretty eye opening, thanks for sharing David.

David Lay wrote:A pretty eye-opening view into Consumerism:

http://storyofstuff.com/

Verrrrry interesting. Good catch David.

This kind of video is dangerous nonsense. On the other hand the video could serve as a basis for a debate on our assumptions about the military and the purpose of government. Government spends more than 50% of its budget on the military? That's nonsense even before you include, State, County and City spending:


http://www.heritage.org/research/featur ... fense.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_b ... ted_States

Of course that's before Obama's spending spree.

I'm not sure the proportion of the US budget comprised by the military, or the purpose of government are the point of this video.

I think it's about the mining, processing, use, and disposition of finite resources.

I remember a book called "Paddle to the Sea," from when I was a kid. It's about a little boy up on the Canadian side of the great lakes who whittles a little boat and drops it in the water. It follows currents inevitably, swirling around the different Great Lakes basins until it heads out to the Atlantic. It's pretty much irrefutable that floating objects follow currents like that.

Garbage follows those currents, too. And therefore we have a floating stew of plastic in the Pacific, which depending on the report you read or what year it is stretches across an area double the size of Texas, or maybe even bigger than the continental US. Forget about the proportion of military spending. What kind of world do you want for your grandkids?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLrVCI4N67M

within a few years of the NAFTA superhighway being completed the cable news shows will start drumming up support for a U.S. invasion of Nigeria or Equatorial Guinea or some other oil-rich section of western Africa. There is just too much easy oil there.

At least we'll have more stuff between now and then.

Americans don't turn liberal because of politics. they turn liberal so they can have more of the shit on television. manufacturing is outsourced so we can float more television channels.

Here's a graphic from one of Bill's links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._ ... Y_2007.png

Medicare and Social Security are presumably paid for directly with Social Security and Medicare taxes. Other federal expenditures are subsidized by the social security tax revenue surplus. Social Security is an ultra regressive income tax. Direct Defense spending is about 40 percent of federal spending that is not Medicare and Social Security spending.

It isn't unfeasible that garbage plastic in the oceans can cause big problems. J.G. Ballard wrote a dystopian speculative fiction novel about this causing severe drought. It isn't entirely plausible, but it makes you think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drought

michael gill wrote: Forget about the proportion of military spending. What kind of world do you want for your grandkids?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLrVCI4N67M

A free and prosperous future. Which they won't have if Obama and the environmentalist have their way.

The only thing man made about global warming is the hysteria. We have abundent resources of all kinds, more than enough to give every person on Earth a decent standard of living. They won't have than standard of living if Obama gets his way. He disdains the economic and political system that generated the wealth he is looting.

All of the political leaders and celebutards who push the environmentalist agenda individually consume more resources than some small countries.
Our schools are being used by the hysterics to propagandize the environmentalist agenda. No wonder that we spend more on education than ever before and have ever less to show for it.

The story of stuff predates the current president and the previous one, Bill.

And you ought to know better than to be distracted by celebrities and headline seeking pols.

Branding the environmental movement by the big names that leap out from the millions of others is a rhetorical stroke, but in terms of reality, it's nothing. Stop wasting our time with it.

It doesn't matter who's in the white house, or who's name is on the campaign.

The US and, increasingly, the developed world have been consuming finite resources and producing garbage and redundant stuff without regard for the consequence, and that has ramifications at both ends of the spectrum--both the raw material side and the waste side.

We will run out of oil eventually. When that happens, we'll have even more volume of waste, including plastic, contaminating the world.

That gigantic swirl of plastic debris floating in the pacific is not a Democrat or Republican idea. It's there. We all made it. It's just one visible example of our failure to restrain ourselves, to actually be conservative.

We also have something like 15,000 vacant, abandoned houses in Cleveland alone, worth less than zero in market terms. We have those because we continued to build more and more houses without dealing with what is effectively waste. Cities all over the midwest and northeast have the same kind of waste. A fiscal conservative would bear in mind that the public gets saddled with the cleanup of all these houses, if we care at all about the quality of the place we live. A fiscal conservative would realize that we don't have a way to clean floating plastic out of millions of square miles of ocean, and further would realize the devastating effect this could have on --say--the fishing industry.

Did your mother teach you to clean up after yourself?

And did she tell you not to take more food than you could eat at dinner time, in order to avoid scraping the uneaten piles into the garbage?

These are things that most of our mothers taught us, and we need to practice them on a national scale.

It would be nice if as a society we would not waste but our society is all about bigger and better and always buying new. Who cares if your tv works fine, you need a new one, why drive a car thats 4 years old when you can buy a new one. It amazes me the things that get tossed out and the waste I see around me. And yes this isn't about being a republican or a democrat it's about doing what is best for this world.

If any teachers shows the "Story of Stuff" to their classes then they should also show the crituiqe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5uJgG05xUY

Dont' hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

Bill I will still continue to teach my children to conserve and not to be mass consumers. We will buy used care and shop at thrifts stores and buy only what we need. We will do the responsible thing and if you choose not to then so be it. I just want my children to learn that their are more important things in this life than material goods, after all that is one of the big things we learn when we go to our ultra conservative church every week. After all when we leave this life all our stuff stays here. So consume, consume, consume if you want but me and my family will try to leave as little of an impact on the physical earth as we can.

One thing that confuses me, who exactly does it harm when people try to live a responsible life and not waste, waste, waste?

Danielle,

it's all really confusing.

There are some people who think they are conservative, and they think you've got to live within your means, and so does the government, but when that idea gets applied to consumer habits, they're offended.


I was hoping that so-called critique of the Stuff video would be serious, but when the guy told us "efficiency" somehow negates the concept of "finite," I just started to laugh.

It seems as if whoever made the critique got all worked up because The Story of Stuff spoke to him on his own level, and he feared that the other nine year-olds of a different political persuasion might understand the concept "finite."

If I have a gallon of gas, and drive a car that gets 30 miles per gallon, and you have a gallon of gas and a car that gets 25 miles per gallon, my car is more efficient. I will run out of gas five miles after you. My gallon gets me a little farther, but it's still finite.

Further, he seems to think that just because microchips are getting smaller, everything is just so much more efficient. But that doesn't reconcile with the mileage our cars have gotten for the past 30 years, or with the SUV craze.

I really started to roll on the floor when the guy started to question the size of corporations vs. the size of government, found that the information was presented accurately, and then resorted to calling it "a meaningless statistic."

I only heard about this video, hence my dredging up of a thread that is 4 months old. I'd like to thank Danielle for pointing me in this direction.

Danielle Masters wrote:One thing that confuses me, who exactly does it harm when people try to live a responsible life and not waste, waste, waste?

Preface: I have not watched the entire 20 minutes of the video. I plan to do so today. Once I have done that, I plan to return and post my thoughts.

Danielle,
From what I have seen of the video, my problem is not the overall message. Living responsibly is very important.
My problem is with the method used to present the message.

What method are you opposed to? That is it short and catchy? The use of animation?

It's a good talking piece. It's good for our kids to be presented with information of all kinds. Parents need to talk with their kids, find out what they are being taught. No matter what you political idealization is talking to your kids about what they are learning and what their thoughts are is an important part of being a good parent.