Buying Used Doesn't Save Resources
December 29, 2009
I keep seeing articles talking about how buying used conserves natural resources. This simply isn't true. The only way to conserve natural resources is to build fewer items, or to find a way to build each item using fewer resources (miniaturization has helped with this in electronics). But, contrary to what seems to be popular belief, buying a used car doesn't prevent Ford from building a new one. Almost certainly, the reason someone sold you that used car is so he could buy a brand new one with which to replace it. Ford still built another car, but sold it to him instead. The number of new cars being built is directly proportional to the rate at which they stop working. Cars are expensive, and they tend to stay in service as long as possible. Sure, you may not want to drive a ten-year-old car, but someone with less money than you doesn't mind, and so he'll buy it from you when you no longer want it. Cars aren't being thrown in landfills to be replaced with new ones while they're still functional -- they move slowly down the economic ladder until they're no longer serviceable. Brand new cars are built and injected into the higher levels of this ladder, but people only buy these cars because their cars have in turn been sold down the ladder, ad infinitum, until people at the bottom are replacing cars that no longer run. The new car market absolutely depends on the used car market, and people wouldn't buy nearly so many new cars if they couldn't sell their old ones.
If what you want to do is prevent wasted resources, here are some more effective options:
- Stop driving. There are as many cars on the road as there are people who want to drive them. You can reduce that number by one.
- Don't crash your car. Totalling your car requires a whole new one to be built.
- Take a car that was about to head to the scrapyard and refurbish it. Extending the life of a car keeps it from needing so many replacements.
Buying used does nothing to reduce resource usage, this factor is already built into the system. This is especially true for cars, but it's mostly true of everything. Sure, you can find exceptions, but they're just that -- exceptions.
Avatar (Spoilers)
December 26, 2009
I enjoyed the movie, but lots of the plot was somewhat unbelievable. For instance, the communication mechanism with the avatars themselves seemed quite handwavy. Also, I can imagine in this day and age a single photo of a private security company shooting native people at a potential oil field making it to the newspapers would shut the entire operation down. Based, on what I've seen, this is something that people are becoming more concerned with over time, not less. You can imagine that if the earth had been bulldozed as the movie implied, its people would be more conscious than ever of the dangers of damaging an ecosystem.
The plot aside, the movie is worth watching just for the scenes of the na'vi running through the forest. The graphics team did a fantastic job creating a new world. It definitely is the most spectacular movie I've ever seen in a purely visual sense. I actually experienced vertigo during one scene -- I felt like I was falling with the main character, and that says a lot because I've never felt that before at any movie. It definitely worth going to see on the big screen.
"Do What You Love" as a Pyramid Scheme
December 21, 2009
"Do what you love" is repeated all over the internet lately by bloggers and "personal development gurus" and in general by people who's profession is traveling to exotic locations and updating a website. The primary focus of these web sites is simply to repeat "do what you love" and show how the author's life is awesome -- after all, he just flew to Dubai from Thailand, how could it be anything but awesome? These sites get lots of readers, and the appeal is obvious -- lots of people want to get paid to wander around the world telling others how awesome it is. Really though, there's only so much market for this. You can only read so many blogs. As more and more people jump on the traveling blogger bandwagon, will we eventually see the travel blog count reach its critical mass, where the traffic for any particular blog isn't enough to sustain its author? Then all these people talking about "doing what you love" will have to pick a country, probably the one they started in, and sit down and get a real job where they actually build things or provide services to people. Will these jobs entail things that these authors love doing? Somehow I doubt it, for most of them. Or maybe they can all just jump to "social marketing" and get people to pay them to talk about themselves on Twitter.
Anti-Consumerism and the Fall of American Manufacturing
December 20, 2009
I wonder if it's become easier for Americans to have an anti-consumerist bias in recent years as most our manufacturing industry has moved overseas. The idea that "I don't need so much stuff" might be easier to hold now that all that stuff is coming from China and Southeast Asia rather than from our own backyards. What about when it was Schwinn bicycles and Kenmore appliances and GM automobiles, all built right here in the USA? A mass rejection of consumerism at that point in time would have been putting all our neighbors out of work. This isn't to say that there's a current "mass rejection" of consumerism happening in America, but there's at least a few people holding that viewpoint, myself included.