Qed

Populate or perish? – Crikey

Interesting comments…you might notice that of the dozen posted so far those that seem to think the ACF and the rationale of the article represent an affront to humanity do not actually discuss the issues raised by the writer, ie carbon pollution, water availability and land use. Rather they focus on the notion that growth is inevitable and part of our human nature which is hardly the point. At some stage the physical limits will come into play and at some other point some of the hypothetical constraints, such as unlimited growth in a finite world, will also manifest themselves.

The debate about human population growth must be discussed but it is so entrenched in the dominant orthodoxy that its proponents can simply duck the issues and resort to unassailable rhetoric. Last time I looked there wasn’t a spare Earth that we can easily move to…

Populate or perish? – Crikey.

The Press Association: Britons ‘waste £52bn on gadgets’

This story arrived in my inbox yesterday and like all good headlines it did grab my attention but the more I read the story and similar related ones doing the rounds the more curious I have become about the source and its methodology.

The source of the story seems to be a British based magazine called Stuff. Stuff is apparently a “mens” magazine which is code for a magazine which will frequently pander to sexual appetites of men in a softly pornographic way as this collection of google images illustrates. Now being a men’s mag shouldn’t count heavily against Stuff but it does raise a question over its methods and since it appears to be the source of the story about eWaste I am inclined to think that the story is doing the rounds as a form of indirect marketing driven by connections between the Haymarket media company and other media enterprises in the UK.

The fact that Haymarket (the parent company that makes Stuff) is apparently owned in part by Michael Heseltine the one time British conservative politician and now Baron in the UK makes the Stuff story a bit more interesting. Here we have a suite of glossy men’s mags bombarding readers with rave reviews for the latest technological gadgets which makes money from deals with advertisers (usually the makers of said gadgets or related services) gently chastising its market for the amount of eWaste the process creates presided over by a man, who we can safely say, knows absolutely no financial hardship and suffers not from the pangs of unrequited consumerism but instead enjoys a powerful position in the British establishment.

The motivation appears to be whatever sells works and guilt is a close companion to sex so the two combined should be a winner for the future Stuff however, looking at the UK’s Telegraph site the first line in their story discloses an immediate fallacy in the claim. It’s not that fifty two billion pounds of new gadget promptly wind up in the UK trash can every year, rather it is a somewhat lesser observation that -

the average Briton only uses half of the functions available on their gadgets

So what can we expect now the news has broken that the good people of Britain are frittering away their hard earned wages on gadgets they don’t use? Well a publicly funded education campaign is one possibility, the sort paid for by taxpayers and run by private consultants that buys up expensive media space in magazines like Stuff or perhaps, a public declaration by Michael Heseltine admonishing the great unwashed for their wasteful ways is another possibility. Are we likely to see a concerted media exploration into the morality of consumerism or a huge public outcry about the waste of resources? I think I will leave the answer to your imagination…

The Press Association: Britons ‘waste £52bn on gadgets’.