I watched the movie High Fidelity the other day. One of the main theme is the main character, Rob Gordon, creating top five lists. Mainly in the form of mixtapes. For Rob, the creation of mixtapes is a great art, and probably the one interest that fuels his burning music interest the most. And his interest in music is huge – he’s the owner of a record store, DJ and his apartment is filled with records, presumably legally purchased.
Now, even though High Fidelity is fiction, there is something very real behind the stereotype. Statistics has shown that the people filesharing music are also, on average, spending more money on cultural experiences (music, movies) than people not filesharing.
Creating mixtapes is still legal, unless you have to break some sort of DRM protection to make them, but giving them away is not in most countries, as in Sweden where I live. Apparently, the media industry seems to think it’s a good idea criminalizing a behavior that’s fueling some of their best customers interest in their products.
Anyone wondering what could possibly be the source of the record industry’s declining sales? Maybe their best customers don’t like being treated as criminals, and thus prefer not giving their money to the ones lobbying against them?
There’s been a lot of debate about the consequences of increased ethanol consumption lately. First, this is a problem that is very real, anyone who thought ethanol was a miracle drug against climate change better look again. But I would like to say that it’s more of a problem with our overall energy consumption than a specific ethanol problem. We seem to forget about the huge problems with oil, main one being that we now annually consume an amount of oil that takes 10,000 years to create in nature.
That’s right, the current oil ratio is about 1:10,000.
Or we could say that a sustainable consumption of oil would be 0,01% of the current.
However we say it, it’s clear that our transports are consuming way to much energy. People used to think that there were unlimited natural resources in the world, and for the most of human history that’s been virtually true. It’s not until maybe the last hundred or so years that our ecological footprint has been too big for the planet. Unfortunately, many people seem not to have taken notice. Thus, we get a discussion about ethanol as though it was a new problem, not the same one all over.
Saving the planet could be a lot easier that one might think. According to British environmentalist Norman Myers, about $1.45 trillion is annually spent on “perverse subsidies” (1998). That’s $1.45*10^12 or $1,450,000,000,000 spent on subsidies that damages the environment and indirectly (or sometimes very directly) hurts the economy.
There should be no dubt that these money, spent in a sustainable way, could make a world of difference. As are they today, only in the wrong direction. They are the reason our seas are being emptied on fish, food production in poor countries is destroyed and gasoline in the US is cheaper than bottled water.
PS. James Martin claims that Norman Myers has come up with a figure of about $2 trillion annually. All I could find was the one above from 1998, presenting about $500 billion less than James Martin. If anyone can find a more recent study, that would be helpful.
In the darkest and coldest months of the year, there’s a virus spreading. Slight headache? Feeling of anxiety? Well, you might not be suffering from a hangover since new years eve after all. You may just as well have caught the Affluenza virus, peaking in december.
At the moment I#m taking a rest from reading the book “Affluenza – The All-Consuming Epidemic”, second edition. (New and Improved, just like in the ads). I’m wondering about where our high-tech society is really carrying us. I can see a pattern of corporate owned technology (protected by patents, just to be safe) designed to push our consumtion closer to, or even past, our limits. A credit card mayhem is wrecking havoc, creating the slave labour of the 21st century.
“A powerful virus has infected American society, threatening our wallets, our friendships, our families, our communities, and our environment. We call the virus Affluenza. And because the United States has become the economic model for most of the world, the virus is now loose on every continent”
You are susceptible to the affluenza virus; do you want to step out of the hamster wheel? (Yes / No / Cancel)
Update: Valuable treasures can sometimes be found at Pirate Bay, if nowhere else.
