fluffy stuff, tar as food, and new car consumption
Today I learned that if I run the dryer all day on air fluff, having the house pressurizer running doesn't heat the house up so much because a lot of the hot air gets blown out the dryer vent.
In other news, there's a bacteria that lives in the La Brea tar pits that eats petroleum and releases methane. I read a novel about something like that once, so science fiction comes to life, but hopefully with better reviews.
Also, it says here that people like to get a new car every four years. If everybody did that, and the government stepped in, we could all be in much more efficient cars in something like five years, except those of us who were taught by example to drive cars at least until they're old enough to vote. So actually our car is from the early 1980s, when people still cared about fuel efficiency, so I still don't see why we need a new car.
In other news, there's a bacteria that lives in the La Brea tar pits that eats petroleum and releases methane. I read a novel about something like that once, so science fiction comes to life, but hopefully with better reviews.
Also, it says here that people like to get a new car every four years. If everybody did that, and the government stepped in, we could all be in much more efficient cars in something like five years, except those of us who were taught by example to drive cars at least until they're old enough to vote. So actually our car is from the early 1980s, when people still cared about fuel efficiency, so I still don't see why we need a new car.
posted by missmolly at 9:09 PM
2 Comments:
That's interesting that they (a Chicago paper) would say that, because that whole concept (planned obsolecence) is so much a part of the ugly past that people associated with American cars for so long, and I would be thinking that they would be trying to put it behind them.
There is really quite a story behind 'planned obsolescence' and it tells you a LOT about how we got into the current mess we are in and who is really responsible for it.
I heard this from the editor in chief of one of the most reputable advertising magazines in the country (and world) so it's an authoritative account.
In the early to mid 30s, during the Great Depression, this country came very close to violent revolution. This part of our history has been almost forgotten. Basically, FDR saved us from a bloodbath, and his "New Deal" was literally that, an implicit social contract to prevent real, bloody warfare between the rich and poor. In 1934, we were weeks away from a real nightmare which would have resulted in fascism or communism (which often follows fascism)
Both forms of totalitarianism rely on a process of atomization that breaks down all nongovernmental and noncorporate support networks and pits each person, alone against the state (communism) or state-corporate (fascism) machine.
We came very close to that and indeed, the corporate leaders of America attempted a fascist coup in 1934 (I think) that was only defeated because the man - a military general, they had picked to serve as their puppet President had the moral courage to rat them out. We also came close to revolution in the streets.
The Depression was slow in ending, even with the New Deal, but then events in Europe put the country on a war footing which diverted the nations attention into what was in essence a fight for survival between democracy and totalitarianism for many years. (However, many of America's corporate leaders, including our current President's grandfather, Prescott Bush, hedged their bets by supporting both the US and Hitler, not something that is widely known.. Actually, the Prescott Bush story is particularly disturbing...)
But I am getting way off my point... Planned obsolescence, conspicuous overconsumption, affluenza, etc. Sorry..
Basically, as World War II was drawing to a close, and millions of servicemen were returning home to both the US and Great Britian, there was a tremendous fear that there would not be enough jobs or housing to employ and house them and there would be massive social unrest. Of course, this is when millions of women and nonwhite workers lost the often good jobs - and health insurance (lowering the US's wartime death rate much more than deaths in the war raised it!) that had sustained them during the war years so that returning GIs could take them.
So the word went out that the US was to maintain the wartime economies of scale at all cost..even though that required businesses to make shoddy goods.. that would break in just a few years and be replaced.
So a secret committee was set up to create a policy that would ensure a state of affairs in which people would not remember the Depression in the recent past and start saving too much money, because that would mean they were spending less on things they didn't need. The campaign centered on a concept called conspicuous consumption, and basically, the manufacturers of consumer goods were urged to make cheap, disposable, STYLISTIC goods (whose value was based on cosmetic changes and which also often fell apart after just a few years)
The whole aggressive marketin of the 'model year' in cars and 'fashion seasons' in clothes was part of that. Which isn't by any means all bad, IMO, except as it demanded in some cases, shoddy manufacturing practices that produced intentionally cheap, nondurable products which were often marketed using a 'good better best' technique. The people who bought the cheaper goods were made to feel inferior. This is also when an impossible to attain slimness and unrelistic youthful look was marketed to women, in particular.
Businesses were (are) also under a lot of pressure to only hire young people in nonexecutive positions that involve public contact.
Lots of other things were happening too, including the buying up of mass transit systems all around the country by a consortium controlled by the automobile, petroleum and car companies, and their being deliberately allowed to fall into disrepair and eventual dismantlement. Easy credit was a big part of this. People who could not get credit fell behind.
There was also a not so subtle propaganda campaign to convince millions of urban dwellers to take out mortgage loans, move to the suburbs, stop riding 'old fashioned' public transportation, and switch to cars, preferably one car one person, that they would replace every four years, staying permanenently in debt. The new cities often were built, INTENTIONALLY, without sidewalks. Old city centers with their parks and FREE public spaces were deserted by the new middle class, and the new public spaces were controlled and did not support free speech. (Of course, many cities now are being forced by rising oil prices to buy up land now WITH TAXPAYER DOLLARS to rebuild the same light rail systems that they dismantled 30 or 40 years ago)
Also, public airwaves were sold to the highest bidder, to be replaced by private satellite stations and cable networks that only serve the affluent and which are not subject to any rules as to community-based content. This is eliminating the public commons which is at the very core of democracy, and replacing it with a pay for access monoculture of corporate 'free speech' (corporations are seen as people, legally, and in fact in Hong Kong, which has recently received awards for its 'freedom' corporations even have the right to vote, and their votes are weighed over the votes of people.)
There was also a push to start insurance companies which would give people the illusion fo financial security they would need before they would be willing to spend money freely. Real insurance programs like Social Security were deliberately deemphasized and raided for money which was used to fund campaigns to abolish them.
Of course, in another twenty years, thanks to Moore's Law, at least fifty or sixty percent of working people will have been replaced by cheap and ultra-reliable tasks-specific automation in various forms, so people really DO need to be saving LOTS of money now in preparation for the day to come when they wont be able to find jobs at any wage, but NOBODY is talking about that.
Its not a bad thing, as it means businesses will do much more with less, which means that they will be more and more profitable and rely less and less on people for the supply side.. (They will of course, still need consumers, who will need money to buy anything.. where will they get that without jobs?)
In an ideal world, people everywhere would theoretically be freed from doing often boring, repetitive jobs, and then have other structures of their choosing to replace that time, with say, a renewed emphasis on learning and things like science, art, community service, space exploration, etc.
In reality, what we could easily have is another global Depression and a war started by the fearful power elite to get rid of all the 'excess people' (historically, that is what has happened in times like these when global, international elites feel threatened. They pretend to fight each other with 'their' people - their property, as they see it, as cannon fodder.)
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