The story of stuff

Rather good. Really Really good. Watch it all the end..

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

best fact is 99% of stuff made isn't in service 6 months from the production date.

78% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

RossD wrote: 78% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

heard that at 90% and 99% and others as well..

Thats funny.

and you didn't watch it.. I expected more.

edit: forgot to mention that I really liked the way this talks about our rampant consumerism.. which is something I think we all can agree is killing us.

George Carlin on Stuff

Actually this is just a place for my stuff, ya know? That's all, a little place for my stuff. That's all I want, that's all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table, everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there. That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time.

A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you're taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody's got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff. And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn't want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They never bother with that crap you're saving. All they want is the shiny stuff. That's what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get...more stuff!

Sometimes you gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff anymore. Did you ever notice when you go to somebody else's house, you never quite feel a hundred percent at home? You know why? No room for your stuff. Somebody else's stuff is all over the goddamn place! And if you stay overnight, unexpectedly, they give you a little bedroom to sleep in. Bedroom they haven't used in about eleven years. Someone died in it, eleven years ago. And they haven't moved any of his stuff! Right next to the bed there's usually a dresser or a bureau of some kind, and there's NO ROOM for your stuff on it. Somebody else's E36 M3 is on the dresser.

Have you noticed that their stuff is E36 M3 and your E36 M3 is stuff? God! And you say, "Get that E36 M3 offa there and let me put my stuff down!"

Sometimes you leave your house to go on vacation. And you gotta take some of your stuff with you. Gotta take about two big suitcases full of stuff, when you go on vacation. You gotta take a smaller version of your house. It's the second version of your stuff. And you're gonna fly all the way to Honolulu. Gonna go across the continent, across half an ocean to Honolulu. You get down to the hotel room in Honolulu and you open up your suitcase and you put away all your stuff. "Here's a place here, put a little bit of stuff there, put some stuff here, put some stuff--you put your stuff there, I'll put some stuff--here's another place for stuff, look at this, I'll put some stuff here..." And even though you're far away from home, you start to get used to it, you start to feel okay, because after all, you do have some of your stuff with you. That's when your friend calls up from Maui, and says, "Hey, why don'tchya come over to Maui for the weekend and spend a couple of nights over here."

Oh, no! Now what do I pack? Right, you've gotta pack an even SMALLER version of your stuff. The third version of your house. Just enough stuff to take to Maui for a coupla days. You get over to Maui--I mean you're really getting extended now, when you think about it. You got stuff ALL the way back on the mainland, you got stuff on another island, you got stuff on this island. I mean, supply lines are getting longer and harder to maintain. You get over to your friend's house on Maui and he gives you a little place to sleep, a little bed right next to his windowsill or something. You put some of your stuff up there. You put your stuff up there. You got your Visine, you got your nail clippers, and you put everything up. It takes about an hour and a half, but after a while you finally feel okay, say, "All right, I got my nail clippers, I must be okay." That's when your friend says, "Aaaaay, I think tonight we'll go over the other side of the island, visit a pal of mine and maybe stay over."

Aww, no. NOW what do you pack? Right--you gotta pack an even SMALLER version of your stuff. The fourth version of your house. Only the stuff you know you're gonna need. Money, keys, comb, wallet, lighter, hanky, pen, smokes, rubber and change. Well, only the stuff you HOPE you're gonna need.

My grandma always said, "posessions will possess you" and she was right. I just sold tons of crap I didn't use a great deal when I sold my house. We were moving from a house to an apartment. It was liberating, but it was astonishing that I had collected all that lightly used crap in such a short period of time.

ignorant wrote: best fact is 99% of stuff made isn't in service 6 months from the production date.

well maybe people should make better stuff, then it wouldn't be E36 M3.

I like old stuff. It's good E36M3. Like the 100 year-old bottle jack that still lifts cars every week. Or the 60+ year old wrenches that still work on bolts. Or the gasp 26 year-old TAPE DECK in my Mazda RX-7 that still works! I rock that Dio tape

New stuff sucks. That's why I have a PS2 and not a 3, why my computer is a 2002 that I rebuilt twice, why I still wear t-shirts I had in the mid-90's, and why the most used (and abused) tool in my box is on it's 3rd Generation of owner.

They don't make em like they used to.

Man, all my E36 M3's more than 6 months old! I need more stuff!

QUICK, EVIL CONSUMERS! BURN YOUR COMPUTERS AND TV'S! Oh wait...then you can't watch the movie on how you're an evil consumer.

I liked the part about a linear system and finite resources. Makes sense. Good logic.

I stopped the video at the "It's the government's job to TAKE CARE OF US" part.

I actually started looking at the annotated script. Because a lot of their facts seemed like quite a stretch.

The first big one was their statement about how "There are less than 4% of our forests left in the United States." Apparently the resource they are citing states that "95 to 98 percent of forests in the U.S. have been logged at least once since settlement by Europeans." Wait... so 2-5% have been untouched since Europeans settled. That doesn't mean all the other forests are gone. They weren't clear cut.

Sure, I do think our society has become too consumerist, and we need to cut back on things a lot. But making wild claims saying how horrible and evil we are does not help the situation.

And on that note:

Salanis wrote: I actually started looking at the annotated script. Because a lot of their facts seemed like quite a stretch. The first big one was their statement about how "There are less than 4% of our forests left in the United States." Apparently the resource they are citing states that "95 to 98 percent of forests in the U.S. have been logged at least once since settlement by Europeans." Wait... so 2-5% have been untouched since Europeans settled. That doesn't mean all the other forests are gone. They weren't clear cut. Sure, I do think our society has become too consumerist, and we need to cut back on things a lot. But making wild claims saying how horrible and evil we are does not help the situation. And on that note:

+1. The quickest way to lose an argument is to overstate it.

I had an interesting conversation with a customer last weekend. She was abhored that our CC receipts print out on an entire sheet of paper. This is somewhat neccesary as:

A. CC receipt printers cost about $1,000, and the CC companies hit you up to buy a new one every 5-10 years, or they'll provide them "free" (the cost of the printer is worked into your fees.)

B. The card reader we use came with our POS software, and does not use a standard receipt printer. The software eliminates a lot of redundant book keeping.

Anyway, after getting a tongue lashing from the customer, I explained to her that every time I use a sheet of paper, I'm ordering more trees. Her eyes glazed over. Then I asked her what kind of gas mileage her monster SUV got. She did not have an answer. I told her I was very appreciative of her business, but does she really NEED a second home up here? How many trees did they cut down to build that home? How many trees were used in the construction of her second home? A tree had to be cut down for the moulding I used on her framed relief map that she'll hang in the second home. The map is made of plastic and will take a gazillion years to break down.

I then suggested that she GIVE me her second home. That way, I wouldn't have to drive 80 miles a day to our shop, and I could afford the $1,000 receipt printer.

Another satisfied customer.

Salanis wrote: I actually started looking at the annotated script. Because a lot of their facts seemed like quite a stretch. The first big one was their statement about how "There are less than 4% of our forests left in the United States." Apparently the resource they are citing states that "95 to 98 percent of forests in the U.S. have been logged at least once since settlement by Europeans." Wait... so 2-5% have been untouched since Europeans settled. That doesn't mean all the other forests are gone. They weren't clear cut. Sure, I do think our society has become too consumerist, and we need to cut back on things a lot. But making wild claims saying how horrible and evil we are does not help the situation.

I was going to comment on the forest thing, too- many people who come by my house seem to imply that the US is a big clear cut desert. When the realiy is that many forest that have never been cut are still only 100 years old since that's the typical frequency of major fires. And with the last 80 years of "prevent forest fires"- it's going to get a lot worse. A LOT.

The point about 99% of the stuff is out of circulation- how does that account for food? She did mention "harvest"- and the agriculture system is pretty sustainable- granted, they use chemicals, but it's a regenerating system at the heart. So I'd personally discount food items from that. And what about water? It's used immediately. So much of the consumer industry IS FOOD (and we can have a tendancy to eat too much, but that's another problem). It HAS to be consumed in 6 months, else it is waste.

The point about pollution- why do we keep downplaying the good we've done over the last 40 years? Ok, so you may not want to drink directly from the stream- it may have animal waste in it, but it's still safe. I'd say close to 90% of the fresh water is not bad. HUGE improvement, BTW.

Not to say that she doesn't have a point, especially the consumer based society we have. But at least be realistic in showing how bad it is. And be realistic in how much gets thrown away vs. first order recycling (a GRM reader speciality, if you ask me).

Am I the only one who is beginnig to really ignore any side that shows how overwhelmingly bad humans are? It makes me unhappy....

Eric

I also noticed the "70% of fisheries are operating at or beyond capacity."

Umm... a fishery operating at capacity is not a bad thing. That means it's operating at a sustainable level. The number operating beyond capacity and grossly over capacity would actually mean something.

Frankly, if you want to conserve natural habitats, give people the opportunities to responsibly use those resources. Here in California, the biggest proponents of wetland conservation is Ducks Unlimited... which is a bunch of hunters. The people who care most about the health of our rivers and river ecosystems are the commercial Salmon fishermen.

poopshovel wrote: I stopped the video at the "It's the government's job to TAKE CARE OF US" part.

What's messed up is that she 100% believes that. :(

The forest thing: the average life of a tree in this part of the country is roughly 100 years, give or take. That means that the forests pretty much renew themselves every 100 years or so. Of course, it's not all at one time.

There was a BIG push in the Forest Service a few years ago to 'restore the Eastern National Forests to their pre-European condition'. For WHAT, dammit? There was actually talk of doing so (with tax dollars of course) and then restricting access (i.e. keep out the undesireables even though they paid for the friggin' thing). Jeez. People are NUTS. I think that idea has been discarded finally.

hmmmm.. excluding food, water, cleaning supplies, expendables (toilet paper and the like)and tyres (both car and bicycle) most everything I have bought in the past year is still in use.

I just moved back to my old home town in PA and boy does it really exemplify the use and abuse of stuff.....

Girl at the pretzel stand was bragging to her friends about her new 3 series.. But.. she wanted her dad to wait and not purchase a left over cause she had to have the latest year....

ughh...

The home town now has a gap across from a starbucks on the main street... W000....

I believe that when they talk about stuff not lasting 6 months is the tons of disposable junk that most people buy every day AND the the mountain of equally disposable things that they use to make those items.. Case in point gloves on a manufacturing line for workers. Damn what a fight it is to get people to accept gloves that can be washed and reused. Noone wants them, even though they perform the same as the old gloves. They're just different.

edit: ohh yeah.. Her arguments aren't perfect, but it sure made me think about my rampant consumption....

poopshovel wrote: +1. The quickest way to lose an argument is to overstate it.

That should probably be called the Michael Moore law.

BTW, one of my personal "theorems":

The amount of "stuff" you have is directly proportional to the amount of space you have to store that "stuff".

aircooled wrote: The amount of "stuff" you have is directly proportional to the amount of space you have to store that "stuff".

nope.... see mini storage

If she listened to her friends and kept the government as a tank... we could have just blasted the corporations away instead of cleaning their shoes.

She parrots the 'humans are evil' line of the eco freak organizations. She completely ignores the advances which have come from that same 'linear system' such as the much better life expectancy for premature babies, completely dependent on technological advances.

I'm not saying she doesn't have a few points, like the one about perceived obsolescence (something that I hate and that really sticks in my craw), just that she

1) like poopshovel says, right off the bat she says the government should take care of us and that's dead wrong 2) ignores the fact that even though there's more to do that rivers etc are cleaner now than 30 years ago (She infers that we were not as evil a bunch of consumers at that time. I beg to differ. I LIVED through the 1970's. I KNOW.) 3) as noted earlier she says 99% of what's made is not used a year later and that is a gross overstatement along with the whole thing about 73 garbage cans full of waste being generated during manufacture for 1 garbage can we fill and throw out. No evil corporation would EVER stand for that kind of inefficiency 4) makes a lot of other unsubstantiated statements like the one about human breast milk which she says contains the highest concentration of evil chemicals in the food chain and then IMMEDIATELY says 'but keep breastfeeding your kids', or the bit about the tiny chip inthe computer that won't fit. Any computer nerd knows how to swap a motherboard, dammit. 5) like the average ecoweenie she bitches but offers no real, substantial solutions, just that we need to all live as she wants and then all will be perfect.

Jensenman wrote: 3) as noted earlier she says 99% of what's made is not used a year later and that is a gross overstatement along with the whole thing about 73 garbage cans full of waste being generated during manufacture for 1 garbage can we fill and throw out. No evil corporation would EVER stand for that kind of inefficiency

This is incorrect. I've worked for them and I know for a fact that one food company I worked for threw away over $1million in waste per month. 85,000 lbs a week. They didn't care cause their margins were so high on the good stuff. Infact, the VP of Ops demonized me and my fellow engineers for pointing out inefficiencies.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/pdfs/annie_leonard_footnoted_script.pdf

Theres the annotated script.. She cited all her assertions in there.

find your own data to fight this....

edit: didn't mean that to come off like a challenge.. Just to say she's got data to back up what she says.. and all you guys have is nothing a bag of nothing... with a side of internetz conjecture.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1242055 <--- Nih talking about what we don't know about all the damn chemicals in breast milk.. Maybe she's not so crackpotty afterall and you guys are just in the dark.

Interesting, and I actually watched all of it. Some of it made good sense, some of it just showed her political leanings.

We are definitely a disposable society. I can remember my grandmother saving wrapping paper at Christmas when I was a kid. Her generation saved everything. Our generation, most present company excluded, save nothing. We are a got to have the latest and greatest no matter the cost generation. I live in yuppyville South Carolina. You can bet that most of the cars 5 years or older are people who work here not live here. We have all the cutesy junk stores that the "Jonses" shop at. Not my cup of tea, but it's where the best public schools are.

I don't agree with some of her points, and some of her stats seem exaggerated. She did manage to make me think of all the disposable crap we buy. Most of it seems to be packaging. Used to be you could go to the local hardware and buy nails by the pound. Now you buy a box of them, or a little plastic package.

They sure don't build things like they used to. In some ways that is good, in others bad. I sure wouldn't want to drive a Model T to work every day. But my lathe was made in the 40s and it's a much better machine than some of the new crap I have seen.

Her biggest problem is people aren't going to pay $10.00 for her $4.99 radio just because the guy selling it to her gets medical coverage. Joe public just doesn't care. They want it now and want it as cheap as possible. How many of us have bought crap off of E-bay to save money when we could have bought it local. I know I have. We don't assume the local guy has higher overhead in labor and insurance. We just assume the local guy is stiffing us. I buy from my local hardware store to keep him in business so I don't have to deal with Slowes. But car stuff I just find it on line and hit the order button. I might need to think about that the next time I'm shopping for car crap.

Ignorant is right about the Mini Storage places. That is one of the fastest growing industries nationally.

Edit: I just reread this and realized it is kind of disjointed. Sorry

So her main thrust is we export our garbage overseas? Hell, who doesn't know that? Do you know WHY?

Short answer: we passed lots of laws here in the States aimed at cleaning things up which actually did so. Google 'Cuyahoga River fires' to see where we were in the 60's and '70's. Then compare that to today. Damn right we are better off than we were.

So as progress marched onwards the raw materials and finished goods had to come from somewhere. Couldn't do it here cheap enough, so what happened? We exported our crap overseas. Told you she was right about some things. Hell, I've said it myself on this same forum.

Some people in those countries took advantage of their culture to make themselves rich off of sweatshops etc, very similar to what began to end here with the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Google that one as well.

But now we are supposed to go to these other sovereign countries and beat their exploitative citizens into doing right by their other citizens? Isn't that a LOT like going into Iraq??? Or we just force them to jack up the salaries of these overseas workers, creating another whole Third World of linear consumers?

Be careful what she wishes for; it could happen and be worse than she ever dreamed.