Now you can pay for the convenience of water!

This is now the second time in a few months that I've gotten the following piece of junk mail: This letter is advertising a promotion in which, for thirty-two dollars a month and up, I can pay to have bottled water delivered to my door. What a brilliant idea! How could you beat that for convenience? Oh, that's right . . . Instead of paying for Poland Spring water at the rate of about $1.64 per gallon, I could get clean, fresh, drinkable water of any temperature I please straight from the tap in my kitchen. I don't know exactly how much this costs me, but I can say with complete confidence that it's a lot less than a dollar per gallon. Clearly, Poland Spring doesn't want you to think too hard about the economics of this. However, for the environmentally conscious consumer, this mailing also has a page touting their green credentials: Bottled Water Junk Mail Recycling 900,000 bottles and keeping 1.8 million pounds of plastic out of landfills is certainly very impressive. But, the skeptic in me has to ask, wouldn't it be much better for people to just use their perfectly good existing public infrastructure for drinking water, and not have to manufacture all that plastic in the first place? The bottled-water industry is one of the great triumphs of modern marketing: creating demand for a product for which there's absolutely no genuine need, selling at exorbitant cost a substance which any person in the Western world can obtain virtually for free. Even more absurd, despite its imagery of glaciers and mountain springs, most bottled water comes from municipal sources - i.e., the same water you get from your tap anyway. What bottled water really represents is almost pure profit for the beverage conglomerates that sell it, and unnecessary environmental harm caused by the expenditure of fossil fuels needed to manufacture, pack and ship it (not to mention sending out all this junk mail touting it). It's no healthier than the water that comes from the tap in your house. It doesn't even taste better. What on earth could convince a person to pay money for a scheme as ridiculous as this?

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Suggestion for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Hire real script writers.

My family doesn't go to many movies at theaters. In our experience, modern movie theater audiences tend to be far too talkative during the shows and prices are not cheap. Netflix is the default option for my family. I made an exception for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009). On Friday, I had heard an director interviewed on NPR. She indicated that the producers had to work hard to earn the trust of those who run the various Smithsonian Museums, the setting for the movie. Plus the movie featured Robin Williams and other notable actors. Thus, I gathered up my willing daughters (aged 8 and 10) and assumed that even though this was a movie geared for kids, there was a decent chance that it would have some take-home value. I was sorely disappointed. The problem is that this movie, despite the almost-constant high-quality special effects, had no meaningful plot and no meaningful resolution, even for someone willing spend disbelief for the duration. I was already dissatisfied with the movie while the credits ran, but now that I have had further chance to consider the work both as a parent and a member of the audience, I'd have to say that I'm all the more disappointed. Those special effects constituted eye-popping pyrotechnics, but it's an old story for so many American movies: the producers forgot to hire a real script writer. Thus, the movie was merely one damned thing after another, with Ben Stiller and company dashing here and there, in a wacky and barely-connected series of scenes that continually threatening to break out into needless violence. What especially aggravated me is that the attention-deficit afflicted characters made almost no effort to think things through, quite a feat for 105 minutes. There was no sustained effort at problem solving, but only a constant need to drop buckets of wise-cracks and put-downs and to keep on the movie moving--to keep doing something, anything. This movie exemplifies one of the most prominent social illusions: that movement is necessarily progress. Here's my bottom line: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian presents a collection of paper-thin characters running amok, somehow not getting each other killed. Most notable is the prominent appearance of the character of heroic aviator Amelia Earhart (played by the fetching Amy Adams), who was quickly reduced to a woman who became all-too-willing to take orders from a numbskull ("Larry," played by Stiller) while maintaining her schoolgirl crush on him for most of the movie's 105 minutes. This movie must have cost many tens of millions of dollars to produce. Whatever it cost, the producers of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian could have spent a pittance more ($50,000??) to hire a real writer so that all of those special effects could have told some sort of story. Sheesh. [Hint: there are many good writers looking for work.] It was like the producers were concocting the scenes even as they were shooting them, even though this couldn't have been true, since big teams of computer artists had to be finessing in those dozens of special effects. What an embarrassment it must be for them to see their first-rate special effects put to such piss-poor use . . . .

Continue ReadingSuggestion for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Hire real script writers.

Businesses tricking children into thinking that brands can solve non-existent problems

I really like the message delivered by Josh Golin of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. [Note: I interviewed Josh here.] This speech was giving at the February 2008 Conference for Reclaiming Childhood From Corporate Marketers. First of all, yes, a healthy childhood lifestyle is something that is extremely difficult to commodify. That fact means that when you see commercial entities trying to convince children to buy things, it is almost certainly an attempt to convince families that there is a problem where there really isn't one. Golin states that "children are being targeted relentlessly with the lie that it is brands that will make them happy, cool, powerful and sexy." He scoffs that the problem can be addressed by allowing businesses to "self-regulate." In this speech, Josh clearly identifies some of the specific problems with allowing advertisers into the hearts and minds of children. And then he tells some stories about how people are fighting back. Here are parts II and III of Josh's speech: [more . . . ]

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Hear the story about all of our stuff

In The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard tells us that all of our "stuff" is part of a linear system that is clashing with our finite planet. Her video is extremely popular (5.5 million views) and easy to follow. Here's a short description from her site:

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

What are the main problems? We are externalizing costs, so that we are oblivious to the damages we are causing around the world when we buy so much of the stuff that we are buying. We are running out of resources. Her stats from the United States are especially troubling because we are so very much living beyond our means. We generating huge heaps of waste. We are using energy + contaminated products to promulgate toxic products and untested products. One of the highest concentrations of toxic food substances has become human breast milk. 200,000 people move from their resource-exhausted long-time communities into crowded cities, many of them slums. And consider that 99% of the stuff we run through our economic system is trash within 6 months. This is not an accident, either. It is long-time government and industry policy that we should shop and consume. We shop three to four times as much as Europeans. Which, again, leads to disposal problems. For every trash can full of waste we throw away there were 70 trash cans of waste produced to make that one can of waste. Incredible. Many DI related posts can be found here. Further, listen to Daniel Goleman's description of the basic problem and the solution in his interview with Daniel Goleman.

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What’s the count?

What's the count? Image by Erich Vieth No, not the balls and strikes! I'm talking about the number of advertisements you'll find in a baseball stadium (click on the image for a much bigger and clearer image). I was recently invited to go to a Cardinal baseball game for a work function. I was amazed at the number of ads. There had to be more than 100 large ads visible from the seats. And I'm only including static ads, not the videos they pump out on the big screens.

Continue ReadingWhat’s the count?