Peak Oil and Population reduction

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Desks and other furniture have short term obsolescence? What exactly are you thinking of as being "obsolescent in short order"?

And even if an item IS likely to be of short lifespan, why must these things be made from a resource we could use more efficiently elsewhere?

Just about anything electronic. Are you playing your 8 track tapes lately?

ruveyn

Occasionally, on days when I feel nostalgic and also I pull out the Pioneer Laser Disk Player

Do you load your 8 inch floppy disk into your computer frequently?

ruveyn

That sounds vaguely like a sexual innuendo, but perhaps my mind is in the gutter today
Mostly, as when I was a kid, I would play Frisbee with those things. Goggles recommended

I have vinyl that still plays. I have gramaphone records that still play. I lost 60gig of mp3s on a drive only two years old. Some electronics are designed to die. If it wasn't for the shitty jacks, I would have about 500gig of mp3players I could still use.

I wasn't referring to electronics in the first place though.

Were over-dependent on it. They even use petroleum to make artificial fertilizers, when really there's enough human s**t from waste treatment plants to meet the demand if treated and sanitized in the proper way first. Really there's a lot of reasons to find another fuel source than just climate change. A lot of people are convinced its a hoax, but its not completely off the table for me since so many climatologists argue that there's a human cause behind it with all the Carbon, that's been sequestered in the earths crust for billions of years, that's very rapidly being reintroduced into the atmosphere.

Anyway, there's other reasons. There's this huge pile of plastic the size of Texas floating in the middle of the Pacific too. Plastics, all bi-product of petroleum, cant be broken down by bacteria. Its completely alien to the whole biological history of the planet, and its carcinogenic. I don't think that's any good for the food chain.

Because oil is an energy source fairly difficult to obtain, and because the engines that run on it create a virtual monopoly for the suppliers since it can't run on anything else, you can't boycott it. Its a very non-democratic form of energy, and it causes a lot of tensions in the world, because the resources keep dwindling and the oil companies have to, more and more, rely on these Arab and African dictatorships and political hot beds that nobody really cared about 60 years ago.

Just for the fact were supporting oppressive, absolute monarchies to get our oil supply, I'd much rather drive an electric car. You can buy domestic energy from the grid, it would create more demand for the building of energy plants at home, and if you, for example, didn't like nuclear or coal, you could buy energy from a renewable source, like solar or wind, to power up your car. Oil is stupid, its out dated, and its time to move on to something better.

Processing would most likely also expend oil.

So would I. Unfortunately the most you can go on a battery is 150 to 200 miles and there is no nationwide distribution of fast charge electric power. One cannot (as yet) "fill up" with electric power and quickly be on the way.

ruveyn

And this would be bad news for someone like me where I may need to be able to evacuate within a few days' notice and travel much more than 200 miles.

Blast from the Plast topic

Plastific Ocean Waste Water Mismanagement <<<Link

If that clump of trash could be harvested and recycled!! !! !!

Buggy whips are still used today and if it can be made to last 100 years it means that for 100 years more than one person did not have to buy more than that 1.

As for electronics their obsolescence is inevitable due to tech advances however even things that are rapidly obsolete like computers can and should be made to both last an expected technological timeline (aka an 8 yr old computer still runs most work related programs just not graphics and games..but todays system components are planned to break down in just 3 years or so) and to be easy to recycle.

With hi-tech items that have a short obsolescence factor, a degree of built in obsolescence is required to provide an incentive to purchase "new and improved" items. If people had to may a substantial investment in an item that would last "forever" (i.e. a long time) they would be less inclined to dispose of it and buy a newer and better item. Computers which are ten years old are slower and clunkier than there newer item. That is because the speed of the electronics doubles every 2 to 4 years.

ruveyn

This is the point. Built-in obsolescence forces us to waste valuable resources on replacement goods, simply to drive profits. The replacements are often no "better" than the original. They simply contain elements that could have been in the precious release, but were left out in order to drive this cycle.

(How much do you think they will charge for the Iphone that a) actually has a flash for the camera and b) lets you make calls to other phones without having the signal blocked by your face? Why did the early PS3s only come with 40/60 gig drives, when PCs already came equipped with 250/500gig ones at the same time? How fast do you think the electronics are that haven't seen general release? Why do Dyson vacuum cleaners only come with one "revolutionary new feature" in each release? Are we seriously to believe that the designer sits there and ONLY thinks of one concept at a time? Dual cyclone AND a ball-joint? Ridiculous, that would cut our profits in half.)

I say that we should expand into space while we still can.