Home » Archive

Articles tagged with: consumerism

Americas, Asia, COMMENT, Europe, INNOVATION, Our World »

COMMENT, Australia, USA, UK – This is a reminder that the world has changed.
Increasingly we live in a consumerist society, obsessed with consumption of the cheap, short term and disposable.
This will end eventually, because quite simply cheap consumption, especially plastic, is based on cheap oil. And cheap labor. And shifting pollution to some one else’s backyard.
So that cheap consumerism will end. Corporations that create polluting products will learn it can’t continue.
I mean what are we doing?
Irrespective of whether you, dear reader, believe in global warming, it has been scientifically, logically, …

Americas, Business & Commerce, COMMENT, Human Infrastructure »

SATIRE, Global – I have noticed a new fad in offices I have been visiting lately.

Need to look like you’re into your job?
Want to look like you care?
Want to disguise the fact you’re lazy?
That a chimpanzee could do your job?

Americas, Asia, COMMENT, INNOVATION, Our World »

COMMENT, Global – Often that is just too much information. Cell phone users in public often have little discretion.
Cell phones on trains.
Cell phones (or mobiles if you prefer) in restaurants.
Famously, I once heard a man chatting up a woman in a toilet cubicle with the door closed at a cinema. I first thought she was in there with him, then he came out holding a phone.
I wonder what she thought of the loud ‘flush’?
The Market Opportunity for Quiet
Expect a pendulum swing back to quiet and focus.
In the meantime expect a …

ANALYSIS, Americas, Asia, Emerging, INNOVATION, Innovation Economics, Our World »

ANALYSIS, Global — Our town, our world, is drowning under a flood of cheap sub-standard products. Products that we can and did once live without.
This is because our modernist global economic system in English-speaking countries largely runs on the manufacture and mass consumption of cheap low-priced goods made from oil-based plastics.
Think about that for a second. What really happens?
The following chain of events was loosely based on media reports of the China pet food story, Fisher Price scandal, and recent other events.
Here is one average scenario:
A company in your city …

Americas, Asia, Cultural Inspiration, Environment, Europe, INNOVATION »

ANALYSIS — Innovation (a positive social change) is rare. Innovation is needed in environmental issues, not reliance on just scientific solutions.
This means, governments, business, people and their communities need to act. And to varying degrees each of them are.
The Big Innovation Guerrilla/Gorilla in the Room – Our Environment
Your beliefs on Climate Change don’t matter, nor mine. Our environment is the issue.
A reasonable person would agree beyond reasonable doubt that there is evidence of harm to human and animal life attributable to environmental damage.
That is the standard of proof in …