Word: buying
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...without projects can entertain, preach and irritate - sometimes all at once. They can attract participants and lose them too. Since September, more than 130 people have joined Seattle clotheshorse Sally Bjornsen on her yearlong quest not to buy a single garment other than underwear. But in March, Bjornsen wrote a post about how two fellow self-deprivers had officially given up and how she wished they would tell her their reasons for doing so. "Why not just cheat and then recommit? Why flat out just call it quits?" one commenter asked. "Was it too hard? Too silly...
Sometimes self-deprivers adopt rules that turn out to be not only impractical but counterproductive. Rachel Kesel, a conservationist in San Francisco, has blogged since 2006 about living according to the Compact, a group with more than 10,000 members on Yahoo! who promise to buy nothing new other than food and medicine. But Kesel's work involves long days in the woods battling invasive species, and trying to get by in secondhand clothes meant that she was often pulling weeds in pants that had more holes than thread. Now Kesel begrudgingly buys new, highly durable gear, though only when...
...Obama. And he is sure to face ferocious opposition from the right and left given his confusing opposition to the new federal health care law, which is strikingly similar to the measure he signed as Massachusetts governor (among other analogous items, the statewide plan included a requirement that individuals buy health insurance...
...least for as long as I've had my iPod Touch. I love iPods, and got the Touch in early 2009 (even though, for some psycho-consumerist reason, I've refused to buy an iPhone). I love the Touch's handiness and the fact that, beyond carrying my entire iTunes library of everything from Rachmaninoff to Lady Gaga, it also has the neat Amazon Kindle app that lets me upload War and Peace (or whatever book in my library I'm reading) and take it with me - palm-sized and backlit...
...Rather than letting the unknowns paralyze us, Ackerman suggests looking at the potential costs of climate change differently. "You don't buy fire insurance on your house because you think it's going to burn down, but because you're not completely sure that it won't," he says. He says about 3% of per capita income is what is needed to protect against climate change: the amount people typically spend on insurance. We could think of it as collective property - or life - insurance...