which is that consumption is treated as a morally-neutral "lifestyle choice," whereby people who want to consume more should be subsidized by those who economize.

Example: I don't drive, I don't have a car, I live downtown and I walk everywhere. But I pay the same municipal taxes as everyone else while using WAY less infrastructure. (My one-kilometer walk to work causes a tiny fraction of the wear and tear on the roads that a one-kilometer drive would. I don't take up valuable space downtown storing my car. My building has sixty feet of frontage with four apartments in it, so we're each using one-quarter as much pipe and sewer and asphalt as some bungaloid in the burbs.)

But I'm paying extra to subsidize the overconsumption of land, infrastructure, resources, and energy of people who just take it for granted that they should be able to drive everywhere and park right next to the door. (You want to talk about socialism?)

Those same people find themselves getting fat because they never walk anywhere, because they chose to live in the burbs and so there's no exercise built into their daily lives. So they get fat and sick and when I have to go to the doctor, I have to wait for months because the system is clogged with people who've damaged their bodies through overconsumption.

I'm boarding a flight to Europe in the fall. I'm moving there for graduate school and will have to bring enough basic stuff to equip my life for two years. I'm allowed to bring 66lbs of luggage; if I want to bring an extra bag, I have to pay another $200 (one-way!) But someone who's 100 pounds overweight gets the same ticket as me, and gets to bring the same amount of luggage. How is that fair?

I'm not deriding fat people. What I'm saying is that our civilization is so obsessed with making sure there are no consequences for consuming too much, it ends up punishing everyone who moderates their consumption.

"Yea. I'm going to answer a semester-long Geology Seminar question in 6 seconds for a guy who probably can't spell "tectonic."

Not to mention, can't pronounce "arctic."

In my job I often have to publicly answer questions from elected officials and I know exactly what Chu was thinking:

"How do I answer this question accurately without making this guy look like a total imbecile, embarrassing him and thereby giving him reason to go out of his way to fuck with me down the road? How do I set him straight without making him lose face?"

It's been a long time since consumer products were made in such a way that they would age gracefully.

Sofas made in the past thirty years are more likely to have their springs give out and otherwise become non-functional than they are to acquire that artfully worn-out covering from decades of butt contact.

The substitution of particle board for actual wood, of course, means that most of the tables, desks, bookcases etc. made in that time will die long before they get old. Any device with moving parts is sure to have at least one critical part made of plastic, which will render the appliance inoperable when it breaks and can't be replaced.

Chalk up another victory for the house porn industry: if you redecorate as often as HGTV etc. suggest you should, your stuff only needs to last five years 'cause then you're chucking it for the new makeover.

The lower classes love things shiny and new. Because there are so many more of them than those of us who appreciate quality, their demands have completely taken over the marketplace, except for tiny niche markets aimed at people with both money and taste. But God help you if you have taste but not money. There was a time when you could hit thrift stores and find a significant amount of good old stuff, but more often such stores have already been picked over by professional retro-chic dealers who snap up that Art Deco lamp for $5 and re-sell it for $300. The fact is that the past is a finite resource, and as it gets more distant more of it gets lost, and what remains is increasingly scarce and expensive.

I'm looking at my drafting table, which belonged to my departed grandfather. Needless to say it's made of wood, with cast-iron hardware to boot, and it's covered in dings and dents and ink splatters, each another record in its fifty-year history. I could never get a table like that now--not new, anyway, and certainly not for a price an actual draftsman could afford.

The only things I'll have that are worth passing on to my grandchildren are the things I got from my grandparents.

Honestly, I was going to post on this but the eight posters who got there before me said everything I was gonna say.

I guess the only thing left to say is that the U.S. would be stuck dealing with another backward-ass petro-state (to the extent that Texas has any oil left) but I can live with that if it means the rest of the country becomes free to routinely elect presidents who can read at the eighth grade level.