The (im)morality of conspicuous consumption
Sharp essay by Peter Singer.
When Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, went to Ukraine for talks last month, his Ukrainian counterparts reportedly laughed at him because he was wearing a Japanese quartz watch that cost only $165. A Ukrainian newspaper reported on the preferences of Ukrainian ministers, several of whom have watches that cost more than $30,000. Even a Communist member of Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, was shown wearing a watch that retails for more than $6,000.
The laughter should have gone in the opposite direction. Wouldn’t you laugh (maybe in private, to avoid being impolite) at someone who pays more than 200 times as much as you do, and ends up with an inferior* product?
That is what the Ukrainians have done.
He goes on to make the point that
We can adapt that judgment to the man or woman who wears a $30,000 watch or buys similar luxury goods, like a $12,000 handbag. Essentially, such a person is saying; “I am either extraordinarily ignorant, or just plain selfish. If I were not ignorant, I would know that children are dying from diarrhea or malaria, because they lack safe drinking water, or mosquito nets, and obviously what I have spent on this watch or handbag would have been enough to help several of them survive; but I care so little about them that I would rather spend my money on something that I wear for ostentation alone.”
Spot on.
* Oh and by “inferior” he means that these expensive bling watches are functionally worse than standard quartz devices.
The colour purple
The virtues of engineering
Standing on a railway platform and a high-speed express train comes through. 250 tons of steel hurtles along at 125 mph, safely and predictably. And I’m thinking: this is the kind of unimaginable feat that good engineering makes possible. But when my friend Tim Minshall was thinking about this the only mention of “engineering” he could find in connection with railways were notices of travel delays “due to engineering work”. The result: an entire country which associates engineering only with trouble.
Are the effects of nrop reversible?
It’s an unexpected topic for the Wall Street Journal editorial columns, but — Hey! — it’s a Murdoch paper.
Today 12% of websites are pornographic, and 40 million Americans are regular visitors—including 70% of 18- to 34-year-olds, who look at porn at least once a month, according to a recent survey by Cosmopolitan magazine (which, let’s face it, is the authority here). Fully 94% of therapists in another survey reported seeing an increase in people addicted to porn. It has become a whole generation’s sex education and could be the same for the next—they are fumbling around online, not in the back seat. One estimate now puts the average age of first viewing at 11. Imagine seeing “Last Tango in Paris” before your first kiss.
Countless studies connect porn with a new and negative attitude to intimate relationships, and neurological imaging confirms it. Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, used MRI scans in 2010 to analyze men watching porn. Afterward, brain activity revealed, they looked at women more as objects than as people. The new DSM-5 will add the diagnosis “Hypersexual Disorder,” which includes compulsive pornography use.
Repetitive viewing of pornography resets neural pathways, creating the need for a type and level of stimulation not satiable in real life. The user is thrilled, then doomed.
But here’s the good news: “the evolutionary plasticity of our mind makes this damage reversible.”
It was apparently the way in which young men nowadays learn about sex from porn sites that set Cindy Gallop off on the track which led to her new business, makelovenotporn.tv.
So where some people see a problem, others see an opportunity. Isn’t capitalism wonderful?
Al Baba
Well, isn’t this interesting. Turns out that Al Gore is quite well off. Almost as wealthy as Mitt Romney, it seems, according to this Bloomberg report.
In 1999, Al Gore, then U.S. vice president and a Democratic candidate for president, sold $6,000 worth of cows.
The former senator, who spent most of his working life in Congress, had a net worth of about $1.7 million and assets that included pasture rents from a family farm and royalties from a zinc mine, remnants of his rural roots in Carthage, Tennessee. Funds from the cattle sale went to three of his kids, according to federal disclosure forms filed as part of his presidential run.
Fourteen years later, he made an estimated $100 million in a single month. In January, the Current TV network, which he helped to start in 2004, was sold to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Satellite Network for about $500 million. After debt, he grossed an estimated $70 million for his 20 percent stake, according to people familiar with the transaction.
Two weeks later, Gore exercised options, at $7.48 a share, on 59,000 shares of Apple Inc. stock that he’d been granted for serving on the Cupertino, California-based company’s board since 2003. On paper, it was about a $30 million payday based on the company’s share price on the day he claimed the options.
That’s a pretty good January for a guy who couldn’t yet call himself a multimillionaire when he briefly slipped from public life after his bitterly contested presidential election loss to George W. Bush in late 2000, based on 1999 and 2000 disclosure forms.
And he’s still got another 50,000 Apple shares to go. Seems like Forrest Gump isn’t the only innocent to profit from Steve Jobs’s largesse.
Draw, print, bang
This is interesting — a working handgun produced by a 3D printer. “I’m seeing a world where technology says you can pretty much be able to have whatever you want. It’s not up to the political players anymore,” said Cody Wilson, the head of the Texas-based outfit which made the weapon. Cue Shock! Horror! reactions. For example:
Defense Distributed plans to make the blueprints for the almost entirely plastic firearm (only the firing pin is metal) available online, worrying political players including Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who on Sunday reportedly called the possibility of mass production of untraceable weapons “stomach-churning.” Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., last month introduced the Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act, which would extend the ban on non-detectable weapons and add language concerning 3D-printed guns. “Security checkpoints, background checks and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print their own plastic firearms at home and bring those firearms through metal detectors with no one the wiser,” Israel said in a statement, according to the New York Daily News. Wilson has said before that he views Defense Distributed’s project as “vital” and a censorship issue.
So is this an example of technological determinism gone mad? Well, maybe. But Alex Hern’s piece in the Guardian takes a more measured stance.
The Liberator is a more serious prospect. All of the necessary parts can be printed from a 3D printer except for the metal firing pin, which is made from a single nail. (In order to comply with US laws, the gun as produced also has a 175g chunk of steel inside it, so that it doesn’t evade metal detectors). It is a fullblown gun, and recognisably so.
But technologically, it’s still simple. That’s because the principle behind a gun isn’t too tricky: load a bullet into a reinforced tube, and whack the back of it hard. That’s an engineering problem street gangs in the 1950s managed to solve with wood, antenna housings and elastic bands, building “zip guns” to shoot at each other; and it’s also the basis for converted air rifles and cap guns. The difficult stuff – getting it to fire accurately, repeatedly and without jamming or blowing up in your face – is still a long way off for 3D printers. And even the best 3D-printed gun still relies on someone else to make the gunpowder.
How to build a postman-detector
Farage: the new Boris
Watching Nigel Farage being interviewed on the Andrew Marr show this morning suddenly brought on the realization that the UKIP leader is the new Boris Johnson! He has the same easy fluency on TV, the same line in plausible half-truths, the same appeal to the battier elements of the Tory Party.
All that remains now now is for him to be kebabbed by Eddie Mair.
Google Glass: half full or half empty?
This morning’s Observer column.
The Chinese name their years after animals – the year of the goat, the rat and so on. In the tech world, we name years after devices. Thus, 2007 was the year of the iPhone and 2010 was the year of the iPad. It’s beginning to look as though 2013 will be the year of Glass. This prediction is based on the astonishing level of comment, curiosity, excitement, trepidation and hostility surrounding an augmented reality device created by Google and called Google Glass…