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This festive season: the accumulating effects of individual activity
| Guest post by: Gavin Chait |
Article Overview: There are plenty of good reasons to buy hand-made or bespoke goods. There is the support of individual craftsmanship, high-quality originality, and ensuring that life doesn't become a mass of hum-drum sameness. Declaring that "hand-made" is more efficient and better for the environment is not one of them.
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This festive season: the accumulating effects of individual activity
There are plenty of good reasons to buy hand-made or bespoke goods. There is the support of individual craftsmanship, high-quality originality, and ensuring that life doesn't become a mass of hum-drum sameness.
Declaring that "hand-made" is more efficient and better for the environment is not one of them.
Yet this is precisely what the HandMade Project declares: "The accumulating environmental effects of mass production are a major cause of global warming and the poisoning of our air, water and soil." This being the third-tier of their justification for promoting "handmade" over "factory-made".
Purely logically, that doesn't hold. The peak times for electricity consumption happens to be 18h00 to 21h00 ... AFTER people come back from work and start preparing dinner, bathing, and watching television. In small family groups.
Given that South African electricity monopoly, Eskom, hasn't invested in their network for thirty years these effects are important since the grid falls down at peak consumption periods.
Power companies are familiar with the network effects of people finishing viewing their favourite television shows and turning on the kettle for a quick "cuppa". In the UK, the biggest recorded power surge ever was 2,800 megawatts after England's 1990 World Cup penalty shoot-out against Germany.
Individual production is hardly efficient. If it were those terrible leaches on society – capitalists – who would sell their own grandmothers, children and wives to make mincemeat to sell to horses to make craft-glue-macramé-sandals if there was a profit in it – would be divvying up their factories into small job-lots.
Mass-production is more efficient. If everyone on earth agreed to wear the same clothes, eat the same food and live in the same place, the world would use a fraction of the things we consume today. It is precisely our individuality that makes us use more things and produce a wider variety of goods.
Our individual requirement to have our own computers is also inefficient. Something the wise boffins at Berkeley realised when they developed SETI@home in 1999. This screen-saver uses the spare capacity on ordinary PCs to sift through radio-telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The results are sent back to Berkeley.
More impressively, Stanford University, using a similar system for their Folding@home project – which simulates protein folding (and mis-folding) – has just passed the combined computing capacity of one petaflop (a quadrillion mathematical operations per second).
Clearly mass-production is the way to go if you want to get a vast amount of sameness for the lowest possible cost at the maximum efficiency.
This festive season, buy what you want for the right reasons. Not because some idiot tried to guilt you into buying a good that supposedly is more environmentally or socially "beneficial", when it clearly isn't.
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About the Author: Gavin Chait RSS for Gavin's articles - Visit Gavin's website Click here to visit Gavin's website   Killing the Golden Goose a lesson in Economic Freedom The Miracle of Investment 100 Days of Sodom This festive season the accumulating effects of individual activity Exports and parliamentary laziness |
Related Forum Posts
Re: Season's Greetings!
- Hi GT,
Thank you for your good wishes which I echo wholeheartedly.
Wherever you are in the world, may the festive season be happy and peaceful,
Merry Christmas,
Mal.
Christmas Holidays?
- Hi there,
Primarily I am an informal carer to my spouse. In addition I am on the internet, but my helpers like time off during the Christmas Time.
This means I have extra work to do. I think it is an honour that I can do it.
It has its rewards. How many men would give prime time to that?
Whereas the festive season is wonderful, the flipside is more work for me. Does anybody out there provide care for a family member?
Kindest Regards
Beat
"Unlock People's Potentials!"
Apprentice show coming back?
- Kevin,
I loved the first season of the Apprentice. I used to have a get together every week when it was on at my place with entrepreneur friends of mine. We had 20 people come over for the finale.
It looks like they reached a deal with Trump to do another season - I'm looking forward to seeing it come back on air!
New Apprentice - will it be a bust?
- Being a fan of the Apprentice I admit that the quality has decreased since the first season but I was sad to see that they canceled the show.
I was excited to hear that the show would be making a comeback but it seems to be less and less focused on business tasks and more about bringing in celebrity guests.
In the newspaper yesterday I read about them courting Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsey Lohan to the show. Whether it is true or not I would prefer that the show focuses back in on quality business tasks. I would much rather see a new season that was similar to season 1 than one filled with celebrities who have questionable business experience.
What do you think?
Racing car drivers
- [quote:39rinmcm]This year a new name arrived on the Formula One scene: Lewis Hamilton. He has had unparalelled success right in the first season of his racing career. [/quote:39rinmcm]
Car racing is not an activity I've ever gotten into... although rally car racing or "point to point" sounds kind of fun - I've never seen the point in driving around a circle 500 times...
But, I'm always interested in people who do things well...especially when they're just starting out in their chosen profession. I'll check him out!
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