In the great race to the bottom, visualizations and info-graphics are a handy tool for replacing words, what with all that laborious reading some old codgers think we ought to do since we have a facility for language. It’s annoying enough to have to read the names of the foods we buy, why should we [...]
Intellectual Property
Cory Doctorow has an article in The guardian about the silliness of “intellectual property”. The article begins with the obvious marketing of the term: aren’t you more sympathetic to someone who has had their “intellectual property stolen” than “industrial entities who’ve had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated”?
The important bit is that “intellectual property” [...]
Wants & Needs
We (meaning those of us in Westernized, first-world market economies) seem to be awfully confused as to what constitutes a need and what constitutes a want. We constantly talk about things we need when what we mean is that not only do we want whatever it is, we want to have the experience of not [...]
New Types Of Tourism
Bored? Too much money? Too many people you know into eco-tourism and adventure travel for it to be cool any more? Need a new, more extreme way to spend money on distracting yourself from your normal, day-to-day distractions? Looking for new ways to forget your ennui, anomie and accidie for a few precious moments [...]
Are You A Big Fat Idiot?
Okay, so over-eating makes you dumber, smoking makes you dumber, lack of sleep makes you dumber, unnecessary seriousness makes you dumber, multi-tasking makes you dumber and dumber, email makes you dumber, and meetings make you dumber…
So the dumbest person to work with, or for (in an office setting, anyway), would be a fat smoker who [...]
A Big Kitchen
If you look in architectural magazines or cooking magazines, kitchens have become enormous, high-tech wonders; ads show monster appliances, triple ovens and fridges big enough to park a cow in. I will admit to having been drawn into big kitchen lust — taken in by kitchen porn. I spent quite a bit of time complaining [...]
Large Houses
By the second quarter of 1999, 17 percent of new homes constructed in America were larger than three thousand sqaure feet, the size at which a house generally becomes unmanageable by the people who live in it. By the fourth quarter of 2005, this had become almost 19 percent.
Why exactly have so many people crossed [...]
Web 2.0
I have, since the term first began to appear, had an innate revulsion for the idea of “web 2.0″. I didn’t buy Tim O’Reilly’s definition then, and I don’t buy any of the other punditry now.
As a matter of fact, other than some shiny bits tacked onto the same old contentless “tools” and “networks”, Web [...]
Bottled Water
There isn’t a product out there that is as silly (or cynical) as bottled still water. Sparkling water I can understand, it really isn’t available anywhere else, but bottled still water? Does anyone actually think that there is something better about it than plain old tap water?
Obviously, yes, quite a lot of people do. That [...]
Unnecessary Words
In my pursuit of ridding my life of the unnecessary, it would be foolish for me to ignore the non-corporeal unnecessary things; words, phrases and ideas that, like their physical brethren, seem useful but actually cost us dearly, this time in both misunderstanding and the unwitting perpetuation of ideas we might not agree with.
I [...]
“Necessary” by Design
Dan Lockton writes about “architectures of control“:
Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.
I personally find the list of products he has talked about to be [...]
Discardia
Metagrrrl has gone and created a whole new holiday for Unnecessary Things; Discardia!
Discardia is a floating holiday to celebrate letting go… The exact days vary. It takes place in the time between the Solstices & Equinoxes and their following new moons. Sometimes it’s short and sometimes it’s long.
Discardia is celebrated by getting rid of stuff [...]
People Who (Converse) Like William F. Buckley
Well, here we are with our first person, or rather group of people, listed as unnecessary. And what a nice group it is; witty, urbane, well-read…
Buckley is famous for saying things like “Character is required, along with the suppression of envy, for the less fortunate of two friends not to hold his old friend’s success [...]
Debt
I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy the idea of “good debt” versus “bad debt”. As far as I am concerned, all debt is bad, end of story. The idea of “good debt” is based on one of the subtle fallacies that permeates modern life and serves to reinforce a narrowly economic view of life. [...]
Junk Mail & Postal Form 1500
The United States Post Office contains a huge secret, one that made me giddy with power when I found out about it. Buried deep within the Domestic Mail Manual is Postal Form 1500; Prohibitory order against sender of pandering advertisement in the mails, which is available as a PDF Download.
Originally intended to stop “pandering advertising”, [...]
Yard Sale, Finally
This Saturday, we are having a final yard sale to get rid of the remainder of the stuff we had collected for no good reason. I am very excited to be closing the door on this chapter of my craziness, finally.
We have been working towards this point for more than a year now, beginning with [...]
Lawns
Why exactly is it so important to have some area around ones house covered in non-native turf grasses? Why would a sane person cut down all of the native trees and bushes in order to plant “ornamental” species in their place?
I would much rather live under the canopy of native tree and take my chances [...]
Suburban Uniformity Vehicle
The SUV, that station-wagon-on-a-truck-chassis that is all the rage with aspirationally minded suburbanites who think that cheap ladder-frame trucks with solid rear axles and the aerodynamics of a shipping container are some sort of status symbol, and an appropriate conveyance for around town driving.
Every time I see one, a Superman-esque scene plays out in my [...]
Multitasking
Multitasking is a very popular idea, a buzzword with wide acceptance, and one of the best ways to waste your time and raise your stress level, both at work and at home.
University of Michigan psychologists demonstrated in a detailed five-year study that multitasking actually makes people less effective at their jobs. Because the human brain [...]
“Real Simple” Magazine
I find it quite amusing that a magazine with a tag line such as this:
Life, Made Easier
is sixty percent blatant advertisements and forty percent barely disguised advertising. In the interest of truth in advertising, I think they should change their tag line to:
How To Buy Crap You Don’t Need, On Credit
More Cynical Ramblings….And They’re Not Even Mine
Sort of as a follow-up to my Open Letter To Twenty-Somethings, over at College Humor Brian Steele has recently posted an article in much the same vein, entitled Post-Collegiate Life: Your Next Ten Years.
I particularly like year nine:
You meet a girl. She’s really pretty and smart. She even likes to cook. Unfortunately you slip up, [...]
Cubicles
Fortune magazine is running an article called Cubicles: The great mistake. It’s as if I am playing tee-ball here with Unnecessary Things…
Highlights of the article include the inventor of the cubicle, Robert Propst, calling them a “monolithic insanity”, the history of the cubicle from Hermann Miller to now, and the hilarious observation that
It is the [...]
Senator William M. Napoli
In solidarity with Bitch | Lab, may I present the sexist asshat, Senator William M. Napoli…truly, he is an unnecessary thing.
The Following Will Not Be Seeing Any Of My Money…
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. Its mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members’ creative and financial vitality.
… by suing their own customers, and refusing to listen to any criticism of their distribution or business [...]
Paper Towels
It has been more than two months now since we last had paper towels in the house, and I can’t say that I miss them. Not only are they a complete waste of money and just one more thing to fill up our dumps, they kind of suck for what they were intended for anyway.
Like [...]
Vacuum Cleaner
It is my opinion that people own vaccum cleaners for, primarily, one of two reasons; either they don’t like keeping their house clean, or they don’t feel as if they have time to without this modern convenience.
Taking the second reason first, let me posit that if you do not have time to clean all of [...]
Microwave
By way of the microwave, fast food culture broke free of its traditional confines along roadways and into the center of our homes. As it became ubiquitous during the seventies and eighties, it became a primary beachhead of frantic consumer culture in our kitchens. By its constant presence, we are reminded that we are too [...]
Dishwasher
As Maricar wrote over at Keeping The Castle, the dishwasher is not the labor/time saving device many people think that it is. As a matter of fact, as I have learned, it actually costs more money and time to own and use one than it does to wash our dishes by hand.
Invented by Josephine Cochran [...]
Unnecessary Things
When I first began looking at how we could live well on less money, one of the first things that I noticed is that a lot of “modern conveniences” instead of truly being conveniences actually cost you more in both time and money than simply doing them an “old-fashioned” manual way. I cataloged quite a few of these, and will be writing about them individually in the future. For now, I want to explain how I began to think about these supposed necessities of modern life.
These are the ramblings of 