Pages tagged consumerism:

COULD YOU SURVIVE WITHOUT MONEY?MEET THE GUY WHO DOES: DETAILS Article on men.style.com men.style.com: Fashion and Lifestyle News from the Online Home of GQ and Details
http://www.men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_9817

"Suelo's been here for three years, and it smells like it. " http://tr.im/vasK [from http://twitter.com/techpr/statuses/3088661236]
"When I lived with money, I was always lacking. Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."
HE WASN'T ALWAYS THIS WAY. SUELO graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in anthropology, he thought about becoming a doctor, he held jobs, he had cash and a bank account. In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes.
A symbiotic relationship with industrialised society. He's almost as heavily dependent on everybody else as everybody else is. I'm not impressed at all. Nor is he all that bright: "Gold is pretty but virtually useless" - wrong. Gold is dense, soft, and therefore malleable, like lead, and both are very useful. Chimps would find such a metal (if they were bright enough to mine it, smelt it, etc.) rather handy. Then other chimps would get jealous... eventually they'd start trading it. A few thousand years later, some chimp would decide that gold is silly and go back to living in a tree (or a cage in a research facility).
"In leaner times, Suelo's gatherings include ants, grubs, termites, lizards, and roadkill. He recently found a deer, freshly run over, and carved it up and boiled it. "The best venison of my life," he says." ... ""I'll do what creatures have been doing for millions of years for retirement," he says. "Why is it sad that I die in the canyon and not in the geriatric ward well-insured?"
Where The Buffalo Roamed « Weather Sealed
http://www.weathersealed.com/2009/09/22/where-the-buffalo-roamed/
全米のマクドナルド分布図。
To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide. So, I set out to determine the farthest point from a Micky Dee’s – in the lower 48 states, at least. This endeavor required information, and the nice folks at AggData were kind enough to provide it to me: a complete list of all 13,000-or-so U.S. restaurants, in CSV format, geolocated for maximum convenience. From there, a bit of software engineering gymnastics, and… Behold, a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s!
"Which begs the question: just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out? [...] To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s"
As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia. For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota.
A visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s
"As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia. For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota. There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer."
Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2008/11/28/2008-11-28_worker_dies_at_long_island_walmart_after.html
best. black friday. ever.
stampede
A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an "out-of-control" mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store's front doors and trampled him, police said.
Love’s Labors and Costs § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/loves_labors_and_costs/
acquire
In Seed Magazine, Jonathan Gottschall, a leading Literary Darwinist, reviews Geoffrey Miller's latest book, Spent, which argues that most of what we do, especially what we buy, is a kind of marketing designed to signal our power and secure our (genetic) place in the social hierarchy. That's all well and good, but it seems awful reductive.
In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.