Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

This is a nice video - which supports my post on perpetual growth. I'm left a bit confused about what one can actually do about it though... Even the apparently fantastic Obama is a touter of growth as the Number 1 priority - without questioning this doctrine at all.

When the press and marketing people talk about "Saving Lives" it's a bit misleading really. You can only prolongs someone's life for a certain time - perhaps not very long - rather than permanently saving it - as this phrase (at least to me) implies.

The reason this bothers me is that

1. It reinforces people's denial of death, which in the end is bad for everyone.
2. It makes an artificial division between people who are terminally ill, die young etc... and people who die later on in life. People are afraid of terminally ill people for example because they remind them of their own mortality but they don't want to be reminded.

Doesn't work as a strategy even though it's a goal for most economists. Recession is seen as an evil hell. But economic growth is inseparable from increasing use of natural resources and the capacity to deal with waste products - which are finite - very finite. If we continue to grow at the present rate in this century, the use of resources will be totally absurd by by 2100...

See this New Scientist Report for more facts and argumentation.

Will probably be between China and the US. By analogy with personal debt - if you owe too much and can't pay it back, the creditor will come knocking on your door and if necessary use force to get it back. The US foreign debt particularly to China is becoming unsustainable. One day they'll want it back... I mean most products in the US are made in China - what is the US really giving back except increasingly worthless greenbacks. The so-called "financial rescue plan" is just going to delay and increase the problem by devaluing the greenbacks yet more.

There are certain technologies which have been rolled out on a massive scale, but which (at least for me) either DO NOT WORK AT ALL IN ANY WAY, NOT EVEN ONCE, NEVER or are quite obviously completely unuseable. I'm thinking in particular of:

* Windows is searching for a solution to your problem...
*Windows is looking for drivers online...
*Multimedia Messaging (MMS) (Europe) - I have spent days trying to set it up and have only ever received one successfully in my life and that was from identical phone to identical phone on the same network provider.
*Video calls on a cellphone (would anyone want to use that on a cellphone anyway?)
*Chat on a cellphone

I'm interested to know if anyone else had the same experience with these or other technologies and if so, what they think can be the explanation for a company rolling out a technology which so patently does not work.