Cistern bags won't save us from the system.

I spent Friday the 11^th of March saving the world. Or rather, I didn’t, I stood for 10 hours in a local Sainsbury’s giving away free “energy saving kits”, wearing a cyan tabard that made me look as if I’d just escaped from Broadmoor via a freak printing accident, resulting in me having “I GIVE FREE THINGS” emblazoned across my chest. Most of the day was spent gazing into the horrendous pit of mundanity that consumes most peoples’ working lives in this world, interrupted occasionally with the great pleasure of guiding old people through the gargantuan task of filling in their name on a bit of paper, like some sort of morbid ferryman guiding a cup of poisoned apple juice to the lips of a Dignitasee. Oh, and also explaining to people that, no matter how much my foiled wrapped energy kits looked like microwaveable paninis, that I didn’t work for Sainsbury’s so I couldn’t direct them as to where to indulge their delusionally aspirational gambling habits, nor how to operate the change machine so they could convert their bingo money into notes. One man had over £300 worth of coins! I was very tempted to ask him whether he’d robbed a penny arcade, but he looked quite nervous, so he probably had and I’m guessing he wouldn’t have appreciated it if I’d brought it up.

Anyway, it was such an under-stimulating experience that I felt less like a human by the end of it and more like pond life. The most interesting thing I could come up with to do was a game I called “spot the weirdest shopping”. The winner was a Chinese man who bought 10 whole packs of Sainsbury’s basic tissues and a pot of honey – weird. Anyway, the product I was pedalling was a bag which one can fill with water and put in one’s toilet cistern to save about a litre of water per flush and a plastic adapter that fits between the shower hose and head that restricts water flow, achieving a similar saving. I proudly boasted to the public how utilising both gadgets could save them up to £100 per annum on utility bills. This, of course, was minus the addendum that they also had to follow an “energy saving guide” provided in the free pack if they were to achieve anything like this kind of saving.

The energy guide, although containing some genuinely worthwhile suggestions like “wash at 30^o” and “don’t use a tumble drier”, was mostly filled with such obvious advice that Captain Obvious could not achieve such levels of obviousness, even with his extra special super power, that being: The Blinding Strike Of The Obvious. Such advice included: “don’t leave the TV on 24 hours a day”, “don’t take hour long showers” and “don’t heat your living room to similar levels of warmth as experienced in the desert”. This made me wonder how stupid the government really think the British public is. Then I remembered that this is the age of brainstorms, think tanks and grass roots (whatever the hell those are), and that these sorts of operations have millions of the tax payers’ pounds thrown at them so that “extensive market research” can be conducted in order to “optimise the effectiveness of the campaign”. Well guess what, the fruits of their labour must have concluded that Britons are totally thick. Scarily thick.

Peak oil is something that we really need to be worried about. Our entire species has become addicted to the stuff and we depend on it probably even more than a heroin user depends on getting their next hit. You may be familiar with what happens to a human body when one tries to rehab from heroin addiction: it usually involves a reaction so violently unpleasant that people need to be locked away in their rooms and sometimes even strapped down to their beds. This is basically what is going to happen to the world - and I’m not even being slightly melodramatic or sensationalist. Oil powers almost everything we call “modern life”. It gives us electricity, powers our cars and trains and planes, heats our houses, packages our food and drink, builds our cities and it’s even responsible for The X Factor. And Justin Beiber. 50 years ago it seemed so abundant that we developed a culture of treating it like an infinite resource and, although we were all taught in school how it definitely IS NOT, the human race still treats it as if it is.

You’d think that with all the smart people in White Hall and Washington that someone would have noticed by now and started enacting changes to wean us off our addiction. Well, they’ve encouraged us to recycle and use energy saving light bulbs and they’ve even started handing out free energy saving kits.  The problem is that probably more energy was used to make the plasticy bits of the kit than the contents could ever help to save – totally useless. This goes for all the other half-arsed energy saving initiatives that our government employs. Basically, it’s the equivalent of attempting to treat a malignant stomach cancer with a glass of warm Ribena. There are a number of very complicated reasons as to why nothing serious has been done, but it all boils down to a systematic failure of what 95% of the brainwashed people of this earth believe to be the corner stone of modern humanity: the free market. Extreme right-wing capitalism ensures that those with the most money rule. Who has the most money? Well, it’s obviously the oil companies, seeing as they are the dealers of this drug we are all so fantastically fond of. Money is power and the result of this is that the governments of the world are mere puppets on the strings of their oily masters. And there’s no way they’re going to give up all that power so easily – even if it means the end of the world.

Meanwhile, here in Britain, we continue to drive around in our 4x4s and indulge in exotic fruits that we don’t even need that have used 100 times more energy to get to us from Guava than the energy they will actually provide our bodies and, basically, we don’t give a shit. The problem we’re seeing now is that the dealer is running out of stock and so he’s starting to massively raise his prices. When petrol is suddenly £5 per litre and or utilities bills double and all the shops have to raise their prices to cope with extra energy costs and no one’s wages are getting any higher because all our employers are dealing with the same problems... then we will see the biggest shift in standard of living ever experienced in human history. Maybe when most of us can’t even afford to feed or clothe ourselves; maybe then we’ll start doing something about peak oil.

Watch this film for more information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqy6717el78&feature=player_embedded

iPad 2 - The Best Thing Since Sliced Faeces

People of the world, stop what you’re doing immediately and heed these words, for there has come a new, revolutionary product from the geniuses at Apple Incorporated. Yes. the iPad 2 has been announced and, as predictable as it is that a cat will get pissed off if you apply selotape to its bum crack, morons and drones from across the western world have joined forces to waste their hard earned currency on pre-ordering this tablet-shaped scam. The iPad 2 boasts a “brand new design” – in the same way that one could create their very own “new design” by rubbing a brand new dress in a turd on the side of the street. Basically, by “brand new design”, Apple mean that they’ve made it about 2mm thinner (didn’t see that one coming) and added a basically useless HDMI output capability – and not even a hardware output at that, of course not, you’ll have to spend about £30 extra to buy the adapter. Doesn’t sound very impressive does it? That’s because it really isn’t. Heck, at the unveiling even Steve Jobs himself appeared nervous that this particular hustle was going to go tits up. But no, as rehearsed, his planted audience members started an appreciative, if tentative, round of applause when he announced these incredibly underwhelming additions to an already ineffectual appliance.

A few days ago I posted a blog which, I’ll be honest, was basically a rant about why I don’t like Apple. A lot of people agreed; some, however, definitely did not. Some pointed out that Apple products are not just bought by “starry eyed idiots drooling over anything that gets put in front of them that's in white or brushed chrome”. Others explained Apple’s popularity by saying “People pay more for nicely designed (and well marketed) products.” Both of these statements at least hold some truth; neither, however, could even possibly sway my position on Apple. The news about the iPad 2 provides a useful example as to why.

For a great many years now, big companies have been using a technique called “planned obsolescence” to ensure that they can squeeze as much cash out of their consumer puppets as possible. No company in the world exploit this technique to anywhere near as great an extent as Apple. A quick explanation: when you buy a high quality, highly priced product you would expect that the build quality would be of such great a standard so that you get your money’s worth. Wrong. Nowadays, things are designed to break; after all, why would a company just want to sell you something once that you’ll have for life? There’s no money in that – our economy relies on cyclical consumption. Apple couples this technique by releasing a very slightly altered version of their products approximately once every year. Just think about it. Why couldn’t the original iPad be 2mm thinner and have HDMI output? Do Apple seriously think we’d believe that one year ago there wasn’t the technology available to achieve that? The problem is that hardly anyone nowadays stops to think about this sort of thing because they’ve grown up in a world where it just happens and seems natural. And they fall for it.

So, you’ve had your iPhone for a year, it suddenly breaks, why spend all that money repairing it when you can just get the new one? And so the cycle continues. You may ask yourselves now: “Why is this bad? I’ve got the money. I don’t mind forking a bit extra out now and then to make sure I’ve got the latest gadgets.” Yes, that’s all well and good, but think about what happens to your old phone - it will very rapidly become obsolete and then be discarded. When you think about how many resources go into making phones and how many phones across the world are sold and then thrown away... that’s a lot of wastage, and unless you haven’t noticed, the world does not have an infinite amount of resources. This is all we’ve got.

This is why I hate Apple. It’s not about petty things like minor differences in operating systems or wanting to be the guy who bucks the trend and says “I don’t do Apple, man. Like, that’s so mainstream”. It’s because this consumer culture, of which they are the flagship company, is dangerously exploitative – not just of the public, but of the Earth. We simply cannot afford to support this economy of cyclical consumption otherwise, a few decades down the road, we will be living to regret it.