Link Banana

For the eco-conscious consumer, there’s a new time sink aid available: GoodGuide. It’s description of itself:

GoodGuide™ provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of products and companies. GoodGuide’s mission is to help you find safe, healthy, and green products that are better for you and the planet. From our origins as a UC Berkeley research project, GoodGuide has developed into a totally independent “For-Benefit” company. We are committed to providing the information you need to make better decisions, and to ultimately shifting the balance of information and power in the marketplace.

(via Snarkmarket)

At Snarkmarket, Matt offers some advice I find both intriquing and scary:

If you’re like most people, you purchase Benadryl. A slightly smaller and savvier subset of you will always reach for the drugstore’s “generic” counterpart, e.g. Waldryl. Stop this madness, all of you.

As you might know, Benadryl (available at Walgreens.com for $5.29 for a box of 24 capsules) and Wal-dryl ($3.99 / 24 capsules) are otherwise known as “25 mg. of diphenhydramine HCI.” Compare. Yes, that is 400 tablets containing 25 mg. of diphenhydramine HCI, for about $10 when you factor in shipping. Once more with feeling:

Benadryl - 22¢ / pill
Wal-dryl - 16¢ / pill
True generic - 2.5¢ / pill

While the price is amazingly good, I’m (perhaps erroneously) worried that quality assurance must be much less rigorous.

I sometimes fancy myself rather spartan, but living with only 100 things — as Dave Bruno is trying for — sounds like a bridge too far.

“Stuff starts to overwhelm you,” says Dave Bruno, 37, an online entrepreneur who looked around his San Diego home one day last summer and realized how much his family’s belongings were weighing him down. Thus began what he calls the 100 Thing Challenge. (Apparently, Bruno is so averse to excess he can’t refer to 100 things in the plural.)

(via kottke)

Apparently it’s going to China. Blake Houshnell calls a chart of China’s cement use “staggering,” while Joshua Keating points out the recent uptake in theft of India’s manhole covers is being blamed on China’s ravenous demand for iron.

In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Rob Walker highlights this interesting business:

Sometimes, it takes a minute for visitors to the Destee Nation Shirt Company in Seattle to understand the common theme linking the wide array of T-shirts on sale. Many have a vintage look and seem to advertise businesses from a bygone era, or to offer made-up riffs on such advertisements — a faux faded logo for Blue Moon Burgers, the dubious-sounding Tractor Tavern and so on. But each has a tag attached, giving the story of each business, as well as its address. “Then it hits them,” says Matt Morgan, the founder of Destee Nation. “These places are all real.”

Nothing in this table about the cost of driving different vehicles should surprise you, but the presentation’s rather clever.

Sounding a tad more conservative than usual, David Brooks laments America’s spending well beyond its means:

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

Two NYT Op-Eds from last Friday cry out for the good old days (and illustrate how broken my “readflow” is). They both make worthy points.

• Adam Kohen wants to know why states have been stripped of the ability to regulate many things they used to. Through the supremacy clause, the Bush administration stopped them from acting on, for example, sub-prime lenders before the crash.
• Meanwhile, Elizabeth Royte thinks that if big cities had more water fountains — as they did in the old days — there would be less demand for bottled water.

Rob Walker has an interesting, if sometimes shallow-feeling, exploration of the increasingly common practice of reviving old brand names that people remember faintly. It an interesting look at psychology and the logic of branding.

Too many such deals, or the wrong kinds, can boomerang: this happens with some regularity in the fashion world, when a famous designer name gets spread over so many products, with so little regard to quality, that the entire image of the brand sinks. Still, if you see a ladder made by Stanley, you may well think, Well, there’s a name I can trust. What you’re trusting, though, isn’t Stanley workers in Stanley factories upholding Stanley traditions and values under the watchful eye of Stanley managers. What you’re trusting is Stanley’s recognition that a badly made ladder with the Stanley name on it could be highly damaging to the Stanley brand. You are trusting Stanley’s recognition of the value of its brand and its competence in defending that value.

Promising a mass of customers if businesses agree to do environmentally-friendly things. It gives new meaning to that old “voting with your dollars” idea. Also: the more-bloated longer version of the video, and their website.

(via Ze Frank)

The epic battle that accompanies every children’s toy.

(via clusterflock)

This isn’t so much news as a reminder of long established facts. Americans can love driving far more than anyone else because gasoline here is so much cheaper than anywhere else.

The Economist’s Special Report on China arrives with these contentions:

[C]oncerns about the dire consequences of China’s quest for natural resources are overblown. China does indeed treat some dictators with kid gloves, but it is hardly alone in that. Its companies do not always uphold the highest standards, but again, many Western firms are no angels either. Fifty years of European and American aid have not succeeded in bringing much prosperity to Africa and other poor but resource-rich places. A different approach from China might yield better results. At the very least it will spur other donors to seek more effective methods.

For all the hue and cry, China is still just one of many countries looking for raw materials around the world. It has won most influence in countries where Western governments were conspicuous by their absence, and where few important strategic interests are at stake. Moreover, as China is becoming more involved in places such as Congo, its policies are beginning to change. It has promised to co-operate with the World Bank in its development efforts in Africa. It no longer seems prepared to back its most objectionable allies in the face of international opprobrium. Its diplomats, for example, did eventually stop parroting their line about unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state and allow United Nations peacekeepers to be deployed in Sudan.

Though I’m wary of most new organization playing with economics or statistics, this Reuters story qualifies for being both modestly interesting and completely plausible:

At U.S. warehouse club stores, a growing number of shoppers are giving up steak for cheaper chicken. Coffee sales are soaring at McDonald’s, while higher-priced Starbucks slows. Restaurants are serving fewer customers because more people are eating at home.

Stung by the housing slump, tightening credit terms, and rising inflation, U.S. households are finding ways to cut back, putting a damper on the consumer spending that is the driving force behind the economy.

I’m rather saddened that this data is so old, but it’s still very impressive to see how much spending on credit card increased (especially in Australia) during the period. I have to admit, as someone who’s never had one, I can’t fathom why it would ever go up. Sky miles I guess.

Unlike Wired’s Chris Anderson who counter-intuitively argues that it’s greener to read that magazine in print, Slate’s Green Lantern says — as do I — that’s unlikely.

The greener choice would be to read the paper online, correct?

The Lantern believes so, but the environmental difference between dead-tree newspapers and their online editions is a lot smaller than you might imagine. In fact, there are learned experts who contend that traditional newsprint ultimately comes out ahead, at least in terms of net carbon-dioxide emissions. Though the Lantern disagrees with some of the assumptions these contrarians make, it’s worth exploring their arguments in order to better understand how hard it is to calculate a product’s cradle-to-grave impact.

Judith Warner makes the case that we may not be as drug-obsessed as people (like myself) tend to think.

Just because it feels like, just because it sounds like, just because soaring drug company profits and obnoxious direct to consumer advertising seem to indicate that everyone around us is popping pills like mad doesn’t mean that they are doing so. Nor does it mean that we’re in the grip of some new, previously unheard-of, and uniquely epoch-defining social phenomenon. […]

All of which suggests that what social critics now identify as the signature event of our time (the urge to manage psychic pain through substance use) may, in fact, almost always have been a facet of the human condition. It may just be that we’re better at it than ever before – with cleaner, safer, less addictive and debilitating tools at our disposal.

Catherine Price sets out to hide in plain sight for an entire week and found it far harder than you might think.

He laid out my basic tasks: Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes. Get a confetti-cut paper shredder for sensitive documents and junk mail. Sign up for the national do-not-call registry (ignoring, if you can, the irony of revealing your phone number and e-mail address to prevent people from contacting you), and opt out of prescreened credit offers. Don’t buy a plane ticket, rent a car, get married, have a baby, purchase land, start a business, go to a casino, use a supermarket loyalty card, or buy nasal decongestant. By the time I left Hoofnagle’s office, a week was beginning to sound like a very long time.

(via brijit)

Though I though Mr. Reich’s column would be a usual blurb about the uselessness of stimulus packages, he offers some interesting ideas:

The only way to keep the economy going over the long run is to increase the wages of the bottom two-thirds of Americans. The answer is not to protect jobs through trade protection. That would only drive up the prices of everything purchased from abroad. Most routine jobs are being automated anyway.

A larger earned-income tax credit, financed by a higher marginal income tax on top earners, is required. The tax credit functions like a reverse income tax. Enlarging it would mean giving workers at the bottom a bigger wage supplement, as well as phasing it out at a higher wage. The current supplement for a worker with two children who earns up to $16,000 a year is about $5,000. That amount declines as earnings increase and is eliminated at about $38,000. It should be increased to, say, $8,000 at the low end and phased out at an income of $46,000.

It was closer than ever, but it appears that GM will keep the title for at least one more year.

GM, which was expected to lose its title of the world’s largest automaker for the first time in 76 years, sold 9,369,524 vehicles in 2007. Toyota sold about 9,366,000 units, a source told Reuters on Wednesday.