My Blog
The Story Of Stuff
Tue, April 1, 2008 - 9:30 AM
www.storyofstuff.com/
Tue, April 1, 2008 - 9:30 AM -
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Thu, April 3, 2008 - 9:04 AM
I love this! I had seen it before - but no one can see this one enough. :)
Thanks for posting! |
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Thu, April 3, 2008 - 12:09 PM
A few years ago, I bought an ink jet printer for $30. After a month, it was out of ink. I discovered that the replacement cartridges cost $40. After another month, it was out of ink. Why not just buy a whole new damn printer every month, right?
So last year, I invested $200-something in a laser printer. I was teaching at the time, and since our grad program provided zero free copies, I had to print out like 80 million things per term -- all my lesson plans, all my class handouts, plus all my own stuff for the classes I was taking. I really needed a printer that would continue ... printing. The people at Office-Whatever assured me that although I was investing $200, and the ink cartridges cost $70, the benefit is that the ink lasted way, way, way longer than my old printer. Also, I could replace cyan, magenta and yellow separately (in my old printer, they came in one cartridge, so if I was out of one, I had to replace the whole thing). Now, my point. Yes, it turned out, the ink lasted longer. Yes, I could replace each color separately. BUT, when it ran out of one cartridge -- let's say black -- the entire printer stopped working. I couldn't change the text to red, blue, purple or whatever and keep printing. I HAD to go to the store and drop $70 before it would stop flashing "Replace supplies!" and keep working. A bit ago, it ran out of black again. I grumbled my way out to go get a new cartridge, came back, put it in -- and the printer immediately flashed "Replace supplies!" for the other three colors, too. (Translation: You need to spend $210 for three cartridges before you can print.) I was about to reenact the scene from Office Space where they kill the fax machine with baseball bats. Instead, I searched online until I found: www.fixyourownprinter.com There, I discovered simple instructions (written by frustrated common folk like myself) for how to OVERRIDE "Replace supplies." I did it. And guess what? My printer is NOT out of ink. On override mode, it has been printing out full color, totally sharp, full of ink copies for weeks. In short, I totally dig the "planned and perceived obsolescence" part of this movie. The whole point is to keep us spending, spending, spending, spending. If we can get to the moon, why can't we make a printer that works continuously -- for years? One more thing. When I worked in auto advertising, we would create pieces for new vehicles ... and then go back and make tweaks a few months later. Why? Because there's something called "MCR" which is short-hand for "Material Cost Reduction" which is shorthand for "Manufacturers are constantly combing over vehicles to see what they can TAKE AWAY in order to make them cheaper to produce, in order to make more money." So if we created a piece that showed a new pickup with some side mirror defrosting mechanism, we may have to fudge the picture/copy a few months later to erase references to the defrosting mechanism, which didn't pass MCR. I made up that specific example. But not the concept. It's kind of like, "Psych! We were *gonna* give you that. But then we figured out we could strip it away and people would buy the vehicle anyway. So now we no longer offer it." It's horrifying that at the "golden arrow" point of this woman's diagram, after raping the planet and giving people awesome jobs like "Person who assembles our running shoes for $5 per day" ... the process shits out pieces of crap. And we keep buying them. Right. The story of stuff is a sad, sad story. |
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Thu, April 3, 2008 - 12:17 PM
By the way, the "fix your own printer" advice that helped me was in "forums" on that page. (Where the peeps are talking to each other.)
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