Editing User talk:Teratornis/Tasks



== Hello ==

I just wanted to send you a message. I read your Tasks, and you have been extremely busy ! I hope the tedious tech-work is done soon? :)

I also noticed some of your comments on how you view climate-sceptics!

I personally are down to about one fifth of the average american citizens carbon footprint. ''(half of the average swedish citizen)''
And I am still very comfortably and casually living in my apartment, doing normal things. So I guess more people would need to find out that it is possible to carry on living city life and still be very green.

The prejudice and misconceptions is still out there among average people that we '''"green radicals"''' will try to force all human beings in giving up their lives and move them all into caves in a forest. That is not at all true! we can all continue to live, but just get everyone to try to cut out some percents of the top of their wasteful behaviour.

I just mean : do we really need diamonds and champagne in our lives ? (methaphorically speaking) And if you could have champagne and lobster for every single future meal of your life, wouldn't it become boring and depriving you from the few occasions when you really get to taste something wonderful?

Thanks to our centralized systems of recycling and collection of waste in swedish cities, i am able to sort exactly 100% of all my households trash into different material recycling bins, so '''I contribute with nothing at all''' to the landfills or incineration of garbage. This leads to positive side-effects, much less odour in my kitchen, much less number of times i need to take out the trash.

My results is a much more relaxed life with less daily chores, and less expenses. And most people do not realize that, they see being green = being more involved, buying more expensive food and needing to work much more with small domestic details.

::''(feel free to delete this after you read it, or I will appreciate if you like to comment on any of it?)''

Oh, by the way, the first results are in on my electric bill thanks to "Updated cooking methods..." https://www.appropedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Updated_cooking_methods_in_modern_kitchens&section=4#Electricity_consumption

[[User:Yeahvle|Yeahvle]] 02:26, 27 February 2011 (PST)
:I agree with your points. It is possible to live a modern life on a fraction of the fossil fuel burn of the average modern person. We don't have to go all the way back to the Stone Age - but if we did, we could do a better job than our ancestors did the first time, because now we know a lot more. Eventually I will write a user subpage to document everything I have done to cut my carbon footprint and other aspects of my ecological footprint, and what I have left to work on. I have a page on my personal wiki{{w|Personal wiki}} with tables of my monthly home utility bills since 1999. I have cut my annual natural gas burn by 95% and my electricity use by 66% since then. I buy green electricity to cover the remainder that I still use. Recycling is not as good here as your arrangement, but with composting and recycling I only generate one small bag of trash every two months. And our local recycling options are gradually improving. I compost all my food waste, so my kitchen trash is odorless now. The bag can take two or three months to fill up, with no stench. I also collect yard waste from several of my neighbors and compost that too.
:The thinking of many people suffers from the endowment effect.{{w|Endowment effect}} That is the tendency to perceive a loss as greater than a gain. For example, the lost pleasure of giving up air travel can easily be offset by the gained pleasure of volunteering at a community garden. But people don't like to give up what they know, even if they replace it with something as good or better. They just focus on what they lost.
:There is a lot of wiki technical work to do here. Unless many more people will do some of it, I could be doing it for a long time. That is typical for a small wiki{{w|Wiki}} like Appropedia. We don't have the millions of users that Wikipedia does, from which a few thousand users can specialize in technical issues instead of content editing. The technical contributors can greatly facilitate the work of the content editors. This is plainly evident on Wikipedia, where there is a help page, a template, or some sort of tool to help with almost any task. Only a handful of users on Appropedia are available to do that kind of infrastructure work, so Appropedia is not as well developed internally as Wikipedia. But the same is true of every small wiki I have seen. This problem has no easy solution. Someone just has to dive in and do the work. --[[User:Teratornis|Teratornis]] 18:15, 27 February 2011 (PST)

::The best solution is more people :-). I'm doing some proselytizing, and have been planning a much bigger effort via email. Getting close to starting it now - maybe this month. 

::What helps those new people to stick around is finding that Appropedia is a useful and enjoyable site. Thank you, both of you, for helping make Appropedia what it is. --[[User:Chriswaterguy|Chriswaterguy]] 21:55, 27 February 2011 (PST)

::A bit of an academic point: I'm dubious about the endowment effect. (There's still validity in the particular comparison you make, volunteering vs air travel, but I suspect that it's a bit more complex, to do with effort required and the rewards of volunteering being less obvious.) Apart from the issues with experiments noted in [[Wikipedia:Endowment effect]], I actually think it makes sense that by default we value something we already own more than an equivalent that we don't own. We know the quality of what we own, or we know workarounds to make it functional. In the real world, the unknown has risks, and effort involved in assessing it - I might buy a coffee cup and find it breaks easily or has another problem. The one I have works and I don't have to think about it. But of course, I'm speculating way beyond my expertise... --[[User:Chriswaterguy|Chriswaterguy]] 22:24, 27 February 2011 (PST)
:::Daniel Dennett{{w|Daniel Dennett}} talks about how the brain develops programs to deal with the familiar. That's why we can still hear loved ones talk after they die. Our brains keep playing their programs. Naturally no one wants to lose what they know, because their brains keep playing those programs. Learning to value something new means building up new programs in our minds. Sometimes that requires work, and nobody likes work. --[[User:Teratornis|Teratornis]] 01:37, 28 February 2011 (PST)

::::That Interview with Daniel Dennett was interesting to listen to. I am very interested in psychology behind shopping and how people respond to "deals". Because it can help if you are conscious about the mental tricks & games that the media & corporations try to play on you (the innocent consumer). We consumers have Free Will, but corporations are always trying to influence us (in many ways) to believe we made the choices to "desire" their products.
::::If it was completely true and the strongest desire to "treasure what we already own" we wouldn't throw away so much old stuff or buy so much new shit we don't really use. But companies do not make any money on making longlasting products that we love and treasure and use forever.
::::There is also a big part of lazyness and convenience involved in what you own and what products you feel that you really "need". If you have a car and a bicycle, you will end up taking your car to work even though the hassle is bigger in finding parking space and paying parking fees and so on. (of course the tipping points are many different elements : weather and gas prices and such)
::::Interestingly there have been medical research in a group of women to find out some of their addiction to bargains and sales. And now i cannot find the resources, but i recall they did find clear connections with the trigger elements in pleasure center in Central Nerve System that equals that of heroin junkies. Many women get a high at the moment of when they purchase an item, and that can turn into feelings of guilt on the trip home (because they really couldn't afford this, or even need the item) And there were some comparisons made during the time of female "monthly cycle", so lots of chemical signalsubstances are involved, hormones, dopamines, endorphines and such.
::::If we think we made the choice to purchase, we will believe we feel more content about owning & using the product (even if it comes with big cost of fuel, taxes or monthly subscription fee). If we understand someone else pushed us to buy it, we will feel a bit less interested in using such products. (Compare w tobacco - drugs - alcohol)
::::One of the big reasons to why people shop on sales, factory outlets and when they see big red discount signs ("50% off"), we believe that the shop is being kind and generous towards you. "Oh, The shop reduced the price so that you could afford to buy one, or even two" And we reward the shop with buying, as a misplaced thank you! ;-p Not many realize that the shop is just trying to get rid of old unsellable products from the storeroom, or items of lesser quality.
::::If only we could learn about all of this and become conscious about risks with these signals and effects, we can possibly avoid some behaviour and some of that negative feelings afterwards, and of course make women try to avoid walking into every shop with large red billboards in the window.
::::I am looking forward to more discussions about consumerism and AT and anything.  -- [[User:Yeahvle|Yeahvle]] 23:51, 9 March 2011 (PST)