[americandream]

Retail sales in the U.S. climbed for a second straight month, a sign consumers may be looking past recent volatility in financial markets. The 0.2 percent increase in August followed a 0.7 percent gain in July that was larger than previously reported, Commerce Department figures showed Tuesday in Washington. The median forecast of 84 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for a 0.3 percent advance. Although confidence has taken a hit from stock-market turmoil and global-growth concerns, the data show households are still putting their savings from cheap energy to work. More jobs and higher pay would go a long way in supporting household

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... by-turmoil

[GHung]

Omniomania, compulsive shopping, or what's more commonly referred to as shopping addiction, is perhaps the most socially reinforced of the behavioral addictions.

We are surrounded by advertising, telling us that buying will make us happy. We are encouraged by politicians to spend as a way of boosting the economy. And we all want to have what those around us have –- consumerism has become a measure of our social worth.

Although widespread consumerism has escalated in recent years, shopping addiction is not a new disorder. It was recognized as far back as the early nineteenth century, and was cited as a psychiatric disorder in the early twentieth century....

http://addictions.about.com/od/lesserkn ... ingadd.htm

[Paulo1]

My name is Paulo, and I'm a woodaholic. Pick your poison, hah hah. Nice and cosy by the woodstove on a 4 degC morning. I hate shopping so much I almost always try and source products online. If a sales clerk comes around I'm outta there. Consumerism is simply bizarre, but it must be rooted in the same place extreme prepping and other obsessions are.

[americandream]

My name is Paulo, and I'm a woodaholic. Pick your poison, hah hah. Nice and cosy by the woodstove on a 4 degC morning. I hate shopping so much I almost always try and source products online. If a sales clerk comes around I'm outta there. Consumerism is simply bizarre, but it must be rooted in the same place extreme prepping and other obsessions are.

Hi Paulo

And thanks for that insight.

[ennui2]

People like "stuff". Good luck trying to change human nature.

[dinopello]

And, now Amazon has same day delivery for many things (at least in my area). It's pretty amazing I must say. I was fixing up my Koi pond Sat morning and thought I really would like some underwater LED lights to spiff it up - went on Amazon, found the light set I wanted and saw it was available for same day delivery (free with Prime) and I ordered it. 3 hours later it shows up on my doorstep.

[dolanbaker]

At the end of the day, it's all this shopping that is keeping the economy going and people in jobs.
Those underwater LEDs generated quite a fair bit of activity from their transition from raw materials to sitting in the pond.

If we all stopped buying this "fluff stuff" and only bought the "needful stuff", we'd end up in a depression very rapidly and it wouldn't be those at the top who would lose their jobs, it will be the shop employees and delivery drivers and the like (& factory workers in China).

[ennui2]

Yeah, um, sure. I await the bright utopian future when people prefer donkey carts to cars. This clarion call for asceticism isn't very realistic.



Humans evolved in times of scarcity, which encourages them to gather all they can while they can. Yeast in the petri dish, as it were.

[ennui2]

Don't you get tired of posting the same tired artwork and ideas?

Says the man who can't resist the temptation to keep claiming that peak oil caused the credit crisis, the man who can't seem to let 2008 go.

I wouldn't seem so repetition if I just let your hidden posts remain unread, since your talking points are what cause me to rebut the same way again and again, just to get another ad-hom in response rather than a real debate. You are the consummate hypocrite when it comes to netiquette. Practice what you preach. Your 'facts' are supposition, wishful-thinking, and correlation = causation.

What I'm describing is how people actually behave in the real world, which is why they aren't voluntarily riding in donkey carts. I know you hate the way the world is now. Your rhetoric is kind of Kunstler-like in its BAU-shaming. But it's ultimately pointless fist-shaking. It doesn't lead anywhere. People generally like BAU, suburbs and all, otherwise they wouldn't be living this way. Just because you don't doesn't mean everyone is somehow brainwashed or deluded into living in what you construe as a ghetto, hell-hole, shallow, or vapid existence.

You'd be better off accepting that people like comfort and luxury than trying to create some twisted narrative that we'll culturally evolve beyond consumerism. I think this is how we are and anything else runs counter to our nature (flawed as it is). It's why we so easily become addicted to things.

[americandream]

ennui2

pstarr is correct in his characterisation of the role of PO as a market inefficient. We really have no hard data on the state of global resources, why even the timeline in the climate context is uncertain.

What we do know however is that we have a skewed world economy, subject to incompetencies and inefficiencies that is globalisisng and has a particular toxins profile.

Thus shouid we throw up our hands in despair and set about unleashing the kudzu as some Earth Firsters seem to relish or continue with the modernisation project, in the process encouraging the progressive forces of social and economic reform towards greater circularity...with our fingers crossed on the timing element.

I would suggest that Earth Firsterism is an aberration borne of privilege and the old order and not all it seems.

[americandream]

People like "stuff". Good luck trying to change human nature.

People are quite capable of moderating their behavior. It's called free will. The bower bird collects pretty trinkets, hamsters store seeds and nuts. Humans have no predisposition to hoard shiny stuff. We are captives in Suburban Consumer Ghettos and our shopping addiction has been manufactured to distract us from our own rebellious nature.

+1

[americandream]

Thanks AD. A circular economy where resources and labor are apportioned by the unique culture and natural capital of every region. The free market in its clearest form. Sounds hopeful.

Earth Firsterism is not a rational economic project, but rather a call to downsize our expectations and to consider the paramount value of the planet's resources. After all everything else, our work and imagination is only added value.

In my travels in trading, if there is anything I have learnt its that our problems, even the market turmoils are down the significant inefficiences. The influence of these Earth Firsters on the market does not help and simply compounds the problems they complain of.

[ralfy]

A free market involves prices and competition. One that is governed by physical limitations in the natural environment may involve something like bartering or a gift economy.

[americandream]

A free market involves prices and competition. One that is governed by physical limitations in the natural environment may involve something like bartering or a gift economy.

Talk of bartering and gifting is premature. We have an inefficient economy with hurdles established by the likes of the Cogs of this world who fear competition and in the process stir ignorance and fear in a bid to block competition, in the process dominating existing social relations in incompetent ways that fail to extract value efficiently.

This is what underlies many of the cycles...added to that calls by self interested parties such as gold bugs, regionalists and Earth Firsters running on gut instinct and not data and billions are lost by the panic that is induced by these klutz.

Free up capitalism and competition and we create the basis for stability and measured approaches to issues such as long term forms and structures and of course, even ethnic representation on the planet........and not the current imbalanced boat with everyone apparently headed for the Western deck.

[GHung]

americandream said: "Free up capitalism and competition and we create the basis for stability..."

Who is "WE", AD? You keep saying "we" can do this and "we" can do that, but when it comes time to do it, 'we' find there is no 'we'.
I know plenty of folks who don't care about your free capitalism, don't care about fairness, closing their waste streams, equal opportunity, the environment that 'we' all depend on, or even the law. All they care about is winning at any cost. Your so-called "free capitalism system" is a playground for mobsters, gangsters, crime syndicates, and others who will continue to exploit their species and planet to no good ends. It isn't even about profit; it's about a warped sense of ego.

That's the flaw in your thinking. You are assigning an ideal to a non-idealistic, fucked-up species; selfish and generally uncaring beyond their little scope of things.

Your free capitalism offers no protections for (or from) those without the capacity to understand any of this, or to compete on what you assume would be a level playing field. No place for the stupid people, the same stupid people who vote for stupid shit and politicians who don't give a rat's ass about you or me. That's why societies (and economies) need rules, and the collective will to enforce them. Always have.

[ennui2]

And you still have not answered the Billion-Dollar question: how does a zero-sum oil-future contract between two parties (in which one wins and the other loses in equal amount), settled at maturity could possibly affect the cost and price of crude oil at the terminal?

Still waiting. Oh. And don't bother to link to another spurious self-serving comment/article by an industry playa who wants suckers like you to join in the fun. Just answer the question in a simple fashion. Okay?

^^^ Still replaying 2008 endlessly. Get over it. Nobody buys your argument which is why there are only maybe a half dozen active posters on this site.