#consume

If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order? We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences -- which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef -- and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails. ↗

— Susan Freinkel

#environment #plastic #sustainability #love

Outsourcing and globalization of manufacturing allows companies to reduce costs, benefits consumers with lower cost goods and services, causes economic expansion that reduces unemployment, and increases productivity and job creation. ↗

— Larry Elder

#benefits #causes #companies #consumers #cost

One of the things in the back of my mind is that, after my sports experience, I never want to be, totally consumed by any one endeavor, other than my family life. ↗

— Julius Erving

#any #back #consumed #endeavor #experience

Consumers are statistics. Customers are people. ↗

— Stanley Marcus

#customers #people #statistics

But beyond the hysteria of phantom death panels, where is the abomination? Show me the provisions that will hurt consumers, because if you think a $110 billion a year tax break for working-class Americans to buy private health insurance is a government takeover, I welcome the debate. ↗

— Jim McDermott

#beyond #billion #break #buy #consumers

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed. ↗

— Julius Sterling Morton

#consumed #each #earth #exhausted #forests

But a rise in the wages of labour would not equally affect commodities produced with machinery quickly consumed, and commodities produced with machinery slowly consumed. ↗

— David Ricardo

#commodities #consumed #equally #labour #machinery

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#food #responsibility #food

The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#love #technology #love

Commerce is the new green. Spend your money where your beliefs are. ↗

— S. Kelley Harrell

#consumerism #green #money