In other words, you will need to work not days, weeks but months to earn a holiday trip, an iPad.

If the Ipad lasted 30 years (Veblenically!) would that necessarily be a Bad Thing?

If the holiday trip to far-flung destinations reunited you with distant family or provided an experience so profound or galvanising you would treasure it for life, partly because it wasn't crawling with ignorant boors there drunkenly despoiling the environment...

Make people value things more, or else the ecocide will continue gathering pace. That's the lesson I get from resource depletion.

In the same vein, building nukes so we can continue a throwaway lifestyle is like embracing the devil and the deep blue sea. (With its plastic pollution, algae runoff, jellyfish swarms, fish graveyards and Fukushima/BP 'events').

:(:(:(

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty