*quality recycling of the end of an era

Awesome! I've always wanted to encourage the world to move toward reusable containers at food sources (grocery-store-provided, deposits for use, etc). I just don't know how to effectively communicate that kind of message to a wide audience (especially in a game or similar media).
It's absolute nonsense that consumers are primarily responsible for the bulk of recycling when we often have no choice.

*death *nature

Throw me back to "Earf" to recycle my body for future lives. No point of putting me in those hard caskets that preserve my body.

@eoe
jesus christ dude..
could you be any more presumptuous?

first off,i didnt call you out specifically.
i rather enjoyed you and newts exchange,but my commentary was not addressing nor interjecting in that conversation.

second,the only argument (if you even want to call it that) that i proposed was to cut the moral absolutes out,because they are bullshit.

now maybe you do not engage in the morality argument that many ..MANY ...vegans DO attempt to utilize to better make their point,and hats off to you if you see the hypocrisy of such a tactic.

now please understand i am not ignoring that there is a morality factor in being a vegan and i totally respect that.what i am stating is to not become burdened with absolutes and attempting to use morality to further a position..or you will be called out on it and rightly so.

thirdly,
your comment is actually a straw man,not mine.
you posit a position i didnt take in order to refute that imaginary position.

which you took a step further by accusing me of not addressing certain aspects of an argument that i only tacitly referred to and in no specific or detailed way.

in fact almost your entire comment towards me is a fabricated argument that i never had with you.

so who are you arguing/debating with?
because i can say with some authority that it is not me.

maybe you took my tone or words as a direct assault on you or what you have written,but as anybody here will attest,i have no problem calling someone out directly.conversely,i have no problem being called out (if my fly is open,please let me know).

so if that is the case,allow me to offer an olive branch:
my girlfriend of many years is a devout vegan.
so i am full aware of the reasons why she became a vegan (at the tender age of seven,no shit) and for her the decision was mostly a moral one i.e:cruelty,abuse etc etc.

when we first started dating she attempted to use every tactic in the book to get me to see the barbarity in my callous and cruel meat eating ways.she would send me videos of the most horrific abuse of animals,slaughterhouse horror stories..i am sure you may be familiar with many of her tactics in attempting to reveal the moral imperative to stop this torture and abuse.

which i responded (much like alluded to in my original comment) by showing her videos of the horrific abuses perpetrated upon human beings just so she could have cheap clothing and those electronic gadgets she loves so much.

which of course made her feel absolute,crushing guilt.almost to the point where it paralyzed her.because she is an adorable sweetheart who genuinely cares for not only people but animals.

which leads me to the main point i was making:
you cannot make a vegan argument based solely on moral absolutes,because it will fall apart within seconds and you come across as a pretentious twat.

so YOU can make the decision to be a vegan based on moral grounds and that is totally acceptable,but you cannot take the moral high ground when debating veganism to further a point,because we ALL bear responsibility in the suffering of others.be they animal or human.

do you see what i am saying?

if you choose to indulge moral absolutes,then you will be exposed as a hypocrite,because when we use absolutes,that metric has to be applied equally to all factors of living.

which leaves us with the "distinctions" and the reason i say those are boring is because it becomes a narcissistic exercise of self-righteous twattery.

i recycle.
i refuse to shop at walmart.
i do not eat fast food.
i only buy organic.
i try to shop local.

all these things i do,not because they actually make a difference,but rather they make me feel better about myself.it gives me the "feel goods".even though i am full aware that in the larger picture,what i am doing means next to nothing.

but it means something to me.
and i think that is really the only real argument a vegan has to rely on to express their viewpoint.

i have seen the videos.
i am aware how awful,cruel and barbaric farming animals can be,but i like bacon.

i am an asshole.

Man, they just keep recycling the island from Far Cry 1

When I die (now would be nice ), I would like my body to be donated for science and be reused. Anything left over, burn it and recycle back to "Earf". There's no point of having my dead body slowly rotting in a casket. Let God's life take care of my body to be reused for the future.

Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!
I love this on so many levels. It's a beautiful melding of recycling, innovation, art, ecology, engineering, exercise, job training, self sufficiency, etc. This is how I want to see 3rd world countries to better themselves, in ways that better their lives without falling into the same traps 1st world countries have that destroy their priceless environments for convenience or profit. 1st world countries could learn something from that too.
*promote

When I die I want to be embalmed with vodka. My parts can be recycled if need be.

It's got a strong Speed Buggy meets Road Warrior feel to it. It's going to be hard for him to pick up dates with it though, being a single seater.
*quality *engineering / recycling.

I've kept some of my favourite examples of my kids' art from when they were little, but really these days there's no reason not to photograph all of it and file it away for future reference, prior to putting the less fun ones in the recycling.

Varoufakis is on stage at an IMK gig in Berlin right now. It was ~40 minutes of old news, really, at least if you've been following the developments over the last couple of months.

The interesting bit is that he's still making a clear commitment to a permanent primary surplus. For a country as devastated as Greece, that's austerity. Some argue that a 5% deficit over 5-10 years would be required to get Greece back on track, Bill Mitchell and Jamie Galbraith even make the case for running a 10% deficit to get some traction.

Since Varoufakis has to be aware that a primary surplus of any size is still contractionary, I wonder what funky accounting voodoo he has in mind to circumvent this contradiction. Just surplus recycling via the EIB? Who knows...

Edit: the ongoing panel discussion is interesting though.

Edit #2: the recording is now up again:
http://www.boeckler.de/veranstaltung_54282.htm (Varoufakis' talk begins at 12:30)

Edit #3: SPON has a piece on it this morning and one of the first comments correctly calls them out on it.

My own take on this is that I shouldn't just buy more expensive clothes...

I can do things to make my clothes last longer and that they aren't treated as a disposable commodity by reducing the number of washes (always bugs me when people wear a pair of trousers for a day or even just a few hours and then chucks them in the washing machine) as well as picking appropriate clothing for whatever task I'm currently doing.

I can help recycle clothes by making better use of charity shops, both in giving clothes to them and by purchasing from them.

I can buy clothes from retail stores that audit their entire supply chain. I'm fed up of retailers who have one or two lines of responsibly sourced clothing that they use for marketing and advertising purposes, but the rest of their stock does not receive such diligence. It doesn't seem right that they can paint a fair image of themselves by only selling one or two garments of clothing that come from sources where employees are treated and paid decently.

Most importantly I can do something simple like ignoring fashion trends. I am comfortable with my choice of clothing, I don't need to buy what everyone else is wearing. Unfortunately it's hard to make this point stick with others when our culture is so heavily dominated by consumerism and we're made to feel 'uncool' because we're not buying into the latest trends.

Totally understand your cynicism @deathcow, in all likelihood it's what'll probably happen. I guess I'm just gonna focus on what little I can do to make a difference

Perhaps it's rather just cheaper to reduce the amount of actual toothpaste you put in a tube? I wonder what the going rate is on shredded recycled plastic compared to the same volume of crest toothpaste? It's like watering down alcohol, but you probably can't water down toothpaste. So you plump it out with a bunch of cheap plastic.

@RedSky

The need to be kept afloat by European funds is pretty high on the list of things Syriza is keen to do away with. Varoufakis was clear on this pretty early on, at least 2009 as far as I know. They treated it as a problem of liquidity instead of a problem of insolvency, and therefore any funds funnelled into Greece were basically disappearing down a black hole. They are bleeding cash left, right and center, and the continuous flow of credit from Europe doesn't help a bit in its current form.

As of now, they can't pay shit. Any additional credit has to be used to pay back interest on previous credit. Their meagre primary surplus is less than their interest payments. With that in mind, some of the ideas floating around sound rather intriguing, especially given the horrendous failure all the previous agreements have produced. These ideas include: cap interest payment (1.5% of primary surplus), use the rest for investment or humanitarian relief; no payments on debt below 3% growth, 50% of agreed upon payments at 3-6% growth, full payments at 6+% growth.

Yet even those ideas are purely theoretical, because there is no growth in Greece. The celebrated growth in Q3 2014 of 0.7% might very well be a fluke, as Bill Mitchell described here (prices falling faster than incomes). For Greece to be able to have any meaningful growth, they'd require not just a complete reconstruction of its institutions (structural reforms), but also massive investment.

And there's where it breaks down again, since you rightfully pointed out that the Germans in particular won't spend a dime on Greece, especially not with investment in Germany in equally dire shape (shortfall of about a trillion € since 2000).


Which brings me to another point: Germany vs France.

Productivity in both countries was en par in 1999, and productivity in France in 2014 was only slightly below German numbers. "Living within your means" is a very popular phrase in the current discussion, which basically means living in accordance with your productivity.

Subsequently, there should be a similar development of unit labour costs within a monetary union, with growth targets set by the central bank. In our case, that would be just below 2%. Like I've previously said, Greece lived beyond its means in this regard, and significantly so.

But what about France and Germany? The black line marks the target, blue is France, red is Germany. That's beggar-thy-neighbour. That's gaining competetiveness at the cost of your fellow Euro pals. That's suppressing domestic demand in order to push exports.

German reforms killed its domestic market (retail sales stagnant since early '90s) and created an aggregate trade surplus to the tune of 2 trillion Euros. That's 2 trillion Euros of deficit in other countries. And we're looking at an additional 200-210 billion Euros this year. If running trade deficits is bad, so is running trade surpluses.

Ironically, there's even been legislation in Germany since 1967, instructing the government to balance its books in matters of trade (and other areas). They've been in violation of it for 15 years.

With this in mind, everytime a German politician calls for the other countries to run trade surpluses just like Germany, I get furious. Some of them, on the European level, even have the audacity to say that everyone should run trade surpluses, and all it takes to get there is massive wage cuts. That's open lunacy and a failure of basic math. No surplus without deficits, no savings without debt.

And while we're at it, it's not the savings rate in Germany that bothers me. It's the moral superiority that is being ascribed to running surpluses in every way imaginable. Every part of society is expected to have a positive savings rate, because debt is bad. Well, if everyone's saving and nobody's accruing the corresponding debt, you get the current situation where there is no investment whatsoever, a gargantuan shortfall in demand given the national productivity, and a cool 200 billion Euros of debt a year that foreign actors have to rake up so that Germany can have its massive growth of 0.5-1.5% annually.

Finding borrowers for all that cash is getting more difficult by the day. The ECB's QE is basically one big search for new borrowers, since everyone either doesn't want to borrow or cannot borrow anymore.

If Germany wanted to help the Eurozone, they'd start by increasing their ULC vis-á-vis the rest of the countries. Competitiveness should be regulated through the foreign exchange rate, not this parasitic race to the bottom within the zone. Ten years of 4% increase in wages, annually. That ought to be a start.

Additionally, allow the ECB to fund the European Investment Bank directly, instead of this black hole of QE.

Or go one step further and seriously consider Varoufakis' ideas, including the old Keynesian concept of a global surplus recycling mechanism.

But all that is pure fantasy. I don't think a majority of Germans would support either of these measures, not with the overwhelming fear of inflation this society has. Add the continuous demonisation of debt and you get a guarantee that very few countries might be compatible to be in a longtime monetary union with Germany.