Here’s a photograph of an amazing anti-pollution device:
The retardation of bacteria growth in foods – retardation made possible by this nifty (and today unheralded) device (in home versions, such as this one, and in commercial versions, such as in trucks that carry foods to markets) – keeps us from suffering much of the bacteria pollution that sickened and killed large numbers of our ancestors.
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How’d you get a picture of my fridge?
Does anyone else think that the “Cleaned by Capitalism” series is just an excuse for Don to show off his camera phone while puttering around his house?
Or my puttering around airports….
And here I thought that urinal was in your house!
No; the one in my house is green….
(I’m just playing devil’s advocate here).Conversely, you could say that the freon that used to be in millions (billions?) of these devices have done great harm to our health and the planet.It’s true that they have kept much of our food clean from bacteria and kept organic waste down, thereby allowing more food to be actually used. Also, modern fridges no longer use freon.
Question regarding the greatly improved blog format:
Is there a way to expand the “Recent Comments” box to have more than 3 entries? A page of all comments sorted by most recent first would be particularly convenient.
I’m not sure where best to post questions like this.
Thanks.
Since you brought it up, another nice feature would be the ability to collapse/expand selected sub-threads.
Hmm. Is it an anti-pollution device or is it a clunker seeking a government subsidy program to render it inoperable?…for the long-term reductuion in energy consumption, of course.
In my business we use a sofware that greatly improves the process that use to be done by hand. People forget how hard it was to do by hand. When people complain about, we tell to go back and do it by hand and they quickly remember how good they have it.
We’re such a “what have you done for me lately?” society. It’s easy to forget the dramatic difference these mundane things have made. It’d be easy to remember if we had to do without. Regarding the clean bathrooms, I’ve walked into bathrooms in other countries that made me vomit about 2 steps in.
Is Don using his ‘new & improved’ definition of pollution because he doesn’t like the implication of imposition over private property holders that greenies would have over the real definition of the pollution: ‘the negative externalities of waste products being dumped into the unowned commons’.
I agree that’s another important definition of pollution – and Don is citing examples of the kind of pollution that nobody really disputes markets deal with well (well – I’m sure there are some real crazy nutjobs that might still have Charles Dickens delusions). But you can’t rely deny the importance of internalizable pollution and the (predictably) stellar job that market has done with it.
And it is not just keeping bacteria out. The absence of similar devices in large parts of India, including in many health clinics, has meant that 50,000 people die each year in India because of snake bites. But without the capacity to store the anti-venom medicine in such cool devices, many patients from rural India die on their way to hospitals in bigger towns.