My favorite talmudic anecdote is from the Rabbi who noted "my life has been blessed, because I never knew I needed anything until I had it." I know exactly how he felt; How have I coped without this One Click Butter Cutter? No wonder North American kitchens are so big, they have to accommodate all of this crap....
But hey, with the US$ so strong, thats only $ 382,469 and it is for two dogs, so that is a lot less per dog. So what if people are hungry or losing their jobs, let them build doghouses. Inside:
the dogs will sleep on sheepskin-lined, temperature-controlled beds, soothe their aches in an 18in-deep spa, howl along to a £150,000 sound system and watch dog-friendly programmes on a 52-inch plasma TV.
Automatic dispensers will ensure that chilled, filtered water and deluxe dry food are always available.
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We have noted before that the rich are different from you and me- they emit a lot more carbon dioxide. Presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain is no exception; Joe Romm of Climate Progress ran the numbers on as many of McCain's homes he could find information on.
He writes: "So what is the carbon footprint of McCain’s countless homes? Here is a rough estimate.According to press reports, just one of McCain’s homes, his $4.66 million condo in Phoenix, is about 7000 square feet, which is three times the size of the average American home built last year. His $850,000 Virginia condo is another 2,100 square feet. Given a total estimated ...
There is no question that athletes have to keep hydrated and go through a lot of water. But Lance Armstrong breaks all the records again with his little pile in Austin, where he used 330,000 gallons of water for his acre of gardens and swimming pool, at a time when Texas is going through a dry spell. “We are definitely short on rain,” Lisa Rhodes, a spokeswoman for the water authority, said with a sigh to the New York Times.
Image Modern Mechanix
Sigh. First they monetized the water; now the marketing wiz kids want us to pay for air. And it is working; in New York City it is flying off the drugstore shelves at sixteen bucks a can. Kevin DelGaudio, the "inventor" (it's been around for years) of Instant Oxygen, told CBS "You know you start falling asleep at the wheel a couple of intakes of ox and I'm wide awake."
...
Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times
Back in the day, you told the kids to go play outside; the outdoors, the street, the park, they were the rec rooms. When they got to be teenagers, they went and hung out with friends. Some got into trouble; most didn't. Things changed. Even though crime rates have dropped to the lowest level in decades, cities like New York are as clean as Disneyland and bikes are cool again, Architecture professor Dana Cuff can say to the Times:
In a practice I can hardly fathom, the Turkish government has been giving 155 million new textbooks each year to students, most of which are thrown into the trash at the end of the year rather than simply requiring they return them for use by next year’s crop of students.
Of course there’s not only an environmental cost to this enormous waste of resources, but an economic cost as well, with the books costing the Turkish public more than $800 million annually.
...
A while back we made a big splash about Celine Dion's use of 6.5 million gallons of water per year for a house that she didn't even live in, and got hosed in the comments by many of her fans. It turns out that her staff doesn't check the bills they pay too carefully, and just sent in a cheque for $36,343 to cover the bill. Once the story came out, they looked more carefully and found a broken water main. According to the Palm Beach Post:
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