The True Cost of things
An article about chocolate on TreeHugger made me kind of giddy that my way of thinking has been verbalised so eloquently.
At some point I realised that everything on the market is liable to have cut corners. At the most obvious level, something that seems cheap may have been unethically sourced. Conventionally-grown cotton is basically an ecological disaster. Products shipped from overseas consume fuel and emit poop into the air; some items, such as fresh apples, are shipped by air, the nastiest shipping method of all.
When I buy/use something, I try to find something that doesn’t cut corners and isn’t afraid of charging me the full fare; if not, I accumulate guilt proportionate to the amount of corner that has been cut. Then like a fatty who just ate all the leftover doughnuts I have to go and work it off by doing things like… planting stuff on the balcony.
This long explanation leads up to why I dislike the way most companies and people operate. The true cost is ignored; they turn a blind eye to the real effect of their purchases. The Government of Canada is pretty much mandated to purchase the cheapest alternative (though there are usually ways to get around it for smaller projects, which is one of the reasons why FOSS is not as big as it should be). The mandate likely caused us to strike that infernal deal with American Express — I don’t know the details of this deal, and it is an old one I’m sure — which I think is a pretty horrible thing, considering alternatives such as the Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Montreal, Toronto Dominion or even the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank of Canada. (For a fun exercise, play with the Climate Friendly Banking site to see if you should switch banks.