Month: April 2015

Buy Experiences, Not Things

- Adam Clare

If you have surplus cash it’s better to spend that money on experiences than buying objects. That is, if you want to live a happy life. Researchers who have looked into what makes us happy over our lifetime have concluded that experiences contribute more to happiness than objects. You might nor remember buying that neat computer, but you do remember that crazy time at that place somewhere.

Personally, I’ve been putting of buying furniture for the last six months because I prefer travelling. So even hearing that this research backs up my thinking makes me happy.

“One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation,” says Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University who has been studying the question of money and happiness for over two decades. “We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them.”

So rather than buying the latest iPhone or a new BMW, Gilovich suggests you’ll get more happiness spending money on experiences like going to art exhibits, doing outdoor activities, learning a new skill, or traveling.

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A Competition and Journal Looking Into Philosophy and Games

- Adam Clare

Game Praxis

Games are a very popular cultural medium with a reputation for not being very “deep”. Game Praxis is a new project I’ve co-founded to encourage game makers and players to ask big questions through gameplay. It’s a game competition and a journal focused on philosophy and games.

The goal is simple: generate more interesting content about how games can be used to explore bigger questions. For the first run of Game Praxis pre-existing games can be submitted so if you’ve already made a game that you think should be considered you can do so.

The Game Praxis mission:

Should you choose to accept it? Marx observed philosophers have interpreted the world when the point is to change it. Much the same could be said for the game industry. We need to build more than better worlds, we need to build a better world. We see crunch, the precarious careers of late capital, and a troubled and troubling apprehension of gender in game and the game industry as symptoms of an underlying pathology of the spirit. In the game industry, the measure of success is money. With all due respect to our invocation of Marx, we aren’t against the production of surplus value but we believe there are more creative ways to evaluate games, game industries and our lives in game.

Check out Game Praxis!

Turning Trash Into Health Care in Indonesia

- Adam Clare

Indonesia has a rather large number of people on reactively small landmass and as a result solid waste has become a problem. Enter Garbage Clinical Insurance which is a company focussed on turning trash collection into health care. It’s a simple solution insofar that people who can’t afford to see a doctor can bring in found trash in exchange for health care. It cleans the streets while keeping people healthy!

For patients, it’s like getting health care for free. “They think they don’t pay anything for the insurance—they just give garbage,” Albinsaid says. “So it persuades the community. And we’re encouraging poor people to pay with their own resources.”

Albinsaid, now 26, has been running his startup, Garbage Clinical Insurance, for two years, after a few earlier variations on the idea failed to take off. The company now runs a health clinic of its own, and also works with four others. So far, it has helped 3,500 uninsured people get health care.

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Seoul Starts Vertical Farming

- Adam Clare

Vertical farming is a possible food production solution as suburban sprawl consumes arable land. The new style of farming essentially is a farm in a skyscraper; they have yet to demonstrate commercial value but it’s inevitable that these farms will be normal fixtures in urban centres; Korea wants to be on the leading edge of this.

The farms would be three stories high, with vegetables and crops grown on the second and third floors, while the first floor would serve as a classroom for teaching agriculture, city officials said Tuesday.

The farms will be computer controlled to provide the right light, temperature and humidity, and check carbon dioxide levels.

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Ontario Joins California and Quebec’s Cap and Trade Program

- Adam Clare

Ontario is launching a cap and trade carbon program that matches with the existing programs in Quebec and California. This is a good thing for adoption of carbon-conscious economics even if the system isn’t perfect. The program is being praised by Greenpeace and other environmental NGOs.

And this program is happening despite the obvious incompetence of Canada’s federal government, including their support of the shameful tar sands.

The plan would increase the scope of the market to 61 million people and half of Canada’s economy.

Premiers and territorial leaders are poised to meet in Quebec City Tuesday to discuss an environmentally responsible Canadian energy strategy, which they agreed to in Charlottetown last August. Their goal is to flesh out the strategy before UN climate talks in Paris in December.

Read more.

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