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...really very little opportunity for that. We need to talk hard about how much reduction in our consumer lifestyle [slowing climate change] is going to take and not just tell everybody there's going to be a rosy scenario if we put up a few more windmills and buy a few more Priuses...
...things to buy during the recession...
...takes to charm people from Maine? They're uptight white people coated with a hard exterior made from other uptight white people. While Obama negotiates on climate change, the Chinese government has forced China's entire tech industry to focus on energy efficiency, and soon we'll all buy Chinese products because they'll be far cheaper to power - and people can stay mad about poisoned babies and puppies for only so long. The lesson for Obama isn't that we didn't like George W. Bush because he bossed us around. We just wanted to be bossed around...
Housing subsidies have side effects too. For one thing, they push us to buy rather than rent. There's a positive side to this, as homeowners tend to take better care of their property and their neighborhood than renters do. But there's a negative one too, particularly in times of economic upheaval like this, as homeownership becomes an economic ball and chain that keeps workers from moving to areas where jobs are more plentiful. Subsidies also tempt us to buy more house than we would otherwise, a wasteful use of capital - not to mention of the energy it takes...
...course, you can train yourself to be optimistic through sheer mental discipline. Ever since psychologist Martin Seligman crafted the phrase "learned optimism" in 1991 and started offering optimism training, there's been a thriving industry in the kind of thought reform that supposedly overcomes negative thinking. You can buy any number of books and DVDs with titles like Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, in which you will learn mental exercises to reprogram your outlook from gray to the rosiest pink: "affirmations," for example, in which you repeat upbeat predictions over and over to yourself; "visualizations" in which you post...