<p>^^ that has been true in California for years.</p>
<p>To me it isn’t what one does in their spare time, but I do care because of the environmental impact. I don’t want to turn this thread into an environmental debate but the fact is most people don’t even think about it or know about it or want to know about it… for them, it is simply not their concern how their purchases impact anyone but them. And that is the problem.</p>
<p>for them, it is simply not their concern how their purchases impact anyone but them. And that is the problem.</p>
<p>Well, we are always going to have those who are egocentric. Our best option is to educate.
[The</a> Story of Stuff Project](<a href=“http://www.storyofstuff.org/]The”>http://www.storyofstuff.org/)</p>
<p>Goodwill was more than happy to accept one of the old box TV’s just last week.</p>
<p>Silpat,the “gazillionaire” remark was made in the context of the cost of a townhouse and a half in Chelsea. Not everyone with a big house is a gazillionaire, or even wealthy. <em>I</em> have a fairly large house, especially for the size of our family. In any case, there is nothing inherently “wrong” with being a gazillionaire and I didn’t intend to imply that there was.</p>
<p>My late MIL was always complaining about my “wasting” money on things like a subscription to the NYCB. She would have thought nothing of our spending a hundred times that much on a new car. According to her, it was a well-known fact that working women wasted money on prepared and take out food. At the time, I was baking all of our bread, making all of our jams and pickles and relishes, had a freezer full of homemade stock, cooking al of our meals from scratch–cooking activities that I can assure you would NEVER have occurred to her–commuting almost 4 hours a day and had a fulltime job.</p>
<p>For the record, our household has two functioning computers per person and several dead ones in the cellar, one dead 17" box TV in the garage, one live 22" flatscreen in the house, no cable or satellite subscription but broadband internet, and thousands of books. We each have a cell phone. Mine is stupid: still have the first I ever got, about 5 years ago. H’s is smart: he needs it for work. S’s is dumb, too, but he’s on his third, since he keeps breaking them.</p>
<p>I do think that excess is an issue, and I do think that excess consumption of resources is something to be concerned about. But “excess” looks different to different people. I’m worried about sustainability, and feel pretty guilty about heating my big old house in the winter, even though we’ve spent money on insulating measures and we keep it at 62. YMMV.</p>
<p>If there was a way old devices could be updated for new technology we wouldn’t have as much. Don’t know many people out there working with typewriters and floppy discs.
Analog TVs got scrapped. New TVs got bigger and better for a better viewing experience. Gaming systems got better and less expensive. New computers have to be bigger to run the software being created. Planned obsolescence at its finest!
And you have to keep up with it to a certain extent or you turn into a dinosaur at work and in your kids eyes.</p>
<p>mother22, Thanks for your post. My local Good Will does not accept larger appliances and just started taking computer equipment last month, so I assumed no TVs. I see now that they do take working sets.</p>
<p>lots of tv’s here. let me count…6–and one in the garage (with cable), too! not sure why we have tv’s still in the kids’ rooms–but they do enjoy having them on the rare visits. </p>
<p>if the tv’s aren’t too old, i have had success donating them to schools–</p>
<p>TV? What TV? We are not big on TV’s. When we move, we only bought ONE TV and that is all to it. The COMCAST cable in our house is only for internet and we pay only 29.99 for it. Xbox? No, gaming is bad for acadamics.</p>
<p>We have 2 TVs–one that we bought after the one we got from our wedding in 1986 was too obsolete to plug & play DVDs and one that S won as a prize. We also have one Wii and 2 laptops and 3+ desktops for the 2 of us. Each of the kids also has a desktop & laptop in their residences. Have never wanted more electronics. My brother has many, many TVs–think he has 3 TVs in the kitchen alone and 3 in the great room, as well as some in different bedrooms.</p>
<p>We spent hours this weekend watching Public TV performances of orchestras- some excellent TV viewing time. HD made for an even better experience. Don’t always be proud of NOT watching TV.</p>
<p>Great room? WHAT great room? We don’t have a great room…We only have regular rooms, and only five…</p>
<p>Jk!</p>
<p>"No, Starbright is correct. I’ve experienced being judged by the other side firsthand as a 17 year old freshman in the mid-'90s when I got into a heated argument with an aunt and her family over my refusal to bring a TV to college. </p>
<p>They felt having a TV in my dorm is “essential” whereas I felt in a college dorm environment…it was a frivolous luxury which took up precious dorm space. "</p>
<p>Cobrat, you really have got to set boundaries with your aunts/uncles/cousins, that you mention repeatedly. Their “opinion” on you not bringing a TV is simply irrelevant to your life; why do you continually reference your cousins ’ opinions as looming so large?</p>
<p>The great room of my brother’s house is larger than my entire house, I think–probably about 1500 square feet or so. He did buy the house as a foreclosure sale & got it for a good price. He has remodeled it once & is now in the 2nd remodel.</p>
<p>Cobrat, you really have got to set boundaries with your aunts/uncles/cousins, that you mention repeatedly.</p>
<p>I believe Cobrat is barely out of college & it can take a while for some to get over slights from childhood.
But I agree, mentioning slights at every opportunity isn’t the way to move past them.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Because it is relevant to supporting Starbright’s account of how people who are really into TVs can be just as judgmental of those who aren’t into TV’s as much or worse…anti-TV. </p>
<p>Her post jogged that memory because it highlighted the absurdity with which some who love their TVs feel slighted by those who don’t share that passion.</p>
<p>We have 7 tvs in my house, and probably around ten computers if you count desktops and laptops together. The numbers by themselves sound excessive, but if you consider why we have them and how much we use them I don’t really think it is. For the tvs, we have one in each of the three bedrooms, one in each of the two offices (both parents are self-employed and work from home), one in the family room, and one in the basement where the workout equipment is. Everybody has a desktop and a laptop, and my dad has a few extra computers for his work-- we all started with one desktop but added a laptop later for convenience and still hold onto the desktops “just in case.” I watch more tv than anyone else in my family by far and away and I only watch an hour or two a week. Watching “our shows” and discussing them together is one of few things my family still does together, I’m not sure why someone would behave as though they are superior to us just because we like our televisions… We have what we have because they’ve been saved for and collected over the years, and we like always being able to watch SOMEWHERE in the house without disturbing anybody. I fail to see the issue. It isn’t as though we went out and bought them all at once.</p>
<p>I just amused myself by calculating the ratio of tv screen area to floor area for our house. 
;)</p>
<p>“It isn’t as though we went out and bought them all at once.”</p>
<p>The real culprits are the electronics manufacturers and the &^%# technology. I’d be perfectly fine with my old analog TV and old laptop, but… When Comcast went HD, we had to modify some of our equipment. The DVD recorder was no longer compatible and had to go. Even with the d/a converter, TV watching became a pain (the distorted images drive me nuts!), and guess what - Comcast stopped offering discounted rate to “analog” viewers. A digital TV became a must for someone like my H who likes to watch financial and political shows. Computers… When someone sends me a .docx document, I cannot open it using the old verson of Word! Programs become obsolete, and software companies no longer offer support and updates, and new software requires faster processor speeds, etc. Sometimes, it is less painful and even cheaper to get a new gadget than to try to update the old one to make it functional. I’m really mad at HP now that I discovered that HP does not have a Win 7 driver for the laser printer that functions just fine with our XP computer! I can spend hours poking around the internet looking for a solution, or I can keep printing off the old computer, and when the cartridge runs out, I can go and get a new printer for the price of a new cartridge. And the list goes on and on.</p>
<p>
Sure you can, you just need to get a free utility from Microsoft that converts it on the fly to work with the old format.</p>
<p>
One of many reasons I won’t buy HP gear.</p>