Waste

This is one thing that has really started to get on my nerves recentley, waste!!! People waste time energy and food and it really annoys me. Food! My number 1 pet hate that people waste, and the wasteful habits that are activley encouraged by super markets. My wife buys strawberries, she likes strawberries, yet she has a small appetite. She knows I don't eat them and she also knows that she won't eat more than 1 punnet in the time it takes for them to go off, and yet if there is a buy-one-get-one-free offer on she will walk away with 2 punnets. 1 will get eaten and the other will simply go off and be dumped straight into the compost bin. I've confronted her on this before as to why she is getting 2 punnets when 1 will more than suffice and the answer is she's getting more without spending anymore which you can't argue with. So the farmer that sells his fruit at a lower and lower price because supermarkets are giving them away only suffices to increase the material in my compost bin and reduce the amount of money the farmer gets for his fruit. This lays the blame squarely at the feet of supermarkets...I wonder what true, real and bonefide advantage this gets them?? Another one is food that does simply get thrown away, if you find yourself repeatedly having to throw food away as it has gone over then you are simply overestimating how much you need, or taking advantage of all of those BOGOF offers needlessly. The other thing is when you finish a meal and there is plenty left over is your first response to bin it, or to store it with the intention of turning it into something the following day. I must admit I am a bit of a dustbin for food but some of the best flavoured food I've had has been meals made the day before that have been aloud to marinade in the sauces for a full day strange but true :) Energy Energy being wasted is another bad one, this one carries a more hidden cost not just the environmental one but the fact that most energy is coming from fossil fuels that are for the most part controlled by some rather unsavoury characters and giving them more power is never a good plan. Take new televisions the bigger they are the more energy they tend to require some of the larger plasma tv's draw phenominal amounts of electricity. But there is a simpler energy wasting thing that gets on my nerves and that is this. I recentley bought a new tv, not massive as I live in a small house and big tv's in little houses look shit quite frankly. Anyway I set it up watched it for a bit then, when it came to switch it off realised there was ONLY a stand-by off pressing the button on the tv had the same effect as pressing the power button on the remote, it always used to be in times gone by that you could stand-by with the remote but you could actually switch the thing off as well therefore stopping it from drawing any stand-by current from the wall socket. This means the only way to switch it off properly is to switch it off at the wall which is less than convenient or else get another gadget to switch the plug off remotley but why should I when it was perfectly fine for tv manufacturers give proper power switches!! Time Here is a neat one, people waste so much time it is inconceivable, especially when using computers it would seem. I have heard of people ignoring a faster way of doing a task ( in Word especially ) because they (a) don't know (or want to know) about it (b) don't have "time" to investigate it or (c) their just too plain dumb and stuck in their ways to alter the process that they currently use. Well heres my answers to (a) if you use a tool for X hours a day wouldn't you want to be able to impress someone with just how quickly you can use it, (b) looking into something for an hour that will cut a repeated job down by 10 minutes will have repaid the initial investigation cost in just 6 repetitions (7 if you include the initial learning cycle) and (c) where do you start with someone who lacks the enthusiasm or ambition to better ones self?