Jacob Lund Fisker Quotes & Sayings

conspicuous consumption is not a natural state for all of us. — Jacob Lund Fisker

Nobody thinks of using improvements in technology and productivity to allow people to work less and require fewer assets to achieve the same standard of living. Instead, while everybody is richer, at least in terms of stuff, no one is any wealthier. Their wealth is "safely" out of reach. If it weren't, how many would still show up for work the next day? — Jacob Lund Fisker

Any connection with nature and most connections with technology are lost. There's a belief that nature is irrelevant and that anything can be solved using the current methods--now technology; previously magic or praying. — Jacob Lund Fisker

This figure shows the cash flows in a world with only two people. I labeled them creditor and debtor. In reality, there are many creditors and debtors (see text for details). It also explains why the "rich get richer" and why those who are in debt and work for a living never seem to "get ahead. — Jacob Lund Fisker

When the automobile was made affordable to the masses, people moved further away from work and further away from stores. While transportation speed increased, transportation distance increased proportionally, keeping transportation time constant. — Jacob Lund Fisker

The question you need to answer is what you want to do with your life given that you don't have the time to do everything? Do you want to spend most of your life paying off the interest of a 30-year mortgage and working so you can fill increasingly bigger houses with increasingly more stuff while being stuck in your daily commute in increasingly nicer cars? Or are you prepared to give up the stuff so that you can do whatever you want, whenever, and wherever, within reason? What will your legacy be--what you owned or who you were? — Jacob Lund Fisker

Health is thus a condition of well-being and an ability to appreciate life. It's not necessarily optimizing or conforming to a set of measurable quantities like life expectancy or blood pressure, nor is it removing all symptoms using drugs. Health is the presence of something positive, rather than the absence of something negative. — Jacob Lund Fisker

wit, a salary or even the potential of a future salary seems to be a gateway to the debt drug; so many people could probably reduce the risk of getting into debt by simply quitting their jobs. — Jacob Lund Fisker

The mass education in high schools reflects the mass production of the real world. The teaching style has one teacher (supervisor) lecturing (leading) 20-25 students (workers) sitting in rows, much like a manager and his employees. — Jacob Lund Fisker

realize that economic agents all represent special interests that typically interpret the situation according to their own interests or political views. — Jacob Lund Fisker

The Dark Ages gradually ended six centuries ago with the Renaissance, which seeded new ideas for a different world. The Renaissance ideal dominated our culture until three centuries ago, from the 14th to the 18th century, when it was superseded by modernism. Not surprisingly, this human ideal has almost been forgotten in our culture. The Renaissance, literally "re-birth", was a revival and rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman culture following the decline of culture, trade, and technology during the Dark Ages. — Jacob Lund Fisker

The real problem is not how much we earn; it's how much we waste, perhaps to demonstrate our supposed wealth, when we spend it. — Jacob Lund Fisker

Unfortunately for the existing mature systems in nature, the rapid expansion of the human bubble is destroying them. Unfortunately for us, we can't exist without them any more than a living person can exist without oxygen or a body can exist without a head. In this sense, it is actually a conceptual error to define the environment as the rest of the biosphere save humans, and think of ourselves as apart from it, since we can't exist without it. — Jacob Lund Fisker

If you have debt, you're not a free person. You're explicitly owned by your debt and implicitly owned by the creditor. — Jacob Lund Fisker

In the same vein, tally up the sum total of your earned income so far, subtract your savings, and compare the difference to your pile of stuff. Was it really a good deal? — Jacob Lund Fisker

Walkers easily travel three miles by foot. Drivers get in their cars to get from one side of the parking lot to the other. Neither quite understand why the other is so crazy, when it's so easy to do things their way. — Jacob Lund Fisker

Do you want to spend most of your life paying off the interest of a 30-year mortgage and working so you can fill increasingly bigger houses with increasingly more stuff while being stuck in your daily commute in increasingly nicer cars? — Jacob Lund Fisker

Complexity, therefore, results in flexibility. Increasing complexity always increases capability and adaptability. — Jacob Lund Fisker

We have an economic model that is based on pulling resources out of the ground and mostly turning them into unnecessary products, getting people to buy the products by convincing them that they need them, then getting them to throw the products away because they're obsolete. This makes people buy the next model and bury the other one in the ground. The sole goal of this seemingly pointless exercise is to work faster and grow the gross domestic product, which measures the resource churn. — Jacob Lund Fisker

Many profit-driven corporate strategies are based on fashion, planned obsolescence, unneeded upgrades, and masterful emotional manipulation --marketing--causing people to continuously replace goods which are still in good working order. — Jacob Lund Fisker

For instance, why do we still work eight hours a day, 50 weeks a year, when we're twice as productive as we were 50 years ago? — Jacob Lund Fisker

In fact, education is very different from training. Training is what you know whereas education is who you are as a person. — Jacob Lund Fisker

People with more money than time buy $3,000 road racing bicycles with ultralight carbon frames to shave two pounds off the bike, regardless of the fact that they themselves are probably at least 10 pounds overweight. — Jacob Lund Fisker