Hooked on 'essential' gadgets

UK hooked on 'essential' gadgets:

"'On televisions, for example, we would like to see labels saying 'if you watch it, it will cost x pence per hour, if you leave it on standby, it will cost y pence'. Then you can present the environmental cost in monetary terms,' he told BBC News."

Essential these days means if you don't have one and everyone else does, you are really made to feel like you are weird or deprived. The power of advertising. You have to have a good mobile and an MP3 player, you have to have Net access and it needs to be broadband. There are so many things which advertising has made us, as a community, believe we have to have. The community supports this thinking because it really doesn't cope with those who have a plain kettle, a landline plugged into a socket, an alarm clock which is not plugged in. We do not understand those without microwaves and TVs. There is no independent thinking any longer. An electric toothbrush is not an essential. I have a battery one. Is it essential? No. Everything has a standby light and it's not possible to run a lot of things easily without the standby or you have to reset the whole box and dice. Or you have to keep plugging things in and no, we no longer have that kind of time. So we burn up electricity because we are time poor, not because we are neglectful. To have gadgets which told us how much they cost to run, to be able to compare that at time of purchase would be fantastic and would help us to be more mindful of resources. We seriously need to be more discriminating about resources and we need help to be like that.Maybe I need to go out the back and chisel this into a lump of stone. I may not be back for quite some time!!