> The idea is about increasing the mindfulness of your purchases and reducing unnecessary environmental waste driven by impulse buying.

I like the idea, but this could backfire on me =/

app: "it will take you 10 minutes to afford this" me: "but it took 30 minutes to decide which one! now i need to buy three!"

Taking time off during work hours usually means making it up in the evening or on the weekend.

Of course, it depends on your job and work load. Mine is basically this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961560

Plant space, animal lives, tainted ecosystems, busted up terrain, displaced humans are all contained in most of the products we buy, and especially online.

It's one thing when it's a bare necessity, but I shudder when I think about how many animal lives were lost in order to produce just one faux-animal beanie baby with cute oversized eyeballs.

AFAIK they only do CO2 emissions, yet. But when I spoke to them, they had more planned.

My problem with such products, is that they will reach the people who need it less: people who already care and try their best, will be able to do a little better; but people who don't care, won't install and use it, yet their impact is probably relatively much larger.

This works in two ways: 1. they "plant trees" and/or 2. they buy && hold or destroy certificates.

Certificates are limited regulated and deflationary. E.g. the EU buys X certificates from the market every year and destroys them and grants less certs each year. Every company that emits "significant" CO2 needs to have, buy or be granted certs to do so. The setup makes those certs more expensive, so every year, there's a tradeoff: do I buy certs, or do I invest in lowering my emission.

Apps such as Fairshares allow public to buy (pieces of) such certs.

When agricultural (or similar) lands are transformed back to forests, that has a real and direct effect on the ability of the environment to absorb CO2 emission.

Obviously it needs to be done well, which often is not the case. Quite often there's no tree planted IRL, just some "promise to probably do so in some future" sold instead. And quite often the tree is planted but then abandoned (so that each 2 years everything dies off and the same plot can be re-used to "plant more trees"). But that is not the only modus operandi.

Still, does sound like a good efficiency gain for those villages.

For example I'd go super cheap on wired earbuds but premium on a set of knives. Or super cheap on knives but premium on an electric knife sharpener

I'm sure I end up with results biased towards whatever's in vogue for that community and likely something a bit more expensive, but it seems to have been a reasonably successful strategy in terms of getting things that fit my needs.

Wonder if there's a good way to facilitate finding such resources and avoiding the endless SEOed spam that one gets when googling any item for reviews/recommendations.

Indeed, it's a freaking scourge. My current tactic is to append "reddit" to my searches. Often there's a subreddit of mostly genuine enthusiasts about $thing.

In the last year I’ve bought a great garbage disposal, some all weather tires, a pellet grill, and a dishwasher based off their recommendations. Often times instead of getting the very best rates of something I’ll buy the second best which is often 1/2 the price. Sometimes the best of an item is really cheap compared to other brands that are shinier but objectively worse at the core function of the product.

We ask a lot of our chargers these days (e.g. 100w USB-C PD), and the price-quality curve seems to be very jumpy. Have had good experiences with companies like Anker or Aukey, but also seen tear-downs of failed units one price tier down that had zero isolation between mains voltage and what's going to the device. Would love to find some better guidance on buying such things.

For instance, I've bought stuff from Aukey and Ravpower that's worked well so far, but I wouldn't necessarily call those name brands yet in the US, unlike Anker.

https://medium.com/@leung.benson

Manufacturing ridiculously cheap shit at scale to where more and more people click a button and have anything they want delivered to their door in a fucking day... is absolutely disgusting to me. But that's me, in my privilege. This machine adds ever more people up to the "consumer" class from out of abject poverty and welp that is a good thing.

I'm just conflicted because I feel like that has to be so doesn't it? We get to pontificate about "post consumerism" and derive meaning and such and such and such. Meanwhile that literally-worth-2-cents-t-shirt actually happens to be a good thing, at history scale, to all the people that have not being able to clothe themselves =/

sigh, I don't know what my point is, your comment just compelled me to share.

Like some others hear I'm more interested in the carbon cost of purchases. How long it takes to earn the cost is something my brain automatically calculates! (maybe younger folks don't do that).

I recently worked on an idea to try and build a movement to rally people around taking action to benefit the CO2 problem during a specific month of the year: https://march2zero.com

Lots of these suggestions are great, but honestly just focus on the first version.

Great idea tbh

X is the amount at the checkout page.

On the other hand I often base my purchases based on "Will this $50 spend save more than N minutes of my time"

For example a top-filling humidifer may cost $50 more than a bottom-filling one but I spend an extra 1 minute fighting with the bottom-filling one and cleaning up water spills so after 15 uses it makes up its price difference.

This of course depends on my savings rate, current assets and expected return on investments.

Either way, cool stuff!

I couldn't find stated clearly one way or the other whether or not you collect information about the sites that I visit.

You can also read the source code here: https://github.com/jsom/curb-your-consumerism/tree/main/src

I realize there have been browser extension authenticity issues recently with some sketchy things being published like The Great Suspender https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1.... I've got to spend more time investigating a way to remove this question for users, but my intent is to never collect any data beyond the anonymous online tally of the homepage which is opt-in only.

Sorry, I need to replace that email address it is unfortunately a placeholder. Side project has some loose threads. I'll do that tonight.

Edit: email fixed

At least on Firefox AMO, their new “verified” add-on badge is worth a look.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-badges

I think it’d also be useful if there’s a way to render stacks of cash (paper money and possibly coins) to show how much money you’re spending represented visually.

Keep refining it !