It’s true.  I know by normal American standards my quaint European life may not appear so.  I drive a modest car (that I own), I have no television, and wear the same clothes I have worn since 1867 and am damn proud of them.  Besides, these checkered pants are going to be back in fashion any year now and then won’t you all be sorry!

But the truth is that I actually love new toys.  Anything and Everything.  Cartoon Balloon Sticky Notes?  Yeah.  Star Wars bookends?  Gotta have ‘em!  Watch made out of Dinosaur Poop?  WANT!  There are two things and two things alone keeping me from selling my organs, or my pets, or my pets’ organs to get what I want: a laughably low income and the deep shame of spending money on random crap instead of my children. 

Am I wrong?  Do we not all live in conflict between the commodity fetishism of Madison Avenue and our own sense of shame for having money to spend on crap while most of our brother’s and sister’s earn less than $1 per day?

Apparently not.

I shot this yesterday at the mall.  In case you can’t tell from the photo, this was a contest – replete with corporate sponsors and ‘Fair Trade’ promotions – where high school students competed with one another to determine who knew the most about their true and golden role on this planet.  Seriously, when did ‘consumer’ stop being an insult?

Sigh.

Image via Wikipedia

You know the drill.  Some automaton from the corporate matrix decides that all outgoing emails must contain a disclaimer that reading this email is both illegal and immoral, will cause your eyeballs to char and your sperm to mutate and you will go to jail jail jail.  And lest you forget, this is repeated on each and every reply so, after four or five emails, you have enough digital ink to choke a Southern Dwarf Siren who, as everyone knows, have surprisingly small mouths.

Turns out, these are not only annoying, but completely lacking in any legal force.  From the Economist (via Lifehacker):

[Email disclaimers] are assumed to be a wise precaution. But they are mostly, legally speaking, pointless. Lawyers and experts on internet policy say no court case has ever turned on the presence or absence of such an automatic e-mail footer in America, the most litigious of rich countries.

Many disclaimers are, in effect, seeking to impose a contractual obligation unilaterally, and thus are probably unenforceable. This is clear in Europe, where a directive from the European Commission tells the courts to strike out any unreasonable contractual obligation on a consumer if he has not freely negotiated it. And a footer stating that nothing in the e-mail should be used to break the law would be of no protection to a lawyer or financial adviser sending a message that did suggest something illegal.

They go on to explain that these disclaimers are probably so prevalent because companies see other companies using them, and then decide they should too. If you're using these in your business emails, you can probably get rid of them—you'll make all your contacts a whole lot happier, without making yourself any less protected by the law.

Via SBMC:

Er … how exactly can or would I use my sleeping 3 year old daughter to stop the reanimated minions?  Damnit!  Why couldn’t I be snuggled up against Simon Pegg right now??

What’s your weapon of choice?

via geekology