User Profile

There are now more than 2,000 billionaires living in 20 countries from the United States, China and Russia to Turkey, Thailand, and Indonesia. An annual wealth tax levied at just 1.5 percent of their net worth would raise $74 billion each year: that alone would be enough to fill the funding gap to get every child into school and deliver essential health services in all low-income countries.

— Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

According to HTTP Archive, the median number of images on any webpage is approximately thirty, with a total transfer size of 1 MB—equivalent to one hundred fifty thousand words of lorem ipsum in an HTML file (http://bkaprt.com/swd/03-03/). That’s more than four times the length of this book! Even if a picture does speak a thousand words, it’s still far less efficient than text.

We therefore need to think carefully about our use of images on the web. Like everything, we first need to question what value each image in our designs actually brings. Does it help the user to understand something, or is it critical to making the user experience enjoyable? Often the answer is yes, but in the case of stock photography, the answer is probably more commonly no. What is the user really gaining from that photo of a team of twenty-somethings pointing their fingers at a fake graph?

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 43)

...In the 1950s.... the American Can Company, Owens-Illinois Glass Company, Coca-Cola, and the Dixie Cup company got together to design a solution to the growing pressure to regulate disposable packaging. They knew the issue of litter would not go away and was increasingly unpopular with the public, but disposable packaging was incredibly profitable. They needed a way to avoid regulation that might limit the use of disposables, and their solution was cunning.

They founded a nonprofit called Keep America Beautiful and poured significant amounts of money into environmental awareness campaigns. This helped them look good, but the real genius was in the message behind the campaigns - that litter on the streets had nothing to do with the producers, but was the fault of the person who dropped it - the litterbug. Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate around Americas garbage and litter problems away from the industry and on to consumers, and the strategy has been copied to time and time again since.

— Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood (Page 18)

When Adam Smith published 'The Wealth of Nations' in 1776, there were fewer than one billion people alive, and in dollar terms, size of the global economy was three hundred times smaller than it is today. When Paul Samuelson published 'Economics' in 1948, there were not yet three billion people on earth, and the global economy was still ten times smaller than it is today. In the twenty-first century, we have left behind the era of the 'Empty World' when the flow of energy and matter through the global economy with small of relation to the capacity of nature's sources and sinks. We live now, says Daly, in 'Full World', with an economy that exceeds Earth's regenerative and absorptive capacity by over-harvesting sources such as fish and forests, and overfilling sinks such as the atmosphere and oceans.

— Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth (Page 65)