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Comment by jsomau | Hacker News Reader

A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complete that purchase.

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

Here's what I'm planning next:

- Detecting the checkouts and extracting the checkout total generally across websites still needs refinement.

- Storing the purchases/savings locally in the extension storage to show you a graph of spending and saving.

- Showing a CO2 savings estimate.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumer...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-con...

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> A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complete that purchase.

> 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!"

It also shows you a random but helpful prompt to reflect on the nature of consumerism and happiness. Maybe they'll decide to not buy all 3. Not guaranteed to save everyone or anyone.

This was my exact thought... I already rationalize too many purchases with “whelp, that’s not even a days work!”

Small purchases easily eat up way more budget than most people realize. I bet a “you’ve $$$ in the last $TIME” feature would really help with that use case.

I mean, I really don't have a spending problem. It's a joke.

Oh I got you, I was just piggybacking for the OP’s eyes if they see it. Because lots of people do end up having budgeting difficulties due to a large number of small, seemingly inconsequential purchases.

“I made more money then I spent because I bought this at work!”

To everyone who plays the occasional video game during “wfh hours” - that $60 triple A title steam purchase actually is MAKING you money!

As someone who has worked from home my whole career - not really. You still have to get your work done because there is no butts in chairs measure of productivity in wfh. You will be judged on your output. In fact you often have to work harder than the people in the office because of this.

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

As someone who has just started working at home, not really. Instead of sitting at my desk at work browsing the internet while I keep some terminals open to make it look like I’m doing stuff, now I can just explicitly do whatever I want at home.

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

If it monitors the cost of Time, then I hope it reminds you of how much earning potential you've lost arguing on social media too.

That's a really nice idea! I like that. What helped me from impulse buying is a simple thing; I always when I encounter something I want to buy I store it in the bookmarks (I have a folder in bookmarks called "To buy"). I only buy after a couple of weeks have passed and I decided I really need that thing. When I have a free time I go through my list and delete things that are obsolete. The second thing is, I have a limit of buying 1 thing per week (this includes also things like basic necessities, for example deodorant, that I need for myself). Needless to say I got the inspiration from my wife, she practices this for a few years already. The best thing about this is that it actually makes me feel good.

I'm not sure how one would word this exactly, but there are many additional costs to each product that we buy.

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.

A local group is building FairSharesApp, which is an app that tries to make you aware of the additional costs to a product. And allow you to buy that off.

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.

I don't understand, how can you undo it by paying for it?

Because they plant a tree or something. (Just greenwashing)

"planting trees" is not "just greenwashing".

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.

CO2 compensation cannot just be done by planting trees, either. I'm sending a monthly donation to a project that goes into remote villages in Africa where people still cook on open fires and provides portable stoves to them. Since a stove loses much less heat than an open fire, the villagers can cook the same amount of food with only a tenth of the original amount of wood, thereby reducing CO2 emissions.

Can you share the project?

Curious how much CO2 is emitted by fires in remote African villages compared to, say, power plants in industrialized countries, particularly since all the literature I've seen pins the CO2 issue of late on the industrial revolution.

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

How much CO2 is emitted in the travel, all the supplies that the travelers have to bring, and the production of the stoves and presumably the refillable fuel containers for them? Meanwhile, the wood has already absorbed CO2 in the process of growing from the air...

If you fly from Rome to Barcelona, you could "offset" the CO2; often directly when buying that ticket.

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.

Your extension sounds cool but what I'd love is a system to suggest if I should go premium or cheap on an expense.

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

My (highly imperfect) solution to that problem is usually to go find the niche internet forum/subreddit for whatever thing I'm looking to buy and try to see what people there are interested in in my price range.

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.

> 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.

Same here. Seems like there's a subreddit for just about everything (for instance, I consulted r/backpacks recently). Good advice, but unreliable in terms of finding an active community.

you want to look at /r/onebag

Now that has some potential to cause pain to my wallet. Gonna have to force myself to forget about it now...

Same, although I'm starting to suspect that companies have started to catch on to this trick over the last few months, sadly

It says a lot that so much of the "genuine" opinions on products are all siloed in Reddit. They call themselves "the front page of the Internet", which speaks of arrogance to me, but it might slowly be starting to come true. But if it works, I don't see it as a completely bad thing, I guess.

One thing I'll tack onto this in case someone with the right knowledge comes by: anyone know a site for good reviews of charging accessories?

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.

Just stick with name brands. They go on sale regularly, aren't that pricey, and will prevent fried devices or a burnt down house

I generally agree, but with charging especially it seems to be hard to figure out what exactly "name brand" means. Obviously you've got companies like Anker that've been around for a good while, but, in my opinion at least, it can be tough to distinguish up-and-coming brands pumping out great products from not-so-great brands producing junk.

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.

If you buy it in store, it should follow your local regulations. It's generally the cheap stuff on eBay that is the problem.

I mean, at least in the US, you can buy utter crap in the store at crazy prices. Plenty of stuff that just barely hits the regulatory requirements but doesn't do any good engineering work beyond that.

Local regulation is basic so they can still sell badly implemented USB Type-C charger, non-MFi Lightning cable, and so on.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/google-engineer-leav...

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

Wish someone would do teardowns/testing of these cables/chargers on a wide basis (or that I had the skills to do it myself). I've seen a few people doing such things for computer PSUs, multimeters, and the like, but not for charging devices. Too bad.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ is an interesting stop for that kind of thing. I'm cheap and usually inclined to pick the cheapest 4-star option on Amazon (with the trick of &sort=review-count-rank). Browsing /r/BuyItForLife usually helps provide some pre-emptive buyer's remorse.

I subscribe to Consumer Reports and always check there first to see if they have rated items in the category I’m shopping.

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.

This is an interesting idea. If people know they should not buy a trashy set of knives that they'll throw away in a year that would indeed reduce consumption. I'll think more on this. Thanks for the idea!

They shouldn't buy it, yes, but this is fundamentally a privilege to even consider. That's what I struggle with, that I'm in this privileged position to discern to what degree do I want to be complicit in my presumably negative impact on the sustainability of Earth and Life.

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.

Thanks for your response. The extension itself won't solve global overconsumption, poverty or climate change in the same way that any one individual won't. I do believe that by being more mindful of our purchases it can influence other parts of our lives though - we start to consider "the machine", consider more closely our impulses against the negative impacts our choices have and perhaps then we begin to demand something more from "the machine". Maybe if enough people become mindful they will vote for politicians that represent an interest in saving the environment, drastically increase environmental protections and incentivize sustainable manufacturing which I hope in the long run benefits all.

This is great idea and I love the name.

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

Could it also estimate CO2 output from delivery? I always try to buy local even if it's online when possible. Luckily this is usually possible in the bay area/California :)

That is actually where I was going to start. Tracking the CO2 output for the production of millions of individual items across the internet is hard but I believe there are some services that can estimate CO2 for deliveries based on country + zip.

even if you just did it from "city center -> the address on the postal" -> estimate gas -> CO2 estimation would be useful.

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

Great idea tbh

Hi I had another idea. You could also show "If you invested X dollars in VTI, your returns could be Y in 5 years Z in 10 years J in 15 years"

X is the amount at the checkout page.

Haha, I love this - yeah there's lots of incentives available so maybe I allow the user to select which types of metrics are most meaningful to them. This is going on the list for sure!

For a number of bay area devs I suspect this might have the opposite psychological effect. A $50 price tag might put some people off until they realize it's only 15-20 minutes of work.

Yeah this is exactly what I was thinking. I am certainly more put off by $50 than N minutes.

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.

The extension also shows you a random but helpful prompt to reflect on the nature of consumerism and happiness. Maybe it won't help everyone, but I hope that it reaches some.

I think a great opportunity could be the FIRE community. I think a lot of them think in terms of "if spend X amount I have to work Y more days before retirement". At least I try to do that. The problem is I don't really know how to calculate Y, if your plugin could translate the dollar amount on the checkout page to the number of days I have to work extra that would be really cool.

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

Either way, cool stuff!

The email address listed in the privacy policy doesn't seem to be valid.

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

It does not except in a single case. All the data is stored locally in the browser extension storage otherwise. As part of the onboarding flow you can choose to anonymously submit your money saved to the online tally at https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/

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

> I've got to spend more time investigating a way to remove this question for users...

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

Maybe you can charge companies to be hidden from the service :D

Surely you're joking, Mr ambivalents!

This is great!

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.

I want this but with a squeeze grip that shocks you for N ms for each dollar that you are about to spend. If you can’t hold down the grip and bear the shock, then you’re not allowed to run the charge.

I hear hardware startups are hard.

I hear products whose main objective is to inflict pain to their user are hard.

Super into the CO2 estimate part. I think incorporating shipping is a easy first place. While much harder, future iterations could consider the composition of the product. Is it plastics? Etc

Wow, this is exactly what I need. I've recently been thinking a lot about how much less likely I am to purchase a product if I map its cost back to my hours worked. Thanks for this!

I'm stoked you connect with the idea. Feel free to reach out with any feedback.

Love the idea, but I found it very intrusive and removed it. As in I don't like the redirect

Keep refining it !

Thanks for trying it! So unfortunately I can't launch an extension popup over top of the checkout, it's just not in the browser extension APIs AFAIK. One alternative was to inject the popup in to the checkout page but I figured if this got any traction it's possible then a checkout page host could read the data (ie, your salary) from that. Thus, I landed on the intrusive redirect. Open to other ideas though!

Weird - why'd the twitter account you've linked on the page get suspended?

I just submitted a Twitter support request to figure that out myself :)

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