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phlux

>...economic impact of this advertising is worth more than the cost for Google to send a CR-48 to be blended.

I know what it is called - but it is still clearly waste.

I was not referring to the economic impact but rather the environmental.

Sure, we can all say "who cares" -- I do, which is why I ask.

Have you seen the garbage problems we have? The toxic waste dumps that are china and other places.

I am not trying to be some tree hugging hippy here - I just dont see the need/value of such advertising.

If they want to advertise - why not go give the things to even more people who want/need it?

How about give one to every student in a school of their choice?

This is utter stupidity on the part of the advertising industry and proves how little value they provide society other than more and more thought pollution on top of the actual pollution they produce.

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You do not have nearly enough information to make this determination. If tablets like this reduce the demand for bigger laptops and desktops, making them more popular through various forms of marketing may in fact reduce overall environmental impact.

"Various forms of marketing" - of the nearly infinite range of marketing approaches, "wasteful destruction" is only one, and oddly enough, most successful marketing campaigns never stooped to that level.

And even when damaging the product is the approach taken, it's not usually a pointless stunt. When Timex abused their watches in commercials, the point was to show that the watches would keep working.

The blending thing is just stupid web-meme fan service, that is unlikely to make a notable contribution to selling Cr48s. Or blenders, for that matter.

I dont know. Every time I stream grooveshark, I wonder how much less energy I would be using if I just had the same 10 songs locally.

I don't?

Here we see a device go straight from production to destruction intentionally and to a state where recycle/rebuild/re-use is impractical.

Sorry but all these arguments for advertising supporting the complete destruction of useful resources are misguided retarded and stupid.

Downvote all you want - but I'd prefer it were you that drank the water into which these toxic particles shall leach.

Fuck advertising.

It is not just simply an environmental cost - there are other costs associated with the preponderance of disposable possessions, and the leaking over into the category of disposable of things that were once considered permanent.

To start with, it is simply wasteful for the reasons you describe. However it also contributes in a small way to the paradigm of exponential growth that permeates everything about human civilisation, which we as hackers know represents certain death.

EDIT: I'm not saying google have created a "disposable computer." However all this advertising definitely shifts us culturally in that direction.

I'd love to have a laptop whose sum parts are made out of reusable/biodegradable materials as much as possible.

Corn/potato based cases, even if they need to be replaced often - or solid aluminum ones that are a set form factor and I simply replace the guts every time I upgrade.

I wish that apple would require/request/desire that any old apple product gets returned to them for disposal/credit when it reaches true EOL.

It has been said too many times by others greater than myself; Our garbage and waste will be the downfall of our species.

>I'd love to have a laptop whose sum parts are made out of reusable/biodegradable materials as much as possible.

I present the cardboard computer (case): http://recomputepc.com

Unfortunately it's prohibitively expensive compared to conventional options, as you would expect. And you obviously can't fab the boards from card and the chips from potato, as it were.

>It has been said too many times by others greater than myself; Our garbage and waste will be the downfall of our species.

We can learn to recycle our waste. Mining landfill is going to be big business one day. It will however be much harder to repair the environmental and human damage caused by the extraction of the raw materials in the first place.

"I present the cardboard computer (case): "

The case is probably the most recyclable part of a computer, unless there's something funky about the plastics used. An aluminum MacBook Pro case could be melted down, or, hell, probably used as-is as raw material to machine new small parts.

That's not necessarily true. Advertising helps sell products, and getting the idea of Chrome OS into people's minds will lead to more people buying it. And through Google's professed indirect and obscure schemes leads to more internet usage and advertising exposure, leaving more revenue for Google to give them to children. It might seem strange, but it seems that much of what Google does seems to follow such logic.

This video was part of the Chrome Demolition Lab http://www.google.com/chromeos/demolab/ and the four colors on the bottom strip are labeled "Learn", "Apply", "Recycle" (the green one) and "Legal". Recycle says "Electronic waste is piling up globally at a rate of 40 million tons a year. That's the same weight as 5 loaded buses every minute. Enter your zip code to locate electronic device recycling centers in your area" "The US produces 8% of the world's electronic waste per year (8% = 3.2 Million tons)" "Americans only recycle 13.7% of their electronic waste, leaving 2.9 million tons per year" "That's a big pile of electronic waste. So far this year 038,992,672 (increments by one every second)" The legal tab says "Google does not now, nor has it ever, endorsed or encouraged in any fashion, the hazing of or harming of electronic devices for entertainment purposes, anger management or stress relief. The demolitions and tests are performed using prototype notebooks. Chat interaction and user data are not being recorded. Do not try this at home. Please Recycle."

When I saw a BlendTec commercial for the first time, I thought: "that's wasteful!". Then I thought about it some more and realized that it was a tiny fraction of the waste that's being produced by viewers. I realized if viewers would keep their electronics 10% longer it would make many times as big a difference as putting a kibosh on this commercial series. So it actually raised awareness for me.

It's not a tiny fraction, it's an undetectable fraction. Keeping electronics 10% longer wouldn't many many times as big a difference, it would make many orders of magnitude more difference.

Commenting that this is waste is like commenting that all the astronauts coming to the launch site in personal vehicles is a waste of fuel. You're about to burn in 10 minutes more fuel than anyone will likely ever use in their entire life. It doesn't matter at that point.

Please don't misunderstand me. I don't mean that since you can't change the big picture, you shouldn't do anything at all. I'm just saying you shouldn't blow things out of proportion.

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