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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I spend a lot of time in public transport, and on internet in general. I never paid for 3G or 4G on my smartphone. Only wifi. OSMAnd for maps, etc.

5G is also pretty bad for the environment (netflix, instagram, snapchat are also pretty awful). The amount of energy and resources you need to make all those electronic is gigantic, not to mention the lifespan of a smartphones is so short, smartphones vendors are now trying to add more and more features to make customers replace their phones.

I'm really dying for any electronic brand to release durable hardware, and I'm also eager to have minimal smartphone OS that consume less CPU and memory.

I can't understand that race towards higher bigger everything.

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How exactly are they "bad for the environment"?

Would you prefer we revert to manufacturing plastic VHS tapes, then distribute them by diesel trucks like we used to in the good old days?

Would you prefer people get their morning news on broadsheets made from the bleached pulp of rainforest trees?

Or would you like to go back to the good old days of AM radio when the inadequacy of the receiver electronics was compensated for by sheer power at the transmitter, to the tune of megawatts of broadcast power?

You're probably one of those people who would prefer to breathe in lungfuls of woodsmoke rather than bathe your skin in the harmful rays of electric light.

I believe he's implying we don't need to share all that information, period.

I agree.

Remember: reduce, reuse, recycle is a hierarchy. Reduction is far more effective than the other two.

One of the use cases I saw somewhere for 5G was "smart wine glasses".

Like glasses with sensors in them so the waiter at a restaurant would know where he needed to go to refill someone's glass.

This was in a context where it definitely was not an ironic jab at the overuse of technology.

I don't know if the product actually exists, but honestly. Honestly. Smart wine glasses! I think it's just like... a really, really dumb idea. And if that's the kind of thing that 5G is going to enable, I absolutely do think we should consider it a threat to the environment.

I've seen wireless thingies that would beep when your order is ready at kebab joints. Since the basic principle is the same (1-bit signaling), I'm pretty sure it could be just as well rolled out right now, unfortunately.

> And if that's the kind of thing that 5G is going to enable, I absolutely do think we should consider it a threat to the environment.

That use case is already enabled by existing 802.15.4 protocols, no need to wait for 5G.

How much water does it take to purify the silicon used in your phone?

Is that water destroyed beyond repair? Is there a water shortage where silicon is purified? What would you do with that water if it was not used to purify silicone, bring it to Sahara?

I have definitely read that water poisoning is a problem in areas surrounding semiconductor fabs, but I don't have a citation on hand.

Drinking water shortages are certainly common enough.

It is certainly contaminated after being used. It has to be purified before hand too. The energy cost and environmental impact of manufacturing a single phone is tremendous.

Allegedly streaming a single 2 hour HD feature length movie online consumes the same amount of energy as boiling "10 kettles" of water - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/energy-used-in-streaming-...

Constantly replacing antennas, smartphones, having large datacenters, network infrastructure that consume a lot of energy is bad for the environment. Video is a big offender. Instagram and facebook feeds also consume a lot of memory and energy.

Even storing document as PDF instead of paper might be worse after all.

If at least smartphones would be designed to last 4 or 5 years it would make a big difference.

Wirth's law is also an excellent way to describe how computer software is most often horribly designed, and it also plays a huge role in how we could have cheaper and eco-friendly devices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

> You're probably one of those people

Lowering yourself to snarky comments is not helping your argument.

>I can't understand that race towards higher bigger everything.

I think it's called growth-economy. Solving things creates new exciting possibilities, which have problems that need solving. We're never satisfied, and that's a good thing. Otherwise we would've stayed in caves

> I think it's called growth-economy

More like "growth-economy with massive hidden externalized costs" - from the obvious like pollution and climate disruption, to subtle ones like economic pato-incentives that distort markets and prevent them from doing their jobs...

> Otherwise we would've stayed in caves

Yeah, but we're long past that state. A cave man can safely externalize stuff like recycling, and even most of food production to NATURE. We can't.

I love growth-economy per se, but our current brand of it is messed up, and markets don't seem to be good enough at pricing all the nasty externalities. We need to invent quickly some extra devices that price this stuff in at a global scale (doing it per country CAN'T work!) IF we want to keep our beloved growth-economy!

Otherwise we'll default to the crappy solutions of ducktape-enviro-socialism + state-capitalism + islands of "free" markets here and there, dragging ourselves through a new f dark age from war to war...

We need to get smarter about the damage our progress does though. I am not saying we need to stop looking to better our lives. But the life we have now is at great cost to the environment and indeed our own species. The electronic gadget abundance specifically comes at a great human cost to those in third world countries. To say nothing of the environmental cost.

5G is really replacement for a WIFI.

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