A toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for tech
bbc.com
bbc.com
Software developers and companies alike are very proud of it. I can understand companies defending it due to commercial concerns. But developers defending addition of enormous number of dependencies, bloating the software and calling it best practice to reuse existing components saddens me.
Though I'm not very convinced of the individual guilt angle. It's a systemic problem of incentives (lack of good ones).
An island nation that the most powerful country in the world has been trying to cripple economically for half a century.
> Ecuador
A country with a smaller GDP than that majority of US states.
These are probably not good or representative examples of how this would work writ large.
You're right, I think 2021 will be the year of the Linux desktop.
This would enable custom kernels to target a range of compatible devices at once, which (among other things) would then simplify porting over alternative Linux-based OSes. Including the convergent ones we're starting to see pop up on way less impressive hardware.
My laptop doesn't get Windows updates held back because Dell wants to sell me the latest model.
Drivers are also much better with the original vendors version most likely working fine even if it's not on the laptop manufactures list of tested drivers.
Desktops are effected even less.
Sure, the new one is better, but the old one did everything I wanted it to do.
Here is what an 8-bit CPU with 64KiB of RAM could do in 1986:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9k5Xa2PpEg
Obviously this is far behind current UIs in areas like resolution and graphics, but it's not so strikingly far behind that it's unusable or unrecognizable.
Does it really take gigabytes of RAM and multiple 2+ghz cores to deliver the same basic paradigm as this 8-bit CPU in 1986, but in 32-bit color, 4K resolution, and with better language and character set support? Really?
What would a quad-core 2ghz machine with 16GiB of RAM be able to do if software were written in equivalently efficient ways, dispensing with so much unnecessary bloat and layers of indirection?
You haven’t described what modern software does though. You’ve just listed a random subset of features.
Examples: simple paint programs, text editors, terminals, mail clients, basic word processing, and so on. In all cases resource requirements have exploded to an extent that can't easily be explained by gains in features or capability.
As a 6 user for another month or so, my biggest complaint isn't slowness, it's the lack of ram that causes apps to be closed readily whenever you switch, compounded by the apps having to boot/reload again.
Most of the apps I use aren't IOS apps, they're things like chrome.
This is nothing like using a 3g or a 4 until they stopped getting updates, those were downright painful to use. This is merely frustrating.
I don't know what people expect from their phones, but 5-6 years of updates and the phone still running well is incredible. I hope my next iPhone gets me another 6 years. It seems likely.
I don't know what it's like in Android land, but I expect that the number people using a phone at all for 6 years is even less than those using old iPhones. At least they had way more ram for a same era phone.
My phone is a computer that happens to occasionally make calls. I expect a flagship computer to easily last a decade and phones should too.
In fairness, this attitude of mine is fairly recent and probably attributable to the fact that phones are now the price of computers. So it only applies a little to the iPhone 6, but will apply in full power to the next iPhone.
I thought about that recently. And I would want for my phone to be something akin to my car, lasting for several years (10-20 of I take care of it), being able to repair it, and not needing constant updates just to keep working (although Tesla seems to be going in the smartphone direction).
Other than a substantial camera upgrade, louder speakers, and no headphone jack I honestly couldn't notice a difference between the two. The 6S is still a rock solid phone.
If your phone has gone into performance management (to prevent crashing) you will see it in your Battery Health "Settings" panel. You can disable it there as well if you would rather crash than slow down.
Oh we still do: https://houston.culturemap.com/news/city-life/01-26-12-there...
I was pretty excited to see that the new Fairphone actually has a user replaceable battery
Of course, that's also the point of the product.
Some of the most hopeful strategies i've come across is Sensorica's Open Value Network style Commons-based peer production (as well as projects like Precious Plastic, Open Source Ecology and WikiHouse, etc.), coupled with using a Holochain-pattern Resource Event Agent accounting method, currently being developed by http://valueflo.ws / Holo-REA (from the people at http://mikorizal.org/)
Tech companies should be shamed for the "disposable" computer culture they have put so much effort into creating. It is possible to improve software without requiring new hardware. With the prices Apple charges for hardware, there should not be any forced obsolescence.
So many people seem to be living in this bubble where the only thing they experience is the clean interfaces to civilization and then they talk about the messy bits like the slightest blemish is doom.
A dispassionate analysis of the site might have painted a more convincing argument for something being wrong, but as it is, it reads like a melodramatic fainting after seeing some trash.
There are plenty of very real environmental issues, but if you sensationalize everything that isn’t pristine natural beauty, it doesn’t matter because your motivations have moved from reason to superstition.
We aren't using the river, but the river is still the same form of transportation it ever was. We don't barge away the goods, but the river will still happily carry any toxic materials that leave the factory by malice, incompetence, human error, or a series of unfortunate events (Fukushima).
I mean at this point, building a factory where you swear not to pollute next to a geographical feature that makes it easy to pollute without getting caught or where any honest mistake is magnified... it feels like a teenager hovering by the display of expensive stuff and saying they are just looking, or playing catch in the living room. You won't be the least surprised when you find out there is something missing/broken. The solution isn't more yelling, it's taking away the temptation to misbehave, and/or reducing the consequences of doing so.
We need public policy to build a proverbial glass cabinet around our core watersheds. Build highways, train and powerlines and zone for factories at a slight separation, along on the route between Here and There, where nothing we care about is directly downwind or downhill.
Tennessee Valley Authority lost a dam and dumped years of fly ash into a tributary of the Mississippi. It's just a matter of time until deferred maintenance takes out this dam, and the lake remembers it was a river once.
Stated as a question: how often do brand new factories (or new enterprises in existing factories) use water for transport?
It is not an easy comparison to do because the last mile distribution kind of freight gets mixed in with the raw materials kind of freight.
Canada and Mexico aside, you can’t really do international trade without ships, in 2019 international trade volume was 10% of our GDP.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11593
So it seems you're correct--factories don't ship via inland and intracoastal waterways. But they appear to be extremely important for low-value commodities, such a grains:
> America's farmers depend on the inland waterways for more than 60 percent of our farm exports.
https://www.mvp.usace.army.mil/Portals/57/docs/Navigation/In...
Rare earth metals are not rare. They are common, but processing them safely without environmental impact is not cheap. Whenever competitors show up, China floods the market to push down prices to bankrupt them.
The world needs to start putting environmental and social tariffs on Chinese goods, to force them to improve environmental standards, and put a stop to human rights abuses.
Maybe governments should take the opportunity to stockpile at that moment. Either the price rises keeping the competitors afloat or you have a nice stockpile. Either way you become immune to shenanigans.
In 1982 (iirc), the US decided that Thorium is a "source material" for nuclear weapons, even though it very clearly isn't. Since rare earth metals have chemistry very similar to Thorium, they tend to occur together. Anyone who mines REE, ends up with waste Thorium. It's just slightly radioactive, chemically inert sand, but by decree it is a "TENORM" (technically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material), and by decree, someone stealing it could theoretically build an atomic bomb from it, even though they can't in the real world.
So because it's a TENORM, the waste can't go back into the same hole in the ground that it came from. And because it's a "source material", it has to be guarded. And the eventual disposal has to follow all sorts of regulations. All of that is so expensive, that nobody bothers anymore.
China simply doesn't play these stupid games. That's why they are cheap.
Memes spread pretty quick these days.
Why do you say that? From the news I've read over the past 10-20 years, my understanding is that China has steadily increased its emphasis on environmental protection and regulation, for example regarding food safety, air quality, and even nuclear safety (nuclear plants are becoming more expensive to build there, though claims of the industry's death have been extremely premature). Most recently, for example, part of the reason for banning imports of recyclables is because they were piling up and contributing to pollution. It's just that in absolute terms, and relative to the standards of rich industrial countries, China has a lot more ground to still cover.
As with domestic news, the fact that you read and hear about these situations is often better understood as evidence that things are getting better, not worse, reflecting a positive shift in attention and emphasis. Especially in a country like China where authorities have far more control over both domestic and foreign reporting--compare the difficulty of substantive reporting on the Ugyhurs.
The only thing noteworthy about that HN link is that some interesting comments may have been posted there.
Are there serious research about how much this "green" tech is actually greener or not?
And what are the actually greenest energy we can have right now?
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-...
TL;DR: Lithium ion batteries have a ratio of around 10:1, whereas compressed air or pumped water are 200:1 or better.
This is just storage - I'd be interested in the ratio on solar photovoltaic, wind, or similar power generation tech.
https://newatlas.com/mit-offshore-wind-concrete-sphere-energ...
(Edit: better link)
It blows my mind that it takes 1/10 of the energy it will ever store to manufacture a lithium ion battery.
However, with an electric-to-electric efficiency of only 40-52% compressed air has a net efficiency of ~ 0.5:1 even if construction costs suggest 200:1 that just means it stays 0.5:1.
Think about all the ore-bearing rock and soil that had to be mined, sifted, transported, refined, formed, milled, transported again, and so on, just to produce the machine that puts a label on a box.
Even putting truly complex tech aside, the amount of resources we collectively tear through, day after day, to get to this (not particularly admirable) place is staggering.
There's not a huge difference in going from 91% efficiency (10:1) to 99.5% efficiency (200:1).
What's more concerning are the other negative externalities -- pollution, ecosystem destruction, etc, as described in the original article. This won't be captured by looking at energy stored vs. energy used in production.
3000mAh*3.8v /1000 = 13.3Wh in a phone battery.
13.3Wh * $0.20/kWh * 365 ~= $0.95 a year
This is sometimes expressed in time range (which depends on average generation rate based on where it is installed etc) or just energy vs energy ratio (Eg kWh to produce vs lifetime kWh generated)
As others have said this statistic is not the whole picture, type of pollution generated due to the construction of the solar panel, wind turbine etc should vs other technology should also be take into account so this gets pretty complex pretty quickly.
Some recent studies [0] show a break down of input/output for solar with Switzerland of 9-10:1, this is likely higher if panel was installed in Australia for example and goes into some detail showing a fairly minimal amount of storage in an electricity grid (8%) increases the amount of usable generation for wind and solar which improves that ratio.
Wind I believe has a better EROI but has a lot more complexity when it comes to installation, maintenance so how much this is taken into consideration and will likely vary for onshore vs offshore installations. Numbers I’ve read before were in the 16-20:1 range but can’t find any decent study sources at the moment.
Hope that helps.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Another interesting example of environmental trade-offs is the plastic bag ban (where the disposable, ultra-light-weight plastic bags at supermarkets are banned in favor of heavier, reusable plastic and paper bags).
The lighter bags:
- break more easily, making them harder to re-use
- tend to blow around and get stuck in trees, rivers, etc, causing visible pollution
However, the heavier bags:
- emit a lot more carbon through their transportation (because of the extra weight)
- put more total plastic into the world at the end of the day unless everyone reuses all of them (which many people don't)
Just like there's no single definition of "healthy food", there's no single definition of "good for the environment".
That said I fully agree with the larger point. We have to be willing to weigh and accept tradeoffs.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/12/17337602/plastic-tote-bag...
The issue there, of course, is that we have a whole modern civilization built around consuming and discarding, and it's hard to achieve change once these habits are built and there's little direct incentive for change. It's entirely feasible--sometimes people point to "labor specialization", but it takes a day (if that) to learn to do basic sewing and weaving pretty well--but we would need to drastically shift (back) to a rather un-capitalist society of home industry with very strong incentives for mending rather than replacing.
That is not what the report in that article says[1]. In Table IV, for a conventional cotton bag, it has to be re-used 52 times in order to equal the LDPE plastic bag in the climate change metric.
For a woven PP bag (which is the most common plastic re-usable bag in my experience), the numbers it has to be re-used is only 5.
[1] https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
> A 2011 study by the U.K. government found a person would have to reuse a cotton tote bag 131 times before it was better for climate change than using a plastic grocery bag once. The Danish government recently did a study that took into account environmental impacts beyond simply greenhouse gas emissions, including water use, damage to ecosystems and air pollution. These factors make cloth bags even worse. They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment.
It would appear I was misremembering somewhat, but I think my point (and the GP's that I was referring to in my earlier comment) still stands: These decisions are often about tradeoffs. Sometimes things can be green on one axis, and not so green on another.
The Michael Moore produced documentary Planet of the Humans[0] tries to answer that question. Strongly recommended.
Where is it recycled and how much more energy the recycling uses?
Rare earth metals are mostly not rare. The vast majority of rare earths are plentiful. We're not going to run out of the most useful rare earths for hundreds of years at a minimum. It's the extraction and processing that is a problem (environmentally), not the scarcity factor. The US for example is loaded with rare earths and has barely even scratched the surface of its supply (the same is true of Canada and Australia); there has been a lack of interest in rare earth mining in the US for the past several decades because of how intense and dirty the process of extraction and processing is.
> The rare earths are a relatively abundant group of 17 elements composed of scandium, yttrium, and the lanthanides. The elements range in crustal abundance from cerium, the 25th most abundant element of the 78 common elements in the Earth's crust at 60 parts per million, to thulium and lutetium, the least abundant rare-earth elements at about 0.5 part per million.
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/rare-earths-statistics-and...
> The "rare" in the name of this group of elements is actually somewhat misleading; the U.S. Geological Survey describes them as "relatively abundant in the Earth's crust."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-panic-about-...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-earth-ele...
No one said that...an exaclty because of that i am no shure if recycling is better or worse for the environment.
They are not just pushing renewable sources with the partners and partners' partners, but are also pushing for Carbon neutral.
With that plan meant to hit "zero/negative footprint by 2030" I find myself feeling less and less guilty about buying their products and returning the "not yet old" versions.
And in 2030, I'd be happy to pay Apple the incremental extra $ for the guilt free experience.
Gosh you really belief in that right?
Beyond that, yes I buy iPhones anyways and so will trust Apple at their word until some new agency does a deep dive and provides the counterfactual data. Or if over 10 years, Apple erodes the trust they have built with me.
BTW: stop trust a company...thats what religion is for...and if you live in a really good place the goverment...but NEVER a Company
Can't legislate physics. At some point, people are going to need to decide that they shouldn't use some of this stuff. Or maybe make the stuff last longer? Or figure out how to recycle it? Not sure. So many issues from refining through to product lifecycle. (The fact that solar panels cannot be recycled for instance really kills me personally. Like a dagger to my heart.)
I don't know what the answer is, but it's clear we have a long way to go.
What does that even mean? You can absolutely legislate the cost to the environment, to health, to sustainability. If making a widget causes $1 trillion in environmental damage to natural resources, legislating that the company is responsible for that damage is the solution. They either innovate to prevent the damage in the first place, raise prices of the product to cover all the costs (which would basically price out products that aren't sustainable), or they go out of business and stop damaging the environment.
Instead track resource/labor contents of products directly and "price" resources according to their pollution/known externalities.
One of the biggest problems we have is that markets can price labor costs effectively, but are terrible at pricing resource/raw material costs. Supply and demand has nothing to do with ecology and known externalities of resources. We should be able to set the costs of fossil fuels directly democratically (and same with rare earth minerals) either on a per-resource basis (if the use of the resource has known costs) or a per-process basis (if the process of extracting the resource has known costs), and have those costs trickle through the economy via companies that are effectively acting in a distributed productive relationship (like a market) but without using prices for allocation. Instead use orders directly, and then have consumers cover the costs of products on purchase, at which point the money they earned from their (negotiated) wages would be destroyed and not circulate the productive economy.
Markets can only effectively price resources in a democratic setting. This is impossible in a globalized capitalist system.
And this isn't even talking about any kind of extraction, just the physical action.
Why single out the smart phones?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil. I read the original for the first time recently, and was amused that it ended with a rant against the post office.
That article is nothing more than a damage control and is completely funded by the "green tech" billionaires. Just look at the history log.
If you want to see how far these """green""" tech billionaires have gone to censor and suppress this documentary and what kinds of legal tricks and other pressure they've used, read Max Blumenthal's article.
>‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/07/green-billionaires-planet...
Michael Moore also interviewed Max about this amazing investigation into how these rich people censor things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDIEqHGAveA
> https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/07/green-billionaires-planet...
Just an FYI, but that website has Wikipedia's worst reliability rating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
I don't imagine it's any better today.
Good idea, and lets go to mars so we dont have to care about earth ;)
Similarly we can make carbon-neutral concrete and steel, it just takes a lot lot lot more energy.
And we kind of dropped the ball on energy because of costs.
So now we are in a two or more front war for more and clean energy.
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6350939,109.6828376,5323m/da...
Link to the satellite view of the permanente mine outside cupertino.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3198492,-122.103036,5187m/da...
you can appreciate the scale of this lake if you know the permanente.
It actually looks as if the Chinese are doing it right this time: the ugliness of the black sludge is confined to a small lake, so that the sludge can settle and the water can drain. One day, when the pond is filled with clay, they will turn it into a park.