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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes 'funding the change you want to see' is merely to appease your own conscience; some real problems are systemic or caused by other actors. Turning a 1 L/min sink off for the 20 seconds of washing your hands doesn't matter when the farmer down the road is growing row crops in a desert with center-pivot irrigation system.

But other times, like this? It's absolutely a valid approach. If a high-profile open laptop like this can succeed - which is helped at this scale by individual purchases - maybe some bigger players will take notice.

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1 L/min is 1 L/min, and it's not a great sacrifice to turn off a faucet when you don't need it. So even if the farmer is not judiciously using water, it doesn't mean you shouldn't.

You should take a look at Ahmdal's law. "Every little bit helps" type thinking is a detriment to the fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always. This is a rule of optimisation that can be extended for most other things.

While that is true in the theoretical, it ignores human psychology. For example the Debt Snowball method has been so widely successful for ignoring precisely this black&white pragmatism.

Ahmdal's law lets you calculate the theoretical speedup of a job given how parallelize-able it is. I don't see how that is applicable here.

If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. But to say that people _shouldn't_ conserve resources just because they aren't the largest consumer of the given resource is ridiculous. Me being conscientious of how much water I waste from my faucet doesn't slow progress in dealing with the larger water wasters. There is no reason not to do it.

> fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always

This only applies if you can only fix one factor at a time. That is never the case in real world, complex, societal issues. Society is not a computer science puzzle.

> If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument.

I mean.. that doesn't seem very far off from the truth?

I wasn't suggesting people shouldn't make that particular 'sacrifice', I suppose the analogy could be better. My point was that individual action may be neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent the bad outcome from happening: agriculture could cause aquifer depletion even if suburban houses used no water at all, while without agricultural use, suburban houses could be incredibly wasteful and the aquifer might be fine.

In this case, the 'bad outcome' is crummy thin-and-light disposable laptops with insufficient numbers of obsolete ports, proprietary drivers, bad thermals, and closed operating systems, and no options for power users who want good laptops. It has felt to me, for a long time, that Apple, Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. have been pressing further in this direction. My 'boycott' of these products is not heard in any of their boardrooms or design committees; the strategy of buying business' discontinued Thinkpads on eBay works for now but does not work long-term.

A successful Framework laptop might make some waves. Somewhere in some conference room, someone will float the proposal that their new mobile workstation should obviously save $0.25 per unit by gluing in the battery, this would be a data point to say that some people who might be making decisions like this would actually like a laptop that includes a screwdriver.

Not an entirely relevant example. The point remains: if you want the market to provide a kind of product you want, you have to cough up the bucks for it.

You'd be surprised by how much water has been saved in droughts by encouraging this kind of small scale efforts. E.g. the Cape Town water crisis

A water crisis is almost always a case of using slightly more water than is available, so you can usually address one by putting the burden on whichever consumers are least able to fight back, even if they are least responsible for the crisis.

I think your comment is misleading. What was "encouraged" during the Cape Town water crisis was not "small scale efforts". There were details like forbidding hand-washing in some places (replaced by hand sanitizers), but there were also important changes. For example, they introduced a punitive water price for big consumers.

Like the OP, I think one should analyze the problem before opting for the "obvious" solution. I did so with water a few years ago. IIRC, for individuals the biggest share is for showers, then toilet. These two account for two thirds of standard use.

If you encourage people to turn off the sink more often, you may gain 20%... of 5% of their average water needs, so 1% overall. If they take fewer showers, each with less water, they easily can halve their consumption, so a gain of more than 20% overall.

> Sometimes 'funding the change you want to see' is merely to appease your own conscience; some real problems are systemic or caused by other actors.

Sure. But politics of change happens only when an idea spreads. This happens only by changing your own attitudes first, and then trying to advocate it to others in your social circle. The more you believe in an idea, and personify it by adopting it, the easier it is for others to believe you and consider it.

This is what Gandhi once said:

> “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

(This is what is drummed down to the quote - "Be the change you want to see in this world".)

Gandhi was a brilliant politician and this advise is psychologically quite profound - a lot of pessimism, frustration and anxiety that we experience is because we often focus on things that are beyond our sphere of control.

(Gandhi was not the only politician to have this idea. Muhammad, whom the muslims consider their Prophet, also advocated similar ideas in Islam and this is apparent on Islam's dictates on charity. Muslims in my social circle are literally taught that "charity begins at home". Apart from the poor and the needy, they are told to keep a major portion aside and first enquire within the family if anyone is in need of financial help, and then expand their search to include friends and acquaintances. That's socialism and distribution of wealth within a family / social circle, and the effects of that can be much more profound.)

> Sometimes 'funding the change you want to see' is merely to appease your own conscience; some real problems are systemic or caused by other actors.

Indeed, there is no point in having individuals resisting the system, rather changing the system itself would bring forth the systemic change we want.

Probably better to have legislations such as GDPR in place rather than people having to install a bunch of privacy extensions in their browsers.

It's not an either/or, both of these angles are extremely important.

Thinking of this as "the system" just sheds personal agency for no reason. Or at least, no good reason.

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