Why I am not going to buy a computer (1987) [pdf]

1. Debatable. It is nice it it costs less, but if it has added or improved functionalities then each person should evaluate if for their use case the added/improved functionality is worth the extra cost or not.

2. Debatable, for the same reason as point 1: each person should evaluate this by themself.

3. I agree

4. Not sure for the same reason as points 1 and 2, but since we're in an environmental crisis this point is becoming more and more relevant.

5. I strongly agree due to environmental concerns. But also note that a device doesn't necessarily need to be designed to use solar energy: it could just end up using it because the power grid switched to a more sustainable energy mix

6. I agree, at least for consumer devices.

7. Also this could be good, although it is not granted that a private person going with his own car to a nearby shop pollutes less than a big shipping company that tries to optimize shipments as much as possible. It could be the opposite.

8. Not necessarily, also a big franchise of shops works, as long as they actually take care of repairing the devices instead of inventing excuses to not do so (look at what Louis Rossman has to say about Apple Sores for an example, but of course it is not just Apple)

9. I agree but with a catch: we need to better define what this "anything good" is. Because a new technology that replaces an old one is disrupting that old technology. Maybe the old technology was already good, but if the new one is better in some form then it's woth considering disrupting the old one. Indeed we should keep in mind potential side effects of a new technology that could harm society.

Edit: formatting

Still working on making my skin glow, got any tips?

Seriously, if you have parents going into their 70s and 80s you need to really start limiting exposure to scams or the ability to send them money. Otherwise, you won't know until it's too late, their bank account is empty, and their CC are maxed out on cash advances. Also, immediately contact the IRS and Social Security, because they've probably redirected returns and payments to their accounts.

I did give her an old laptop but when the link to "her email" webpage was moved by the ISP she got the error message "It looks like your page has been moved." Innocuous enough error message right?

But this caused her to freak out as clearly "someone" was watching and knew what "her" page was. Ergo "someone" was watching her on the internet. So she turned off the laptop and never opened it again.

On the one hand, she has mental health issues including paranoia. On the other hand, she wasn't wrong!

Patch Adams is another character who has got everything he's wanted out of life without ever needing to touch a computer, at the age of 77 he corresponds by handwritten mail as he always has

I wonder what she was doing back then... :D

Sure, relying on the wife is not an option, or not a desirable option, for most writers. But the article is named "Why I am not going to buy a computer". His wife helps him and reducing his dependence on "strip-mined coal" eases his conscience. Good for him, though I don't think that the article has a lot of relevance for the rest of the world.

So he's saying that workers in the coal industry should just learn to code? That's certainly a prescient attitude.

Really the battery is the only problem but some models do still have 3rd party replacements available.

George R R Martin works in Wordstar 4.0 from 1987:

https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/14/5716232/george-r-r-martin...

This is a bit rose-tinted. You can pick from a huge variety of floppy drive readers available on amazon, most for less than 20 bucks.

Additionally -

>As an example, I'd like to get an e-reader that would be usable in 20+ years. But that doesn't seem likely.

I have a kindle gen 2, purchased basically as soon as that model was released in jan 2009 (I actually ordered a gen 1 and amazon bumped me to gen 2 when it was announced). It's still going strong. My guess is that basically any kindle will go about 20 years as long as you take care of it. Battery life degrades a good bit, but even at only 20% of the original capacity, the thing still goes 3 days without a charge - used to be a month, but three days is enough.

USB floppy drives can still be purchased, and will generally work with anything, including android phones lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT1l8Dcjb1Y

So you wouldn't even have to mess with floppy drives if you could get the software for networking. You could just upload it.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/sorbet-leopard-your-pow...

They have USB 2.0, so transferring files is no issue. They have Dual-Layer DVD drives, not floppies. I brought the PowerBook with me to a hotel and was able to connect to their still active 802.11g Wifi. It browses sites like hacker news almost as well as a modern laptop. Although, Javascript brings it to a crawl. It can still edit video in Final Cut, make music in Logic 9, and play games like Halo 1.

Honestly any highly specced laptop made with a Core 2 Duo and up (so ~15 years old or newer) is still usable today.

Because that is the one most desirable quality in tech, and you are mixing with undesirable platitudes like if they are the same.

1. It has negative externalities. 2. It's too expensive. 3. It's not an improvement/doesn't work.

The fascinating thing is that people see these criticisms and it counterintuitively bolsters their confidence that their tech is special, because things that turned out to be special were also criticized.

1) The number of crap things or even actively destructive things that have been criticized on these same not-so-narrow grounds are far more than the number of things that turned out to be good that got criticized. Why? Because there are far fewer good ideas than bad ones, and the bad ones get criticized more (at least on average.)

2) Not only are the listed three the only ways to criticize things, but everything is going to be criticized eventually. So, the mere presence of criticism can't be evidence of anything because everything gets criticized.

1. The consumption of bees has been suggested to be harmful to the pollination of plants. This is a fallacy. Not only will the consumption of bees increase the pollination of plants, but plants can be pollinated by hand.

2. The consumption of bees is not a threat to the existing honey industry. Skills in the production of honey can be applied in the harvesting of more bees.

3. Consumption of bees is superior to existing consumption of honey because bees contain a powerful combination of amino acids, the building blocks of life. Protein from bees relieves the traditionally polluting industries such as poultry and dairy. Honey is a natural preservative, ensuring the nutrition from bees is locked-in and can be stored for years, decades or longer. Bees can be produced on hillsides and other locations that traditionally have been resistant to intensive environmentally friendly farming. There is no threat to the maple syrup industry.

I will not fall to the anti-change propaganda, and nor should you. Come found the kick-starter for my ICO, details on my profile page.

The difference is that EVs are marketed to be environment friendly.

I wonder whether the process has much to do with that:

"My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong and marks them with small checks in the margins. She is my best critic because she is the one most familiar with my habitual errors and weaknesses. She also understands, sometimes better than I do, what ought to be said"

Seems like an old school "behind every great man" thing.

and his poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wendell-berry

First off, I'm not sure where you're getting that from reading this article, but maybe I'm missing something.

Secondly, Berry is a Christian so of course he believes that there can be enough for all - this is (at least used to be) a central tenet of Christianity. Christ said: "25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? 28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these."

Berry is coming from the worldview that God created a world of great abundance and that if we share, there is enough for all.

Well.. you can but only once, but it's immoral/illegal.

A level of technology unlikely to be achieved by computers anytime soon.

“ Sophia acted as copyist of War and Peace, copying and editing the manuscript seven times from beginning to end at home at night by candlelight after the children and servants had gone to bed, using an inkwell pen and sometimes requiring a magnifying glass to read her husband's notes.”

Stop and think about that: WaP in Russian is 1225 pages. Seven times!

  I have often been asked why I don't use [Word Processors], and my honest answer has always been that there is for me so much to write that I cannot afford the use of these time-saving devices.

Frigyes Karinthy, a very famous Hungarian author active roughly 1910-1935 rightly famous for his humorous writing. He is also often billed as a translator -- this, however, is not quite true. His son, much later, in 1981, confessed he had a mentally ill sister, Emilia -- as an example, she used to put buttered toast in her handbag as is -- who nonetheless was a translator genius. She spoke 15-20 languages and she was capable of such feats as typing text in Russian dictated in Spanish. It was she who made the rough translations and Frigyes rewrote these in his style. This, for example, resulted in Winnie The Pooh becoming a cult classic book in Hungarian, much beloved by every Hungarian child (and let me quietly note: adult too) -- and it only resembles Milne's original passingly. Aside from the few sentences this son told the grandson in 1981 we know nothing of her. There are no photos, no records, nothing. Nonetheless the textual evidence is extremely compelling -- it was a longstanding mystery how could Karinthy translate Milne and Wells when he didn't speak English well.

(Tangential note: there's nothing in English Wikipedia about this. Obviously not. And I'd rather gnaw off my arm than try to fix anything there ever again. I tried once.)

This doesn't mean that exploitation of women as unpaid labor is fake, it's _extremely_ rare. But, on the other hand, it's not inconsistent for someone suggesting _relying on your community_ to, you know, _accept help from said community_.

The issue with the unpaid labor of women isn't that we're helping our families, or even that we're not receiving monetary remuneration - it's that it's frequently non-consensual (in the sense that there's no safe possibility to refuse) and without any respect for women's agency.

And, you know - thinking about that this way - it's not like I never proofread a friend's manuscript. It's an interesting, and on many levels enjoyable activity. It's also a quite personal, even intimate, way of helping a friend.

When I worked at Boeing circa 1981, I was expected to write documents out longhand and then hand it to the secretary pool to type. Screw that. I invaded the word processing room, a windowless room with about 20 women working on Wang word processors, with a supervisor facing them. With all the charm I could muster, I talked the supervisor into letting me use one. She warned me that it was very difficult to learn, and I must take a 2 week Wang course beforehand. I said nah, just gimme the manual, and I was using it in 5 minutes (she was horrified by that).

> I am also surprised by the meanness with which two of these writers refer to my wife. In order to imply that I am a tyrant, they suggest by both direct statement and innuendo that she is subservient, characterless, and stupid -- a mere "device" easily forced to provide meaningless "free labor." I understand that it is impossible to make an adequate public defense of one's private life, and so I will only point out that there are a number of kinder possibilities that my critics have disdained to imagine: that my wife may do this work because she wants to and likes to; that she may find some use and some meaning in it; that she may not work for nothing. These gentlemen obviously think themselves feminists of the most correct and principled sort, and yet they do not hesitate to stereotype and insult, on the basis of one fact, a woman they do not know. They are audacious and irresponsible gossips.

But, consider what it would take to run the thing. Unless you power your computers by solar energy or somehow have a nuclear reactor in your back yard, you're probably expending non-renewable energy to power it. The typewriter, being made in 1956, is almost certainly a manual model and only uses ribbon and paper to keep it going. I daresay the typewriter has a lower lifetime environmental impact than any computer.

Paper is made through an energy and chemically intensive process. I'm sure someone can math out the kwh that go into each sheet of paper, but it is far from 0. Paper costs anywhere from $0.005 -> $0.02 per sheet and that price point is going to be very closely tied to the energy used to produce that paper.

Here in Idaho, power goes for around $0.11/kwh and is primarily non-co2 emitting sources (hydro is the big one with nuclear, solar, and wind up next. Coal exists on our grid but isn't the prime source of power here). So, that'd put the power cost for one sheet of paper at a max of 45 -> 181wH.

If he wants to be energy conscientious, then I'd argue a raspberry pi with a low power oled display will beat the pants out of paper and pen in terms of energy consumed per page. Especially since writing with a keyboard is much faster than pen/paper or a typewriter.

Rpi = ~5W of consumption OLED display = ... idk, can't really find good numbers on this but certainly less than 100W which is where a 65' oled display maxes out. For a 13' display, that's what, ~9W?

So, with a 15W system, you can write for 3 hours before you get to the max possible energy cost of a piece of paper. I'm guessing the author can use more than 1 piece of paper in that timeframe.

And, of course, you can pair such a system with a solar + battery setup to get completely coal free writing (except for the cost to produce the chips for the rpi, display, solar, and battery)

> I did not say that I proposed to end forthwith all my involvement in harmful technology, for I do not know how to do that. I said merely that I want to limit such involvement, and to a certain extent I do know how to do that.

While one option is not zero impact, it is still many orders of magnitude lower impact. They aren't equivalent, he wasn't fooling himself.