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Comment by hettygreen | Hacker News Reader

I'm the CEO of a startup specializing in personal electronics and communications equipment designed to withstand rising global temperatures. We're in our second round of funding and are ramping up production as we speak. Our goal is to get global-warming-hardened phones into the hands of nearly every human on the planet before it's too late.

Sure, the mass-manufacture of 5 billion more phones is only going to contribute to this global warming, especially since we're making these in third-world countries under lax environmental laws. But that just means we'll be selling even more phones!

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I like the philosophy

Don't watch the world burn, warm yourself by the fire

The rapidly collapsing biosphere presents a number of rapidly expanding business opportunities

It’s a great time to start a moving company! People will increasingly start migrating away from the equator for more livable temperatures.

Weapons. People will kill to keep their patch of desert from others.

Automated border defenses, both lethal and nonlethal. Weapons that are technically not lethal, but make the victim wish they were (bonus points if the weapon doesn't leave any external marks on the victim, to prevent media backlash). Weapons and procedures for destroying damns with minimal damage to your own country that lies downstream. Hypertargeted cloudseeding, to make sure it rains on your fields instead of your neighbors'.

So many new opportunities for psychopaths to earn lots and lots of money.

Pro tip: constitute as NGO, the tax structure is very convenient and most of the capital will come from traffickers anyway, so you cannot exactly declare it.

Just make sure money is properly laundered before accepting it as donation. Art auction are great to shift large capital quickly.

Let me write all this down, great tips!

Add "blockchain-for-X" and you got yourself a new customer.

Let's squeeze out the last quick bucks before the ship sinks!

Unfortunately, even if we stopped all global emissions at this very moment we will not avoid all of the serious outcomes from climate change. That doesn't mean that we should give up, but we should prepare for the world to keep changing. That means that we need people working on solving emissions but also that we need people working on adaptation to the changing world.

Adaptation is a lot less sexy than directly solving climate change, but if we don't do it a lot more people are going to have a much worse quality of life than they need to.

> [...], but if we don't do it a lot more people are going to die.

ftfy.

I had originally wrote 'die' too, because that's true as well -- but it also applies to things ranging from reduced smartphone access to loss of property from increasing wildfires. And these will all have effects on us too.

And bring some marshsmellows...

> Our goal is to get global-warming-hardened phones into the hands of nearly every human on the planet before it's too late.

So this is our life now. It makes me sad.

It's a joke. A pretty good one, it fits HN.

You never know haha some HN comments that should be jokes are actually dead serious.

yeah, that was way too close to a solution to a real problem that'll make someone a LOT of money.

And they have to step over Apple’s corpse to accomplish that, first red flag it was a joke.

Is this an add-on case situation or IP play?

found the VC

I assume such a thing would be best as an IP thing, because device companies wouldn't find it particularly hard in a technical sense when they have a powerful business need to make heat tolerant phones, but if you can mine the path with patents beforehand, you get some nice fees when they do.

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