Big Tech’s Waste “Solutions” Are a Scam
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
Removing lead helped. But the rest of the tech waste stream remains. If we mandated full cycle recovery the cost per unit would jack up. And, the refresh cycle would take longer as Apple and Dell worked out how to live with a standard component replacement model, and then their bottom line would take a hit as people kept aluminium chassis, and only replaced memory and the M[2,3,4...] chip.
Most waste isn't tech waste, but tech waste is a problem.
John McCarthy (LISP), on his keyboard libertarian warrior days on USENET would frequently say our future kids will thank us for all the amazing tantalum, germanium, lithium and like product we thoughtfully buried for them to find, rather than having to dig them from complex inorganic matricies elsewhere. ie, the best thing in his mind was to design better clay capped burial methods domestically in the US, and use them. I remain unsure if he was being ironic, sarcastic, or literal.
And perverse incentives for companies like Big Oil:
1) Dig up fossil & pollute the air by doing so. Profit!
2) Pivot from fuel to producing (more) oil-based plastics, causing pollution of the environmont with that. Profit!
3) Finally, offer 'solutions' to those problems (like carbon capture), which may or may not work, and gobble up taxpayer's money in the process. Profit!
Recycling, carbon capture etc are a poor fix, if that. Real solutions must attack the production side of the equation.
Surely "Paypal's Peter Thiel" counts as "big tech", and that's not the only reference.
One might, for example, understand that investing in a small, totally ineffective environmental nonprofit would be profitable because it lets you greenwash your larger, environmentally destructive investments at a fraction of the cost of actually making effective progress on the problems your companies cause.
Surely "Paypal's Peter Thiel" counts as "big tech", and that's not the only reference.
If environmental non-profit startups count as big tech, then what doesn't?
Maybe you're thinking of the part of the article where it mentions Amazon: "We could force modern logistics giants like UPS and Amazon to take the lead on reusability"? (Given the title it's ironic that the author is proposing that big tech be given more responsibility for waste solutions.)
Bro, Peter Thiel is big tech. You literally quoted his name in your post. You know "Paypal's Peter Thiel", like I said? Or perhaps you know him as the chairman of Palantir, or the 10% owner of Facebook, or Y Combinator's most notable partner for a while?
> Maybe you're thinking of the part of the article where it mentions Amazon
Okay, since you seem to agree that Amazon is big tech, remember when you said "the article has almost nothing to do with 'big tech'"?
> "We could force modern logistics giants like UPS and Amazon to take the lead on reusability"? (Given the title it's ironic that the author is proposing that big tech be given more responsibility for waste solutions.)
The difference, in context, being that holding Amazon accountable for results is pretty different from accepting their fake solutions, which are intended to make it look like accountability isn't needed.
Amazon was only mentioned in passing in this article. This headline does not pass the smell test. It is pure clickbait that suckered you.