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Comment by rty32 | Hacker News Reader

This sentence looks very weird and out of place to me as well. I mean, Apple used metal on MacBooks long before people jumped on the environment bandwagon. And Lenovo and HP use plastic on $200 Chromebooks not because they hate environment, but because plastic is cheap.

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Plastic in a laptop you replace every 3 years is hardly anything like plastic waste coming out of a household. My family produces many times as much plastic waste every month just by shopping food and cleaning supplies at a supermarket and eventually getting rid of the packaging.

It's not nothing though:

50 million tons of e-waste yearly, https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/waste...

Apple sells 21.9 million units/year: https://www.statista.com/topics/10435/apple-mac/

Large distances are covered with tiny steps.

E-waste is generally considered a separate category than plastic, as it contains small amounts of a lot of useful, hard to mine metals - much of which is in the chips, but also the lithium in the batteries. And many of those metals are toxic if ingested so we need to keep them out of the soil and water.

Recycling those is probably far more valuable than recycling plastic, pound per pound. We just make so much plastic.

Isn't that the point though? Plastic's only cheaper when you're thinking short term and have externalised any non-material costs – which is exactly how capitalism has set us up to think.

In a few special cases plastic is almost certainly the best choice - single use medical supplies come to mind: while "single use" itself is bad, avoiding infection risk is likely worth it in hospital settings for items that a reusable version would be hard to sterilize.

Of course the vast majority of plastic usage doesn't fall into this bucket but is more a matter of plastic having convenient properties while also being very cheap.

>Apple used metal on MacBooks long before people jumped on the environment bandwagon.

Huh? My country (the US) jumped on the environment bandwagon in the 1970s.

This is unrelated but I've been noticing recently a great deal of comments both on HN and Reddit starting with "Huh?"

Is this a developing slang or have I just been under a rock and only noticed it now?

Under a rock. That's been a common interjection for decades in casual conversation, at least in the US.

I can't say for certain about it's commonality online in written form though.

Agreed. As an interjection, consider Scooby's 'Huh?' sound from the early 1970s cartoon series.

I believe that it means "I disagree". It seems common on platforms where language is not sophisticated, but rarely do I see these on HN.

It's worse than that, it's feigned surprise. "I disagree" is at least intellectually honest, "Huh?" is pretending that the position is so far off that they couldn't even understand it.

I learned the term "feigned surprise" from Recurse Center's social rules[1]. It's related to, but not exactly the same as, that well-known XKCD about "today's 10000", too[2].

[1] https://www.recurse.com/social-rules

[2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Why is it feigned? Why can't it be (mild) genuine surprise?

> Is this a developing slang or have I just been under a rock and only noticed it now?

It communicates disagreement and pushback to perceived aloofness.

Its archetypal form would be an academic making a Monty Python Witch Trial argument being refuted by an average Joe. You generally don't see it followed by a rigorous intellectual argument, because by its framing it's rejecting intellectualism. Put another way, it's a call to common sense. In reality, it tends to reflect an inchoate argument,.

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