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Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

I grew up with cassettes, CDs, and MiniDisc (and floppy discs and using a file splitter to spread large files over multiple disks... risky business!) I never want to go back to that because the impact on the environment is just too high. All that plastic which, eventually, will end up on a landfill.

As much as I hate the fact a publisher can pull music from Apple Music in an instant, it's rare and the benefit is instant streaming with little impact on the environment. No impact if I've already got the track downloaded.

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Little plastic discs are killing the Earth but building massive datacenters which require continuous power, cooling, and other resources, not to mention all the intermediate network transport - whether or not they're being used, all for the sake of convenience - is little impact?

A CD requires no power sitting on your shelf unplayed. The same as cups and dishes sitting in a cupboard. If the threat to the environment is as real as you say, consider pouring food directly into your hands.

Those DCs and those cables are serving PBs of traffic from music to movies to emails to gaming and way way way way more. Your CD provides access too one form of data in one format and eventually ends up on a landfill.

Are you really this blind?

Plastic in a landfill and carbon dioxide in the air are two very different forms of environmental damage, even though they frequently get lumped into the same catchall, and only the latter has the potential to be a civilization-ender, so most people mostly care about that.

> carbon dioxide in the air

Because CDs just appear out of thin air and involve absolutely zero CO emissions during their production; during the extraction of their base materials; during the logistics of the final product; the sale of the product; and the CO produced by the consumer travelling to the shop and back again, multiplied by 10,000,000 consumers per year… none of that counts because of wishy thinking and space-star-ology.

Sure, materialism generally is a problem, but CDs are just not a significant contributor.

But cassettes, CDs and MiniDiscs replaced expensive traveling musicians, burning petrochemicals to drive a bus from one gig to the next.

Sort of how coal mining and oil drilling saved whales from extinction by replacing whale oil.

And how do MP3s and streaming services NOT do that? Putting aide the fact they also don’t require a physical plastic product to be produced and shipped and then eventually end up on a land fill.

It becomes an issue when you think of the electricity source of your power generation. Clearly storing and listening to MP3s in green electricity jurisdictions like Ontario and Quebec is better than using plastic because computers are powered by nuclear and hydro power. But in Ohio and places with coal electricity generation, you should forgo recorded music altogether and only listen to live accustic music in well lit buildings that don’t require electricity.

Yes I am joking.

These supports shouldn't be necessary anymore, no contest - while the reality of it, etc... But why do you think CDs, of all things, are such a high impact on the environment?

Go look at the number of CDs and cassettes that ended up on landfills.

Now show me the number of MP3s that ended up on landfills.

How are these CDs that ended up in landfills a high impact on the environment?

Now I know you must be trolling. Very good.

Rare? It’s subjective. Spotify will keep showing tracks in playlists if they aren’t available. I have quite a few with grey/missing tracks. Sometimes they come back. But it’s incredibly annoying to have tracks you’ve played many times suddenly become unplayable. That’s not possible with a CD.

It’s not possible with an MP3, neither. How many MP3s end up on landfills compared to CDs and cassettes?

mp3s are starting to turn up at the bottom of the ocean too

I cannot believe the amount of people missing the point entirely, and actually stating that datacenter(s) and the global Internet backbones are worse for the environment than the literal MILLIONS of physical plastic discs that reach landfills every year since inception.

Incredible.

Maybe they're smart enough to realize a MILLION CDs stacked floor to ceiling occupy the space of a restroom handicapped stall. An amount of trash so inconsequential it's not even worth discussing, and delusional to think it's remotely a problem.

Yes, datacenter(s) and the global Internet backbones are worse for the environment than a single dumpster's worth of trash per year.

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