Comment by tombert
18 hours ago
What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”.
It’s beautiful, I love it.
18 hours ago
What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”.
It’s beautiful, I love it.
For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...
To make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).
Varies widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"
17 replies →
Depends, it’s hard to make a blanket statement like that. Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration is mostly a better solution than recycling (which produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy contaminants in the few cases that it’s not actually a scam).
Can you elaborate on that?
Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.
8 replies →
Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch?
(The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics.
Especially considering the extra logistics and quality degradation that recycling entails.
Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.)
Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view?
The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare.
Do you need it spelling out more clearly?
8 replies →
> Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.
Directly reusing plastic bottles that were not meant to be is bad for your health though, isn't it?
1 reply →
>they could use a non-rechargeable battery
The problem here is the item lasts 'long enough' that they can't, a single battery, unless it were very large would drain charge first.
But that brings in the second issue of the device not being refillable, which may be the bigger sin.
Let's start by pricing in the negative externalities.
> As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it?
You need to offer an incentive (ie: discount on new vape if you recycle) and then, from my experience, most people will recycle.
And you also need to refrain from breaking this scheme entirely, by introducing silly restrictions like only exchanging for in-store vouchers instead of cash, or demanding same-store receipt for original purchase (or equivalent) - like it happened in some places (e.g. my country, Poland) to glass and aluminum recycling.
Such restrictions seem to purposefully target poor people, and I have rather strong ethical objections to them (something about making a problem invisible and hoping it'll go away - or starve out), but the effect goes beyond that. Getting $20 back on a $200 product would be a different story, but here, it's more like $2 on $20, or $0.2 on $2; most people aren't going to bother with that (and understandably so: it's not worth the logistics overhead). So at best, all this does is redirect money stream from poor people to recycling companies. More typically, it just makes people recycle less.
I concur on this one.
Here in NY as a cannabis user, one of the brands available that offers vapes (Fernway) offers a recycling program at dispensaries. I get 10% back off my next vape/cart if I return the old one to the recycling dropbox. My dispensary also keeps how many I've returned on file if I return extras, so I keep a 'balance' of disposables returned for the discounts.
It reminds me of how Sussman talked about someday we'd have computers so small and cheap that we'd mix dozens in our concrete and be put throughout our space.
Russia started with mixing diodes into concrete a while ago- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41933979
A Deepness in the Sky by Vinge has this as a minor plot point.
> It’s beautiful
Especially since both the waste created in the process of making the device and the e-waste created with it's disposal are somebody else's problem!
> It’s beautiful, I love it.
When computers become disposable, their programmers soon become disposable as well. Maybe, you shouldn't love it.
That doesn't make sense.
Life lessons from anime and the WordPorn meme account.