An interesting point of anecdata is that I didn't choose to upgrade my perfectly good three-year-old smartphone. I was forced to do so by the weight of compulsory upgrades to OS and apps that now make what was once a decent enough product completely unusable. I'm sure the hardware would last several more years if the vendors would allow me to run the same software that was originally installed on it.
I still use an iPhone 6 as my main phone, and works great. The trick is that I haven't upgraded iOS in at least a couple of years. I also kept an iPhone 5 as a music player at home, until a few months ago when, despite not upgrading the software, it became unusably slow (even for just playing music).
Software bloating to consume all available space is a long-observed trend that has been called Eroom's law, for Moore's law backwards. What Moore's law giveth, Eroom's law taketh away.
Here is what an 8-bit CPU with 64KiB of RAM could do in 1986:
Obviously this is far behind current UIs in areas like resolution and graphics, but it's not so strikingly far behind that it's unusable or unrecognizable.
Does it really take gigabytes of RAM and multiple 2+ghz cores to deliver the same basic paradigm as this 8-bit CPU in 1986, but in 32-bit color, 4K resolution, and with better language and character set support? Really?
What would a quad-core 2ghz machine with 16GiB of RAM be able to do if software were written in equivalently efficient ways, dispensing with so much unnecessary bloat and layers of indirection?
Your smartphone isn't the problem, the problem is irresponsible businesses. We used to have the same kind of crap in the USA. Companies insisted they couldn't be economically viable without dumping toxic waste into our rivers and lakes.
I wonder if things would change if the os updates were handled by a different vendor, i.e. a model where the phone makers sold hardware and os vendors sold installs/updates? Maybe if the motivations of phone makers were decoupled from the os vendors, then phones could be supported a while longer due to the os vendors desire to improve their profit?
The "smartphone" world needs the equivalent of NetBSD for larger form factor computers and development boards. An open-source, modifiable, freely available, experimental OS that can run on both old and new "smartphone" computers. With larger form factor computers the tradeoff has generally been less hardware support on the very newest ones. Over time however the support for newer hardware generally increases as contributors have the chance to tinker with it. Instead of losing performance from the same hardware, users generally gain performance over time. Whatever one may think of this dynamic, it does allow for the longest possible use of hardware.
Tech companies should be shamed for the "disposable" computer culture they have put so much effort into creating. It is possible to improve software without requiring new hardware.
With the prices Apple charges for hardware, there should not be any forced obsolescence.
Surprised nobody has mentioned Android on here. The Galaxy Note 4 is now 6 years old. It was the last flagship smartphone with a removable battery. It still works great.
Maybe a law stating that anytime someone stops updating the OS for a consumer device they have to release source so the community can support it themselves.
> weight of compulsory upgrades to OS and apps that now make what was once a decent enough product completely unusable.
Software developers and companies alike are very proud of it. I can understand companies defending it due to commercial concerns. But developers defending addition of enormous number of dependencies, bloating the software and calling it best practice to reuse existing components saddens me.
This is one of the main reasons I switched from Android to iOS. Got really tired of getting new phones when they would run out of updates. I hope to keep my 11 for 6 years, maybe more.
I’m sorry but this just fetishizes environmental disaster. Some reporter is surprised that mining produces waste and writes about it like one small lake is poisoning the planet. Yes it could probably be done better with better environmental standards but waste is waste and setting aside small areas of the planet for it isn’t equivalent to some global catastrophe.
So many people seem to be living in this bubble where the only thing they experience is the clean interfaces to civilization and then they talk about the messy bits like the slightest blemish is doom.
A dispassionate analysis of the site might have painted a more convincing argument for something being wrong, but as it is, it reads like a melodramatic fainting after seeing some trash.
There are plenty of very real environmental issues, but if you sensationalize everything that isn’t pristine natural beauty, it doesn’t matter because your motivations have moved from reason to superstition.
Especially since the article contains lots of cluelessnes about the meaning of their reported facts: Clay that is radioactive at three times the normal background is called: normal clay. Your living room might be three times above background because of Potassium-40 in the wall bricks. Totally normal and harmless, except if you want to stir a panic among the clueless.
When water was a source of power and transport, we made a habit of building industry right on bodies of water. When we switched to other ways to transport goods and power, we never stopped that tradition and I wonder how harshly future generations are going to judge us for doing so.
We aren't using the river, but the river is still the same form of transportation it ever was. We don't barge away the goods, but the river will still happily carry any toxic materials that leave the factory by malice, incompetence, human error, or a series of unfortunate events (Fukushima).
I mean at this point, building a factory where you swear not to pollute next to a geographical feature that makes it easy to pollute without getting caught or where any honest mistake is magnified... it feels like a teenager hovering by the display of expensive stuff and saying they are just looking, or playing catch in the living room. You won't be the least surprised when you find out there is something missing/broken. The solution isn't more yelling, it's taking away the temptation to misbehave, and/or reducing the consequences of doing so.
We need public policy to build a proverbial glass cabinet around our core watersheds. Build highways, train and powerlines and zone for factories at a slight separation, along on the route between Here and There, where nothing we care about is directly downwind or downhill.
Tennessee Valley Authority lost a dam and dumped years of fly ash into a tributary of the Mississippi. It's just a matter of time until deferred maintenance takes out this dam, and the lake remembers it was a river once.
Its predominantly China's fault. They achieved a monopoly on rare earth metals by undercutting competitors by ignoring safety and environmental practices.
Rare earth metals are not rare. They are common, but processing them safely without environmental impact is not cheap. Whenever competitors show up, China floods the market to push down prices to bankrupt them.
The world needs to start putting environmental and social tariffs on Chinese goods, to force them to improve environmental standards, and put a stop to human rights abuses.
> Whenever competitors show up, China floods the market to push down prices to bankrupt them.
Maybe governments should take the opportunity to stockpile at that moment. Either the price rises keeping the competitors afloat or you have a nice stockpile. Either way you become immune to shenanigans.
In 1982 (iirc), the US decided that Thorium is a "source material" for nuclear weapons, even though it very clearly isn't. Since rare earth metals have chemistry very similar to Thorium, they tend to occur together. Anyone who mines REE, ends up with waste Thorium. It's just slightly radioactive, chemically inert sand, but by decree it is a "TENORM" (technically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material), and by decree, someone stealing it could theoretically build an atomic bomb from it, even though they can't in the real world.
So because it's a TENORM, the waste can't go back into the same hole in the ground that it came from. And because it's a "source material", it has to be guarded. And the eventual disposal has to follow all sorts of regulations. All of that is so expensive, that nobody bothers anymore.
China simply doesn't play these stupid games. That's why they are cheap.
Looks like mining to me. While it reminds me of the tailing ponds from the tar sands in Fort McMurray, a real Hell on Earth was Vale SA's tailings dam collapse in Brumadinho that devastated the downstream villages of Bento Rodrigues and Paracatu de Baixo.
A number of years ago, people speculated that as people in China became wealthier, they'd start worrying about things beyond just having food and some nicer goods in their lives, and start pushing for change, including, perhaps, some form of democracy. Things like local environmental disasters could have moved things in that direction, as people tire of the corruption and lack of action. That hasn't happened, sadly.
No sorry, it is not 'created by our thirst for tech'. It is cratered by our socioeconomic system that selects for concentrated benefits and externality dumping, no matter what the cost.
Worth noting is that there's no single definition of "green". Sometimes tradeoffs have to be made. Personally, I would tend to say that a single concentrated pollution event is less important than global runaway climate-change.
Another interesting example of environmental trade-offs is the plastic bag ban (where the disposable, ultra-light-weight plastic bags at supermarkets are banned in favor of heavier, reusable plastic and paper bags).
The lighter bags:
- break more easily, making them harder to re-use
- tend to blow around and get stuck in trees, rivers, etc, causing visible pollution
However, the heavier bags:
- emit a lot more carbon through their transportation (because of the extra weight)
- put more total plastic into the world at the end of the day unless everyone reuses all of them (which many people don't)
Just like there's no single definition of "healthy food", there's no single definition of "good for the environment".
The question I think needs to be answered is how we can move the market forces to move away from such harmful practices? I think this is a symptom of much larger geopolitical and economic issues.
- Apple is using 100% recycled rare earths in their upcoming iPhones, but they are just one manufacturer out of many.
- No one has really figured out how to extract the elements out of phones after they have been manufactured.
- We don't yet know how to recycle solar panels either.
Instead track resource/labor contents of products directly and "price" resources according to their pollution/known externalities.
One of the biggest problems we have is that markets can price labor costs effectively, but are terrible at pricing resource/raw material costs. Supply and demand has nothing to do with ecology and known externalities of resources. We should be able to set the costs of fossil fuels directly democratically (and same with rare earth minerals) either on a per-resource basis (if the use of the resource has known costs) or a per-process basis (if the process of extracting the resource has known costs), and have those costs trickle through the economy via companies that are effectively acting in a distributed productive relationship (like a market) but without using prices for allocation. Instead use orders directly, and then have consumers cover the costs of products on purchase, at which point the money they earned from their (negotiated) wages would be destroyed and not circulate the productive economy.
Markets can only effectively price resources in a democratic setting. This is impossible in a globalized capitalist system.
Many mining sites look really desolate and alien.
If you carve a hole into solid rock, the crushed rock doesn't fit into that same space anymore. You will have rubble piles. Also all kinds of substances start leaching from it. What was just inert rock is now mining waste. Basically you can easily poison nearby water bodies.
And this isn't even talking about any kind of extraction, just the physical action.
If you think that "green tech" is "green" or that it somehow eliminates fossil fuels out of the equation, please watch Jeff Gibbs' "Planet of the Humans" documentary. It will open your eyes to how this "green tech" movement really works.
Before anyone takes this documentary seriously, please do some research. This[1] Wikipedia article is a good starting point, but there are a lot of sources showing how misleading and inaccurate this documentary is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_a...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil. I read the original for the first time recently, and was amused that it ended with a rant against the post office.
The problem is not hard, I'd even wager to say it's solved. Simply use a lot more filters, basically build big wastewater treatment plants (covered sedimentation tanks, [reverse]osmosis filters, last resort, use closed loops and fractionating columns [like the distillation towers at refineries]), it just takes a lot more energy.
Similarly we can make carbon-neutral concrete and steel, it just takes a lot lot lot more energy.
And we kind of dropped the ball on energy because of costs.
So now we are in a two or more front war for more and clean energy.
It actually looks as if the Chinese are doing it right this time: the ugliness of the black sludge is confined to a small lake, so that the sludge can settle and the water can drain. One day, when the pond is filled with clay, they will turn it into a park.
I'm a recluse, I don't go anywhere or talk to anyone anyway, so when I lost my smart phone a few years ago I didn't bother to replace it. I think if I still had one this would convince me to get rid of it.
I hoped this was an update from the 2015 article, but this is the article from 2015. I’d like to know if there have been any improvements in China on this issue.
[+] [-] FearNotDaniel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta1234567890|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|5 years ago|reply
Here is what an 8-bit CPU with 64KiB of RAM could do in 1986:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9k5Xa2PpEg
Obviously this is far behind current UIs in areas like resolution and graphics, but it's not so strikingly far behind that it's unusable or unrecognizable.
Does it really take gigabytes of RAM and multiple 2+ghz cores to deliver the same basic paradigm as this 8-bit CPU in 1986, but in 32-bit color, 4K resolution, and with better language and character set support? Really?
What would a quad-core 2ghz machine with 16GiB of RAM be able to do if software were written in equivalently efficient ways, dispensing with so much unnecessary bloat and layers of indirection?
[+] [-] User23|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abawany|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|5 years ago|reply
Tech companies should be shamed for the "disposable" computer culture they have put so much effort into creating. It is possible to improve software without requiring new hardware. With the prices Apple charges for hardware, there should not be any forced obsolescence.
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|5 years ago|reply
Though I'm not very convinced of the individual guilt angle. It's a systemic problem of incentives (lack of good ones).
[+] [-] forinti|5 years ago|reply
Sure, the new one is better, but the old one did everything I wanted it to do.
[+] [-] narrator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geodel|5 years ago|reply
Software developers and companies alike are very proud of it. I can understand companies defending it due to commercial concerns. But developers defending addition of enormous number of dependencies, bloating the software and calling it best practice to reuse existing components saddens me.
[+] [-] e40|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|5 years ago|reply
So many people seem to be living in this bubble where the only thing they experience is the clean interfaces to civilization and then they talk about the messy bits like the slightest blemish is doom.
A dispassionate analysis of the site might have painted a more convincing argument for something being wrong, but as it is, it reads like a melodramatic fainting after seeing some trash.
There are plenty of very real environmental issues, but if you sensationalize everything that isn’t pristine natural beauty, it doesn’t matter because your motivations have moved from reason to superstition.
[+] [-] corty|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
We aren't using the river, but the river is still the same form of transportation it ever was. We don't barge away the goods, but the river will still happily carry any toxic materials that leave the factory by malice, incompetence, human error, or a series of unfortunate events (Fukushima).
I mean at this point, building a factory where you swear not to pollute next to a geographical feature that makes it easy to pollute without getting caught or where any honest mistake is magnified... it feels like a teenager hovering by the display of expensive stuff and saying they are just looking, or playing catch in the living room. You won't be the least surprised when you find out there is something missing/broken. The solution isn't more yelling, it's taking away the temptation to misbehave, and/or reducing the consequences of doing so.
We need public policy to build a proverbial glass cabinet around our core watersheds. Build highways, train and powerlines and zone for factories at a slight separation, along on the route between Here and There, where nothing we care about is directly downwind or downhill.
Tennessee Valley Authority lost a dam and dumped years of fly ash into a tributary of the Mississippi. It's just a matter of time until deferred maintenance takes out this dam, and the lake remembers it was a river once.
[+] [-] Khaine|5 years ago|reply
Rare earth metals are not rare. They are common, but processing them safely without environmental impact is not cheap. Whenever competitors show up, China floods the market to push down prices to bankrupt them.
The world needs to start putting environmental and social tariffs on Chinese goods, to force them to improve environmental standards, and put a stop to human rights abuses.
[+] [-] im3w1l|5 years ago|reply
Maybe governments should take the opportunity to stockpile at that moment. Either the price rises keeping the competitors afloat or you have a nice stockpile. Either way you become immune to shenanigans.
[+] [-] 08-15|5 years ago|reply
In 1982 (iirc), the US decided that Thorium is a "source material" for nuclear weapons, even though it very clearly isn't. Since rare earth metals have chemistry very similar to Thorium, they tend to occur together. Anyone who mines REE, ends up with waste Thorium. It's just slightly radioactive, chemically inert sand, but by decree it is a "TENORM" (technically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material), and by decree, someone stealing it could theoretically build an atomic bomb from it, even though they can't in the real world.
So because it's a TENORM, the waste can't go back into the same hole in the ground that it came from. And because it's a "source material", it has to be guarded. And the eventual disposal has to follow all sorts of regulations. All of that is so expensive, that nobody bothers anymore.
China simply doesn't play these stupid games. That's why they are cheap.
[+] [-] dade_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] najarvg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notRobot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adwww|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterStuer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speeder|5 years ago|reply
Are there serious research about how much this "green" tech is actually greener or not?
And what are the actually greenest energy we can have right now?
[+] [-] brundolf|5 years ago|reply
Another interesting example of environmental trade-offs is the plastic bag ban (where the disposable, ultra-light-weight plastic bags at supermarkets are banned in favor of heavier, reusable plastic and paper bags).
The lighter bags:
- break more easily, making them harder to re-use
- tend to blow around and get stuck in trees, rivers, etc, causing visible pollution
However, the heavier bags:
- emit a lot more carbon through their transportation (because of the extra weight)
- put more total plastic into the world at the end of the day unless everyone reuses all of them (which many people don't)
Just like there's no single definition of "healthy food", there's no single definition of "good for the environment".
[+] [-] hjek|5 years ago|reply
The Michael Moore produced documentary Planet of the Humans[0] tries to answer that question. Strongly recommended.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
[+] [-] zdw|5 years ago|reply
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-...
TL;DR: Lithium ion batteries have a ratio of around 10:1, whereas compressed air or pumped water are 200:1 or better.
This is just storage - I'd be interested in the ratio on solar photovoltaic, wind, or similar power generation tech.
[+] [-] metissec98|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianmobbs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambdasquirrel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orthecreedence|5 years ago|reply
Instead track resource/labor contents of products directly and "price" resources according to their pollution/known externalities.
One of the biggest problems we have is that markets can price labor costs effectively, but are terrible at pricing resource/raw material costs. Supply and demand has nothing to do with ecology and known externalities of resources. We should be able to set the costs of fossil fuels directly democratically (and same with rare earth minerals) either on a per-resource basis (if the use of the resource has known costs) or a per-process basis (if the process of extracting the resource has known costs), and have those costs trickle through the economy via companies that are effectively acting in a distributed productive relationship (like a market) but without using prices for allocation. Instead use orders directly, and then have consumers cover the costs of products on purchase, at which point the money they earned from their (negotiated) wages would be destroyed and not circulate the productive economy.
Markets can only effectively price resources in a democratic setting. This is impossible in a globalized capitalist system.
[+] [-] Gravityloss|5 years ago|reply
And this isn't even talking about any kind of extraction, just the physical action.
Why single out the smart phones?
[+] [-] Jerry2|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q2m_mCIrQY
[+] [-] sacred_numbers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aspenmayer|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
[+] [-] ardy42|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil. I read the original for the first time recently, and was amused that it ended with a rant against the post office.
[+] [-] yboris|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quantified|5 years ago|reply
I don't imagine it's any better today.
[+] [-] lokl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pas|5 years ago|reply
Similarly we can make carbon-neutral concrete and steel, it just takes a lot lot lot more energy.
And we kind of dropped the ball on energy because of costs.
So now we are in a two or more front war for more and clean energy.
[+] [-] KiranRao0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therockspush|5 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6350939,109.6828376,5323m/da...
Link to the satellite view of the permanente mine outside cupertino.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3198492,-122.103036,5187m/da...
[+] [-] antijava|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 08-15|5 years ago|reply
It actually looks as if the Chinese are doing it right this time: the ugliness of the black sludge is confined to a small lake, so that the sludge can settle and the water can drain. One day, when the pond is filled with clay, they will turn it into a park.
[+] [-] carapace|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barney54|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soperj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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