| Eco-friendlyness and general kharma in the public eyes is usually dependant on how many vendor-layers you are away from the horrifyng layers of reality. Chicken-Stable-Cleaner - horrifying. Egg-Delivery-Truck-Driver - acceptable. Hotel-Breakfast-Cook - never met a nicer person. If the horror is additional well distributed, and humanity is secretly addicted to your product and wont imagine live without it- you get a free ride on the kharma slide. >>Coltan from african warlords mined by enslaved children in every cellphone! Will humanity give up cellphones to save the innocent? Click here - to find out.<< It would be a interesting project to find out the actual kharma-cost of a product though. Imagine the inheritance, if the industry relies on a lot of kharmatic lower services- or propells other low-kharma activitys onwards. Though it could end up, showing that the it- is actually a net-positiv to humanitys kharma, after all i drastically reduces what humanity would have usually done with its spare time. |
I'm having trouble finding it and would love if someone else found it, but a couple years ago someone did an academic paper doing just that for the iphone, tallying up all externalities (abuse of workers and the environment for example) involved in manufacturing the product and coming up with a "real" cost of making it. I recall they concluded an iphone would cost $1000 to $2000 if the true costs were included.
I seem to remember the phrase "dark value" but it hasn't been helpful in googling for the paper.