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by pg-gadfly 2179 days ago
Waste is very subjective. When you have 100x the supply of something, it becomes cheaper to do stuff, which means other more valuable resources can be saved instead.

We don't manage "information" as much as we do abstract objects. You can have a 5 mebibyte, gibibyte or tebibyte objects, and they will still consume the same amount of mental capacity.

The switch to a new wireless standard is not a cliff, it will happen gradually, there is no need to throw away everything at once. Energy per bit transferred is lower for 5G devices, which makes them more efficient in the future to compensate the need to transfer more bits.

1 comments

The experience I have is that we've never had such a high attention deficit. Attention is a finite resource, there are biological limits to what we can analyze in depth.By increasing the speed of comunications, we run the risk of becoming more superficial. My point is that developed countries already have infrastructure and in my view it is not justified to change it completely in consideration of the environmental challenges that lie ahead and that many of us already suffer from hyperconnectivity. In this respect my way of thinking is very much in line with this article.