[quadrifoliate]

This.

I lose any hope for us as a species being able to reverse climate change if the top comment about an article that goes quite deep into meaningful ways to “reduce, reuse, recycle" is that this is virtue signaling, and that we should buy Macbooks every year instead because they are "expendable tools".

Guess what, their impact on the environment is very much noticeable. There is no way we are going to reverse or even meaningfully delay climate change with this kind of collective attitude.

[nine_k]

Laptops are expendable tools, no question.

The problem is that their price does not include the expenses of the global warming accelerated due to their production and transportation. So they are sold artificially less expensively than they will turn out to be.

When laptop production, transportation, and recycling become largely carbon-neutral, it would be easier to argue for throwing them away once a slightly better model is available.

[hdivider]

Worth remembering this is HN, where all too often, people hide behind screens and make less-than-considered comments for points. This is just one of many echo chambers. Apple worship in particular is quite prevalent in this thread -- but in reality, way more people use Windows.

The folks who spearhead the real fight against climate change aren't likely to spend much time on threads like this. They're in meetings with supply chain and logistics folks trying to figure out how to hit an ambitious decarbonization quota.

My point: there is hope, and usually, it's not found online, but out in the real world.

[Gigachad]

Who is buying macbooks every year though? I'm using the M1 2020 for work and it still feels like a brand new laptop.

[redroyal]

That issue can’t be solved by reusing laptops or sorting cans from cardboard. The argument that every little helps is totally flawed. Fantasy, make believe. The other 8 billion people simply don’t care and why would they? 50 years from now they’ll all be dead. Since when did people care about future generations and the good of humanity? It’s a very recent western fashion. The only thing that truly motivated the vast majority of people is sex and money or objectives closely descended from that tree. To modify mass human behavior you have to incentivize based on that leverage. But - even modification of the behavior of the crowd won’t be sufficient. The only way to fix this is w new technology

[liamN]

You're falling prey to the fallacy that just because 1 person's actions can't make a world of difference on their own, those actions aren't worth taking. By your logic, you may as well not vote either, because everyone else is voting. Every little bit DOES count, because the more people believe they can make a difference, the more of a difference they will make collectively. You have to lead by example. Rolling over and dying because you dont think you can make a difference makes you part of the problem.

New tech certainly would help, and it isnt/shouldnt be on the shoulders of just individuals to make all the change. But Im not going to use that as an excuse not to change my own behavior for the better.

[piaste]

> By your logic, you may as well not vote either, because everyone else is voting.

Correct. Voting is the worst possible example, because while e.g. individual recycling has a negligible but technically non-zero impact, voting is overwhelmingly* likely to have exactly zero impact.

* unless the voting base is either extremely small, or extremely close. Your vote only matters as much as the likelihood that at least one result is decided by exactly one vote, which is only realistic in something like a local town election. Which are the only elections most people should actually pay attention to.

> Every little bit DOES count, because the more people believe they can make a difference, the more of a difference they will make collectively.

That's pure wishful thinking.

What actually happens is that people believe they are making a difference, even when they actually aren't, but since they feel personally good about having put in an effort, they stop worrying about the actual problem, and stop even thinking (let alone acting) towards solutions that might actually work.

Why do you think the "carbon footprint" idea was actively pushed by BP and other super-polluters? Out of the goodness of their great? Or because it drew attention away from other, less corporate-friendly CO2 reduction measures?

[bscphil]

> Your vote only matters as much as the likelihood that at least one result is decided by exactly one vote

This is entirely wrong. The value of your vote is the relative ratio of the fraction of alternate universes in which you vote in the election and your side wins, over the fraction of alternate universes in which you don't vote in the election and your side wins.

The value of your vote, as a result, is emphatically and enormously greater than the likelihood of the election being decided by a single vote. That's because there is an enormous amount of correlation between you not voting and people in the same voting demographic as you not voting. The question of whether you will vote should be seen as largely a consequence of the turnout characteristics of your voting block, not a free choice of the "uncaused cause" variety.

In fact, the real danger of the your argument is that by taking it seriously, you greatly reduce your voting power by making your demographic that of the tiny group of people who decide whether to vote based on meta-arguments about the value of their single vote. And this particular demographic basically never swings elections, so by putting yourself in that demographic, you effectively make the value of your vote zero.

[piaste]

You're basically describing superrationality, which is a model I don't buy.

Defecting still wins the one-shot PD, which in this case maps to "not wasting dozens of hours researching political candidates" and everyone who votes like you is a prisoner.

If you want to be safe against network effects, just lie and tell everyone that you voted when asked.

[redroyal]

I mean you’ve got to appreciate the scale of the problem here and be pragmatic. The danger of recycling is it gives the illusion of progress, but I’m not against it otherwise. Philosophically you might be correct but voting blue in a non swing red state is completely meaningless

[paulryanrogers]

We need not be locked in a two party system forever. If enough of us demand same day primaries and ranked choice then other parties have a chance.

Only voting in blue strongholds certainly isn't going to break the duopoly.

[vel0city]

There's 8 billion people so my actions don't matter. I guess I'll pour all my old paint and paint thinner down the storm drains. Maybe my motor oil and used coolants as well. After all I'm just one person out of 8 billion, my actions don't matter.

I'll just litter all my stuff as well. Single use plastics? Sign me up, I'll just throw it out in the street. I'm only one of a few million in my city, my actions don't really matter.

Or maybe my actions really do matter.

[piaste]

Your actions do not, indeed, matter. Neither does your vote, or your boycotting of $global_evil_corp, precisely because there's millions or billions of people involved. (To be pedantic: while not literally zero, your actions matter several order of magnitude less than would be necessary to be able to perceive their effects.)

But that's a really hard pill to swallow. Your post is a beautiful example of that difficulty: you spell out examples of how your actions don't matter [as much as you would like], and then wildly swing into open denial with "Or maybe my actions do really matter".

My advice - if you focus on the consequences of your actions that you can actually perceive, instead of the ones you only wish you could, you'll be less frustrated. For example, helping your local community will typically give you far better returns than trying to improve any global issue.

[vel0city]

So you're saying my neighbors and I should feel fine throwing old car batteries in the lake and switching back to leaded gas?

[piaste]

I'm saying that lakes don't get saved when people virtuously choose to individually stop throwing trash into it: they get saved when the entity in control of the lake forbids throwing trash into them, and enforces that ban.

If leaded gas was still being legally sold alongside unleaded one, people like you would be passionately arguing for decades about why it's everyone's moral duty to pay extra for unleaded gas, and you would feel so proud every time you stopped at the green pump instead of the black one.

And meanwhile we would all be breathing lead.

[vel0city]

So your stance is feel free to keep doing things you know is overall bad for society until we bother passing a law and pushing enforcement to eliminate the activity?

I don't know about you, but if pumps had leaded gas and unleaded gas, I'd still be going for the unleaded every time along with trying to lobby for change. I'd absolutely be telling everyone I know not to use the leaded gas and try and change everyone around me to get rid of it. I would not just shrug and say "lots of other people are using leaded gas, I might as well as well, my use doesn't matter!" Meanwhile I guess your stance is to just use the leaded gas despite knowing how bad it is and telling everyone else to keep using it anyways until they finally tear the pumps out of the ground.

It's people thinking "my use doesn't really matter!" that is massive problem. Imagine how much easier things would be if people just did the right thing instead of assuming their actions don't matter.

Each rain drop isn't much water, they don't really matter. Yet floods destroy cities. Where does the flood come from?

[ryukafalz]

Japan stays free of litter because residents keep it that way (despite not having many trash cans in public), not because someone's there watching over everyone and enforcing it: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20191006-what-japan-can-t...

Individual actions may not make much of a difference on their own but in aggregate they do.

[flangola7]

This is lazy defeatism and an immediate disqualifier I use in the selection of both friends and employees.

[bloomingeek]

I agree, all branches of science should invent ways to recycle almost anything. We know we have a waste problem, yet society doesn't demand enough to have ways created to deal with recycling. Forget Mars and looking at the Titanic till we find ways to deal with real world problems.

Burying our heads in the sand will hurt future generations!

[lotsofpulp]

The evidence indicates that recycling is burying our heads in the sand.

It is reduce>>>>reuse>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>recycle.

As far as I can tell, very little recycling actually ever happened or does happen. It was always just poorer countries willing to look the other way and trash it and claim it was recycled.

[bloomingeek]

I'm guessing you're assuming I meant throw everything into the landfill? That's the problem with assuming, it's almost always dead wrong. And besides, I didn't say that. Perhaps you though I said "throw away"?

I meant we have to quit adding to landfills and reuse materials from discarded objects, or in other words "recycle".

[gotoeleven]

How much climate change do you think has been allayed by sorting garbage into 3 kinds of trash cans and drinking from paper straws?

[Shekelphile]

Owning a macbook vs owning a framework laptop isn't going to effect climate change in any way. In fact, Apple's track record is that their products generally outlast the competition, even when they do otherwise stupid things like software DRMed screen and battery replacements and soldered SSDs.

It is purely virtue signaling. If you want to do good by the climate and still want a powerful tool there is no better option than a used macbook.

[kelnos]

I don't think Framework is expecting to compete with Apple. They're competing with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, ASUS, etc. Apple's laptop market share is what, still under 10%?

Assuming Framework's thesis bears out, that their customers will actually upgrade their laptops piece by piece when given the opportunity to do so, rather than buy a whole new laptop, then it's a matter of increasing their market share, especially through corporate IT contracts.

Every new company/concept has to start from zero. Maybe Framework has a sub-1% market share right now, but what if, over the next decade, they can grow that to 10%, maybe beyond? While there will certainly be some e-waste (likely most users will not find a use for their old Framework mainboard when they upgrade, and some mainboard upgrades will presumably require new RAM), it'll still be a lot less than people chucking complete laptops, including chassis, keyboard, touchpad, and screen, once every few years.

> Apple's track record is that their products generally outlast the competition

Not sure I agree with this, though my personal experience is pre-Apple-Silicon, which may have changed things for the better. When I used Apple laptops for software development, I only got around three years out of them before they felt uncomfortably sluggish, given the general bloat increases in software development tools (and the increasing number of lines of code we need to compile) over time. Apple certainly does fairly well by their users who have more modest computational needs; my partner has a ~10 year old MacBook Air that's still usable for light web browsing and video playback, though not much more.

At any rate, telling people that their desire to own an upgradeable laptop is mere virtue signaling is just lazy thinking. I might venture to suggest it's a defensive reaction to justify their own purchasing habits, but perhaps that goes a little too far.

[Shekelphile]

> Assuming Framework's thesis bears out, that their customers will actually upgrade their laptops piece by piece when given the opportunity to do so, rather than buy a whole new laptop, then it's a matter of increasing their market share, especially through corporate IT contracts.

You can't upgrade a framework laptop 'by piece', unless you mean swapping in more ram or a bigger/faster ssd. Not really any different from other mainstream laptop vendors in that regard. The CPU is soldered, so you can't upgrade within the CPU platform generation, there's no drop in replacement options for the screen except the IPS panel they ship with (so no high dpi options or OLED/microled, no high refresh rate option, etc), and only proprietary recessed USB-C dongles for changing ports. It's a joke product.

> When I used Apple laptops for software development, I only got around three years out of them before they felt uncomfortably sluggish

Sounds like your usecase calls for a desktop system then, I know plenty of people still using 2013-2015 retina macbook pros for daily development work and they do just fine. There wasn't much performance improvement after those years until the apple silicon transition, you could get 6 and 8 core coffee lake CPUs on the last year of the intel macbook pros but they were essentially unusable for laptop usecases since they had to aggressively thermal throttle and nuked battery life as a result (something that is an even worse problem now with Intel and AMD both juicing core count and clock speeds to chase benchmark wins rather than improving perf per watt and overall system usability).