[metalspot]

> keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills

while i like this idea in theory, in practice the energy efficiency and lower electricity costs of newer hardware mean that in terms of both cost and environmental impact it would probably be better to recycle the old hardware and buy something new in most cases.

[tw04]

>recycle the old hardware and buy something new in most cases.

Completely agree, other than nobody is willing to recycle the hardware in any environmentally friendly way. So "recycle" pretty much just means "send it to some poor country who is perfectly fine polluting their ecosystem to pull anything valuable from the junk".

[znpy]

It really depends. Computers have got very efficient in the last ten years.

Throwing away a five years old chromebook because google decided they don’t want to support it is very different than throwing away a Pentium4 (more of a heating machine than a processor)

[anthk]

Building and shipping new machines requires far more envionmental related costs.

[fuzzfactor]

Plus just earning the money to buy the new hardware is bad enough.

[makerdiety]

So, for the sake of "the environment," the solution is to go backwards? Stop working and stuff?

[anthk]

We did work with Jabber/Email and 512MB/1GB of RAM running similar chat clients, desktop environments (XFCE 4.6 was much faster than 4.16), video players and office suites.

Nowadays to do the same today you need 10X the resources just for a chat application.

And by 'chat' I don't mean 'irc'. Jabber, embedded Youtube URL's, inline LaTeX documents...

[robinsonb5]

No, the solution is to take a balanced and realistic view of the cost - both environmental and monetary - of digital wastefulness.

We used to ridicule the likes of HP shipping a replacement screw in a 3 foot cube box - perhaps we should be applying similar thinking to software.

[fuzzfactor]

>for the sake of "the environment," the solution is to go backwards?

Well, it's your environment, you would probably have to figure that out for yourself.

I don't think you would have to go fully retro to be more environmentally responsible.

When it comes to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, this is a proven hierarchy where lots of times it's like an order of magnitude better if you can reduce compared to merely reuse. And once again better to reuse as much as you can, before you finally recycle (which can require so much reprocessing beyond that needed for simple reuse) to extract any worthwhile components to be used in a circular way, that can preferebly displace the need for brand new raw materials or ingredients in freshly manufactured new products.

It's quite possible for freshly manufactured new products to be more environmentally friendly then ever and as high-technology as you would like, you just have to make the committment and step up to the plate.

Everybody's situation is different, but I do think there is a good reason why people say "think local" so much more, the deeper they do the math.

You shouldn't fail to figure, how much money does it cost just to work, and further how much of that is just to get to work?

How much pollution do you have to create just to earn the money to be able to work in the first place?

For everything you consume, or even worse waste, how much potentially environmentally damaging work did you (plus everyone else in the chain) have to do just to earn the money needed, and that's before the actual consumption could even be paid for? Whether consumption takes place before or after it ever gets paid for.

Then you can more accurately decide the degree of balance you are going to try and maintain, between consumption and conservation.

It's all so personal so you shouldn't let it bug you, just do the math for yourself and take action accordingly.

Most people can easily find some low-hanging room for improvement, sometimes really obvious stuff but it's nothing to get embarassed about.

Don't get me started on the way different currencies have different degrees of toxicity, and not only dependent on their current relative exchange rates.

But you can only imagine that for two workers doing identical work, each earning "equivalent value" but in different denominations, when there is any difference in their environmental impact it could only be due to the difference in impact between the currencies themselves. Naturally including bitcoin and things like that along with "regular" money.

[makerdiety]

> Well, it's your environment, you would probably have to figure that out for yourself.

No. Actually. It's not my environment at all. I could just leave and go somewhere else. Like Mars, Heaven, or somewhere else.

And I'll be taking three gigajoules per second of power production with me.

> It's good to minimize consumption of Earth's resources to maximize the displacement of the need for extraterrestrial raw materials and ingredients for the manufacture of new things.

What you're trying to sell me is something that is physically impossible. Entropy will still eventually—literally kill you if you actually did what you're advocating for (which is degrowth and primitivism). So, you don't actually believe what you're trying to sell to people as an "environmental conservative." Unless you're a zealous fanatic or something.

Unfortunately, Earth was meant to be used up into a big void of nothingness with this exploitation of a planet followed by the next complete consumption of a giant world. Mars is in our sights. As is the rest of the Solar system.

And we may as well go to infinity and beyond.

After all, time and entropy aren't really on our side. Solving the problem of our scheduled annihilation is the real action to think about as a responsible person who isn't afraid of objective mathematics and analysis that doesn't miss crucial variables in global dynamics.

[fuzzfactor]

Well when I try to be as zealous a fanatic as possible it still isn't working, so it must be something else;) Good catch.

Sorry about having nothing to sell, it was all sold out by more well-informed and more persuasive geeks than me, way before I had a chance to get near any soapboxes.

Nothing wrong with a little reminder that some people's fruit hangs a lot lower than others.