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Summary: Various media sites claimed apple recycled $40 million worth of gold from iphones, they were dead wrong. What actually happened is that Apple is unde
by abhi3 11y ago
Summary:
Various media sites claimed apple recycled $40 million worth of gold from iphones, they were dead wrong.
What actually happened is that Apple is under statutury obligation to recycle a certain weight of e-waste depending on it market share or weight of electronics sold (depending on state laws). The e-waste doesn't have to be of the manufacturers own products.
Apple paid third party recyclers to recycle mostly CRT's and PC's (iphone have hardly any gold and are much more valuable refurbished, In fact, phones and tablets often don’t count toward the overall recycling requirements in many state laws.) and probably incured a loss rather than a 40 million windfall as claimed in news articles.
Original Article: 1500 words (~8 minute read)
Summary: 114 words (less than a minute)
The articles goes in to some more detail and analyzes the mandatory recycling laws deeper as well. There is also some commentary of how many other sites got it very wrong and overview of the e-waste recycling industry. Reading recomended if you want gain more knowledge on this.
If you'd like such summaries for all articles before you read them check out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11535695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11535695
- bobwaycott 11y agoHey, can you cut it out with the summary advertising crap?
- trollingineeer 11y agoSTFU, Bob! I don't want to read an entire article.
- efdee 11y agoYes, how dares he provide an interesting service while pitching his startup on a startup related news aggregator.
- bobwaycott 11y agoThis isn't the only time s/he's done it, and it reads as unnecessary ad spam—which is frequently looked down upon here. The same thing was downvoted in another thread. And if this user is going to continue doing it, it's going to become very annoying very quickly.
- jeff_tyrrill 11y agoHacker News would be immensely more valuable and useful to me if a poster such as abhi3 posted such a well-written summary on every story.
- bobwaycott 11y agoAnd that would be fine—as an ad-free TL;DR, as so many other HN members offer on many long articles.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jsmthrowaway 11y agoI'm not sure I'd call that summary well-written or particularly valuable, but I also don't think that's the poster's fault. Journalism is fundamentally contextualizing information, and stripping the context back to information is like playing telephone. I say this all the time, and I'll say it again: you and I can both write a passable story relaying a world event, but contextualizing it and adding illustration around the event is what journalism is about. Distilling that back to a summary is the antipattern. Simply start with the information and don't add context, because stripping out that nuance can change the context of the story (and did, in this case, particularly in the "even smaller" summary-of-summary). Even beyond that, the summary is a bit error-prone, but again, not the poster's fault and probably due to English being a second language or rushing it. I'm less concerned about that.
- engi_nerd 11y agoI don't want summaries in the discussion. I want actual discussion.
- Dylan16807 11y agoA summary is not very big, and doesn't exclude other posts. If ten people posted summaries, you would have a problem, but let's not worry about something that isn't happening.
- adrusi 11y agoIt's an ad, but one that's providing a legitimately useful service. Theres no conflict of interest here (the summary isn't any more biased because it's an ad than a regular commenter would be) and if it weren't an ad, it would be generally recognized as a constructive comment. There's no need to get dogmatic about advertising. If all ads were this high quality and considerate, I would have no problems with ads.
- bobwaycott 11y agoExcept it's really not very constructive, is it? It's a summary with no context or part in discussing the actual article. I know we all love TL;DRs, but I don't want to see every article that takes >60s to read have promotional summaries. That will make HN rather low quality.
- cortesoft 11y agoEvery person/company that creates an ad thinks they are providing a legitimately useful service.
- jonathansizz 11y agoTL;DR Per legal requirements (and at a loss), Apple recycles monitors and computers, but not iphones. Summary-of-summary: 15 words. 5 seconds.
- trollingineeer 11y agoCan we go shorter?