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I don't know. If we're just looking at it on the basis of how many natural resources it cost to build the thing, you may have a point (although, computer chip

I don't know. If we're just looking at it on the basis of how many natural resources it cost to build the thing, you may have a point (although, computer chip manufacturing is a notoriously dirty business -- look what it did to the orchards of Silicon Valley). But, consider what it would take to run the thing. Unless you power your computers by solar energy or somehow have a nuclear reactor in your back yard, you're probably expending non-renewable energy to power it. The typewriter, being made in 1956, is almost certainly a manual model and only uses ribbon and paper to keep it going. I daresay the typewriter has a lower lifetime environmental impact than any computer.

astrange 4y ago
> although, computer chip manufacturing is a notoriously dirty business -- look what it did to the orchards of Silicon Valley If I wanted Silicon Valley to have good air and soil quality, I would simply not have built suburbs and auto infrastructure on top of all of it. The idea that single family homes aren’t pollution and industry is comes from 70s boomer environmentalism, which is part “if I don’t see it, it’s not happening”, part pastoralist NIMBY (because you just read Cities as Growth Engines), and part explicitly trying to stop people from having children (because you just read The Population Bomb). I would’ve said the modern examples are Marin County NIMBYs and MCU’s Thanos. But it seems like the guy in the article is an even more orthodox example. Note that the Bay Area’s residential only zoning may be commonly thought to keep away dirty industry, but since it was invented here in Berkeley you can just look up what the inventors thought they were doing, and they just wanted to keep out Chinese people. “Residential zoning” meant “no home businesses” and by that they meant “Chinese laundries” with a side of “immigrant corner shops”. It wasn’t about factories.

astrange 4y ago

> although, computer chip manufacturing is a notoriously dirty business -- look what it did to the orchards of Silicon Valley If I wanted Silicon Valley to have good air and soil quality, I would simply not have built suburbs and auto infrastructure on top of all of it. The idea that single family homes aren’t pollution and industry is comes from 70s boomer environmentalism, which is part “if I don’t see it, it’s not happening”, part pastoralist NIMBY (because you just read Cities as Growth Engines), and part explicitly trying to stop people from having children (because you just read The Population Bomb). I would’ve said the modern examples are Marin County NIMBYs and MCU’s Thanos. But it seems like the guy in the article is an even more orthodox example. Note that the Bay Area’s residential only zoning may be commonly thought to keep away dirty industry, but since it was invented here in Berkeley you can just look up what the inventors thought they were doing, and they just wanted to keep out Chinese people. “Residential zoning” meant “no home businesses” and by that they meant “Chinese laundries” with a side of “immigrant corner shops”. It wasn’t about factories.