4 ms·

> burning billions of joules per day in a bank of resistive elements and then dumping the heat directly into the atmosphere is morally wrong. Does this include

• stubish 4y ago
  In most ethical frameworks, making many people happy vastly outweighs making a few people rich. In some ethical frameworks, making people happy is the most moral thing it is possible to do.
• somenameforme 4y ago
  Just imagine the amount of compute, mechanical and human, that's spent trying to force people to watch ads that they don't want to see to convince them to buy things that they don't need. Alternatively consider planned obsolescence. Devices are designed to break and be replaced rather than last today, as a rule. Consider just phones alone on this front. The amount of resources that consumes is unimaginable, and that goes well beyond just electricity or manpower. Ultimately our entire society is built around the largely arbitrary expenditure of absolutely massive amounts of energy and resources to accomplish tasks that, in most cases, are not especially useful or necessary. Optimizing GDP, a goal of most all developed nations now a day, is often just a proxy for increasing waste. Buying the same phone 20 times gives a 20x boost to GDP relative to buying it once. And yet this is the metric we've chosen as a measure for progress.