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The insane hypocrisy of pretending to care about how green you are as a company while also fighting tooth and nail to put your products into the landfill as qui

The insane hypocrisy of pretending to care about how green you are as a company while also fighting tooth and nail to put your products into the landfill as quickly as possible is one of the most telling things about the modern “green business” movement. It clearly shows that the companies doing this — which is most — are sustainability focused as long as it’s for more profit and don’t have honest environment commitments. You can have all the low carbon datacenters you want, but if your primary product and its colossal manufacturing footprint is designed to fail and you oppose allowing people to use what they already paid for through planned obsolescence or even go out of your way to make your products impossible to repair you’re a total hypocrite. I get why — profit. But consider this: try explaining why you spent years at Apple or Amazon doing everything you could to improve profits at the cost of the future even while ice melted and the ocean currents were clearly slowing to your great grandkids. You can’t. You’d just be another card carrying early 21st century moron. Bringing our companies back into alignment with the life support systems of the earth is necessary and a priority, and we need to find a way to penalize this kind of behavior harshly and quickly. The real market incentives are not aligned with human survival on this planet. Oh and btw, the people on HN are the most likely people to answer this call and make this change. The nerds and founders and execs and creatives. We make the system they’re talking about. It’s up to us.

intelVISA 3y ago
Why would a corp be anything but x,y,z focused if not for profit?
- nicoburns 3y ago
  They might care about the stability of the world they depend on. They might care about longer term profits. They might care about the wellbeing of their employees. Or they might have really any other agenda subject to whims of those who control it. The idea that corporations would be purely profit focussed is a recent one. IMO the interesting question is: why are so many corporations so focussed on short-term profit. With the answer seemingly being evolution by natural selection subject to the regulatory environment they find themselves in. Less profit-focussed companies are usually outcompeted.
- f1shy 3y ago
  Legislation. That is what the state is for. To internalise the externalities.
randomdata 3y ago
> we need to find a way to penalize this kind of behavior harshly and quickly. There is only one solution: The population valuing repairable products. After that, problem solved. That will make them the more profitable one, penalizing production of non-repairable products through loss of profitability, and companies will jump at the chance to produce that which is repairable. But so long as we, as a population, don't value repairable products, companies are going to continue to produce what we actually value instead. After all, a company can only stave off bankruptcy by producing what people want. There is no other option. Even if you want to penalize through law, or similar means, democracy requires that the population first value repairable products to usher in such a law, and at that point the company's quest for profitability will have already solved the problem anyway.
- Timshel 3y ago
  Cool story the usual speech of making it the fault of the consumer ... I want a repairable phone with extended support for around 400e can you find me one ? Fairphone are not too bad but look at the price and they are probably doing the best they can. But you might have heard of economy of scale ? If right to repair becomes law then repairable product might stop being niche and so expensive. Edit: but no let's not pass any law and just continue to let society subsidize corporation pollution.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > I want a repairable phone with extended support for around 400e can you find me one ? Does 400e speak to you meaningfully valuing such an item? That's little more than a single meal at a high end restaurant, for a highly complex device that takes many thousands of man hours to create. You can't even buy many non-repairable smartphones for that much. This does not demonstrate you valuing a repairable device at all.
    - Timshel 3y ago
      You might need to interact with a more diverse group of people ... I don't know where you eat but in Paris a high end meal would start along the line of 100e. You can buy a repairable Nokia G21 for 134e at the moment would probably be sufficient for my usage but sadly support is crap :(
lazide 3y ago
Don’t worry, anyone involved would likely rationalize or deny it if any of those consequences occurred.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
At this point, professing the greenness of your products is like mentioning benefit to minorities in a research-grant application: it is simply a step you have to do to play in the market. On one hand, we might excoriate an individual company for being hypocrites, but on the other hand, that makes us open to criticism that we are missing the game-theory implications in a whole world gone mad. I just looked at the website of a camping-equipment brand that extols its care for the environment, but if you read through the lines, you find that the brand is just taking an existing Chinese manufacturing and having its own logo stamped on the goods. Again, companies seem to feel that if you have any web presence, this is the kind of stuff you have to write.
- hirundo 3y ago
  The absence of a shibboleth is a shibboleth identifying an outsider.
izzydata 3y ago
It will stop when we run out of resources to make garbage.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
johnnyanmac 3y ago
> try explaining why you spent years at Apple or Amazon doing everything you could to improve profits at the cost of the future even while ice melted and the ocean currents were clearly slowing to your great grandkids. "well I lived a good life. Good luck, kiddos" and that's the generous assumption if they feel they are even responsible for anything. >Bringing our companies back into alignment with the life support systems of the earth is necessary and a priority, and we need to find a way to penalize this kind of behavior harshly and quickly. They were never in line to begin with. They simply kowtow to the local regulations while trying to make as much money as possible. So of course the answer is to lobby and weaken regulations. Solving it on the business end is one solution, but not the only. We also need to ensure the right supporters are in office and vouching on the politcal side as well.
optymizer 3y ago
The sole point of a business existing is to make a profit. If it doesn't make a profit it dies. A business essentially acts in its own self interest through its employees. Proof of that is that if an employee hurts profits, the business will likely dispose of them. You can try to enact change via a bottom-up approach, where all of the employees decide to introduce a new primary metric, e.g. climate impact, alongside profits, but it's pretty clear that humans are not terribly good at agreeing and acting for the good of humanity (see all the wars happening right now). I think a top-down approach where the government includes 'climate impact' as an existential metric for all businesses would have more success because it wouldn't require all the people in all the businesses to agree, only the elected officials would have to agree. Unfortunately, elected officials are people too, and by definition they're not terribly good at agreeing either. That said, it's a more tractable problem. This is why I think enacting laws to change the purpose of businesses is more realistic, than to appeal to employees. The latter is useful too, but as part of spreading the message to all the people that "it's up to us" to influence the results of elections, so that we elect people who could enact this change from the top down.
- norir 3y ago
  > The sole point of a business existing is to make a profit. From some angles, it seems like the sole point of most businesses is to keep people busy and employed so that they don't actually try to meaningfully change their circumstances.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > The sole point of a business existing is to make a profit. That's not the sole point, but it is important. That said, it doesn't mean we should accept the "as much profit as possible regardless of societal cost" stance a lot of businesses take. A more sustainable, human, and less harmful thing would be to go back to the idea that businesses should make a reasonable profit, not profit at any cost.
  - avmich 3y ago
    Yes, I agree that "profit is the whole purpose of the business" is oversimplification. This point is well illustrated in "Other People's Money", 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102609/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102609/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
picometer 3y ago
I agree, strongly, and am the happy owner of a Framework as my main computer. I’m about to make a somewhat pedantic observation but do not want it to detract from your main point - yes, it IS up to us to push this along. Now for the pedantry. I think the repairability concern is more about owner-user agency & rights, not material efficiency /sustainability. The latter is very important of course, but we should expect it to follow from ownership. This isn’t a disagreement - I think you’re saying the same thing - just a difference in emphasis. Imagine a population of users who, when replacing broken parts, would actually just toss them in the local river rather than properly recycling them; and imagine a corporation who sells unrepairable electronics, and touts “green” and perfectly upcycles every last bit of silicon from returned devices. (Scooping the effiencies for themselves, of course.) On principle, I would still prefer the former scenario of users with the rights to do what they wish with their goods, than the scenario where corps essentially rent out their manufacturing expertise under the guise of selling. Luckily, that’s an abstract thought experiment and not likely to actually occur. But corps WILL try to convince us of their benevolence and sell us the latter scenario. We need to steel against it because, like you are emphasizing, we can’t trust the profit incentives to ultimately align. As a side note, we need non-corp entities (or at least, much smaller businesses) to handle proper electronics recycling - after all, that river-dumping scenario is not great! They exist but it’s not as easy to use them; for instance, unlike paper/glass/etc recycling in most US cities, they typically don’t come to your house to pick things up (at least in the places I’ve lived). Some shops will take this part but not that. The whole ecosystem has a LONG way to go before competing with the gravity well of the big corps. But I don’t have confidence that we can somehow get them aligned with human interests without the emphasis on individual agency and rights. And this is just based on the sustainability issue; right-to-repair is related other ownership concerns, e.g. DRM and data privacy, neither of which are directly related to material sustainability.

intelVISA 3y ago

Why would a corp be anything but x,y,z focused if not for profit?

nicoburns 3y ago
They might care about the stability of the world they depend on. They might care about longer term profits. They might care about the wellbeing of their employees. Or they might have really any other agenda subject to whims of those who control it. The idea that corporations would be purely profit focussed is a recent one. IMO the interesting question is: why are so many corporations so focussed on short-term profit. With the answer seemingly being evolution by natural selection subject to the regulatory environment they find themselves in. Less profit-focussed companies are usually outcompeted.
f1shy 3y ago
Legislation. That is what the state is for. To internalise the externalities.

randomdata 3y ago

> we need to find a way to penalize this kind of behavior harshly and quickly. There is only one solution: The population valuing repairable products. After that, problem solved. That will make them the more profitable one, penalizing production of non-repairable products through loss of profitability, and companies will jump at the chance to produce that which is repairable. But so long as we, as a population, don't value repairable products, companies are going to continue to produce what we actually value instead. After all, a company can only stave off bankruptcy by producing what people want. There is no other option. Even if you want to penalize through law, or similar means, democracy requires that the population first value repairable products to usher in such a law, and at that point the company's quest for profitability will have already solved the problem anyway.

Timshel 3y ago
Cool story the usual speech of making it the fault of the consumer ... I want a repairable phone with extended support for around 400e can you find me one ? Fairphone are not too bad but look at the price and they are probably doing the best they can. But you might have heard of economy of scale ? If right to repair becomes law then repairable product might stop being niche and so expensive. Edit: but no let's not pass any law and just continue to let society subsidize corporation pollution.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > I want a repairable phone with extended support for around 400e can you find me one ? Does 400e speak to you meaningfully valuing such an item? That's little more than a single meal at a high end restaurant, for a highly complex device that takes many thousands of man hours to create. You can't even buy many non-repairable smartphones for that much. This does not demonstrate you valuing a repairable device at all.
  - Timshel 3y ago
    You might need to interact with a more diverse group of people ... I don't know where you eat but in Paris a high end meal would start along the line of 100e. You can buy a repairable Nokia G21 for 134e at the moment would probably be sufficient for my usage but sadly support is crap :(

lazide 3y ago

Don’t worry, anyone involved would likely rationalize or deny it if any of those consequences occurred.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

At this point, professing the greenness of your products is like mentioning benefit to minorities in a research-grant application: it is simply a step you have to do to play in the market. On one hand, we might excoriate an individual company for being hypocrites, but on the other hand, that makes us open to criticism that we are missing the game-theory implications in a whole world gone mad. I just looked at the website of a camping-equipment brand that extols its care for the environment, but if you read through the lines, you find that the brand is just taking an existing Chinese manufacturing and having its own logo stamped on the goods. Again, companies seem to feel that if you have any web presence, this is the kind of stuff you have to write.

hirundo 3y ago
The absence of a shibboleth is a shibboleth identifying an outsider.

izzydata 3y ago

It will stop when we run out of resources to make garbage.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

johnnyanmac 3y ago

> try explaining why you spent years at Apple or Amazon doing everything you could to improve profits at the cost of the future even while ice melted and the ocean currents were clearly slowing to your great grandkids. "well I lived a good life. Good luck, kiddos" and that's the generous assumption if they feel they are even responsible for anything. >Bringing our companies back into alignment with the life support systems of the earth is necessary and a priority, and we need to find a way to penalize this kind of behavior harshly and quickly. They were never in line to begin with. They simply kowtow to the local regulations while trying to make as much money as possible. So of course the answer is to lobby and weaken regulations. Solving it on the business end is one solution, but not the only. We also need to ensure the right supporters are in office and vouching on the politcal side as well.

optymizer 3y ago

The sole point of a business existing is to make a profit. If it doesn't make a profit it dies. A business essentially acts in its own self interest through its employees. Proof of that is that if an employee hurts profits, the business will likely dispose of them. You can try to enact change via a bottom-up approach, where all of the employees decide to introduce a new primary metric, e.g. climate impact, alongside profits, but it's pretty clear that humans are not terribly good at agreeing and acting for the good of humanity (see all the wars happening right now). I think a top-down approach where the government includes 'climate impact' as an existential metric for all businesses would have more success because it wouldn't require all the people in all the businesses to agree, only the elected officials would have to agree. Unfortunately, elected officials are people too, and by definition they're not terribly good at agreeing either. That said, it's a more tractable problem. This is why I think enacting laws to change the purpose of businesses is more realistic, than to appeal to employees. The latter is useful too, but as part of spreading the message to all the people that "it's up to us" to influence the results of elections, so that we elect people who could enact this change from the top down.

norir 3y ago
> The sole point of a business existing is to make a profit. From some angles, it seems like the sole point of most businesses is to keep people busy and employed so that they don't actually try to meaningfully change their circumstances.
JohnFen 3y ago
> The sole point of a business existing is to make a profit. That's not the sole point, but it is important. That said, it doesn't mean we should accept the "as much profit as possible regardless of societal cost" stance a lot of businesses take. A more sustainable, human, and less harmful thing would be to go back to the idea that businesses should make a reasonable profit, not profit at any cost.
- avmich 3y ago
  Yes, I agree that "profit is the whole purpose of the business" is oversimplification. This point is well illustrated in "Other People's Money", 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102609/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102609/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

picometer 3y ago

I agree, strongly, and am the happy owner of a Framework as my main computer. I’m about to make a somewhat pedantic observation but do not want it to detract from your main point - yes, it IS up to us to push this along. Now for the pedantry. I think the repairability concern is more about owner-user agency & rights, not material efficiency /sustainability. The latter is very important of course, but we should expect it to follow from ownership. This isn’t a disagreement - I think you’re saying the same thing - just a difference in emphasis. Imagine a population of users who, when replacing broken parts, would actually just toss them in the local river rather than properly recycling them; and imagine a corporation who sells unrepairable electronics, and touts “green” and perfectly upcycles every last bit of silicon from returned devices. (Scooping the effiencies for themselves, of course.) On principle, I would still prefer the former scenario of users with the rights to do what they wish with their goods, than the scenario where corps essentially rent out their manufacturing expertise under the guise of selling. Luckily, that’s an abstract thought experiment and not likely to actually occur. But corps WILL try to convince us of their benevolence and sell us the latter scenario. We need to steel against it because, like you are emphasizing, we can’t trust the profit incentives to ultimately align. As a side note, we need non-corp entities (or at least, much smaller businesses) to handle proper electronics recycling - after all, that river-dumping scenario is not great! They exist but it’s not as easy to use them; for instance, unlike paper/glass/etc recycling in most US cities, they typically don’t come to your house to pick things up (at least in the places I’ve lived). Some shops will take this part but not that. The whole ecosystem has a LONG way to go before competing with the gravity well of the big corps. But I don’t have confidence that we can somehow get them aligned with human interests without the emphasis on individual agency and rights. And this is just based on the sustainability issue; right-to-repair is related other ownership concerns, e.g. DRM and data privacy, neither of which are directly related to material sustainability.