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What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”. It’s beautiful, I love it.
by tombert 10mo ago
What a world we live in; we have gotten to a point where computers are so small and cheap that they can literally be “disposable”.
It’s beautiful, I love it.
- rob74 10mo agoFor my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...
- adrianN 10mo agoTo make matters worse, recycling is a scam (with a small handful of exceptions).
- stmL 10mo agoCan you elaborate on that? Edit: I'm actually curious l, i don't know how recycling supposed to work for electronics and how it can be a scam.
- mngnt 10mo agoThis youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
- pbhjpbhj 10mo agoTax CEOs of vape companies the percentage of their vapes that their company doesn't physically retrieve from customers to be recycled ...
- DaSHacka 10mo agoA completely ridiculous and nonsensical proposal I can only assume was said in jest.
- Dylan16807 10mo agoIt sounds like a description of most of a deposit system to me, and deposit systems are good at encouraging recycling.
- tstrimple 10mo agoSee "core charges" for many automotive parts to incentivize the return of waste for refurbishing at the higher end and bottle deposits for cans/bottles at the lower end. It's weird how things so common in one part of our society can seem so foreign in others.
- GuinansEyebrows 10mo agoHey, if your entire business plan is to produce actual garbage, maybe you should be held responsible for making sure that garbage has a pathway to proper disposal.
- DaSHacka 9mo agoThe company, sure, but selecting a fall guy to deal with arbitrary expenses will not help get anything done for the environment.
- pbhjpbhj 10mo agoYes, a jest. But essentially you have to directly impact the take home pay off CEOs as that appears to be the only thing they will change their behaviour for.
- sofixa 10mo agowildly country dependent, e.g. check the stats for the EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20251022-1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
- rjh29 10mo agoVaries widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"
- vasco 10mo agoIt varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle.
- nandomrumber 10mo ago> because it gets burned I wouldn’t really call that recycling.
- johannes1234321 10mo agoAs long as the heat is used for something (electricity, building heating etc.) there is at least some reuse of parts of it. And if exhaust ist filtered pollution is also limited. Better than just putting it on a garbage dump and forgetting about it. But yes, not proper recycling.
- eru 10mo agoWell, it depends a lot on material. Metals, especially aluminum, get widely recycled because it actually makes financial sense. Plastics, well, you are probably better off burning them for electricity.
- chpatrick 10mo agoIn Hungary it gets sorted out locally. We also recently implemented a bottle return system that (although it's annoying) produces clean stacks of PET, aluminium and glass, all of which are recyclable.
- mikkupikku 10mo ago
- setopt 10mo agoDepends, it’s hard to make a blanket statement like that. Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration is mostly a better solution than recycling (which produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy contaminants in the few cases that it’s not actually a scam).
- csomar 10mo ago> As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? You need to offer an incentive (ie: discount on new vape if you recycle) and then, from my experience, most people will recycle.
- kotaKat 10mo agoI concur on this one. Here in NY as a cannabis user, one of the brands available that offers vapes (Fernway) offers a recycling program at dispensaries. I get 10% back off my next vape/cart if I return the old one to the recycling dropbox. My dispensary also keeps how many I've returned on file if I return extras, so I keep a 'balance' of disposables returned for the discounts.
- TeMPOraL 10mo agoAnd you also need to refrain from breaking this scheme entirely, by introducing silly restrictions like only exchanging for in-store vouchers instead of cash, or demanding same-store receipt for original purchase (or equivalent) - like it happened in some places (e.g. my country, Poland) to glass and aluminum recycling. Such restrictions seem to purposefully target poor people, and I have rather strong ethical objections to them (something about making a problem invisible and hoping it'll go away - or starve out), but the effect goes beyond that. Getting $20 back on a $200 product would be a different story, but here, it's more like $2 on $20, or $0.2 on $2; most people aren't going to bother with that (and understandably so: it's not worth the logistics overhead). So at best, all this does is redirect money stream from poor people to recycling companies. More typically, it just makes people recycle less.
- eru 10mo agoWhy recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch? (The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics. Especially considering the extra logistics and quality degradation that recycling entails. Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.)
- pbhjpbhj 10mo agoIs that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view? The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare. Do you need it spelling out more clearly?
- eru 10mo agoWe are sitting on 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg ball of matter. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the centre of the solar system that's providing us with energy.
- slow_typist 10mo agoSome resources are still scarce. And a lot of those 6E24 kg is iron and nickel we can never get to. Another big fraction is basically molten stone. And we really should stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere. Also, if you go for measures like mass processed, the weight of microchips, pcbs, parts is only a tiny fraction of what has to be processed and build in the supply chain. Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly.
- eru 10mo ago> Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly. My argument is that as long as we are still burning oil and gas, we might as well burn old plastic instead of new oil and gas. If/when we stop burning oil and gas, then we can think more seriously about recycling plastic.
- amelius 10mo agoLet's start by pricing in the negative externalities.
- pixl97 10mo ago>they could use a non-rechargeable battery The problem here is the item lasts 'long enough' that they can't, a single battery, unless it were very large would drain charge first. But that brings in the second issue of the device not being refillable, which may be the bigger sin.
- smj-edison 10mo agoIt reminds me of how Sussman talked about someday we'd have computers so small and cheap that we'd mix dozens in our concrete and be put throughout our space.
- progbits 10mo agoA Deepness in the Sky by Vinge has this as a minor plot point.
- slow_typist 10mo agoRussia started with mixing diodes into concrete a while ago- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41933979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41933979
- Mikhail_K 10mo ago> It’s beautiful, I love it. When computers become disposable, their programmers soon become disposable as well. Maybe, you shouldn't love it.
- Dylan16807 10mo agoThat doesn't make sense.
- sejje 10mo agoLife lessons from anime and the WordPorn meme account.
- roadside_picnic 10mo ago> It’s beautiful Especially since both the waste created in the process of making the device and the e-waste created with it's disposal are somebody else's problem!