- 81 Posts
- 103 Comments
0·6 days agoAlso when people would dig through the piles they would often throw shit everywhere
The problem is that they are in piles to begin with. I have climbed on piles of appliance waste stacked ~5 meters high. These are not neat stacks but randomly dropped/tossed things which roll when you step on them. I fell once and got bruised but was lucky I did not get impaled. I’ve been kicked out of junk yards ½ dozen times.
The problem with the chain of disposal is the public tosses something out and the privately-operated metal recovery business immediately claims it as their property to be cashed in for its melt value. They immediately treat the incoming appliances as garbage. A middle step is missing. The middle step should not involve a massive pile of junk that is dangerous to climb. Large appliances should all be on the ground with space around them to inspect. The metal recovery business should not have a claim on the property before this middle step.
Seems like a good approach for the scale. It’s quite thin but I’ll see if I can add a mechanical switch.
i might try this for the calipers. But the battery cover for the scale uses a screw… so i might opt to hack that to use external power of some kind.
I don’t quite follow the connection between retailer size and planned obsolescence. Do you have a Cliff’s Notes? Youtube has become a shitshow since Google now treats Invidious and Tor with hostility. We can no longer consider YT videos to be openly reachable. I am essentially blocked from YT.
(edit) I was able to find a rarely working invidious instance and fetch it. will watch it later.
Concur with all of that. I’m not vegan yet but took these easy first steps:
- meat 1-2 times per week, instead of daily. The frequency is dropping from one year to the next.
- refuse to pay full price for meat. Wait until the meat is about to expire and buy it after the grocer is forced to mark it down (30—50% off). This helps quite a bit because you dramatically cut down the profits that drive the meat industry (your portion of those profits). Since beef is the top problem, I insist on a near-expiry markdown of 50% before I will buy it.
Better than vegan: steal the meat. Vegans are just neutral. They neither contribute nor cause detriment to animal agriculture. If you shoplift the meat, you cost them money and make the business case even less sustainable than vegans.
Another option: hunt wild game and eat that in place of farmed meat.
Oki (formerly Okidata) has always had the ethical higher ground, above Brother, AFAICT. Brother does partake in ink waste shenanigans with their inkjets. IIRC, the only negative with Oki is they write that non-Oki toner voids the warranty – but don’t they all?
⚠ But note that you cannot be in the US. Oki pulled out of the US marketplace.
1·2 months agoThis is click baity. Have a look at some of the laws:
Things like wheelchairs, farm equipment, and cars. Very narrow.
I’m not the least bit impressed and hope these examples are not used as an excuse to encumber the badly needed progress to fix things that matter apart from wheelchairs and veg. farm equipment.
IMO, Trump is more of a right to repair motivator because all the trade wars will make consumerism less attractive and thus inspire repair.
I mean, it would be an accident on Trump’s part and he will want to intervene to thwart r2r. But consider as well that the GOP is theoretically all about shifting power to the states and reducing federal power. This will be a source of cognitive dissonance for the retarded tyrant.
The article has some interesting info but there are some oversights:
- Unburnt natural gas is methane gas, which is over 25× more impactful as a greenhouse gas than CO₂. And you cannot burn natural gas without unburnt gas escaping – not just at ignition but the whole infrastructure leaks unavoidably. So some folks are saying natural gas is more environmentally dentrimental than coal. The gas is also toxic and kills brain cells. Nasty stuff.
- Follow the money. If you consume natural gas, you likely pay for it using banking services. Some regions in Europe have secretly/silently removed the option to pay for gas using cash. Banks are terrible for climate (ref: “Banking on Climate Chaos” annual reports). Even if you can pay with cash, the gas companies themselves finance republican politicians in the US. Republicans are terrible for the environment.
Considering the price of a Fairphone you have a right to be upset. I suppose the only thing going for your situation is maybe the parts are worth something since they can be used to easily fix other Fairphones.
Political ads are not designed for targetting unpersuadables. Over the very long term propaganda that over and over blames undocumented people for problems starts to take a toll which could pull someone out of the unpersuadable demographic. But to a great extent they influence pursuadable voters in swing regions.
You say you would not switch to voting for Trump, and yet the sole reason Trump took power in 2016 was precisely due to advertising. Read about Cambridge Analytica and Peter Thiel. If Peter Thiel had not introduced Cambridge Analytica to the Trump campaign and bought Facebook data, Trump would not have taken power in 2016. THAT is how important advertising is. C/A master-minded indentifying the most important pursuadables, did a deep analysis of exactly what issues would be of interest to those individuals, and targeted them surreptitiously.
I strongly recommend you watch the PBS series “Hacking your Mind”. This episode in particular:
I am just some random stranger on the internet. That is not a credible source to reference particularly if I am the same person giving the citation.
I agree that breaking them up would do some good, but in the case at hand you would just have a longer list of companies working together to defeat r2r.
If you could break them into very small pieces (e.g. split Google’s Android line into 6 different companies instead of 2), then you might see some competing for repairability against Fairphone. But still maybe a long shot. I walk into a phone shop and have 10s of different brands and not a single one of them has tried to go after the built-for-long-life market. Fairphone is alone on that AFAICT.
I think the only way out of this is to ban the environmentally detrimental practices of burying batteries in glue and booby trapping toothbrushes to self-destruct when opened. Because there will always be enough zombie consumer masses willing to buy that shit.
Well to be more accurate, boycotting is the practice of fighting harmful use of money by witholding money. Of course that stands to reason. If your money spent in a certain way is doing harm, you can prevent the harm your money does by not putting it on the harmful path.
I’m not sure what specifically you mean by getting people to reason better (whether you are talking about voting w/money or voting on the ballot in that context). Of course ads work. Political campaigns have started leveraging the same manipulation by ads that works to get people to buy goods and services.
What we certainly know does /not/ work is people thinking they are immune to ads. Everyone thinks that, and marketers prove them wrong over and over again. Advertising is specifically designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the human mind. You have no hope of creating an advertizing-immune population. It would be an ocean-boiling type of endeavor.
The most stark demonstration of money buying politicians seems to be with AIPAC. It happens often enough that a US politician who goes against Israel gets ousted that there’s even verb for it: AIPACed. AIPAC blows a fortune on the campaign of whoever runs against anyone who opposes Israel in any way – and they apparently get their way every time.
- https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/03/aipac-israel-spending-democratic-primaries-00144552
- https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/wesley-bell-backed-by-aipac-defeats-squad-member-cori-bush-in-st-louis-distrct-primary
Also interesting to note that most American Jews are liberal democrats who oppose AIPAC. But what can you do against a massive war chest like that?
Thanks for mentioning Calyx OS… Added it here:
but your conclusion doesn’t match your title.
The title is the thesis (thus conclusion). Are you saying the raw figures contradict that? I believe boycotting Google and MS are a pathway to a better environment, even if the footprint is bigger in the short-term. We really don’t have accurate figures to go off of because no one has researched the MS / Google specific footprint per email (AFAIK).
until we switch back to email.
The transition for activists goes like this: MS email (2023) → paper mail (2024) → non-MS email (future)
The only way physical mail could be environmentally-preferable is if we lived in a fantasy world where all mail is local and the mailman rides a bike. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
In my city it is the fantasy you describe. Postal workers are on foot or bicycle for the most part. It’s likely uncommon from a worldwide standpoint but I’m talking about a campaign anyway, not necessarily a permanent transition.
You’re assuming the paper option is the end game, as opposed to a driver for better email.
An “email protest” will not work because they do not care about the individual user.
You don’t really know to what extent the office worker who receives the letter cares. Office workers are largely helpless to make changes from the inside on their own initiative, but if the will is there and they get a complaint from the outside, then the insider who cares is happy to amplify the complaint using the outside complaint as their excuse so that it does not appear to be from them. Your complaint empowers insider pawns to act. Even if the insider pawn does not care about the environment, they still hate having to deal with paper letters (scanning and filing, then stuffing envelopes and applying postage). Then the org has to buy return postage. They hate it to the point that they look for ways to pass costs back onto the consumer. It’s enough disturbance to compel questions about why the electronic system is not working. I will state right in my letters “could not get past your CAPTCHA” or “I don’t do CAPTCHAs”. (btw, most CAPTCHAs are graphical and have a higher GHG footprint than a letter)
Everything you do results in a signal. When you vote in an election, you send a signal that the voting system is working. When you send an email, you signal that email is working and that you are onboard with it. In my case as an admin of my own mail server, I am actually blocked from MS and Google mail servers. So I add that to the msg “could not email you because your server blocked me likely due to an overly aggressive anti-spam policy”. (Of course tech folks know anti-spam is the excuse that ppl just accept without question… it’s really about the bottom line of MS reducing the cost of spam mitigation using sloppy techniques that are high in collateral damage because it has the side-effect of forcing more people onto the platforms of tech giants which effectively grows the monopoly).
For me email to MS and Google users is trivially wholly the wrong answer as climate is not my sole issue. Feeding my oppressors (surveillance advertisers) is a hard NO anyway. Perhaps my stance is a hard-sell to folks who narrowly care about the environment but not privacy, consumer rights, tech rights, etc. So I am curious what people think strictly from the environmental case that I’ve made.
You said it yourself that most companies use these services so unless you can convince thousands of IT admins to pull the plug, the only impact will be a slight increase in emissions from paper mail.
Dropping off a paper letter is like a ballot. You are voting against whatever shitty digital system they are attempting. It’s important to support analog systems for at least as long as the digital systems are in a shitty state. So it’s not just a vote against crappy tech but simultaneously a vote that says “we need to keep analog mechanisms around”. But unlike voting, you need not have a majority. You just need to get attention, which could happen with a well written letter amid a few other letters perhaps w/out reason and the right receiving staff. If the recipient does not give a shit, then indeed it takes enough paper letters to impact the bottom line before they start asking questions, assuming they care about the bottom line.
Sure, but what about the recipient? You overlooked ¶2. It’s not your choice what the other person uses. Of course if the other person has chosen well, and you have also chosen well, then email is the right answer in that very rare case.
I do an MX lookup every time I need to reach an agency or company. My script output looks like this:
$ lookup someone_i_need_reach@govagency.tld (fail) no PGP key found in public key servers! (fail) E-mail content is shared with 'Microsoft Corporation', a PRISM company! Output from dig: 10 govagency-tld.mail.protection.outlook.com.I think we are in the 95% territory for their provider being Google or MS (usually MS; Google is more common for individuals). The vanity addresses are deceiving.
That reminds me of another possible action. I sometimes provide an onion email address and/or an XMPP address with my correspondence. MS and Google cannot handle onion email addresses or XMPP, so this is a way to give recipients a digital option while preventing MS and Google as MitMs. If they are driven enough to use the email, they will be forced to use a better provider.
The old laptop is the same one I use for all computing. So using an SBC would just add to the energy consumption.
But an SBC could be interesting anyway because there could be moments when I would want a phone to connect without the laptop dependency. So I would be interested in hearing how it works. Does the SBC also charge the phone over USB? Does the reverse tethering software exist that can run on an SBC? It would be cool to have this configuration:
phone → USB → SBC → ethernet → router…
Especially cool if the SBC could run Tor and proxy all traffic over Tor (though I suppose that job would best be served by the router).
Only certain phones. I tried several different hacks out in the wild for my version and they failed. It’s also an off-brand phone that gets no notice by any of the alternate OS projects so flashing is not an option either.
What exactly are you referring to? The stock AOS already supports mock locations. And I’ve used it. But not many apps are designed to make use of the mock location. I vaguely recall coming across an app that hacked the official GPS API to use the mock location in order to fool apps that are naive about mock locations, but of course that bit only works on rooted phones.
It’s a shit show all around. But in any case since not all phones are rootable, apps need to be written to specifically read the mock location feed as a GPS alternative.
I heard of
microgbefore; looked into it, and went no further. I don’t recall what the problem was, but I vaguely recall that it still requires some kind of ties to Google.(edit) MicroG is proposed as an alternative to playstore. I used to use Raccoon, a desktop app to fetch playstore junk. It still required a Google login to use Google’s API. The circumvention was to use a shared account. I imagine that’s also how microg must work. But I eventually decided Playstore garbage does not belong on my phone anyway. I will only use apps I can obtain outside of playstore.
If there is some way of getting that info using an unrooted phone that has been Google-neutered to the full unrooted extent, I would be interested. I could not remove most of the Google infra but I could disable it. I had it in my notes to check out Unified Network Location Provider and forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder.
My notes also mention this app, which only works on recent phones (not mine):
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.wigle.wigleandroid/
Not sure if that was the barrier that stopped me looking further.
In any case, there is still a role for old TomToms to play here. Using cell towers and wifi APs requires your navigation phone to have those radios powered on, which need energy.