We live in a system where costs are only realized at the manufacture of a product and not at its disposal. The inevitable outcome is cheap production wins, leading to throwaway societies, and ignoring the cost of disposal, which is also an important, even critical cost of associated with the product. Society is left to foot the bill, while the manufacturers prance away without having to cover the costs of the problems they created.

The solution is simple - if a company manufactures and sells a product, then that company should be responsible for its disposal as well. This will encourage longer lasting products and reduced environmental damage as well. Plastics are not as cheap as they seem when you factor in the full lifecycle of the costs associated with them.

It would be difficult to implement in practice, but pales in comparison to the massive damage we’re doing to the environment.

If you go back a few decades, you would see how companies would produce technological innovations with the mindset of, “If we design the best, most useful device possible, customers will come to us and buy our product”.

Today, that has flipped into a mindset of, “We will create this technology, force users into adoption, and exploit them as hard as possible once we have them under our control.”

The technology has become a means to control users, not to enable them.

At least it’s good to see that people are catching on though.

I wholeheartedly agree, especially as someone with close friends and living in Bengal. I don’t even know how hot it gets there these days, but there’s a (very regrettably) good chance some of them may perish due to the heat.

But with that said, my concern is that individual action, or even collective actions by governments, on a planet with 8 billion people on it, simply isn’t enough in the grand scale of things. I believe that we have made enough technological advances to withstand an oil crisis, but what we need these days is a forcing event to push governments to adopt them and individuals to accept the transition. I am… cautiously hopeful that this could be that forcing moment.

And by the way, thanks for sharing those verses. I understand very little German, but even I can appreciate how beautiful those lines are.

Any chance that the American far right might have accidentally solved the global warming problem?

As a bit of an aside, I learned recently why Mozilla has the weird Corporate/Foundation structure that it does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47701441

Basically the IRS is highly skeptical of the idea that free software development fits the legal definition of a 501©(3), and tends to reject such applications [1][2]. That is why Mozilla Foundation cannot use donations for Firefox development, and instead uses them for activism.

Someone claiming to be the CEO of one of these foundations appears to confirm it. Just thought people might be interested to know since this comes up in pretty much every thread about Mozilla.

It has been obvious for far too long that ICEs will go extinct and be replaced by EVs.

The people who have been holding out have no excuses at this point. They should have started the transition a long time ago.