I use Ubuntu Desktop as my primary machine and find it very stable. I use it primarily for development with WebStorm, Atom, VirtualBox, Chromium, Node, and Bash. I rarely play games on it, and my taste in games is not fancy. I handle mail, videos, and writing chores in Chrome and Firefox. I listen to music via Spotify. I use the video card built into my motherboard. The most demanding thing I do with it is record videos that capture what I do on the screen.
Perhaps I am not a typical user, but nonetheless, I rarely have trouble with Linux. Everything just works.
To my mind, that is a significant amount of waste, and definitely worth chasing.
* Durable Plastics: 72.9 lbs
* Nodurable Plastics: 28 lbs
* Plastic Bottles and Jars: 17.7
There is more, but this gives a sense of the statistics they quote on their site. These do not seem unreasonable to me, and they suggest that recycling plastics would save a refrigerator or two in weight per household per year, depending a bit on the size of the household.
I take your point: the trashed refrigerator may be a heavier environmental cost than the plastic bags.
It is best if we both recycle and fix the refrigerator. But doing either is better than doing nothing. In other words, arguing that one good is more effective than another good doesn't mean that it isn't admirable to do only the smaller good.
Many of us up here on Hacker News are good at fixing things. But some of us might be less skilled in other areas, such as organizing political campaigns or working in the medical field. It's easy to criticize someone for not doing something we find easy, but it is harder to see how they might be skilled in areas where we struggle.
>It is best if we both recycle and fix the refrigerator.
It might just be marginally better.
If "fixing the refrigerator" (and other such items in our lives, cars, etc) yields 100 e (e = a made-up token measure of environmental benefit) and not using plastic bags for a decade yields 1 e, then it's almost irrelevant.
I think abstractly in these terms too, probably too much so. Whenever my wife or I purchase something or throw it away, I ask myself how much we just debited from the earth. I wonder how one would actually go about defining this measure?
One thing is that companies don't help at all at this -- and they wont unless they are forced to (the same way companies were forced to add calorie and nutrition breakdowns).
In most places I’ve lived in the US it’s takes a lot of work to get an old appliance to a landfill and out of the hands of someone who would repair or recycle it. Somebody buying a $2000 fridge probably had the old one taken away and somebody involved in that process would repair and resell it.
I think the concern is that I might get a significant warm fuzzy feeling from my actions that is disproportionate to the significance of my actual impact on the environment. Presumably (hopefully) my goal is to actually have a positive impact on the environment rather than just feel good by reusing a few plastic bags per month.
I have modest skills as a developer. I was trying to convert an old static web site into something more interactive. Without really thinking it through, I started building a SPA. I got stuck on the SEO part. I found it innately complex, but the real trouble came from trying to bring together the disparate sections of the old static site while preserving and abetting SEO.
One day I just ditched the SPA and rebuilt the whole architecture with NodeJs and Express. I was done in a few days. It could have gone even faster, but the original static site was really a mess with years of accumulated bad decisions embedded in it.
I know this is just one data point and not really proof of anything. Nevertheless, the linked article made a lot of sense to me. Most of the bulleted points resonated with me, but none more than the SEO issue. There are solutions to the SEO issue, but I personally did not find them easy to implement. If I were part of a big professional team, and we really needed a SPA, I would have called this one differently, but I was working on my own, and I didn't really have the sense at first to see that I didn't need a SPA to achieve my goals. I was perhaps a bit too susceptible to the hype without enough experience to really understand the issues involved.
Thanks. This does look interesting. It's hard to keep up with all the frameworks, but this does look like something worth investing some time in. I'll check it out.
As a FE engineer, SEO is the one area of SPAs that does feel like the wheel is being reinvented to accommodate its existence. It's unfortunate, there are solutions, but it's a little annoying to deal with.
I wanted to change my habits because I thought it was the right thing to do. So we put solar on the roof and bought a cheap used electric car (a Leaf). My goal was to do the right thing, but the result has been unforeseen benefits.
The solar power more or less makes us net neutral, even when factoring in the electricity for the car.
In short:
- The solar power will pay for itself in less than five years.
- We don't have an electric bill to speak of. (There is an eight dollar a month charge for just being hooked up to the grid.)
- We pay very little to run the Leaf. (We pay nothing when we charge at home, but sometimes we charge on the road.)
I'm surprised by this outcome. I started out trying to do the right thing but ended up doing something that benefited me financially.
If I read you right, beyond the environmental reasons and beyond the financial results, you sound happier than expected at acting on your values.
I think people don't realize the happiness and emotional reward that comes with acting on your values in the face of resistance.
That's why my podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast focuses on leadership first. The joy, fun, meaning, value, purpose, and community parts of acting on your values are what make it fun. I'm in it because my food is more delicious, though it's cheaper too.
Crossing the finish line of a marathon is similar. It costs me money and causes me pain, but it's one of the best things I've ever done. People can live life for comfort and convenience, but for me the best things come from activity.
We eat a lot of turmeric. If you go to an Indian grocery store, of which there are plenty in the Seattle area, you can buy it in bulk very cheaply. We are vegetarians, so we put it in lots of veggie based dishes, especially stir fries. Frankly, I'm not much of a cook, and adding turmeric and pepper to my meals has led me to experiment with lots of spices, and generally improve the taste of the food I eat. Yes, there have been low points, but overall, it works for us.
We cook in a Kirkland Cookware set which I believe is stainless steel. It is still the same color it was when we bought it. Our blender, on the other hand, is now a depressing yellowish green. But it works the same regardless of its color.
I think the gift that some upper-middle-class kids get that others don't always get is a belief in their ability to succeed. You also need a strong work ethic, but I'm not sure there is such a thing as a work ethic if a person has no faith in their ability to succeed.
Perhaps it looks a bit like this:
- Some people you can't keep down no matter what you do. These people do things like work full time, go to school in the evenings, and graduate from college in four years.
- Some people will succeed if given the opportunity to succeed. That is, if you give them a scholarship or financial aid or if their parents pay for their education.
- Some people will succeed if you give them a big push. Take them to the financial aid office and help them fill out the form, ply them with encouraging words when they want to give up at midterms or finals, etc.
- Some people won't succeed no matter what you do. Usually, because they have so little faith in themselves that they give up even when success is all but guaranteed.
So yes, government programs are needed to get enough citizens across the finish line. But I don't think this is really about class, I think it is about motivating people -- helping them learn to believe in themselves.
Don't tell me that I just needed to believe in myself more.
My belief in my ability to succeed was briefly shattered by my dad's employment situation. He was a well qualified engineer laid off from manufacturing. That made us struggle.
I was always thinking about money and feeling the need to optimize for $2 meals instead of $4 meals, and wondering if my car would hold in long enough to be able to get me to school in a week. These are things that only your first, most motivated, category of people will overcome.
I didn't overcome these obstacles. I temporarily dropped out. Don't tell me that I just needed to believe in myself more.
My story only has a happy ending because state schools are cheap and engineering internships are paid.
I do believe that belief or trust is a necessary but inadequate precondition to success. Believing in yourself is not enough to help you succeed, but not believing in yourself is enough to help you not succeed.
As a society, we do a very poor job giving people that trust or belief.
> As a society, we do a very poor job giving people that trust or belief.
So, do you address that with pep talks, proselytizing about "meritocracy", and "tough love"; or by actually addressing economic insecurity through safety nets that allow people to make a mistake or two without crashing and burning?
I think it's rational for people to not have trust or belief given our society as it is. So I think we should address the root causes of economic insecurity structurally rather than cheerleading people who have no reason to feel secure.
Empty cheerleading gives us no-doc jumbo loans at sub-prime rates... until the music stops and bad debts are revealed as the bad debts they are.
"These people do things like work full time, go to school in the evenings, and graduate from college in four years."
That's not a thing anymore. Working full time at the wages you can earn without a college degree, won't pay for college tuition, especially not in four years.
The biggest way to help inequality would be to radically bring down the cost of a college education. Not loans, which just place lower and middle income families in even greater financial risk. A fully funded public university system with low tuition, like many states used to have not too long ago.
Those who understand Climate Change and love science should not cede the ground to those who disagree with them without a fight.
Most people don't understand science at the same level as many of the participants in HN. They are not bad people, and they are not necessarily ignorant people. But they don't base their decision-making process on scientific principles. Someone needs to reach out to these people and help them understand the world we live in.
Ten minutes on Fox News and similar sites should convince anyone that Climate Change deniers understand how to influence people and do all they can to advocate for those who profit from policies that harm our world. We have to use the available tools to counter their arguments.
You’re denying the people of their right to be treated as an intellectual equal.
If they don’t understand it is their loss. You can bet against them in the capitalist system. Sell them houses near coastlines. If they’re truly ignorant and you are in fact backed by science and facts, then you can profit off of them.
But if you can justify doing this for people you consider not worthy of the facts because they probably can’t understand it, then you can justify it with anyone.
This is the same rationale for why the FBI or law enforcement want more power. People don’t understand that thy are the GOOD guys and they won’t abuse their power.
If the good guys—the people backed by science in this case—lose their accountability to actual science by being good at propoganda and manipulation, why even bother with science? They’ll become bad guys soon enough when they finally realize the facts never mattered.
When propoganda is spewed from both sides the only way to tell is to have facts based on reality that people can independently verify. That’s the whole point of backed by science. If you deny people the option to independently verify then you deny them the ability to find out who’s right and who’s wrong. At that point are you any different from the bad guys?
One of the things I like about open source is its fecundity. When proprietary software ruled, we went to two or three companies to get most of our tools and libraries. Some were very good, some were terrible. We often had to wait years for features and bug fixes. Some key pieces seemed to never go away even though no one liked them. For instance, IE6.
In the open source world, bug fixes often come much more quickly. If fixes don't appear, we at least have the source and can try to fix it -- though sometimes that's a high bar.
If there is an obvious need for a tool or library, someone implements it and throws it up on GitHub. Sometimes the implementation is great, sometimes it is little more than a starting point for our own solutions. But at least we have the source to act as a starting point.
Quality is important, and open source often encourages good quality, but as the writer points out it does not always do so. Sometimes it acts more like a neural net AI algorithm that keeps failing and failing until one day it succeeds.
What open source does encourage is a rapid iteration as developers all over the world look for solutions to known problems. It's a messy solution, but it works surprisingly well. It also helps spread knowledge of how what the nuts and bolts of good software looks like.
Perhaps I am not a typical user, but nonetheless, I rarely have trouble with Linux. Everything just works.