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0 pointsan_opabinia4y ago0 comments

> last multiples of the time I would get out of wired earphones, which always die in a few months from work-hardening the copper wires until they break

Hmm...

> It's just the Discourse in action... I'm fairly confident that for minutes of pleasure / embodied energy, AirPods score higher than almost anything else I own, certainly among things with a battery and chip

It's interesting to reduce environmentalism to "joy per unit size * time." To its credit, if you do the accounting right, a lot of environmentally really bad things, like gasoline and meat, have very poor joy per (size time), while being a tourist in a conserved rainforest has very high joy per size time.

But it's still flawed. Like Bitcoin has high joy per unit size and time, it turns cheaper electricity into more money you can spend on jetskis. No intellectually honest person claims that is environmentally friendly. You've chosen a framework that's idiosyncratically very friendly to electronics and things nerds are into, that I'm not sure would even make sense to people in almost any time prior to 1970. They by and large lived without the joys of electronics and did nothing to address the environmental disaster they're dying too soon to experience. Surely you see the same thing happening now, and right to repair is just one of many fronts of forward-thinking people trying to right those wrongs.

I'm not advocating for "end to end emissions" as the framework either, because what you're saying people hate on Apple for is almost always true about Tesla. People complaining about electric cars having higher emissions are both wrong and saying that stuff in bad faith.

But to go on social media and complain about the "Discourse" you are participating in is definitely intellectually dishonest. AirPods are shitty in their own unique way, and I'm not sure if any intellectual is seriously advocating, in their raw quoted form as opposed to a headline, that the way that they are shitty is exclusively your reductive perspective on "environmentally friendly."

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samatman4y ago

You misread me, my case was joy * time / embodied energy.

How else should we justify the use of energy except through such means? Subjectively I mean, I wouldn't suggest actually quantifying it.

I don't burn energy in the winter because I like to spend money, I do it because there's an interior temperature below which I'm miserable. Once I've achieved that homeostasis, the only think left to me is to do it with as little energy as possible.

> AirPods are shitty in their own unique way

That's just like, your opinion, man.

Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, I will never reply to you again.

an_opabiniaOP4y ago

I own AirPods, I like them, but it sucks that they die when their battery dies, and they have to be thrown away for pretty much no good reason - just because that's how Apple designed it, and it could have many design priorities, and one of those priorities is to not throw nice shit away after two years.

In the spirit of advancing curiosity, it was interesting to just see, is it possible to reduce environmentalism to something like "joy * time / embodied energy"? Bitcoin is mined because a bitcoin is worth more than the electricity used to mine it, so if your joy * time is "making money quickly" - which it is for a lot of people! - it seems really attractive to mine bitcoin but it isn't environmentally friendly.

alisonkisk4y ago

The point is that the environmental focus on airpods is irrational. look at everything in your trash can this week.

If you are upset that they are too expensive, don't buy them. The price isn't going to waste; it has an enormous profit margin over the BoM. (a lot, perhaps most, of the true cost is fixed overhead, so buying more airpods makes them more efficient!)

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