[lug] Anyone else hate to get rid of old equipment?

[Nate Duehr]

On 5/25/2010 1:41 PM, dio2002 at indra.com wrote:
> i'm not authority on this, but the thing that bothers me is that even if
> your equipment supposedly gets recycled, you have no idea what that
> actually means.  i think there was an investigative report last year about
> a recycling company in denver.  they basically just sold the stuff to
> china where it just pollutes the environment there and winds up in
> landfills or something.  kind of like dumping your problems on someone
> else while trying to provide the domestic illusion that you've done
> something good by recycling your stuff.
>    

One could take this point further and point out that "pollution" is a 
man-defined problem.  As someone said, we're just digging the stuff up 
from underground and scattering it around in landfills where it wasn't 
before.  The equivalent of monkeys flinging poo, really.

When that starts affecting us or things we care about (animals, 
whatever... the definition is fluid and constantly changes), that's when 
we call it "pollution" and collectively start to do something about it.

Putting a giant pile of trash (a.k.a. "stuff" we dug up or made) in the 
middle of one of the world's deserts, for example, may not be as 
"polluting" as putting it in a landfill a few miles from Boulder, CO... 
but it's asthetically unpleasing if it's seen, and it's cost-prohibitive 
to do it.

The great irony boiled down to its simplest form is:  Humans want to 
fling poo, but we don't want to live in poo.  (That statement is either 
super-serious, or funny, depending on if you have a sense of humor or not.)

It all comes back to economics.  And by that I don't mean MONEY.  I mean 
personal goals, and costs vs. benefits.  If us digging up "stuff" and 
making other "stuff" out of it and then tossing it in a big pile near 
our homes causes "secondary effects", then we get all emotional about 
it. No need for that, it's smarter to figure out how to make it 
non-cost-effective to the majority, to do that.

In our society, majority (generally) wins.. and right now a bare 
majority says "don't do that" when you get down to specifics.  When you 
talk in platitudes "Don't litter", everyone agrees.  But within that, 
the devil is in the details.

Episodes in the near-past history like the Love Canal where some people 
were putting things they KNEW would hurt others in an area where people 
lived, is UNETHICAL, and even IMMORAL to almost all of us.  We're in 
agreement.  But, tossing a monitor into a Denver dump might or might not 
be a perceived problem to as wide a group of people... when in reality, 
it all depends on if we understand and have planned for the secondary 
effects or not.

We humans act like we're concerned about the billions of tons of CO we 
dump into the atmosphere, so we study it, and decide that maybe it will 
create this situation called "Global Warming".  We're not even sure 
about that.

But we all know and agree that most of our reasons for dumping CO is 
because we burn things.  We burn things we dig up to heat/light our 
cities, we burn things to move ourselves larger distances than we can 
travel via natural means, we burn things to move mountains 
(explosives!), and sometimes we burn things for fun (fireworks). Since 
the first man figured out how to light a fire, we've been burning 
things.  We're dependent on it right now for survival in most areas of 
the globe.

Logically, the answer is to move further south, where we don't need to 
burn things to stay warm, and if we weren't such babies, we could 
survive the summer heat without too much difficulty...

But we're not willing to do that.  The opportunity costs of living north 
of the 40th parallel isn't (yet) high enough to trigger us to 
walk/drive/run south.

See, It's all economics... and it's that strange version of economics 
that's hardwired into our heads that doesn't follow Maslow's Heirarchy 
of Needs all the time, nor Adam Smith's formulas... more like the stuff 
documented in Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics.  The burgeoning 
science of Behaviorial Economics shows the most potential to change the 
world of any of the sciences today, in my humble opinion.

Why?  Because the other thing we humans LOVE to do is manipulate each 
other to change our pecking order in a very complex society structure.  
"Greenies" are climbing the society "love arc" right now... everyone 
loves an environmentalist.  This once wasn't so.  Someday in the future 
it will fade... it's an arc.  Why?  Because we have such short 
interest-spans.  Every three to five generations, a society's goals 
change significantly throughout history.  In fact, without written 
history, they would change even more.  Traditions would survive, ideals 
and goals would be much weaker.

My general feeling about this is... "Humans make a mess."  We throw shit 
(sorry: "stuff") around like monkeys in a cage, pretty much.  (Sorry for 
the language, but it's the best way to describe it.)

If you don't like the humans who throw certain kinds of "stuff" in 
certain places, you have to give them a reason not to do so.  That 
reason has to be a stronger benefit to them, than the reason they threw 
it there in the first place.

In a PURELY economic sense... I didn't NEED a single computer I've ever 
owned.  But without the first one, and subsequent ones, I wouldn't be 
working on them for a living.  Ecologically, *if* you believe the 
in-vogue environmentalists, computers are an utter disaster.  Not just 
the disposal of them, but imagine how much less "stuff" would have been 
dug up and burnt if the electrical requirements of every computer ever 
built was suddenly gone, and computers instantly never existed, overnight.

Take that out to the extreme: Just by having the computers turned on 
discussing this online, we've created a mini-ecologic disaster.  We 
could pick up the phone.  Same problem.  If we met in person, certainly 
a few of us would want to go to a restaurant where they burn stuff, and 
cook other animals, plants, and other things we've found to be tasty to 
us. Maybe drink a beer grown with nitrogen-enriched man-made chemicals.  
(Seen ads for "organic beer" much, yet?  Or is beer too far over the 
mental line still to take that marketing tactic/spin?  You decide.  I 
just ask the questions to provoke thought!)

Ecology and Pollution are almost to the point of religious belief or 
philosophy on the large scale... and we all know that in philosophy you 
must think, but there is no one answer for all.  On the individual item 
of "stuff" scale, it's personal economics.  "Should I throw this away?"

Fun stuff to talk/think about.

If you want to prove it's reached "religious fervor" stage, just say...

"I have twenty computers and I'm throwing them out without recycling them."

Then watch the witch-burning and the fake trials begin, to make those 
"damning" the others to penalties feel better, even though they make 
just as big a mess with other "stuff" in their own lives.

In the end, if the Chinese are willing to take the junk, it's their 
business... not ours.  They'll have the secondary-effects and have to 
deal with them in their own way.  The fact that they have a group of 
unethical, immoral folks running the place, is also a problem they'll 
have to figure out on their own.  Perhaps the Chinese government's 
treatment of pollution and waste will spark their next revolution?

Awesome fun, isn't it... being human? ;-)

Here's a controversial thought: "You can probably work your butt off to 
not throw away that monitor, and something else you threw away will be 
what really comes back to bite you in the ass, sooner than you think."

The concept of Deja Fu comes to mind: "Somewhere, somehow, I've been 
kicked in the head like this before!"

My other favorite phrase that tries to get the point across that we're 
just a mess, as a species: "Even vegan monks who refuse to consume 
consumer "goods" usually have food to eat, and indoor plumbing.  The 
poop goes somewhere."

Nate