I saw this headline over on slashdot just now and couldn’t help but laugh. Following Apple’s withdrawal from an environmental group, the city of San Fransisco – pretty much in Apple’s back yard, is going to stop buying Macs because of it. I imagine they will have to not buy iPads or iPhones too (assuming they were buying any to begin with) since they are just as integrated as the latest Mac laptops.
Apparently the tightly integrated devices are too difficult to recycle to be compliant so rather than make the devices compliant Apple goes their own way.
I don’t care either way myself but I can just see the conflict within the hardcore environmentalists who seem to, almost universally from what I’ve seen anyways adopt Apple products across the board. For me it’s really funny at least.
It is an interesting choice though, given Apple’s recent move to make one of their new data centers much more green by installing tons of extra solar capacity. On the one hand the devices are not green, but on the other hand the cloud that powers them is. But you can’t use the cloud unless you use the devices, what is an environmentalist to do?!
I suppose the question remains – given many organizations have bans on equipment that is not certified by this environmental standards body – once these bans become more widespread, how long is it until some of them cave internally to their own politics and the withdrawal some of their users go through for not being able to use Apple. I wonder if some may try to skirt the issue by implementing BYOD and allowing users to expense their devices.
Speaking of environmental stuff, I came across this interesting article on The Register a couple weeks ago, which talks about how futile it is to try to save power by unplugging your devices – the often talked about power drain as a result of standby mode. The key takeaway from that story for me was this:
Remember: skipping one bath or shower saves as much energy as switching off a typical gadget at the wall for a year.
In the comments of the story one person wrote how this guy’s girlfriend or wife would warm up the shower for 4-5 minutes before getting in. The same person wanted to unplug their gadgets to save power. But she didn’t want to NOT warm up the shower. Thus obviously wasted a ton more energy than anything that could be saved by unplugging their gadgets. For me, the apartment I live in now has some sort of centralized water heater (first once I’ve ever seen in a multi home complex). All of my previous places have had dedicated water heaters. So WHEN the hot water works (I’ve had more outages of hot water in the past year than I have in the previous 20), the shower warms up in about 30-45 seconds.
So if you want to save some energy, take a cold shower once in a while – or skip a shower once in a while. Or if your like Kramer and take 60+ minute showers, cut it to less time(for him it seems even 27 minutes wasn’t long enough). If you really want to save some energy, have fewer children.
I’m leaving on my road trip to Seattle tomorrow morning, going to drive the coast from the Bay Area to Crescent City, then cut across to Grants Pass Oregon before stopping for the night. Then take I-5 up to Bellevue on Friday so I can make it in time for Cowgirls that night. Going to take a bunch of pictures with my new camera and test my car out on those roads. I made a quicker trip down south last Sunday – drove the coast to near LA and got some pretty neat pictures there too. I drove back on the 4th of July (started at around 5PM from Escondido, CA), for the first time ever for me at least there was NO TRAFFIC. I drove all the way through LA and never really got below 50-60MPH. I was really shocked even given the Holiday. I drove through LA on Christmas eve last year and still hit a ton of traffic then.