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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Since you’re so incapable of thinking for yourself I’ll go through it again with everything you mentioned. Same prerequisite except now everyone has a phone and excess phones turn instantly to waste, or do you need a point by point explanation on how excess supply turns into waste?

    Scenario 1: Every year 1000 new phones get released.

    • Y1: 500 people buy new phones and sell their old phones. 500 people buy used phones and throw away 500 phones because nobody wants to buy the previous phone. 500 phones just go to waste. End of the year e-waste is 1000 phones
    • Y2: Same thing. End of year waste is 2000 phones.
    • Y3: Same thing. End of year waste is 3000 phones.
    • Y10: Still the same thing. End of year waste is 10k phones.

    Scenario 2: Every 3 years 1000 new phones get released.

    • Y1: 500 people buy new phones and sell their old phones. 500 people buy used phones and throw away 500 phones because nobody wants to buy the previous phone. 500 new phones go to waste. End of the year e-waste is 1000 phones
    • Y2: People keep using the phones they have. End of the year e-waste is 1000 phones
    • Y3: People keep using the phones they have. End of the year e-waste is 1000 phones
    • Y5: New phone comes out. 500 people and sell their old phones. 500 people buy used phones and throw away 500 phones because nobody wants to buy the previous phone. 500 new phones go to waste. End of the year e-waste is 2000 old phones
    • Y6: People keep using the phones they have. End of the year e-waste is 2000 phones
    • Y7: People keep using the phones they have. End of the year e-waste is 2000 phones
    • Y8: New phone comes out. 500 people and sell their old phones. 500 people buy used phones and throw away 500 phones because nobody wants to buy the previous phone. 500 new phones go to waste. End of the year e-waste is 3000 old phones
    • Y0: People keep using the phones they have. End of the year e-waste is 3000 phones
    • Y10: People keep using the phones they have. End of the year e-waste is 3000 phones

    As you can see. Even with supply meets the demand exactly you generate waste if you release a new phone every year. If the supply exceeds the demand it generated waste. I don’t see how it could be made any clearer beyond also going over your comment point by point.

    Why would you make your scenario supply constrained?

    Because how do you create a secondary market that would buy used phones? I could’ve gone with “people are poor” but that is much harder to put into an example. The supply constraint itself doesn’t matter, but I did my best with the new example.

    Your argument is simply if we sold less phones, less would go to e-waste, and duh.

    Nope. My argument was that if we made less phones less would go to e-waste. That also covers unsold phones that go straight into waste as evident from my new example.

    That wasn’t debate, it was whether releasing new phones every year was wasteful vs new phones being released every 2-3 years.

    If you release a new phone every year you manufacture more phones. I guess technically you can manufacture the same amount of the same model for 2-3 years as you would manufacture yearly new phone. But that makes no sense from an enterprising point of view because you reach market saturation and the phones simply don’t get sold, you’re just manufacturing a loss for the company. Even if you manufacture the same model yearly you’re still going to manufacture them less (due to demand dropping) than if you made a new model every year.

    Your scenario also assuming people buy used or they just don’t have a phone. People who buy a used phone generally do so instead of buying a new phone.

    If you paid attention you would’ve noticed that in both previous scenarios 800-900 people bought used phones and only 100-200 people bought brand new phones. I did that deliberately because you argued that reselling the phone has an effect when it really doesn’t. At the end of the line the person who bought the last used phone throws their current phone away because you can’t sell that to anyone. Which means as long as phone is manufactured regardless of whether it gets sold or not or resold or not, eventually it will go in the bin as e-waste. The best way to reduce waste is to not produce excessively like we’re doing right now.


  • Are you stupid? Let’s say we have 1000 people and they all want the latest phone, all manufactured phones get bought and everyone sells their old phones. And phones don’t break.

    Scenario 1: Every year 200 new phones get released.

    • Year 1. 200 most willing to pay the highest price buy a new phone, 800 are without a phone
    • Year 2. The same 200 buy the latest model and sell their old one. The next 200 get the “new” used phone. 600 are without phones.
    • Year 3, 4 and 5 I imagine are self-explanatory. By the end of year 5 everyone has phone.
    • Year 6. The most willing buy the 200 new phones and sell their old phone. The next group buy the previous group phones and sell their current phone. The last group has nobody to sell to because nobody wants their phone. 200 phones go into e-waste.
    • Year 7. Goes like year 6 except now there’s a total of 400 phones in e-waste.
    • Year 8, 9 and 10 follow the same pattern. By the end of year 10 there 1000 phones in e-waste.
    • Year 20. By the end of the year there will be 3000 phones in e-waste.

    Scenario 2: 100 phones get released (to better stimulate the real world because someone is going release a phone anyway, but you can also imagine 200 phones releasing every 2 years as the numbers will the same for every even year).

    • Year 1. 100 people get a phone.
    • Year 2. 100 people buy the new phone and sell the old one. 100 people buy the old phone.
    • Years 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are the same pattern. By the end of year 10 everyone has a phone
    • Year 11 the first year phones go into e-waste because nobody wants them. Total 100 phones in e-waste.
    • Year 12 the next 100 phones go into waste. Total 200 phones in e-waste.
    • Years 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 are the same pattern.
    • Year 20. By the end of the year 1000 phones are e-waste.
    • Year 40. By the end of the year 3000 phones are e-waste.

    It literally cannot be empirically untrue because what I said is mathematically true. Let’s say that in both scenario 1 and scenario 2 at the end of year 50 they decide to throw away all phones and never create another phone again. In scenario 1 there would be 10 000 e-waste phones. In scenario 2 there would be 5000 e-waste phones. The more you create the more waste will come down the line. If you want less waste, make less phones.

    And before you go “but recycling?” only about 20% of e-waste gets recycled and the recycling process doesn’t recycle all the waste.



  • Right. So let’s imagine everyone uses Puppy OS for the phone OS? How does that prevent phone manufacturers from creating a new phone every year? It doesn’t. I’ve already pointed it out with Pixel phones, TWICE. Pixel 5 runs the same OS as Pixel 9 and obviously it hasn’t prevented Google from releasing 3 different version of Pixel 6, 7 and 8, and then also Pixel Fold and 4 different version of Pixel 9. If every Pixel phone moving forward would be stuck on Android 14 they’d still be able to release a new version every year because you still get marginally better camera, marginally more memory, marginally better processor etc. Using Puppy OS wouldn’t prevent manufacturers from spitting out a new model every year because the other issue with phones is that they’re not repairable. If your screen breaks or battery dies or charging port stops charging you can’t really fix it without paying usually over half the price of a new phone, which means people just buy a new phone. A fixed OS doesn’t solve hardware failures which leads to people buying new hardware. Regular wear and tear is the main reason for e-waste, because you can’t fix your fucking phone. This is literally the reason EU is forcing phone manufacturers to make replaceable batteries a thing again, because it’s the primary point of failure for most phones.

    Solving e-waste doesn’t start with the OS, it starts by making hardware easy to repair or replace. And that’s exactly what fairphone does. And it’s super weird how you’re both “the hardware on fairphones sucks” and “hardware necessity is an illusion”. You’re undermining your own points.


  • I’ve already pointed out that most Pixel phones run on the same OS, it doesn’t prevent Google from churning out new phones on a yearly basis because hardware is independent from software. The same OS doesn’t prevent sticking in a better camera of a better CPU, it only prevents adding new features to the OS.

    What you’re suggesting could work if ALL pixel phones had to run on the same OS which effectively stifles technological advantage. I don’t think you fully understand the impact of your suggestion. What you’re basically saying is that 99% of personal computers should be using windows 3.1 (or I guess actually MS DOS) because that’s the OS Microsoft created and that’s what ran on the first PCs. Even the jump to Windows 95 is impossible because it literally might not fit on hardware that’s designed to run windows 3.1. You could argue that it’s a silly argument as it would start now, but guess what, 40 years from now Windows 11 can be just as ancient as Windows 3.1 is right now. If we somehow figure out quantum computing for consumer market you couldn’t really benefit from it because you need to support windows 11 that has no idea how quantum computing works. Not to mention it actually makes entire companies obsolete because a brand new company could make an OS that supports quantum computing and everyone switches to that company OS because that OS doesn’t need to support decades old hardware.

    Forced baseline OS does not solve the issue. It only creates worse issues.


  • I say to all manufacturers and developers just get one OS and stick with it, and then there is no further e-waste if it’s cross compatible from a dual core spec hardware upward it just runs faster the higher spec you go, there will be no hardware or OS incompatability just an ever improving OS one fits all old and new.

    But where does the new hardware come from? Google has one OS that is the same over all Pixel phones, it doesn’t stop them from churning out a new Pixel every year. It also doesn’t solve the problems Fairphone aims to solve which are a) ethically sourced materials and b) reducing ewaste by having higher repairability.

    Let’s say they create their own OS. How is the OS going to make sure the underlying hardware is “fairly” acquired? It’s not. Nor is the OS magically going to turn a non-repairable phone into a repairable one. That’s the reason why Fairphone makes their own phones, so they can verify their materials are ethically sourced and the phone is repairable.

    All fairphone are goinn to do is become e-waste just with a smaller footprint than the rest but e-waste none the less, I do not see them surviving long either.

    Actually the company recycles its phones. If you don’t like your Fairphone you can send it to them and based on the model and the state of the phone they’ll reimburse it. And how long is long because Fairphones are over a decade old?


  • The idea behind the fairphone is that it’s made fairly. It looks overpriced because they’re paying a fair price for the raw materials + production costs. If other companies didn’t exploit third world countries their phones would be priced similarly to fair phone.

    You don’t buy fair phone for the specs, you buy it so you can be certain some child in south Africa didn’t have crawl in a mine to get the the metals that go into phones, or have a child sit in a factory putting together the chips that go into phones. Or you buy it because you don’t want to throw your phone away after 3 years because you couldn’t replace the battery or the screen or the charging port.





  • You’re stating it like it’s somehow objective, but it’s not. Battlefield 3 and 4 have been delisted and it’s a matter of time until EA turns off services and those games are left for dead. Battlefield 4 still averages above 1k players a month. It’s clear that EA won’t see value in keeping the light on and will turn off the services in the near future, but do you think the players will go overnight from “I want to play this game” to “This game is worthless”. Don’t you think the people playing BF4 wouldn’t want to continue playing after EA shuts down the services keeping the game running?

    I think it’s pretty obvious that there are two groups who decide if a game has value or not, the company and the customers. Right now after purchasing the game the customers no longer have a say whether a game has value or not. Only the company has a say and if the company says it’s not worth it then the people who bought it just have to suck it up. And that’s the idea behind the initiative, to make it so that the company isn’t the only one who gets to decide how long you get to use the product you’ve purchased.

    I think if we expanded the idea of bricking software beyond gaming, if companies could destroy any piece of software they made, you’d also be in favor of this initiative. Imagine if Microsoft could brick Windows 10 when they’ve officially stopped supporting it. Or Nvidia effectively bricking their older cards by stopping official driver support. Would you then also argue that the software has lost value and it’s acceptable behavior?


  • I usually agree with Thor but on this one I probably couldn’t disagree more. Based on what he says I’d say his mindset is completely opposite to what his initiative wants to do. He essentially said he doesn’t see any value in (live service) games after they’ve reached their end of service and from that perspective I can understand how this movement is pointless or even potentially damaging. But that assumes that the (live service) game loses value after the company stops supporting it and I just don’t think that’s the case.

    A lot of games continue live despite the company ending official support for them. If anyone remembers there’s a gem called Wildstar that was shut down in 2018. Despite the game being shut down and even trademark has expiring people are still running the game on private servers. People are putting in sweat and tears to make sure a game is preserved. Imagine how much easier it would be if Carbine or NcSoft had released proper tools for it. Even Vanilla WoW exists because private server did it first and Blizzard wanted to get some of that money.

    And another point that Thor made how it’s not about preservation because you can’t preserve a moment in time. I think that’s a completely disingenuous argument because it feeds into FOMO. If you join WoW today you will never experience “the golden age of WoW”. Maybe another game you might be interested in is having a golden age right now, better buy into the hype. You can’t argue against preservation like this because it’s literally impossible to preserve a moment in time except in your memory so you have be at that exact place at that exact time to really experience that thing, that is FOMO at it’s purest form. That argument against preservation is an argument in favor of FOMO.

    Thors points come for a belief that live service games don’t need to be preserved after official support has ended, and he views this initiative through that lens. Of course he will have issues with the initiative because he’s opposing the idea at a fundamental level. It’s like asking a racist how to be more tolerant with other races, the answer obviously is that you shouldn’t want to tolerate other races. And just like you would ignore a racist I think you should ignore what Thor has to say on this matter because anything he says is against the idea of preservation.