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There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

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Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#601

Post by pixl97 »

triceratops wrote: post #492
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Yeah, because they suck . Uh, pun not intended. Paper straws get somewhat soggy and feel bad in your mouth. They are inferior to the plastic straws they purport to replace, so people resist them as much as they can. If you want to actually make a difference with an environmental effort, you need to make something superior . Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front c…

I don't understand the moaning and bellyaching about straws. Are people that bad at drinking from cups? If you aren't a toddler or bed-ridden patient in a hospital (EDIT: or anyone else with physical conditions that necessitate a straw) you should be able to drink without a straw.

>Are people that bad at drinking from cups?

You ever had the ice in the bottom of the cup turn into a large chunk then hit you in the face?

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#602

Post by 1234letshaveatw »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #593
1234letshaveatw wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about best buy and staples? that's where I take mine

I can't tell if this is a tongue-in-cheek comment or not, but all of that is shipped off to 3rd party "recyclers" who pinky promise that they will dispose of it properly. Very often those 3rd parties rely on other 3rd parties until the it ends up in a waste pile in a developing country, but with a long enough chain of differed responsibility that nobody can be held accountable. The fundamental problem with "recycling…

sounds like cynicism without any factual basis. I just checked and ERI says otherwise: https://eridirect.com/blog/2025/01/rare-earth-metal-recovery...

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#603

Post by pixl97 »

locknitpicker wrote: post #169
teiferer wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why do small if you can go big right away? Because going big right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents people from doing it in the first place because the threshold is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a…

> Why do small if you can go big right away? You're missing the fact that this sort of infrastructure requires a robust business case. That's why scale is critical. Recycling bottles and cans has a solid business case. Glass and aluminium are straight forward to recycle at an industrial scale, but would be pointless if they were kept at an artisanal scale. Any moralistic argument is pointless if you can't put togethe…

In theory plastic food 'waste' could be far more recyclable if it were standardized on plastics that were recyclable and we had a deposit system.

Needless to say the food and drink industry has spent an epic fuckton on lobbying to ensure that doesn't happen. Remember to give a proper fuck you to the Coca-cola corp about this.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#605

Post by pixl97 »

hammock wrote: post #68
jaggederest wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop there? I think more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly. Trash is an enormous externality. I'm talking about plastic clamshells, container lids, "disposable" storage containers, the lot.

> more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly Yeah, we had that. Glass milk bottles and coke bottles and bulk goods sold out of barrels by the lb rather than in plastic bags. But then plastic took off and soon after Big Sugar paid a PR/lobbying firm to run a campaign with a fake Indian cryin…

To play devils advocate I'm old enough to remember when glass bottles and cans were what was around and there are a number of problems there that manufactures would fight...

Glass is heavy as shit. For as much plastic waste as we create, we've saved a ton in fuel costs that would be in the atmosphere otherwise.

Glass likes to break and become a dangerous object/weapon. How much less glass litter is around is amazing. Always fun when you went to the lake, then the hospital because some dipshit broke their coke. It still can happen with liquor, but it's massively reduced the problem.

Also, glass likes to break and cause product inventory shrinkage, which the manufactures and retailers hate.

Same with bulk goods. Never underestimate how fucking dumb your fellow citizens are in their ability to screw up and ruin bulk product displays.

Also, when something in bulk is polluted/one piece goes bad, typically the entire container is a loss.

What we have to force manufactures to do is use plastics that are recyclable and put deposits on them. And then force recycling on the items they collect. This would massively reduce waste by incentivizing the public to gather any they see.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#606

Post by merelythere »

Saline9515 wrote: post #461
volemo wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue it's kinda a myth, because I used to believe we could create a perfectly closed loop (you know, like the one the recycling symbol suggests) if only we could cleanly separate the materials (which in my imagination requires consumers to vigilantly separate the waste into dozens of different bins). I'm beginning to think I was wrong.

If 1kg of "recycled" plastics allow to reduce the production of 1kg of pristine plastics, it's already a big win, even if it's downcycling. No need to throw away the baby with the bathwater.

It is probably the only argument in favor of recycling. After the last six months exploring the recycling process what I get is this:

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

The order matter, recycling is useful but should be the last step when something has to be trashed away. In the case of our straws, buying a metal one would reduce and reuse much better than the two others solutions.

A problem is that we tend to only talk about recycling while forgetting the two others. It is easy to talk about how many tons has been recycled while it's very difficult to quantify the reduce reuse practice and not very appealing for sellers either.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#607

Post by throwway120385 »

s1mplicissimus wrote: post #457
graemep wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also prefer you to use the mobile app so they can gather more data so they do not want the devices to work well in the first place.

It's a nice theory, but many of those terrible parking ticket machines predate smartphones, so it might be the case for machines built now, but it's really hard to imagine that that was the original intention

I work in an adjacent industry, and trust me when I say that a lot of older equipment companies just did not care much about the experience of using the equipment. It's much more important to tick all of the boxes in the back end accounting system than to have a high quality experience on the kiosk.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#608

Post by lazide »

ryandrake wrote: post #589
mrguyorama wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When it comes to the actual quality of the software written, the buck stops at the developer. Blame can be shared. No. The quality is not prioritized by management. A dev that fails to ship a feature because they were trying to improve "quality" gets fired. We have no labor power because morons spent the good times insisting that we don't need a professional organization to solve the obvious collective action probl…

The idea that workers are not responsible for their own competence or the quality of their work output is such a bizarre take that you really only see on HN. Just because nobody is forcing you to write quality code, doesn't mean you shouldn't. Nobody is forcing you to bathe or brush your teeth, either, so why do we do it?

Nobody here is writing that code.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#609

Post by throwway120385 »

sofixa wrote: post #466
potato3732842 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that. You don't need any of that. You need one more box in the electrical closet and one password protected wifi for all the crap in the building (the actual door locks and the like) to connect to.

And when that box fails, you're looking at how long with no access? Longer than any AWS outage.

If you buy hardware from HID Global / Assa Abloy the box never breaks.

Re: There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape

#610

Post by miki123211 »

tialaramex wrote: post #353
pkolaczk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is why when folks nowadays say "you cannot use XYZ for embedded", given what most embedded systems look like, and what many of us used to code on 8 and 16 bit home computers, I can only assert they have no idea how powerful modern embedded systems have become. Yet, I still need to wait about 1 second (!) after each key press when buying a parking ticket and the machine wants me to enter my license plate numbe…

There's no pressure to make a good product because nobody making this decision has to use the machine. Everywhere I've worked purchase decisions are made by somebody with no direct contact to the actual usage, maybe if you're lucky they at least asked the people who need the product what the requirements are, otherwise it's just whatever they (who don't use this product) thought would be good. "Key presses are 15x sl…

Not just that, nobody chooses their parking spot based on the UI of the machine.

Banks and phone manufacturers now care about UI, because some of them started to do so, and people started switching to them en masse. US carriers were bleeding subscribers left and right when the iPhone was only available on AT&T, which was the first time people started switching plans to get a specific phone instead of the other way around.

People usually choose their parking based on where they want to go and how far it is from that place, and that trumps all other considerations. Paying more for programmers or parking machine processors would be a waste of money.

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