Greenpeace: Amazon Fire Burns More Coal and Gas Than It Should 288
Jason Koebler (3528235) writes "The biggest thing that sets the Amazon Fire Phone apart from its Android and Apple competitors probably isn't the clean interface or the unlimited photo storage—it's the dirty power behind it. When Fire users upload their photos and data to Amazon's cloud, they'll be creating a lot more pollution than iPhone owners, Greenpeace says. Apple has made a commitment to running its iCloud on 100 percent clean energy. Amazon, meanwhile, operates the dirtiest servers of any major tech giant that operates its own servers—only 15 percent of its energy comes from clean sources, which is about the default national average." Greenpeace's jaundiced eye is on Amazon more generally; the company's new phone is just an example. Maybe Amazon or some other provider could take a page from some local utilities and let users signal their own preferences with a (surcharged) "clean energy" option.
Hipsterism at its finest (worst?) (Score:4, Insightful)
This whole "I buy my energy from green sources" crap is hipsterism at its finest. It's even more hipster than goddamn "walled garden" cell phones with unusable flat UIs, glasses with no lenses, and fedora hats.
It represents everything that's fucked up about hipsters and their toxic attitude:
1) They think they're "making a difference" without actually doing anything beneficial at all.
2) They brag about how they're "making a difference", when they obviously aren't.
3) They feel good about how they're "making a difference", when they haven't done a goddamn thing.
4) They think they care about the environment, when they clearly don't.
5) They subject the rest of us to their "environmental justice" and "social justice" crap without end.
These hipsters make me sick. Give me back the hippies of the 1960s, or the real environmentalists of the 1970s! As obnoxious as they often were, at least they weren't filthy hypocrites like today's hipsters are. They actually managed to practice what they preached, even if they were out of touch with reality. Hipsters today are totally out of touch, and can't even be assed to live by how they say everyone should should be living.
As soon as greenpeace touches it (Score:4, Insightful)
It loses all credibility. perhaps its true, but once they make a claim i almost always assume that its another exaggeration or outright lie.
I don't hate the environment, i just don't believe anything those idealistic eco hippies say.
Greenpeace... (Score:3, Insightful)
Greenpeace are those hippies that told us nuclear power is bad, so we should keep using coal and gas power, right?
Re:Hipsterism at its finest (worst?) (Score:4, Insightful)
Please STFU and show yourself out (Score:5, Insightful)
I support Apple's initiatives and I'm glad they're setting a good example as an industry leader. However, I could not possibly care less that a given cell phone might be accessing a server that isn't "green". Yes, Amazon Fire will be running "on top of" AWS. This is an absolute given. It will also be leaning on servers from Google, Apple, Rackspace, and Joe's Server Shack.
Greenpeace, shoo. You're not involved in these discussions and you're not relevant to the task at hand. It's cute that you want to be a part of the conversation, but this is the adult table.
Re:As soon as greenpeace touches it (Score:0, Insightful)
Maybe you don't know their history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
So what? They got their boat sunk when they pissed off powerful people.
That in no way refutes GP's claim that Greenpeace is full of self-absorbed, clueless, preaching narcissists. Hell, if anything it reinforces the GPs point by showing how pie-in-the-sky living-in-Fantasyland Greenpeace types are.
Re:Hipsterism at its finest (worst?) (Score:4, Insightful)
SD slots on every phone would be worse for the environment. In the cloud, you can store everyones data efficiently instead of using millions of inefficient SD cards. Plus the the SD card approach will create more waste as cars go bad or break.
LOL.... What? Have you had your coffee or energy drink today?
1. Having stuff that you can download and keep on SD cards uses a TON less energy than having to stream it every time. You are missing the energy required to transmit packets, to run routers and switches, etc...
2. Obviously you "know nothing, John Snow...." I've never had a SD card break, let alone stop working. My biggest fear with the MicroSD cards is that I will lose them, they are so tiny... So far so good...
3. Maybe this was meant as sarcasm and I missed it entirely.... doubtful though....
Re:Hipsterism at its finest (worst?) (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh thank god. All this time I was thinking that no storage device is 100% reliable and here you come along and shatter that view. Thank you David_Hart for assuring me that SD cards are 100% reliable and never experience data loss. I am switching to SD cards for all of my backups from now on; both at home and at work! I am sure my boss will love how much money I saved him by switching from costly tape and off site providers to simple SD cards. THANK YOU!
Don't be a tool.
No one is saying you keep your one copy of the nuclear launch codes on a SD card. He is saying they have become relatively inexpensive removable storage and that most phone makers outside of apple have acknowledged this.
Re:Hipsterism at its finest (worst?) (Score:5, Insightful)
And they tend to oppose nucelar power which is our best way of actually getting enough "clean energy" for modern society.
It's a shame (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me back the hippies of the 1960s, or the real environmentalists of the 1970s! As obnoxious as they often were, ....
It's a shame with all this hostility towards environmentalists.
They were the ones who pushed for cleaner air and water. They were the ones who helped get lead out of gasoline.
If it weren't for them, we'd have the environment of China because businesses do not care. Pollution is the tradgedy of the commons - folks pollute and the rest of society pays for the costs.
During the Summer here in coal powered Metro Atlanta, air quality gets so bad that it kills suseptable young children and the elderly.
But use cleaner and more expensive energy?! Fuck no!
Gotta power all those Chinese made electronic gadgets - especially the big screen TV plugged into the overpriced cable because we gotta have our sports!
And of course there are the gas guzzling SUVs and "manly" pickup trucks - many driven by "No-noes" (folks who drive a truck just to be manly and NEVER actually use it to haul anything). Oh no! Cannot look like a fag driving something a bit more sensible and perfectly adequate with 4 cyclinders.
But I actually walk the walk - and I save a shit load of money.
That's right. Living "green" is CHEAP!
Cheaper cars, lower fuel expenses, no cable bill, no expensive cell phone bills because I don't have a smart phone, cheaper electricity because I don't have a TV in every room or any other energy sucking toys.
I walk to local stores - they're less than half a mile away. See, being "green" also saves money on exercise. Why pay hundreds of dollars and get locked into a shitty gym contract when walking and carrying packages is great exercise?
Much our polution is because of our insane consumerist culture. Buy, buy, buy! Spend money! Go into debt! Sign away your freedom and enslave ourselves with debt because we gotta have those electronic toys, big trucks, cable TV, etc ...
If we learned to live simpler and deeper, we'd be much happier as a society and things would clean up on their own because we would spend time doing important things instead of wasting it on shit doing shit.
Re:Greenpeace Blecchhh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As soon as greenpeace touches it (Score:5, Insightful)
i just don't believe anything those idealistic eco hippies say.
Do you realize how stupid that is?
John Stewart Mill made the point that you should consider every argument, even if only one person in the entire world is making it against the consensus of everyone else, on its merits. The person speaking does not matter, only the merits of the argument.
Effectively you harm yourself by dismissing things that could be beneficial for you, simply because you dislike the messenger.
Re:Hipsterism at its finest (worst?) (Score:4, Insightful)
* I hate the term cloud, I will continue to call it what it is, a file server.
Re:Time to start building more nuke plants as long (Score:3, Insightful)
TMI safety both failed and succeeded depending upon how you look at things.
It failed to prevent a partial meltdown of the reactor core.
It failed to prevent a significant release of radiation to the general environment as 15 curies (560 GBq) of iodine-131 (the most concering portion due to biological uptake to the thyroid)
It succeeded in terms of avoiding the wide-scale problems of Fukushima or Chernobyl
It failed in terms of public opinion of nuclear power being a reasonably source of energy production. Nuclear plant construction in US was virtually shut down after this, no new licenses till 2012.
Re:whoosh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Clever editors. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here you go. Greenpeace exec commuting on commercial air every week between Amsterdam and Luxembourg.
That was not a "private jet". Adding yet-another-passenger to a commercial flight emits about as much CO2 as driving the same distance. How far is it from Amsterdam to Luxembourg anyway?
See, like most liberal assholes, it is do as i say not as I do.
That is a dumb standard. You should do what someone says, or not, depending on whether their argument makes sense. That they are hypocrites is irrelevant. In this case, Greenpeace's argument is silly. Electricity is fungible, and it doesn't really mean anything to say that the source of power for one particular use is "clean". All that really matters is the overall emissions. But even that is silly, since subsidizing clean energy is a pretty dumb way to combat global warming. A far better way to reduce CO2 emissions would be to buy condoms for Nigerians. People that are never born emit far less CO2 than those that are. Long term problems require long term solutions.
Re:And Greenpeace runs its ships on pure sunshine (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually Greenpeace is about the white middle-class telling everyone else that they can't develop because they will cook the planet. And every argument they make about the cooking of the planet is couched in ad hominem attacks against people who disbelieve everything that comes from their mouths.
What exactly does Greenpeace do running these ships? It ain't useful to the planet that's for sure.
Re:Hipsterism at its finest (worst?) (Score:5, Insightful)
You fail to account for how slow SD cards are so that they need to be powered longer to extract data off them.
Every so often, this argument is brought up. What universe do you live in where the wireless interface is faster than the local storage? MicroSDHC cards read at 832Mb/s (104MB/s = 832Mb/s [wikipedia.org]). 4G LTE tops out at 300Mb/s (wiki [wikipedia.org]). And that's optimal speed, not accounting for latency. On my personal mobile device, playing a 5 minute song from Amazon's cloud service takes 1-2 minutes to buffer and then keeps the radio going the rest of the 5 minute song. From local storage, that song would load into working memory in less than a second.
Regardless of the net energy usage, the propagation of cloud services for things that could very easily be handled locally is completely insane.
Re: Clever editors. (Score:4, Insightful)
The CEO of Greenpeace is on my list of people to punch.
Re: Clever editors. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you've managed the trifecta there:
1. Sweeping statements without any explanation or evidence.
2. Use of the word "marxism" in a way that means nothing at all.
3. Claim that those on the left are just trying to oppress you (again without any explanation or evidence, obviously).