good but considering some of the stuff you hear about this sorta thing, I have to take it with a grain of salt

Bah, I thought they were going to release a Carbon Fiber mouse

Yawn... nobody cares, we all know its 99% paper reality, come on.

Vayra86Yawn... nobody cares, we all know its 99% paper reality, come on.

Europe is quite big on carbon tax, I assume that Logitech will have some mechanism to keep track of their emissions.

FourstaffEurope is quite big on carbon tax, I assume that Logitech will have some mechanism to keep track of their emissions.

Yeah. But emissions alone is just a sliver of the problem, right. Its not like that will amount to anything if the rest is business as usual. There is more to environment than carbon.

But... highly offtopic... you're right though, there are big steps coming from the EU. I just read an article today of our Dutch National bank who have calculated the potential economical damage to eco diversity / eco systems. Basically, we're moving towards actually pricing the environment correctly... Interesting times.

www.dnb.nl/en/news/news-and-archive/DNBulletin2019/dnb381614.jsp
This was a year ago

This is today, I didn't find an English article for it yet. Maybe Translate will provide the gist
www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/dnb-en-planbureau-bloemen-en-bijen-zijn-miljarden-waard~b8190fe1/

FourstaffEurope is quite big on carbon tax, I assume that Logitech will have some mechanism to keep track of their emissions.

But how does a tax solve the problem? It's doesn't mean something isn't bad for the environment. And there's no proof the tax goes towards improving the environment...

Just virtue signaling for marketing purposes.

Vayra86Yeah. But emissions alone is just a sliver of the problem, right. Its not like that will amount to anything if the rest is business as usual. There is more to environment than carbon.

But... highly offtopic... you're right though, there are big steps coming from the EU. I just read an article today of our Dutch National bank who have calculated the potential economical damage to eco diversity / eco systems. Basically, we're moving towards actually pricing the environment correctly... Interesting times.

www.dnb.nl/en/news/news-and-archive/DNBulletin2019/dnb381614.jsp
This was a year ago

This is today, I didn't find an English article for it yet. Maybe Translate will provide the gist
www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/dnb-en-planbureau-bloemen-en-bijen-zijn-miljarden-waard~b8190fe1/

Have to start somewhere. I will not be surprised if they expand the scope (e.g. no heavy metals, no poisonous chemicals, etc.)

TheLostSwedeBut how does a tax solve the problem? It's doesn't mean something isn't bad for the environment. And there's no proof the tax goes towards improving the environment...

$ReaPeR$Just virtue signaling for marketing purposes.

This and this.

It has to be clear by now, that in spite of all these fantastic initiatives, the overall state of this world is still rapidly deteriorating?

Let's stop pulling wool over our eyes with these silly ideas that somehow this will make any sort of dent, and get serious about it. Part of that getting serious is being realistic about these efforts that go nowhere. All they do is make us lose valuable time so we can keep doing what we always did.

FourstaffHave to start somewhere. I will not be surprised if they expand the scope (e.g. no heavy metals, no poisonous chemicals, etc.)

Use of heavy metals and chemicals is rising, not falling. We require more and more goods and materials that contain these processes, not less.

Only the companies that have a fully sustainable lifecycle for their products can speak of any sort of environmental consciousness. The rest? They lie and they know it, but that is an economy all of itself by now.

Vayra86Use of heavy metals and chemicals is rising, not falling. We require more and more goods and materials that contain these processes, not less.

Only the companies that have a fully sustainable lifecycle for their products can speak of any sort of environmental consciousness. The rest? They lie and they know it, but that is an economy all of itself by now.

Perhaps I am much more of an optimist, but I think any start is a good start. Changing people's mindset takes time, and the sooner we embed environmental concepts the better it is. About a decade ago, a supermajor oil company decided to embark on a no harm no leak policy. Why would such a polluting company even bother? Fast forward to now, said company is implementing CO2 costs into their project evaluation. There is still a lot of work to be done before any oil company can call themselves environmentally clean (if ever), but every little counts these days.

FourstaffPerhaps I am much more of an optimist, but I think any start is a good start. Changing people's mindset takes time, and the sooner we embed environmental concepts the better it is. About a decade ago, a supermajor oil company decided to embark on a no harm no leak policy. Why would such a polluting company even bother? Fast forward to now, said company is implementing CO2 costs into their project evaluation. There is still a lot of work to be done before any oil company can call themselves environmentally clean (if ever), but every little counts these days.

I think we don't even see anymore how big our cognitive dissonance has become. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence we keep screwing around in the margin of nothing, and you know why?

We care more about preserving our way of life than we care about preserving life. The same oil company making good show with CO2 cost calculations is actively stalling renewable energy development and was in the forefront of pushing one of the most damaging energy production methods ever called biomass.

Yeah, its going real well ;)

Vayra86We care more about preserving our way of life than we care about preserving life. The same oil company making good show with CO2 cost calculations is actively stalling renewable energy development and was in the forefront of pushing one of the most damaging energy production methods ever called biomass.

Said oil company is also investing bigtime in solar. I think we have to have faith that there are some good left in the world.

FourstaffSaid oil company is also investing bigtime in solar. I think we have to have faith that there are some good left in the world.

Faith doesn't serve us too well. Its always used to manipulate the masses. It blinds us from the facts.

Its not a question of good or evil, I think, this is a problem that requires us to rethink some base principles of our systems, mostly economical. Anything else is doomed to fail.

I do agree, you see some movement in the right direction, but also a lot of movement that completely counteracts that. Just a few days back there was a report on how we should 'price' the loss of or impact on biodiversity. In NL, we are now actively making a calculation model for that and the early estimates are that the price of loss and damage to ecosystems is running into a massive price tag. Billions. Annual - and that is not counting the cost of recovery, just the direct loss on company balances.

In our current economical reality I think that is the only way we can move forward. Readjust our pricing and start counting fairly the hidden cost we've always taken for granted - but simply can't anymore. You already see how changes in climate are creating massive unexpected cost increases in every way; drought, flooding, etc.

Reducing this problem to a simple good versus evil problem is a sure way to make it political and not factual. We ALL share in this problem and we're all part of it. Its about time we start thinking along those lines, or nothing will change. It means a change in profit motive, too; and a major shift in the approach of economical growth.

FourstaffPerhaps I am much more of an optimist, but I think any start is a good start. Changing people's mindset takes time, and the sooner we embed environmental concepts the better it is. About a decade ago, a supermajor oil company decided to embark on a no harm no leak policy. Why would such a polluting company even bother? Fast forward to now, said company is implementing CO2 costs into their project evaluation. There is still a lot of work to be done before any oil company can call themselves environmentally clean (if ever), but every little counts these days.

But in this case, it's not an environmental concept, Logitech simply pays some government somewhere a small tax and can claim their products are carbon neutral. They're far from the only company doing this. But what is that tax used for? I doubt it goes directly towards planting more forests or some other form of carbon capture.

Imho, we, as the human species, need to stop product and wanting plastic junk. I was looking at getting a pedestal fan yesterday, the kind to cool you down, as I don't have one here. One of the shops I looked at, are selling these:



Tell me what purpose these fill? They're about $10 each and I guess they won't last a season before ending up, hopefully, being recycled, since at least Sweden has a decent recycling system. In some other parts of the world, they'd end up in a landfill or be burnt.

This is the kind of crap that has to stop being made. We need to go back to making quality products, instead of buying cheap Chinese junk (yes, all this crap is mainly made in China).

Look at a lot of the so called developing countries. They end up buying even worse quality plastic products, often containing harmful chemicals, as those products are super cheap to mass produce. As an example, we used this crap, for bottles that we drink out and it turns out it's slowly killing us en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A

We claim we're so smart and inventive and all this, yet we don't actually test things properly before we decide to start producing things with it and then decades later, we find out that actually, this stuff has been poisoning generations of people.

What we should do, is try to figure out a replacement for plastic ASAP if nothing else, but there's so little traction on that, due to all current alternatives aren't as strong, as cheap or as reliable.

Not going to say I'm any better than the rest of the world, but I have slowly started to try and reduce my plastic use, but it's really, really hard. Just about everything you buy packaged in a supermarket comes in plastic. Instead of having good old fashioned deli counters where your sandwich meat or cheese was wrapped up in paper, we now get everything packaged up in plastic. Sure, vacuum packaging food makes it last longer, so in that sense, I guess plastic is a good thing, as it hopefully leads to less food waste, since people no longer go to the super market several times a week, at least not in the western world.

Anyhow, long rant, but my point was, we need to stop producing pointless plastic products as a start, instead of making up these so called environmental taxes that are more likely to fill the coffers of the nation, than actually doing anything good for the environment.

Vayra86Faith doesn't serve us too well. Its always used to manipulate the masses. It blinds us from the facts.

Its not a question of good or evil, I think, this is a problem that requires us to rethink some base principles of our systems, mostly economical. Anything else is doomed to fail.

I do agree, you see some movement in the right direction, but also a lot of movement that completely counteracts that. Just a few days back there was a report on how we should 'price' the loss of or impact on biodiversity. In NL, we are now actively making a calculation model for that and the early estimates are that the price of loss and damage to ecosystems is running into a massive price tag. Billions. Annual - and that is not counting the cost of recovery, just the direct loss on company balances.

In our current economical reality I think that is the only way we can move forward. Readjust our pricing and start counting fairly the hidden cost we've always taken for granted - but simply can't anymore. You already see how changes in climate are creating massive unexpected cost increases in every way; drought, flooding, etc.

Reducing this problem to a simple good versus evil problem is a sure way to make it political and not factual. We ALL share in this problem and we're all part of it. Its about time we start thinking along those lines, or nothing will change. It means a change in profit motive, too; and a major shift in the approach of economical growth.

As long as we continue to buy into the teachings of commercialism and consumerism, nothing much is going to change. Capitalism has become the bane of the world and is being sold as democracy, which is a lie.

Too many large corporations are allowed to run the world and they only care about one thing, profit. Yes, a few have started to change ever so slightly, but it's all in the guise of winning over more customers. Their goal is still to have the highest possible profit, one way or another. They follow trends, which at least to some degree, allows their customers to dictate what they should do. However, it's impossible to know what these mega corporations do as an individual and many of them own a lot of other brands and companies that you wouldn't even think are connected.
Here's a good example of how complex things are.

Source: wikibuy.com/blog/11-companies-that-own-everything-904b28425120

I don't think most of us even consider these things when we go out shopping for something, as a lot of things are force of habit. We buy brands that our parents and grand parents bought and that we're familiar with, but many of those have changed ownership multiple times since then.
Just looking at brands I grew up with, most of their products are now produced abroad or are about to be moved somewhere "cheaper" as it's too expensive to produce food in Sweden :kookoo:

A great example is a company that makes crackers and biscuits in Sweden. The company was founded in Gothenburg in 1888 and have been making their products there locally until now. In 1994 they were taken over by a Norewegian food conglomerate called Orkla and they've now decided that by 2022, the production is going to end in Sweden and will be moved to Latvia. That now means that the biggest selling brand of crackers and biscuits in Sweden, will be made abroad and has to be shipped by sea to reach its customers. Makes total sense, no?

Keep in mind that most ships (the kinds that delivers goods) pollute an insane amount, as they use really "raw" fuel. People complain about flying, but at least jet fuel is relatively pure, whereas ship fuel is full of sulphur and other nasty bits. It's called fuel oil for a reason...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil

Sweden just introduced a new plastic bag tax, so if you buy a "single use" plastic bag in the supermarket now, it's going to cost you 75 cents, up from 35 cents. This is all in the name of the environment, since plastic is bad. Fair enough, but the tax also applies to single use bags for fruits and vegetables which are four cents each. The insane thing here, there are no alternatives to the fruit and veggie bags in most supermarkets, so if you want to buy unpackaged produce, you have to pay additional money for the bag. Very few supermarkets provide paper bags and if they do, those paper bags often have a plastic window, but those are exempt for the tax. However, a lot of plastic bags in Sweden, were already made from recycled material or partially from renewable materials and the local companies that used to make these slightly better bags, are now going out of business, since the supermarkets already stocked up with as many plastics bags as they could afford to get, before the tax came into affect. Yet, consumers are still being charged the new price for the bags...

There was also a local company that developed a multi-use bag, that can be used at least up to 50 times, but the Swedish tax office still decided that those bags should be taxed the same, even though the law says multi-use bags are exempt from the tax. :kookoo:

So yeah, I really don't trust any of these so called environmental taxes, as they serve little purpose of helping the environment.

Guys, I think we are missing the point here. Or way of life is not the problem, it lack of theological innovation is the problem. We spend as a planet trillions of dollars every year in military hardware, imagine spending that money on tech innovation, we would be in a "start trek" style society by now. If the world was serious about emissions it would have a wide use of nuclear technology because it's arguably the cleanest current way for energy production, and it would push for the creation and wide use of laboratory meat, because cows, sheep etc are one of the main factors of pollution. But, we are afraid of nuclear, even though it is one of the safest technologies, and we are afraid of lab meat because it's not "natural", even though literally everything we eat is genetically modified. We are a primitive civilization, still using race, language and culture to divide ourselves, even though to an alien we would be all just "humans". Pointless.

$ReaPeR$Guys, I think we are missing the point here. Or way of life is not the problem, it lack of theological innovation is the problem. We spend as a planet trillions of dollars every year in military hardware, imagine spending that money on tech innovation, we would be in a "start trek" style society by now. If the world was serious about emissions it would have a wide use of nuclear technology because it's arguably the cleanest current way for energy production, and it would push for the creation and wide use of laboratory meat, because cows, sheep etc are one of the main factors of pollution. But, we are afraid of nuclear, even though it is one of the safest technologies, and we are afraid of lab meat because it's not "natural", even though literally everything we eat is genetically modified. We are a primitive civilization, still using race, language and culture to divide ourselves, even though to an alien we would be all just "humans". Pointless.

All of the changes you mention though are part of our way of life. The meat we eat, the voting we do (as consumers, as citizens), and even the way we produce our energy. I don't disagree, but its helpful to realize how deep inside the rabbit hole we really are, all together, even yourself with the enlightened point of view of a Star Trek ish society (no monetary struggle, only personal merit counts).

Think on that last one for a minute. A society based on merit and not money. One of the biggest struggles of our time is exactly that: how do we keep the lower class at work and how do we not make them feel shitty about it. We can robotize and automate a large part of the simple work already; the only reasons not to, are barely based on 'the human touch' but really on simple cost/benefit analysis - its cheaper to have a person at work than to create and maintain machines, go figure; and there is of course a social aspect as well. Its not really making a lot of people happy and is one of the reasons the US has the president it has right now, along with many other right wing resurgences of late, also in EU, S. America... The core of that: its a vocal worker class standing up for an old world; the whole immigration issue is just an excuse really, after all 'they took our jobs!' ;). And its just one example, really. We're living in a very unique age. We're also, in many levels of society, thinking of things like a base income. That is the early Federation right there :p

Thát is how deep this rabbit hole goes...

Vayra86All of the changes you mention though are part of our way of life. The meat we eat, the voting we do (as consumers, as citizens), and even the way we produce our energy. I don't disagree, but its helpful to realize how deep inside the rabbit hole we really are, all together, even yourself with the enlightened point of view of a Star Trek ish society (no monetary struggle, only personal merit counts).

Think on that last one for a minute. A society based on merit and not money. One of the biggest struggles of our time is exactly that: how do we keep the lower class at work and how do we not make them feel shitty about it. We can robotize and automate a large part of the simple work already; the only reasons not to, are barely based on 'the human touch' but really on simple cost/benefit analysis - its cheaper to have a person at work than to create and maintain machines, go figure; and there is of course a social aspect as well. Its not really making a lot of people happy and is one of the reasons the US has the president it has right now, along with many other right wing resurgences of late, also in EU, S. America... The core of that: its a vocal worker class standing up for an old world; the whole immigration issue is just an excuse really, after all 'they took our jobs!' ;). And its just one example, really. We're living in a very unique age. We're also, in many levels of society, thinking of things like a base income. That is the early Federation right there :p

Thát is how deep this rabbit hole goes...

Some of that comes down to personal pride. Visiting Japan made me realised a few things I hadn't really thought about. Even the people sweeping the streets or cleaning the toilets do the very best they can, as they're proud to be productive members of society and people look up to them for that. In most countries, people doing those jobs are being looked down on and they generally hate their jobs from what I can tell. If you're told you suck, you have a job that you're told is crap, then your life is going to end up being crap at some point and you won't have any personal pride in what you do.

This is one of many problems in the world, how we perceive other people and their place in society. Some people believe they have the right to be above others, be it because of the colour of their skin, their position in society, birth right or job tittle. This is what's causing a lot of problems and have been for a long time. Even though royalty is no longer really a thing, society never really got any better as people with money are still trampling those without.

There are no quick fixes to the world we live in, but until we unite and treat each other as equals, that all serve a purpose, things aren't going to improve.

In many parts of the world, a human life is worth nothing, which is also very obvious with what's being going on these past few weeks.

Vayra86All of the changes you mention though are part of our way of life. The meat we eat, the voting we do (as consumers, as citizens), and even the way we produce our energy. I don't disagree, but its helpful to realize how deep inside the rabbit hole we really are, all together, even yourself with the enlightened point of view of a Star Trek ish society (no monetary struggle, only personal merit counts).

Think on that last one for a minute. A society based on merit and not money. One of the biggest struggles of our time is exactly that: how do we keep the lower class at work and how do we not make them feel shitty about it. We can robotize and automate a large part of the simple work already; the only reasons not to, are barely based on 'the human touch' but really on simple cost/benefit analysis - its cheaper to have a person at work than to create and maintain machines, go figure; and there is of course a social aspect as well. Its not really making a lot of people happy and is one of the reasons the US has the president it has right now, along with many other right wing resurgences of late, also in EU, S. America... The core of that: its a vocal worker class standing up for an old world; the whole immigration issue is just an excuse really, after all 'they took our jobs!' ;). And its just one example, really. We're living in a very unique age. We're also, in many levels of society, thinking of things like a base income. That is the early Federation right there :p

Thát is how deep this rabbit hole goes...

That's why I said that we are primitive. We lack rationality in our way of thinking. Vis-a-vis, most people most of the time navigate reality without using their rational part of the brain simply because it is more efficient that way, for the brain, for society though lack of rationality obviously isn't efficient at all.
BTW, when the industrial revolution started machines were very expensive and rare.

TheLostSwedeSome of that comes down to personal pride. Visiting Japan made me realised a few things I hadn't really thought about. Even the people sweeping the streets or cleaning the toilets do the very best they can, as they're proud to be productive members of society and people look up to them for that. In most countries, people doing those jobs are being looked down on and they generally hate their jobs from what I can tell. If you're told you suck, you have a job that you're told is crap, then your life is going to end up being crap at some point and you won't have any personal pride in what you do.

This is one of many problems in the world, how we perceive other people and their place in society. Some people believe they have the right to be above others, be it because of the colour of their skin, their position in society, birth right or job tittle. This is what's causing a lot of problems and have been for a long time. Even though royalty is no longer really a thing, society never really got any better as people with money are still trampling those without.

There are no quick fixes to the world we live in, but until we unite and treat each other as equals, that all serve a purpose, things aren't going to improve.

In many parts of the world, a human life is worth nothing, which is also very obvious with what's being going on these past few weeks.

We cannot unite in a global community because it's hard for most people to handle the social implications of that out off fear. Although that would be the most efficient choice. We are too tribalistic. Even in this forum you see every time "Intel vs AMD" or "AMD vs Nvidia" being treated like it's the fight of our lives.