Dan_Dilger
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Lisa Jackson touts Apple's environmental initiatives in Earth Day talk
Moore is a storyteller, not a scientist, but he raises some interesting ideas as a form of mostly thoughtful entertainment. However, finding some flaws in how "green technology" has been historically rolled out does not mean at all that we shouldn't be pursuing better alternatives to burning oil and coal, which are massively more destructive to our environment and ecology.buckkalu said:Over the last 10 years, everyone from celebrity influencers including Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Al Gore, to major technology brands including Apple, have repeatedly claimed that renewables like solar panels and wind farms are less polluting than fossil fuels.But a new documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” being released free to the public on YouTube today, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, reveals that industrial wind farms, solar farms, biomass, and biofuels are wrecking natural environments.
“Planet of the Humans was produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. “I assumed solar panels would last forever,” Moore toldReuters. “I didn’t know what went into the making of them.”
The film shows both abandoned industrial wind and solar farms and new ones being built — but after cutting down forests. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at was a solar dead zone,” says filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, staring at a former solar farm in California. “I learned that the solar panels don’t last.”
Like many environmental documentaries, “Planet of Humans” endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy. “We have to have our ability to consume reigned in,” says a well-coiffed environmental leader. “Without some major die-off of the human population there is no turning back,” says a scientist.
In truth, humankind has never been at risk of running out of energy. There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite.
The projects Apple has rolled out are not deforesting the planet. There is no "dead zone" above Apple's biogas or geothermal projects. This entire bit you copied and pasted here is a string of logical fallacies, particularly the idea that green energy is based on "Malthusian ideas," and that the primary intent of moving to renewable energy is that we are running out of oil.
Malthus was a religious philosopher writing in the late 1700s, not a scientist. He postulated that societal problems he witnessed centuries ago could only be solved by a huge die-off in population. It's absurd to say that's the basis of moving to green energy today.
And while there was once the fear that we would run out of good sources of oil back in the 1970s, we've since developed technology to extract oil from shale and frack it out of sources formerly considered worthless. There's lots of oil left, that's not even the issue.
The issue is that fracking blows new toxins into the ground that end up in our water, and cause all sorts of unexpected things like earthquakes in places that are unusual because we are changing the composition under our feet. These issues are just as bad if not far worse than "what do we do with old solar panels" and "hey lets not deforest the earth just to set up solar arrays."
Moore's film is raising an issue and blowing it out of proportion, and it's being promoted by interests who want to vilify the people raising awareness of renewable tech. He's the same filmmaker who visited Cuba and wondered aloud why it has a better healthcare system than the US, mixing some reality into a large bit of fiction uninformed to the point of being misleading.
We need to follow science and a constant re-evaluation of what's working best, not just more fallacious scaremongering so that we are paralyzed by outrage. And unfortunately, everyone in the media appears to be motivated by nothing other than outrage inducement, portraying everything as bad and the "somebody famous" behind it as being maliciously evil as part of a greater conspiracy. That only acts to protect the moneyed interests that depend on the status quo being maintained: a massive military-industrial complex that has to defend the oil underneath a religious battleground and maintain its price to keep the frack-destruction of our own nation in place, so we can continue to build a car-centric wasteland to support massively excessive vehicles making unnecessary trips. We need to rethink the whole thing.
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COVID-19 disaster shows off Apple's true core
Apple doesn't inject fraudulent messaging in front of users and take a cut of it. YouTube very much does. Facebook/IG does. Twitter does. Apple maybe has a problem with apps that are trying to defraud people, but it actively roots those things out.danvm said:
Isn't Apple taking a cut too by receiving billions of dollars from Google every year by making their search engine the default in Safari? Maybe Apple should stop receiving money from Google, and change the default search engine to a company with better privacy track, in addition of removing Google Search / YouTube, Facebook / Instagram, Twitter and Amazon apps. Based in your post, it would be the best for Apple customers, right?AppleInsider said:
Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Amazon have all made various ineffectual announcements about their ad policies. At the same time, they continue to allow frauds to promote and sell fake masks, bogus cures, disinfection robots that don't do anything, and disseminate false information on their social ad networks -- all while taking a cut profiting from advertising this fraudulent activity. Incredibly, this is being done in full public view.
Google pays for access to Appe's platforms, but that access does not allow it to shove ads or videos in front of people.
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COVID-19 disaster shows off Apple's true core
What do you mean by defensiveness?dysamoria said:.His defensiveness of Apple is weird, conspicuous, and embarrassing, at this point. It’s like he’s trying to get Apple’s attention for a job in their PR department.
if anything perhaps I’m a bit lazy in criticizing people who aren’t very smart but have a big platform, while pointing out the obvious in how they are comically wrong. But I’m not defending anything that needs my defense and I certainly wouldn’t want a job in PR. Those people work so hard.
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COVID-19 disaster shows off Apple's true core
Altruism means doing things selflessly for others, it does not mean there is no subsequent benefit to the doer. Mothers are altruistically selfless, and yet we love and celebrate them and take care of them in their old age. They do benefit in some way, despite being selfless and doing things that are right but perhaps not fun to do.hucom2000 said:Let’s be real here for a second.Of course these actions are good. Certainly. But goodness may or may not be the primary motive.Personally, I suspect that the primary motive is to limit the damage to the company‘s bottom line. The longer the crises, the greater the recession, the greater the loss.
It’s smart leadership. Money well spent from which ever angle you look at it. It’s a win-win.
But it’s not altruistic. For that it would have to be selfless - which it is not.What I wrote was that "By unambiguously stating that Apple's executive team has the freedom to make decisions that are right and good, regardless of ROI, Cook was defining Apple as a leader in corporate altruism." One can argue that Apple is benefitting in some ways from its charitable work without changing the fact that Cook has sought to define Apple as being a force for good, beyond just being a manufacturer of good products.
I also laid out why I think Apple is pursuing things like accessibility, supplier responsibility, donating to disaster relief, etc. It's not realistically to limit the damage to the world economy so Apple can sell more iPhones, because feeding the hungry and keeping first responders safer isn't really going to have any discernable effect.
I wrote that it is primarily an exercise of power and capacity. There is nothing that feels better than helping other people and making a real global impact. Cook is not only doing this to feel good himself, but also to attract and retain talent to work at Apple. No amount of stock options or wages can compete with making people feel like they are changing the world and benefittitng society on a global scale. To feel like you are part of such a thing is incredibly empowering and motivating. Self-actualization is the top of the motivation pyramid.
So yes, I agree that Apple is not "doing good" for nothing at all, but the primary benefit is strengthening its people, not defending short term revenues. Sure, people also might tip their scales in decision making to think they'd rather get a Mac or an iPhone than some cheap generic PC or an Android simply because they are aware of Apple's disaster relief, but I can't see that being so important. Being able to attract and retain the best engineers and creatives because they feel like they are changing the world is Apple 101.
And if you saw the reaction and the feeling in the air of the theater full of Apple shareholders watching Cook slice this guy in half and saying Apple doesn't do things only for ROI, it was powerful. All those people felt that much more proud to be investing in a company that had principles and morals and values. It's like being in church and feeling your prophets were great because they were good. It's spine-tingling religion.
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COVID-19 disaster shows off Apple's true core
