Miner Joe
Miner Joe
Jul 28, 2017 · 1 min read

Please let me remind everyone here that, for the health of Mother Earth, spending Federal Reserve Currency on a brand new laptop is one of the worst things you can do for the planet.

The United States is the largest producer of e-waste, with much of this being “recycled” by poor people in far-off countries, with serious consequences to their health and their land’s health.

The embodied energy (energy required to manufacture, AKA carbon into the atmosphere) of a laptop is immense and exceeds the power consumption of a laptop over it’s 3 year estimated lifespan.

The supply chains for many of the materials used in the manufacturing of the laptops combined with a “profit over people” motif fuels slave and child labor and wars at great ecological cost.

As a professional programmer for over 30 years, one of the biggest mistakes I see developers make is to purchase the latest fastest computer, make something cool, and then realize that it runs slow on the majority of the world’s computers, using raw computation power to compensate for understanding Big-O and efficient algorithms.

I recommend picking up a Thinkpad T500 for $50 or free, installing Linux, learning how to program on this machine efficiently and watch the results of your labor truly scream on today’s hardware, while at the same time refusing to add fuel to the engine that is quickly destroying the planet and people’s lives in the process.

    Miner Joe

    Written by

    Miner Joe