vivweb01blog

Last year  I took a look at various options that we in the UK might use for energy conservation as part of a wider review of our energy crisis and its consequences.  Since then, political parties of all hues have weighed in on the ‘greening’ debate and there appears to be a general consensus that we need to replace fossil fuels with renewables and nuclear for our energy generation and supply. The only dispute is over how quickly we should do it, and in the UK at least this is tied up with the pre-election tussle between the two major parties. (Sunak's recent 'go slow' initiative was designed primarily to wrong-foot Labour on their over-hasty introduction of Cameron's eloquently described 'green crap' and was I suspect largely based on the Uxbridge motoring electorate's by-election 'shot across the bows' against Labour in response to Khan's over-enthusiastic widening of London's ULEZ. It may in practice have given them few crumbs of comfort,...

  Introduction ‘Big Tech’, as the corporate technology giants are often collectively known, have a business model that is based on planned obsolescence. Their argument for defending this practice in the face of recent and growing worldwide concern about e-waste is that they are merely responding to consumer demand, and must therefore ‘innovate to survive’.   What they carefully avoid highlighting is that their products are designed to be replaced frequently,  are usually not ‘upward compatible’ and don’t allow easy upgrades or repairs to the existing product. This applies not just to hardware but to the firmware (i.e. chips) and software (i.e. programs) that invariably control it. Indeed, one of the most frequently used tools in big tech’s ‘obsolescence arsenal’ is introducing new software and / or firmware that is incompatible with older hardware. Moreover, upgrades are often installed automatically, with users having to take active steps to switch off auto-install to...