Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) - Greenpeace USA. Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group $34,592 received from Koch foundations 2005-2011 [Total Koch foundation grants 1997-2011: $42,592] The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is a free market organization with offices in Irvington, New York and Atlanta, Georgia that publishes The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, a largely libertarian publication.
Unscientific skepticism and obstructionism regarding global warming are promoted both on FEE’s blogs and through The Freeman–including Willie Soon, whose grants since 2002 are exclusively from fossil fuel interests, and the promotion of two books by discredited industry apologist scientists Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling. The Foundation for Economic Education promoted a list created by Senator James Inhofe, who gets more political donations from Koch Industries than any other single source, naming 400 scientists who supposedly doubt the climate change scientific consensus. We Need Your Voice. The Secret History of Silicon Valley and the Toxic Remnants of the First Computers How to Sell or Recycle Old Electronics. PEOPLE give all sorts of electronics as gifts around the holidays: phone chargers, e-book readers, video games, drones and more.
But what should we do with the devices they are replacing? Most of our gadgets end up in landfills, others stuffed away in a closet, never to be played with again. In the tech industry, hoarding or disposing of used electronics this way is known as e-waste, and can leave toxic materials and pollutants in the environment. The amount of e-waste is growing every year — by some estimates, consumers threw away 92 billion pounds of used electronics last year, up from 87.7 billion pounds the previous year, according to a report by the United Nations University, the academic and research arm of the United Nations.
Where Your iPhone Goes to Die (and Be Reborn) At a dedicated factory with 24-hour security in an undisclosed location in Hong Kong, iPhones are being carefully and meticulously destroyed. The plant is one of a handful around the world, chosen by Apple Inc. to grind up and recycle its iconic phones. And just as the companies that manufacture the handsets are subject to strict standards and secrecy, the same applies in reverse for their disassembly, right down to weighing the shreds, to make sure nothing is lost. Apple has sold more than 570 million iPhones since that January morning nine years ago when Steve Jobs stepped on stage in San Francisco to “reinvent the phone.” Even Apple doesn’t know how many of those phones are still out there -- in the hands of their second, third or fourth owner, or sitting forgotten in a drawer.
But the company wants to ensure as few as possible end up in landfills. That’s the job of the plant in an industrial park in Hong Kong’s Yuen Long district belonging to Apple contractor Li Tong Group. WSJ CIO Network: Intel Chairman Says There’s Life Left in Moore’s Law - The CIO Report. Does Hardware Even Matter Anymore? We are in the midst of a technological revolution that is every bit as profound as the impact of cheap computing power, but it’s subtler and harder to notice.
It will ease the way for companies launching and updating digital products, but it presents steep new learning curves that companies will have to master if they are to be successful. What I’m referring to is the migration of functionality from hardware to software. In more and more businesses, physical objects are no longer the primary basis for innovation and differentiation. They come second to innovations in computer code. Managers are well aware that Moore’s Law, the idea that the number of transistors on a practical-sized chip doubles every 18 months, has brought us a bounty of cheap computing power, leading to smartphones, tablets, fitness trackers, cloud-based services like Facebook and Uber, and on and on. Consider, for example, how we convert and control electrical power. There are important implications for companies. By 2020, more people will own a phone than have electricity. The mobile phone is conquering the world. Everywhere you turn, someone's glued to the screen of a phone, e-mailing, posting status updates or playing a mobile game.
But that's largely in developed countries like the US or those in Western Europe. In many developing countries, even a basic "dumb" phone is a luxury. That's poised to change in the next four years. By 2020, 5.4 billion people around the world will have a phone, according to Cisco's annual report on mobile traffic growth. In comparison, 5.3 billion people will have electricity, 3.5 billion will have running water and 2.8 billion cars will be on the road. The mass adoption of phones underscores society's increasing reliance on handsets for all facets of life. What is 366.8 exabytes? And while there's all sorts of hype over the Internet of Things, or the concept that every gadget and appliance is connected and talking to each other, it'll be the phones that remain the center of our lives.
Cnet. When you upgrade to a new phone, what do you do with your old one? You might sell it or give it to a friend or family member...or you might stick it in a drawer where it will wait to be discovered by future, nostalgic you. Instead of letting tech waste away in a junk drawer, maybe you should consider donating it. Working technology -- even if it's old -- is expensive, and nonprofit organizations aren't exactly rolling in cash.
Lots of charities would love to repurpose, recycle or sell your old devices (working or not) and offer you a tax break too. Here are some places where you can quickly and easily donate your old tech, from smartphones and tablets to USB flash drives and fitness trackers. Phones and tablets Plenty of charities are willing to take old phones and tablets off your hands. Cell Phones for Soldiers is a nonprofit organization that offers free communication services for deployed troops, as well as veteran assistance. Laptops and desktops Activity trackers. By 2050, our oceans will hold more plastic than fish. A new report claims if the rate of plastic pollution in oceans continues to increase, plastic garbage could outweigh fish by 2050. Video provided by Newsy Newslook (NEWSER) – Use of plastic has increased 20-fold in the past half-century; production of the ubiquitous material is expected to double again in the next 20 years (and nearly quadruple over the next 50).
And, CNN Money reports, nearly a third of all plastic packaging "escapes collection systems. " As for where the rest goes, more than 8 million tons of plastics end up entering our oceans each year, where the pieces can survive for hundreds of years. There are believed to be 165 million tons of it in the ocean right now. And the discarded plastic that doesn't end up in the ocean is likely be put in a landfill; those two resting places end up holding about 70% of our plastic, the Washington Post reports. The solution? More from Newser: Read or Share this story: A smartphone was shipped for 1 of every 5 people alive in 2015. By AppleInsider Staff Thursday, January 28, 2016, 06:04 am PT (09:04 am ET) Manufacturers shipped nearly 1.5 billion smartphones to the world's 7.4 billion inhabitants in 2015 as consumers opted to replace older devices with newer LTE-equipped models or those with larger displays.
The massive, increasingly crowded smartphone sector now counts some 850 competitive brands, according to new data from Counterpoint Research. The market remains a mile wide and inch deep, however — the 20 largest companies account for nearly 85 percent of shipments. Apple has been a major beneficiary of the exploding market, shipping a record 74.8 million iPhones in the holiday quarter. That's second only to Samsung's 81.5 million shipments, though arguably more impressive. Apple sells just a handful of high-end models, the least expensive of which costs $450 without subsidies. In contrast, Samsung sells dozens of device variants — some of which are available for under $100. Utopian Media. Calling an idea ‘utopian’ is normally a way of saying it’s pie-in-the-sky and not worth paying attention to. Far from it. Throughout the ages, a number of philosophers have put forward some highly provocative and interesting utopias, describing ideal arrangements of everything from schools to religion, government to holidays.
Utopian ideas aren’t meant to be immediately practical. That’s precisely why they are so useful: they take our minds off the problems of the here and now and offer us a grander vision of what there is to aim for. The news is the most powerful and prestigious force in contemporary society, replacing religion as the touchstone of authority and meaning. It would be most honest to admit that we don’t yet know: we’re still working it out collectively. . © Getty One thing is for sure: we don’t yet have the news we deserve. In a wiser, more mature society we’d still engage with the news on a daily basis.
Celebrity news Disaster News Foreign News Economic News Politics. Computer E-Waste Could Reach 1bn PCs by 2020 · Environmental Leader · Environmental Management News. The Next Big Thing in Hardware: Smart Garbage. The terrifying true story of the garbage that could kill the whole human race — Matter. The ship plows on with groaning sails, with a heave and a shove, like a fat man shouldering through a crowd. The motion is surprisingly stop-and-go, without ever really stopping, or quite going. In the open cockpit we’ve just been holding on and talking about flotsam: things that find their way into the vastness of the seas, and float and float, and finally maybe wash ashore. Grimmest to be mentioned so far by my knowledgeable companion—trumping the foot in the boot—is the skeleton in the survival suit.
Those are pearls that were his eyes! When we pause the conversation to climb up onto the pitching deck to launch the trawl, I’m keeping Mr. Bones in mind. The Sea Dragon, a 72-foot round-the-world racing sloop, is all taut lines and cleats to trip on, and a fall overboard after dark would be a possible death sentence. For the quantities in play now beggar the human imagination. He chucks the trawl into the foam-flecked water. “That’s awesome!” We’ve been talking a lot about rafts. How to Build a Computer, Lesson 1: Hardware Basics. The Best Way To Recycle Your Old Gadgets. Donate old gadgets for a good cause video. [MUSIC] Goodwill and Dell have teamed up to recycle electronics of any brand at more than 2000 Goodwill locations nationwide. Find one near you at dell.com/reconnect. Every item will be carefully sorted to determine whether it can be easily spiffed up and sold at a Goodwill store, dismantled and used for parts, or completely recycled.
Cell Phones for Soldiers collects used phones, resells them and turns the money into pre-paid international calling cards so soldiers overseas can call their loved ones. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Shelter Alliance work in a similar way. Need for speed: Why computers stopped getting faster - tech - 23 February 2015. (Image: Pierluigi Longo) Dizzily increasing PC power used to be a given. No longer – speeds stalled a decade ago and only a radical reboot of computing will accelerate things TEN years ago, computers stopped getting faster. Stroking your sleek smartphone or latest laptop, this may seem a rather implausible statement.
That’s true – in a way. You don’t need to be the type who camps outside stores for the latest gizmo to be concerned ... Humans Threw Out 92 Billion Pounds of Electronics Last Year Does Hardware Even Matter Anymore? ‘Future Shock’: Orson Welles narrates gloriously schlocky documentary on techno-pessimism, 1972. ‘Future Shock’: Orson Welles narrates gloriously schlocky documentary on techno-pessimism, 1972 I was aware of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock when I was growing up partly because my dad was sort of in the futurology business himself; he was an analyst at the Hudson Institute under Herman Kahn from the mid-1970s through the late 1980s, which specialized in the project of using trends to generate scenarios about the future—where a certain kind of counterintuitive reasoning usefully pushed back against the excesses of the alarmist left, as represented by Toffler and The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome.
(Kahn was a brilliant man who is mostly forgotten today, but was prominent enough that he was partly the basis for the character of Dr. Strangelove and was also mordantly represented, after a fashion, by the Walter Matthau character “Professor Groeteschele” in the 1964 movie Fail Safe.) Alvin Toffler. Oh no!! Oh, if you want to see Toffler himself he pops up around the 38th minute. Computer Recycling/IT Asset Disposal (ITAD) in Atlanta GA. The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust. From where I'm standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky.
Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge. Best of 2015 Our top stories Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the refineries that surround the lake. The smell of sulphur and the roar of the pipes invades my senses. It feels like hell on Earth. Welcome to Baotou, the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia. You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking. Element of success Rare earth minerals have played a key role in the transformation and explosive growth of China's world-beating economy over the last few decades.
In 1950, before rare earth mining started in earnest, the city had a population of 97,000. Quiet plant. Does Hardware Even Matter Anymore? Humans Threw Out 92 Billion Pounds of Electronics Last Year Computer E-Waste Could Reach 1bn PCs by 2020 · Environmental Leader · Environmental Management News. The depressing truth about e-waste: 10 things to know. In 2012, the United Nations reported that in five years, the world's electronic waste would grow by 33% from 49.7 million tons to 65.4 million tons. That's the weight of 200 Empire State Buildings or 11 Great Pyramids of Giza. Considering the lifespan of a cell phone is now only 18 months and a laptop's life span is only around two years, that rapid growth rate isn't surprising. What is surprising, however, is how little the public knows about e-waste and how to properly dispose of electronics.
Here are 10 things to know about the e-waste life cycle. 1. Electronic waste includes all discarded electric or electronic devices with battery power or circuitry or electric elements. 2. Electronic waste is a globalized business, and about 70% to 80% of it is shipped to landfills in many developing nations, where it is sorted and sold for scrap metal or burned to extract materials, which is harmful to people and the surrounding environment. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Also see.