Apple
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Bill Gates’ blind spots
So right, and yet so not-quite-rightPhoto: Suzie KatzWhen Bill Gates first jumped into the energy discussion with a big TED talk, I wrote a post called “Why Bill Gates is wrong.” In retrospect, I should have been a bit more diplomatic. I should have started with a post called “Why it’s super-fantastic that someone as […]
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Want to save the planet? Al Gore has an app for that
An Inconvenient Truth started out as a book and became an Oscar-winning movie. Al Gore’s follow-up book, Our Choice, has now gone multimedia too, but in a whole new way, as a first-of-its-kind app complete with documentary footage and even a trailer set to swelling, melodramatic music. Watch it here: After Our Choice was published […]
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Earth Day Aftermath – – Hope or Despair?
On Earth Day last week, I saw a burger wrapper tossed from an old Buick and was stunned that anyone still thought it was OK to use our shared city habitat as a personal dumpster. Later that same day however, I saw a homeless man pick up a Styrofoam cup from the gutter and drop […]
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Dirty clouds: Greenpeace ranks tech giants on their data centers’ coal dependency
Tech companies have something hanging over their heads.Photo: The SharpteamAs I sit here at the Local 123 café in Berkeley on Earth Day, a dozen hipsters are transfixed by their Macbooks, their heads lost in the cloud. According to a Greenpeace report [PDF] released this week, all those presumably green and well-meaning digital workers-slash-slackers are […]
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How green is your iPhone?
Carbon emissions? Energy overuse? Sketchy labor relations? There's an app for that, and it's all of them. This infographic from Geekaphone (there's way more, it's huge — click on our excerpt to see the rest) illustrates that the iPhone, like basically any modern convenience, is probably going to kill us all sooner or later. (What […]
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Your iPod is polluting China and L.A. — and Wyoming might be next
Your 4.9-ounce iPod is responsible for at least 200 times its weight in greenhouse-gas emissions.When you bought your last Apple iPod, you may have been aware that it had been manufactured at a factory in China, perhaps the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen in the province of Guangzhou. (Let’s put aside for the moment the working […]
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Annie Leonard's 'Story of Electronics' tells how our gadgets are 'designed for the dump' [VIDEO]
My newfound obsession with where my tech gadgets come from just got stoked by a new video -- which I watched on a tech gadget. You should, too.
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Like your dinner, your gadgets come from somewhere
While writing about food politics on my Dell "Latitude" laptop, I often daydream about a sleek new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. (And an iPad, and maybe an iPhone.) Or at least I did -- until I read about the conditions of the workers who make them. Why do we spend so much time thinking about where our food comes from, while ignoring the origins of the latest tech craze?
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New Apple store in Chicago means shiny new train station, but who will fix the rest of the system?
Apple paid $4 million to renovate a dilapidated transit station near its new Chicago store. Great. But what if you don't live near an Apple store?