As is the intent with most serial liars, no? Twist you up so bad that it quite literally jams up your reasoning ability, making you more susceptible to the con.
That generalization certainly doesn't fit with this 1977 edition human. The loudest 24/7 thing in my house is the compressor on my fridge. Silence (and office doors) are priceless.
Just dealt with this in the US. And what did they replace it with? A "4G" meter. So, what, about 8 years worth of functionality before that tech is turned off and yet another few million pieces of e-waste are generated?
I'm dealing with this in a slightly different context right now - installing cellular remote access/VPN appliances in industrial manufacturing equipment. The equipment is required to have a lifespan of at least 10 years. Our adjacent equipment regularly lasts double that. Some of the equipment is built around castings and transformers that are 4-10x that age.
But they also want me to be able to dial into the equipment later, and won't give me WAN access. But no cellular vendor in their right mind will certify that the adjoining towers will have any particular frequency available for more than ~5 years, typically limiting it to a warranty of 3 years. This isn't the only pain point - what about the licensing server that the proprietary IDE for the PLC calls out to? The operating system on which said IDE is installed? Security protocols on the SCADA uplink? Replacement parts and critical spares? Good luck!
Unfortunately, a huge amount of industry is effectively subsidized by breakneck investment in consumer smartphones, automotive, and PC equipment. People don't care or don't understand that their choices on the showroom floor for the glossier, flashier, 'smarter' gear result in painful, expensive obsolescence just a couple years in the future. Manufacturers are only incentivized to sell new products and ignore old products, we need a massive shift in consumer preference if we want to avoid this.
Nobody cares about e-waste. If they did companies would stop producing new products at breakneck speed and consumers would stop buying them.
Instead they care about the optics, so you get the ocassional Apple video about how they replaced foo material with bar, while creating not servicable BS - oh, and things like paper straws.
Recycling is also mostly BS (things in the "recycle" bins just end in landfills abroad).
So this is just another drop in the huge ever increasing pile.
Nobody with money cares about e-waste. Those of us on a tight budget value our devices and lament the difficulty of repair.
My phone is 6 years old, and I'm hoping to be able to pay someone to replace the screen and battery at some point (knock on wood).
I specifically bought a gaming laptop to replace my hoity-toity Surface-with-the-dead-battery-base, thinking it would be easier to repair. Come charge port issues, I happily tear it down only to find that it's soldered in (my 2008 HP laptop did not have this problem).
Even when consumers are forced by circumstances to reduce, and make efforts to reuse, companies essentilly force recycle (which, as you said, is essentially "trash").
It’s sad but the best way to avoid e-waste on a personal level appears to be “buy the absolute most common of everything and take care of it”. Because those are the most likely to have parts or even whole working copies available.
And then you still run into “repairing this phone screen is $200, you can buy a used one on eBay for $100” issue.
I disagree. The difficulty of replacing tech changes one's relationship to one's devices. Things that I see people throw away as "e-waste" are really, "Things someone couldn't be assed to repair or repurpose." For example, broken TVs could be repurposed as large light panels (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4), or their main boards could be hacked for fun and profit (https://hackaday.com/2022/11/14/a-single-board-computer-from...). When I see a broken TV, even one I don't own, that's where the pain comes from. Same with phones, laptops, etc. We throw away so mny perfectly good general-purpose computers, it's insane. When we run out of a necessary resource for their manufacture, will we just be scavenging them?
Please direct your attention to any instance of the vast amount of media concerning the inability of people who grew up poor to shake not only their habits but how that background makes them feel about the world. One was up for several Academy Awards last year. The answer is an unequivocal, if not necessarily universal, yes.
But that's also immaterial. That a person's feelings, thoughts, and behaviors might change when they find themselves in a different socioeconomic context doesn't make those experiences any less meaningful - to themselves or society. If personal scarcity inspires more sustainable behavior amidst an environment of eventual, absolute planetary scarcity, which can be applied more widely, all the better.
> and yet another few million pieces of e-waste are generated
That's money generated while the e-waste is not factored in. I know I'm stating the obvious. But it's a problem with being realistic, as you start seeing idiosyncrasies everywhere: I run my household on 4g as I can reach realistic speeds of 100Mb/s. Theoretically that goes up to 150Mb/s. A 4k stream (compressed without visual loss) requires 15Mb/s. So 10 people in a household could simultaneously watch 4k content.
Did I fail at math? Why does anyone need 5g? What for?
Well, ironically, 5g is much better designed for such small devices to connect to the cell network: it can support lower-power devices and they take a lot less network resources. 5G is an infrastructure upgrade more than a consumer upgrade (consumer benefit is incidental: the network is less congested, especially in denser areas)
Basically it is so your smart TV can upload all your watch information without getting you to cough up your wifi password. Soon when you buy a toilet seat it will have a 5G modem in it and upload your bowel movement information to the cloud automatically. The possibilities are endless.
I run my household on 4G too. I live at the center of the town. My ”realistic” speeds with a CAT4 LTE router are 4-34mbps. My guess for this range, is that other people are using the network too, so I cannot get the max bandwidth all the time.
I also own a CAT6 LTE router (serving currently another house), which doubles the bandwidth, so around 8-68mpbs, quite better. With a 5G router I expect quadruple speeds, so around 32-270mbps.
Now we finally reach a usable area, where I can zoom or netflix anytime during the day. :)
I felt the same way during the 5G hype phase. There were all kinds of sales pitches about how it would enable new applications, but I never really got what more bandwidth was supposed to accomplish.
I'm not sure how modular they are, if they're just replacing a transmitter or something, I've seen some places transmitting only locally (zigbee or other) then a module on the street syncing upstream
But let's say even $500 (it's probably cheaper) for something that lasts 8 years is still much cheaper than sending people to get the readings
RE "...ut let's say even $500 for something that lasts 8 years is still much cheaper than sending people to get the readings ..." If a meter is read every 3 months, that is 32 reads in 8 years. That's about $15 a read In my street, it takes a meter reader about 2 minutes max to read , record a meter and walk to next meter. need to allow for overheads, so to me its unknown if it actually is cheaper or not to send a human ???
My gas company has monthly bills, but read the meter annually. They estimate usage other months, you send in any corrections if it's wrong, rnd at the end of the year they read the meter & reconcile any discrepancy.
> But let's say even $500 (it's probably cheaper) for something that lasts 8 years is still much cheaper than sending people to get the readings
Probably true, but only as long as one can continue to externalize the cost of handling the resulting e-waste to future generations or at least current-day taxpayers.
"e-waste" is, unfortunately, mostly a term used to deflect from the real issues with all the garbage produced. Shipping and installing the meters likely generates more waste than producing the meters, themselves.
Right, but that's also the case for the cost of handling the resulting e-waste.
Maybe they meant "externalize" in the "externalities" sense—environmental damage, etc? If so that makes some sense, but for a full accounting you'd have to compare that to the externalities caused by all the people driving around to take readings (tailpipe emissions, adding to traffic, etc).
I think in reality it is a more efficient use of bandwidth using GSM. The alternative means your utility would have to maintain infrastructure and use up alternative bandwidth. In reality I think there should be regulation to keep some really basic form operating like 2G with GPRS or something on all networks.
Meters are already hardwired to each other. There's little reason to need it to be wireless to begin with.
But either way, it's common for them to also chirp at 915MHz. They don't need their own band to operate, they can participate in these same bands used by other devices. They're not sending that much data.
One could mandate a modular design so that the communication pcb could be replaced, i.e. less e-waste. I wonder if smart meter manufacturers stay in business long enough for it to matter.
You do. It’s hidden in that the power company picks up the initial tab, but don’t let that confuse you into thinking that money doesn’t eventually come out of your pocket.
Ha! Good joke. These days they just send out letters asking the customer to read the meter instead. First time I got one of those, I was thinking "What? No, that's your job. Don't I pay you for that?"
Someone other than you has to read it once in a while; every 3-12 months most likely. I report mine (via SMS) so I don't get a surprise bill (or find I've been giving them a six month interest-free loan) when the estimated use and the actual use differ.
> Someone other than you has to read it once in a while; every 3-12 months most likely.
Not here. I assume that as long as your consumption figures aren't wildly implausible, they just leave you alone. You can voluntarily upload a picture of your meter while submitting the reading, but I've never bothered and they've never requested it.
Probably there are random spot checks, but personally I've never been subjected to one of those. They might also catch you when the meter finally gets replaced at some point, but power meters seem to be relatively long-lived, so they probably won't rely on that alone.
It also really doesn't help that some of the power companies have started sending letters/emails to their customers saying "your meter has reached the end of its life, we have a legal obligation to replace it, please arrange an appointment to fit a smart meter". They're lying to try to force you to allow them to install a smart meter, and they're only doing that because so many people have said that they don't want one.
Most of the world reports their meters regularly to get accurate measures - the company still sends someone out every 6-12 months to true up. You're free to lie or ignore it, but the bill will come due just the same.
Many of them don’t even need to be directly read - they have a little sensor that can be read from nearby, sometimes even just by a utility truck driving by.
This exists for incoming ACH transfers, and it is called a UPIC account. It is used so that a company can give out their account info to customers, but the bank will deny any third-party withdrawals. The money is directly transferred into the company's "real" bank account.
This takes me back to my BBS days. ANSI animations were all the rage. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the software I used, but in the mid 90s I created numerous ANSI animations that looked very much like the movie.
Add SIT (aka intercept tones, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_information_tone) to your voicemail greeting. Send robocalls to VM. After a few months, they've dropped to zero for me and mine. Automated systems hear them and identify them as "invalid" numbers. YMMV
As is the intent with most serial liars, no? Twist you up so bad that it quite literally jams up your reasoning ability, making you more susceptible to the con.