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How Steve Jobs Got Green Overnight
Francois writes "At Apple's last special event, Steve Jobs insisted on how environment friendly Apple's new iPod packagings are supposed to be. I don't think he's ever gone that route before. 'We've got some new packagings for the new Nano as well. And it's 52% less volume. This turns out to be an environmentally great thing. Because it dramatically reduces the amount of fossil fuels we have to spend to move these things around the planet.'
Not only is it obvious they shrank the packaging to reduce the cost of shipping around the planet and sell lower than the Zune, but furthermore: there's a reason why he insisted that much, and it's not so very nice."
Why bogus?
Let's say you release mercury into a river. By the time the effects become painfully obvious it'll be already too late: you'll have poisoned fish, and lots of poisoned people who ate that fish, it'll have had a great effect on the ecology of the area...
So I understand Greenpeace's idea as "Even if we're not sure right now, let's be careful with unknown chemicals now, lest we have to figure it out the hard way".
There are actual examples of why being paranoid is a good thing. For instance, Thalidomide