Even better is a privacy policy that goes beyond honesty and understandability to:
- Actually value and promote privacy as a central goal of the service provided by the site - Detail potential caveats with different options or approaches - Specifically detail what information is shared with whom and for what purpose - Link to "competing" services with similar policies
Care to share a little summary? I'm not inclined to give Hitchens my money just on the recommendation of some random comment on Slashdot, but I've heard a lot of what Hitchens has to say about religion and he rarely gives anything other than the Abrahamic religions more than a few offhand remarks. What exactly is his critique of, for instance, mindfulness?
Sorry, I should rephrase that: "economically liberal", taken literally, is meant more or less to mean the same as the colloquial "economically conservative" *is meant*, irrespective of implementation.
The rhetoric of "economic conservatives" and actual existing economic conservative policy are drastically different. Even as a left libertarian, a lot of "economic conservative" talk appeals to me; but I know better.
Well one reason is that at least some of their claims about huge improvements in IE 9 are true, whereas similar claims in the past required all sorts of mental acrobatics. The IE 9 development process doesn't really have an analogue in IE's past.
First of all, I (and I'll not speak for all left libertarians here, as there is some debate on the matter, but I think I'm expressing the majority opinion) distinguish "personal property" (that is, what you own and use) from "private property" (that is, property owned privately, usually by an organization, but not owned or used by an individual, and leveraged to extract profit). This distinction is important before any discussion of any wealth-distribution theory.
Personal property is personal property. I can think of scarce few real leftists (which is to say, true socialists, communists, anarcho-communists, left-libertarians, etc) who include personal property when they say "property is theft". Private property, on the other hand, being the spoils of a great and sustained theft from the public, belong to the public and should be returned to the public.
Note here that I do not mean the state when I say public. Which is to say that I'm not an advocate for systems like the Soviet Union, but I am an advocate for movements like the worker takeover of factories we see in some Latin American countries.
In short, I advocate taking back what was stolen from us.
The problem is that the term "liberal" carries a few different contradictory meanings. It's generally safe to assume that:
- "socially liberal" is usually meant to be taken literally; - "economically liberal", in (and perhaps some places outside) the US, is usually taken to mean something like a hybrid of corporatist and social democratic economic policies; - "economically liberal", taken literally, is meant more or less to mean the same as the colloquial "economically conservative".
Well, I can't speak for right libertarians but for left libertarians it's easy. We don't think the solution to political problems is to throw money at them, we think there are underlying systemic problems that need to be addressed, in a fundamental way rather than a patchwork way.
Poverty doesn't exist because the government doesn't have adequate social programs to funnel money into the hands of poor people; poverty exists because wealth is power and is used to leverage more wealth and power. The genesis of wealth is the conversion of public property into private, which is to say theft from society. And this wealth was not created in a market, but in feudal societies with brutal enforcement of class. It was preserved when the "enlightened" transitioned to markets.
All of these shenanigans are shielded by even the most "liberal" governments, not surprisingly run by the same wealth interests. Nuts to the lot of them.
Reincarnation as you've described it—that one being lives a cycle of lives along a hierarchy of beings, some better positioned to achieve enlightenment—isn't necessarily Buddhist (though it may be found among some Buddhists, as that conception is found in Hinduism, from which Buddhism originally derived). The Buddhist concept of rebirth (which varies between traditions, and even between individuals) is a bit more subtle, suggesting that when a given consciousness passes from life to death, it will become part of a broader set of influences which contribute to the beginning of new consciousnesses. Which is to say that in Buddhism, a life which exists now may not be the same as some previously-existing life, and that a consciousness existing now may not remain intact or unaltered as its existence carries on in other forms. In this conception, an ego is a lot like karma (deed or action), in that in a strict sense it goes on existing, but it becomes a part of the broader world and is subject to all of the same influences that affect and disperse the rest of these phenomena.
As far as your last sentence, I think it's a rare Buddhist (and probably one who has come to their belief as a matter of tradition rather than direct interest) who sees their peers harming themselves and isn't moved by compassion to try to help them cease it. Recognizing that self and ego are impermanent, a Bodhisattva takes responsibility to help to bring all other beings along for the ride, so to speak, toward enlightenment.
Like I said in my first comment, they can certainly be implemented the same way, but in the trends in front-end development that has not generally been the case. The semantic shift has reflected also a philosophical shift.
I meant no insult by my comment, and I hope it wasn't taken that way. My point was that the difference in approach (and terminology) marked a major improvement in front-end web development. I explained the differences in philosophy, and I don't think they're analogous to "glass half full/empty". They are really two different approaches to what responsibilities a front-end developer has. "Graceful degradation", for example, says that Slashdot, at minimum, should have plain HTML + HTTP GET and POST equivalents to each of its various Ajax-centric comment controls—with no suggestion as to how either is implemented. "Progressive enhancement" says, instead, that Slashdot should be a fully usable and functional application before any client-side work is done. This has a lot more to say about the importance of implementing your plain HTML + HTTP interactions in the spirit of your application, rather than putting together a half-assed fallback in order to check "graceful degradation" off the list.
This analogy cuts both ways. Like text, some packages contain contents which are harmed by being manipulated in that way; others simply don't. At small font sizes, the Apple model favors fragile packages—font "integrity", as if a bunch of slightly colored greyish pixels are what the font designers intended—and the Microsoft model favors flexible packages—readability. The former does a (minor and improved over the years, IMO) disservice to readability, while the latter does a disservice to aesthetics. At larger sizes, however, Apple's model pays off and Microsoft's has many artifacts. And where the analogy totally falls apart is that Apple has compromised somewhat on this in newer versions of OS X, slightly hinting smaller fonts toward pixel boundaries; which is to say, the consensus is that the USPS should crush, or damage, some smaller packages for the greater good of better overall shipping performance. It wouldn't surprise me if the USPS thinks this way, but I'm sure you and I don't.
Anyway, I think it pays not to be a font purist, and to prefer pixel-perfect rendering where it counts (WYSIWYG production), and compromise where it doesn't (screen text).
That said, I prefer Apple's "Light LCD" setting (now banished from the UI but can be restored with a plist edit) over any other implementation.
I'm not sure if that's true. Safari on OS X implements its own text renderer which has slightly different results from the OS renderer. Has Firefox adopted the same renderer, or has it adopted the system renderer?
There is a relationship between the points, which is that often when designers are looking for pixel perfection, the implementation of their design fails to account for variations in the user's rendering environment, and things actually break when text size changes. It's a correlation, not a causation, but it's a common correlation and people who want control over text size have a legitimate gripe with pixel-perfect designers.
That said, more and more browsers do full-page zooming, making text size relatively irrelevant. Except that browser-wide full-page zooming preferences aren't implemented everywhere.
the official claim was that IE8 fully supports CSS 2.1
Unfortunately, the other official claim at the time was that IE prioritizes interoperability over standards compliance, and the two claims together did not jibe. I've encountered far too many instances where IE 8 was correct and the competitors were correct also, except the standard allowed for differences of interpretation and IE 8 alone took different interpretations.
Moreover, IE 8's biggest gaping hole was not its HTML or CSS support, nor even some of its oddities in ECMAScript, but its utterly disfigured DOM implementation, largely unchanged from IE 6 (if not earlier). There are so many analogous-but-slightly-different IEisms in the DOM that huge general-purpose libraries are necessary for most developers to do anything useful on the client-side that isn't missing core features in one implementation or the other.
I haven't seen much from MS about IE 9's DOM improvements, and I'm kind of scared to find out if it's still being hung out to dry. My hope is that, while their public projection of "HTML5" is far too broad to be meaningful, their internal priority does include true HTML5 compliance, which will standardize the DOM.
I know it's a petty nitpick, but hear me out. There's a reason the more intelligent among front-end web developers ditched the term "graceful degradation" for "progressive enhancement". For all but a minuscule (but growing) portion of possible web tasks, the client-side approach has a direct HTML/HTTP/server-side analog with—if we're doing our jobs right on the client-side—a UI that is less usable and slower. Even though the two philosophies could be implemented the same way, they rarely are. The philosophy of "graceful degradation" is essentially that the UI is the application and its core functionality is an afterthought to be implemented as a fallback; the philosophy of "progressive enhancement" is essentially that the core functionality is the core responsibility, and that client-side behavior is meant to improve the user experience. Another difference between the philosophies is that, where the analogs exist between client-side and traditional functionality, "graceful degradation" tends to carry with it an implication of increased development cost, whereas "progressive enhancement" promotes a model that allows simplified development. (Again, note that I am not discussing the terminology so much as existing differences in approach.)
I think, though, there's a line to be drawn between content delivery and applications, in terms of the responsibility of web developers. I don't think that information on the Internet should be hidden behind a wall like requiring Javascript; but I do think that some of the capabilities of web-based applications don't have a direct analog to HTML/HTTP/server, or can't be implemented that way in a reasonably acceptable way. As an example, web-based video can definitely be implemented without client-side scripting; but web-based video editing cannot (within users' perfectly reasonable expectations). You might say that this latter category ought not be implemented in the browser in the first place, but for better or worse you're fighting a trend that's probably not going to die any time soon.
Greenpeace isn't particularly interested in the environment. It's more about a social agenda. See, for example, the opposition to any nuclear power, even if it reduces pollution.
What are you smoking? The extraction and use of radioactive fuel dramatically increases pollution. It nearly completely eliminates greenhouse gas emissions, but there's a clear environmental motive behind opposing solutions to global warming whose side effects will poison the planet.
This is like saying that Greenpeace isn't particularly interested in the environment because they don't support blotting out the sun to reduce global warming.
Perhaps they didn't think it would? After all, at the time, environmentalism did not have a positive public image in America. It was seen almost as a gateway to Communism.
And still is. In certain circles. Which aren't Apple's target market and you know it.
Also, Apple's website tends to focus on its products, with a lot less of the corporate boosterism and irrelevant blather than its competitors. Surely, environmental policy is an internal matter, not something that should be exploited for PR purposes? I certainly don't trust companies that trumpet their environmental "credentials" too loudly. It's usually not a genuine concern.
I'm not reading from a script. That's basically what Greenpeace did at the time. They declared Apple worse than the rest of the industry, simply based on statements on their website. Perhaps their methodology has improved since then, but it was definitely suspect at the time, and almost made me stop donating to Greenpeace because of such sensationalistic and suspect tactics.
That's not what happened, that's what gushing Apple fanatics declared had happened because they were experiencing cognitive dissonance. Read Greenpeace's actual literature.
And yet, that's exactly what they did. They gave competitors a better score, not based on actual practice, but based on hot-air promises on their websites.
Okay, let's try an exercise and assume your version is true. Apple had better environmental policies than its competitors. Greenpeace, an environmentalist organization, dishonestly promoted Apple's competitors with worse policies. To make Apple look bad....
Why? How on Earth is it in Greenpeace's interest to promote worse polluters? Can you not see how this is an incredible claim?
I very much doubt that public pressure had anything to do with it.
I don't doubt that you do. And frankly, with the position that you've entrenched yourself into, it's probably impossible that you would see it any other way. Of course, RoHS (which, incidentally, is discussed in Greenpeace's literature) is quite plainly *also* a product of public pressure.
But I gotta ask. Given that you think this public pressure was unfair to Apple, how can you also think it's a "sideshow"? And given that you think it's so ineffective, why bother donating to Greenpeace?
Apple is well-known as not being very public about its operations.
More nonsense. Apple is well-known as not being very public about its future products, but being exceptionally public about whatever it thinks will improve its brand image. Apple is a media darling for chrissake, not the CIA.
Basing an environmental assessment on statements on their website is absurd.
Agreed. Good thing I didn't say anything about that. Are you reading from a script?
Furthermore anybody can make bullshit PR statements on their website about what they are going to do, but it's action that matters.
Again, agreed. But again, not related to what I said.
Apple was already well ahead of the industry at the time in shipping products with minimal packaging, and products that were more energy-efficient than the competition, and used less materials. Yet Greenpeace, of course, does not take that into account.
Yes, Apple had some better policies than its competition. It also had some worse policies than its competition. Greenpeace did account for these differences, and at the time the presence of certain harmful chemicals and the absence of a good recycling program—in contrast with either existing practices of explicit corporate timelines from competitors—did not reflect positively on Apple. Obviously, Apple's policies changed. And obviously, Greenpeace's assessment reflects that.
You should actually read their literature to understand how they rate corporations' environmental records. Some of it has to do with recognizing that current efforts are commendable but not adequate, and that transparency about future programs improves trust in a corporation's record. I don't really understand how this is debatable. A corporation with harmful business practices either plans (for whatever reason) to eliminate those practices, or it does not; the former will gladly disclose that, particularly if brand perception is part of their business strategy, but the latter obviously will not.
Furthermore, if you bother to read Greenpeace's literature on the subject, you'll discover that *exactly the same criteria* is used in rating every electronics producer they analyze. Greenpeace is not interested in making polluters look *good*, so you'd have to have a pretty wild imagination to believe that they fixed their own reports just to make Apple look bad by promoting its competitors. Hell, the most recent report *actually gives Apple bonus points*.
How do you know this wasn't already planned before Greenpeace got involved? Crediting Greenpeace with these changes is not based on facts.
I don't read tea leaves, and I doubt you do either. First of all, I don't credit Greenpeace with these changes, but I do think that they contributed. Apple, ultimately, made the changes as a clear response to public pressure to do so—this much is obvious because public pressure was the only business case for the changes. Greenpeace contributed to that public pressure.
Slashdot Mirror
!= hash browns :(
Oh and, they detail what has changed and when. Can't forget that.
Even better is a privacy policy that goes beyond honesty and understandability to:
- Actually value and promote privacy as a central goal of the service provided by the site
- Detail potential caveats with different options or approaches
- Specifically detail what information is shared with whom and for what purpose
- Link to "competing" services with similar policies
http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html
Care to share a little summary? I'm not inclined to give Hitchens my money just on the recommendation of some random comment on Slashdot, but I've heard a lot of what Hitchens has to say about religion and he rarely gives anything other than the Abrahamic religions more than a few offhand remarks. What exactly is his critique of, for instance, mindfulness?
Wait, it's nonconformist to support one of the two dominant political trends in the most powerful country in the world? Lolwhut.
I can't imagine that not existing would be anything other than peaceful and silent. If it's loud and violent, I don't want to ever not exist.
Just wait til you graduate from "I can't even tell anymore whether I'm trolling at any given time."
Sorry, I should rephrase that: "economically liberal", taken literally, is meant more or less to mean the same as the colloquial "economically conservative" *is meant*, irrespective of implementation.
The rhetoric of "economic conservatives" and actual existing economic conservative policy are drastically different. Even as a left libertarian, a lot of "economic conservative" talk appeals to me; but I know better.
Well one reason is that at least some of their claims about huge improvements in IE 9 are true, whereas similar claims in the past required all sorts of mental acrobatics. The IE 9 development process doesn't really have an analogue in IE's past.
First of all, I (and I'll not speak for all left libertarians here, as there is some debate on the matter, but I think I'm expressing the majority opinion) distinguish "personal property" (that is, what you own and use) from "private property" (that is, property owned privately, usually by an organization, but not owned or used by an individual, and leveraged to extract profit). This distinction is important before any discussion of any wealth-distribution theory.
Personal property is personal property. I can think of scarce few real leftists (which is to say, true socialists, communists, anarcho-communists, left-libertarians, etc) who include personal property when they say "property is theft". Private property, on the other hand, being the spoils of a great and sustained theft from the public, belong to the public and should be returned to the public.
Note here that I do not mean the state when I say public. Which is to say that I'm not an advocate for systems like the Soviet Union, but I am an advocate for movements like the worker takeover of factories we see in some Latin American countries.
In short, I advocate taking back what was stolen from us.
The problem is that the term "liberal" carries a few different contradictory meanings. It's generally safe to assume that:
- "socially liberal" is usually meant to be taken literally;
- "economically liberal", in (and perhaps some places outside) the US, is usually taken to mean something like a hybrid of corporatist and social democratic economic policies;
- "economically liberal", taken literally, is meant more or less to mean the same as the colloquial "economically conservative".
Well, I can't speak for right libertarians but for left libertarians it's easy. We don't think the solution to political problems is to throw money at them, we think there are underlying systemic problems that need to be addressed, in a fundamental way rather than a patchwork way.
Poverty doesn't exist because the government doesn't have adequate social programs to funnel money into the hands of poor people; poverty exists because wealth is power and is used to leverage more wealth and power. The genesis of wealth is the conversion of public property into private, which is to say theft from society. And this wealth was not created in a market, but in feudal societies with brutal enforcement of class. It was preserved when the "enlightened" transitioned to markets.
All of these shenanigans are shielded by even the most "liberal" governments, not surprisingly run by the same wealth interests. Nuts to the lot of them.
Reincarnation as you've described it—that one being lives a cycle of lives along a hierarchy of beings, some better positioned to achieve enlightenment—isn't necessarily Buddhist (though it may be found among some Buddhists, as that conception is found in Hinduism, from which Buddhism originally derived). The Buddhist concept of rebirth (which varies between traditions, and even between individuals) is a bit more subtle, suggesting that when a given consciousness passes from life to death, it will become part of a broader set of influences which contribute to the beginning of new consciousnesses. Which is to say that in Buddhism, a life which exists now may not be the same as some previously-existing life, and that a consciousness existing now may not remain intact or unaltered as its existence carries on in other forms. In this conception, an ego is a lot like karma (deed or action), in that in a strict sense it goes on existing, but it becomes a part of the broader world and is subject to all of the same influences that affect and disperse the rest of these phenomena.
As far as your last sentence, I think it's a rare Buddhist (and probably one who has come to their belief as a matter of tradition rather than direct interest) who sees their peers harming themselves and isn't moved by compassion to try to help them cease it. Recognizing that self and ego are impermanent, a Bodhisattva takes responsibility to help to bring all other beings along for the ride, so to speak, toward enlightenment.
the humanity.
Like I said in my first comment, they can certainly be implemented the same way, but in the trends in front-end development that has not generally been the case. The semantic shift has reflected also a philosophical shift.
I meant no insult by my comment, and I hope it wasn't taken that way. My point was that the difference in approach (and terminology) marked a major improvement in front-end web development. I explained the differences in philosophy, and I don't think they're analogous to "glass half full/empty". They are really two different approaches to what responsibilities a front-end developer has. "Graceful degradation", for example, says that Slashdot, at minimum, should have plain HTML + HTTP GET and POST equivalents to each of its various Ajax-centric comment controls—with no suggestion as to how either is implemented. "Progressive enhancement" says, instead, that Slashdot should be a fully usable and functional application before any client-side work is done. This has a lot more to say about the importance of implementing your plain HTML + HTTP interactions in the spirit of your application, rather than putting together a half-assed fallback in order to check "graceful degradation" off the list.
This analogy cuts both ways. Like text, some packages contain contents which are harmed by being manipulated in that way; others simply don't. At small font sizes, the Apple model favors fragile packages—font "integrity", as if a bunch of slightly colored greyish pixels are what the font designers intended—and the Microsoft model favors flexible packages—readability. The former does a (minor and improved over the years, IMO) disservice to readability, while the latter does a disservice to aesthetics. At larger sizes, however, Apple's model pays off and Microsoft's has many artifacts. And where the analogy totally falls apart is that Apple has compromised somewhat on this in newer versions of OS X, slightly hinting smaller fonts toward pixel boundaries; which is to say, the consensus is that the USPS should crush, or damage, some smaller packages for the greater good of better overall shipping performance. It wouldn't surprise me if the USPS thinks this way, but I'm sure you and I don't.
Anyway, I think it pays not to be a font purist, and to prefer pixel-perfect rendering where it counts (WYSIWYG production), and compromise where it doesn't (screen text).
That said, I prefer Apple's "Light LCD" setting (now banished from the UI but can be restored with a plist edit) over any other implementation.
I'm not sure if that's true. Safari on OS X implements its own text renderer which has slightly different results from the OS renderer. Has Firefox adopted the same renderer, or has it adopted the system renderer?
There is a relationship between the points, which is that often when designers are looking for pixel perfection, the implementation of their design fails to account for variations in the user's rendering environment, and things actually break when text size changes. It's a correlation, not a causation, but it's a common correlation and people who want control over text size have a legitimate gripe with pixel-perfect designers.
That said, more and more browsers do full-page zooming, making text size relatively irrelevant. Except that browser-wide full-page zooming preferences aren't implemented everywhere.
the official claim was that IE8 fully supports CSS 2.1
Unfortunately, the other official claim at the time was that IE prioritizes interoperability over standards compliance, and the two claims together did not jibe. I've encountered far too many instances where IE 8 was correct and the competitors were correct also, except the standard allowed for differences of interpretation and IE 8 alone took different interpretations.
Moreover, IE 8's biggest gaping hole was not its HTML or CSS support, nor even some of its oddities in ECMAScript, but its utterly disfigured DOM implementation, largely unchanged from IE 6 (if not earlier). There are so many analogous-but-slightly-different IEisms in the DOM that huge general-purpose libraries are necessary for most developers to do anything useful on the client-side that isn't missing core features in one implementation or the other.
I haven't seen much from MS about IE 9's DOM improvements, and I'm kind of scared to find out if it's still being hung out to dry. My hope is that, while their public projection of "HTML5" is far too broad to be meaningful, their internal priority does include true HTML5 compliance, which will standardize the DOM.
I know it's a petty nitpick, but hear me out. There's a reason the more intelligent among front-end web developers ditched the term "graceful degradation" for "progressive enhancement". For all but a minuscule (but growing) portion of possible web tasks, the client-side approach has a direct HTML/HTTP/server-side analog with—if we're doing our jobs right on the client-side—a UI that is less usable and slower. Even though the two philosophies could be implemented the same way, they rarely are. The philosophy of "graceful degradation" is essentially that the UI is the application and its core functionality is an afterthought to be implemented as a fallback; the philosophy of "progressive enhancement" is essentially that the core functionality is the core responsibility, and that client-side behavior is meant to improve the user experience. Another difference between the philosophies is that, where the analogs exist between client-side and traditional functionality, "graceful degradation" tends to carry with it an implication of increased development cost, whereas "progressive enhancement" promotes a model that allows simplified development. (Again, note that I am not discussing the terminology so much as existing differences in approach.)
I think, though, there's a line to be drawn between content delivery and applications, in terms of the responsibility of web developers. I don't think that information on the Internet should be hidden behind a wall like requiring Javascript; but I do think that some of the capabilities of web-based applications don't have a direct analog to HTML/HTTP/server, or can't be implemented that way in a reasonably acceptable way. As an example, web-based video can definitely be implemented without client-side scripting; but web-based video editing cannot (within users' perfectly reasonable expectations). You might say that this latter category ought not be implemented in the browser in the first place, but for better or worse you're fighting a trend that's probably not going to die any time soon.
Also, what exactly is the social agenda of opposing nuclear power?
Greenpeace isn't particularly interested in the environment. It's more about a social agenda. See, for example, the opposition to any nuclear power, even if it reduces pollution.
What are you smoking? The extraction and use of radioactive fuel dramatically increases pollution. It nearly completely eliminates greenhouse gas emissions, but there's a clear environmental motive behind opposing solutions to global warming whose side effects will poison the planet.
This is like saying that Greenpeace isn't particularly interested in the environment because they don't support blotting out the sun to reduce global warming.
Perhaps they didn't think it would? After all, at the time, environmentalism did not have a positive public image in America. It was seen almost as a gateway to Communism.
And still is. In certain circles. Which aren't Apple's target market and you know it.
Also, Apple's website tends to focus on its products, with a lot less of the corporate boosterism and irrelevant blather than its competitors. Surely, environmental policy is an internal matter, not something that should be exploited for PR purposes? I certainly don't trust companies that trumpet their environmental "credentials" too loudly. It's usually not a genuine concern.
http://www.apple.com/environment/
I'm not reading from a script. That's basically what Greenpeace did at the time. They declared Apple worse than the rest of the industry, simply based on statements on their website. Perhaps their methodology has improved since then, but it was definitely suspect at the time, and almost made me stop donating to Greenpeace because of such sensationalistic and suspect tactics.
That's not what happened, that's what gushing Apple fanatics declared had happened because they were experiencing cognitive dissonance. Read Greenpeace's actual literature.
And yet, that's exactly what they did. They gave competitors a better score, not based on actual practice, but based on hot-air promises on their websites.
Okay, let's try an exercise and assume your version is true. Apple had better environmental policies than its competitors. Greenpeace, an environmentalist organization, dishonestly promoted Apple's competitors with worse policies. To make Apple look bad. ...
Why? How on Earth is it in Greenpeace's interest to promote worse polluters? Can you not see how this is an incredible claim?
I very much doubt that public pressure had anything to do with it.
I don't doubt that you do. And frankly, with the position that you've entrenched yourself into, it's probably impossible that you would see it any other way. Of course, RoHS (which, incidentally, is discussed in Greenpeace's literature) is quite plainly *also* a product of public pressure.
But I gotta ask. Given that you think this public pressure was unfair to Apple, how can you also think it's a "sideshow"? And given that you think it's so ineffective, why bother donating to Greenpeace?
Apple is well-known as not being very public about its operations.
More nonsense. Apple is well-known as not being very public about its future products, but being exceptionally public about whatever it thinks will improve its brand image. Apple is a media darling for chrissake, not the CIA.
Basing an environmental assessment on statements on their website is absurd.
Agreed. Good thing I didn't say anything about that. Are you reading from a script?
Furthermore anybody can make bullshit PR statements on their website about what they are going to do, but it's action that matters.
Again, agreed. But again, not related to what I said.
Apple was already well ahead of the industry at the time in shipping products with minimal packaging, and products that were more energy-efficient than the competition, and used less materials. Yet Greenpeace, of course, does not take that into account.
Yes, Apple had some better policies than its competition. It also had some worse policies than its competition. Greenpeace did account for these differences, and at the time the presence of certain harmful chemicals and the absence of a good recycling program—in contrast with either existing practices of explicit corporate timelines from competitors—did not reflect positively on Apple. Obviously, Apple's policies changed. And obviously, Greenpeace's assessment reflects that.
You should actually read their literature to understand how they rate corporations' environmental records. Some of it has to do with recognizing that current efforts are commendable but not adequate, and that transparency about future programs improves trust in a corporation's record. I don't really understand how this is debatable. A corporation with harmful business practices either plans (for whatever reason) to eliminate those practices, or it does not; the former will gladly disclose that, particularly if brand perception is part of their business strategy, but the latter obviously will not.
Furthermore, if you bother to read Greenpeace's literature on the subject, you'll discover that *exactly the same criteria* is used in rating every electronics producer they analyze. Greenpeace is not interested in making polluters look *good*, so you'd have to have a pretty wild imagination to believe that they fixed their own reports just to make Apple look bad by promoting its competitors. Hell, the most recent report *actually gives Apple bonus points*.
How do you know this wasn't already planned before Greenpeace got involved? Crediting Greenpeace with these changes is not based on facts.
I don't read tea leaves, and I doubt you do either. First of all, I don't credit Greenpeace with these changes, but I do think that they contributed. Apple, ultimately, made the changes as a clear response to public pressure to do so—this much is obvious because public pressure was the only business case for the changes. Greenpeace contributed to that public pressure.