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Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by craftyguy on Friday August 31, 2018 @06:29PM (#17888988)
Stop treating every improvement as "if it's not a silver bullet, then it's not worth doing."

Consider for a split second that we may have to make lots of little incremental improvements to have a large gain...

Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by elmerfud on Friday August 31, 2018 @06:38PM (#17889025)
I don't believe that's what the original poster was saying at all. It was that when "going green" the marketing department seems to be one deciding what they do first rather than the engineering team.
Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by webkike on Friday August 31, 2018 @07:20PM (#17889195)
This point seems to imply moral imperatives should be ignored if they don't originate from the engineering department.
Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by ddingus on Friday August 31, 2018 @10:59PM (#17889914)
Who knows?

Could be the product of lunchtime chats about the world, their place in it, etc... many people in the company may have contributed with marketing making a move.

Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by threeseed on Friday August 31, 2018 @06:56PM (#17889112)
And what evidence is there of this ? Because it sure sounds like you just made this up.

In most companies these policies have come from the CEO down largely because there has been significant demand coming from (a) employees, (b) consumers and (c) shareholders.

Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by maxerickson on Friday August 31, 2018 @08:51PM (#17889497)
I think pounds of beef is a great way to measure impact.

I don't see any real easy numbers, but it seems a pound of beef is probably in the ballpark of 20 pounds of COâ‚‚, so 1 million tons translates into 50,000 tons of beef, or a few days of US consumption (which is above 1 pound/week per person).

So giving up Legos entirely is like getting everyone in the US to eat chicken 5 times a year.

Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by hueving on Friday August 31, 2018 @08:24PM (#17889406)
Consider for a second that we aren't making lots of incremental improvements though. We're making negligible improvements that are highly visible for marketing and feel good reasons. This is even worse than doing nothing at all because the people that would actually make sacrifices to help are placated by these charades.

This is just like the table water ban.

"Meaningful change is hard, let's max out virtue signaling points instead."

Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by 9935c101ab17a66 on Friday August 31, 2018 @09:23PM (#17889609)
This is a really well-written rebuttal to the "straws are destroying the planet" narrative in general.
Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by specialist on Friday August 31, 2018 @11:35PM (#17890045)
Every journey begins with the first step.

Imagine the competitive advantage Lego will have once they develop this new source of material.

You've heard of Moore's Law, ya? Like Einstein said, the most powerful force in the world is compound interest. Same thing.

Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by hueving on Friday August 31, 2018 @11:52PM (#17890101)
Moore's law (or the exponential effect in general) hasn't applied to any other modern fields (last 200 years) and had finally failed in semiconductors. It's not an actual law, it's just an observation of a manufacturing system benefiting from its own gains.

So unless Lego's output costs cut in half with a reduction in co2 production, there won't be anything like a moores law effect.

Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by specialist on Saturday September 01, 2018 @01:14AM (#17890349)
"or the exponential effect in general"

Uh huh. No progress, no innovation.

So this is irrelevant too:

Metcalfe's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law

"costs cut in half"

Uh huh. We'll never have carbon taxes either.

Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by r00fus on Friday August 31, 2018 @08:56PM (#17889516)
From a PR perspective (which is what Lego is concerned about first and foremost), iterative solutions that have no big splash are not deemed "useful".

The problem is that everything is about perception and there's no followthrough to our myopic/distracted news media.

This probably ties more into the ongoing devolution of journalism into "reportage".

Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by analbeads01 on Friday August 31, 2018 @07:41PM (#17889263)
I will then consider in the rest of that second from my math education (public school no less) that when dealing with orders of magnitude incremental improvements basically will never get you where you need to be. Might feel good though.
Re:Lego Wants to Remake Its Toy Bricks without Anyone Noticing by craftyguy on Friday August 31, 2018 @08:14PM (#17889365)
By that same logic, there's no point in voting in elections, or paying your taxes, or even commenting on HN (since the number of HN users that aren't you is at least several orders of magnitude more than you).