“E-commerce sales jumped nearly 32 percent in 2020 compared to the prior year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data,” reports Politico — and this year “online sales are on track to outpace that record…”
“Now, cities, climate scientists and companies are trying to figure out the consequences for the planet.”

The most recent research is starting to incorporate more of the complexities of retail. In January, MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab published a study that simulated hundreds of thousands of those kinds of scenarios and found online shopping to be more sustainable than traditional retail 75 percent of the time… Most research suggests that ordering goods for delivery is more beneficial for the environment because it means people are making fewer individual shopping trips. The average U.S. consumer goes to the grocery store at least 300 times a year. If they drove there, it was likely in a gas-powered vehicle. Plus, there tends to be higher energy demands at storefronts compared to warehouses. But that scale “could easily tip in the other direction,” according to a study of the U.S. market published last spring by the sustainable investment firm Generation. The firm’s researchers found that e-commerce is 17 percent more carbon efficient than traditional retail, but could change with a few tweaks to their assumptions, such as the number of items purchased in a single visit, the amount of packaging and the efficiency of last-mile delivery…

In an email, Amazon spokesperson Luis Davila pointed to findings by company scientists that suggest online shopping produces fewer emissions than driving to shop at a store; for instance, the company estimates that a single delivery van trip can take 100 round-trip car journeys off the road, on average. During the pandemic, customers made fewer trips to Whole Foods Market stores and other brick-and-mortar Amazon locations and shifted to home delivery, which also lowered emissions. But take a step back, and a bigger, more complex picture emerges. From 2019 to 2020, Amazon’s U.S. sales jumped 36 percent to $263.5 billion. By the company’s own account, its overall emissions spiked 19 percent, equivalent to running 15 coal plants for one year. More fossil fuel use and investments in buildings, data servers and transportation were key drivers.

That figure reflects its response to consumer demand during Covid-19, but doesn’t capture progress Amazon made, Davila said. He said the company tracks the amount of carbon per dollar of gross merchandise sales — a concept known as carbon intensity — and by that measure, Amazon decreased the amount of carbon per purchase last year by 16 percent. In a blog post in June, a company scientist argued that this metric allows high-growth companies like Amazon to identify efficiencies. Amazon also reduced emissions from the electricity it bought by 4 percent due to new investments in clean energy, despite expanding its buildings’ square footage. The company is about two-thirds of the way toward 100 percent renewable energy — a key pillar of the company’s plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2040.

Emissions from deliveries are expected to decrease as Amazon deploys 100,000 electric vans in the coming decade. Davila did not disclose what portion of the company’s fleet that accounts for today.

The director of MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab also warns that cardboard boxes are some of the largest carbon pollutants in the system regardless of the method of delivery. (Politico points out most packaging ultimately “ends up in a landfill or is burned to produce energy, generating 105.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide last year, according to federal data.”) That data also shows only 9% of plastic gets recycled, “because flexible plastic films and pouches and many take out containers still aren’t recyclable. Neither are plastic bags, unless consumers bring them to the grocery store.”

One recycler tells the site that many companies are now promising to use more recycled materials in their packaging, including Amazon, PepsiCo, Coca Cola and Target — but urges “extended producer responsibility,” in which companies (not taxpayers) cover the costs of cleaning up their packaging.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How Bad is Online Shopping for the Environment?

GitHub’s annual report on its user community “combined telemetry data from over four million repositories with direct survey from over 12,000 developers to identify current trends among software development companies and open-source projects,” reports InfoQ.

ZDNet notes the data shows that remote developers “aren’t planning to go back to the office.”
Before the pandemic, only 41% of developers worked at an office either full-time or part-time, but of the 12,000 surveyed in GitHub’s 2021 State of the Octoverse report, just 10.7% expect to go back to the office after the pandemic ends… Pre-pandemic, 28.1% of developers had hybrid arrangements but after the pandemic, 47.8% expect some hybrid arrangements. Before the pandemic, 26.5% worked in places where all workers were remote. Now, 38.8% expect to be fully remote.

ZDNet also highlighted some other general statistics:
GitHub says it now has 73 million developer users and that it gained 16 million new users in 2021. Users created 61 million new repositories and there were 170 million pull requests that got merged into projects… One of the biggest projects on GitHub is the container software Docker, which has a whopping 632,000 contributors from 215 countries and consists of 49,593 packages.
That’s more than a magnitude larger than the estimated number of Linux contributors — and implies that for every 117 developers now on GitHub, there was one who contributed to Docker.

Meanwhile, 2021’s most popular language rankings for GitHub are the same as 2020, with one exception: Shell has risen one position to become the 8th most popular language, edging out C (which now ranks as the 9th most popular language).

And InfoQ summarized some other interesting statistics from GitHub’s report:

Good, reliable, and up-to-date documentation can boost productivity by 50%.
Documentation is often under-invested. The number of pull requests merged within the workday goes down by 17% with each additional reviewer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – GitHub’s Annual Developer Survey Finds Remote Developers Aren’t Returning to the Office

This week Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) looked back nearly 30 years to the glory days of the world’s first true 32-bit CD based home console — Commodore’s Amiga32. In the final three months of 1993, the company had sold 100,000 in just three months in Europe, outselling Sega four to one, “and claiming 38% market share of all CD ROM drives sold in the U.K. (according to the Gallup Weekly Report).”

But the next year all over, Mike Bouma writes, summarizing reports from both Amiga Report and Wikipedia:

Operations in Germany and the United Kingdom were still profitable, but Commodore was not able to meet demand for new units because of component supply problems — and could not release the (already made) Amiga CD32 stock in the United States due to a legal patent issue!

Commodore declared bankruptcy on April 29, 1994, causing the CD32 to be discontinued only eight months after its debut.
This look back was apparently inspired by a report from retro gaming vlogger Lady Decade about what then happened to the Amiga CD32 after Commodore’s demise — and about the system that would’ve been its successor: the lost Amiga64.

Earlier this week Mike shared the news that attempts to make a ‘Doom’ clone for the Amiga 500 have already led to a demo map (for both Amiga 500s with one megabyte of RAM and Atari STs with two megabytes of RAM).

And for more vintage retro-gaming goodness, Mike adds that “In my opinion the most impressive game released for the system was Super Stardust by Bloodhouse, published by Team17.”
It was the sequel to Stardust for the Amiga 500 and Atari STE. Bloodhouse merged with Terramarque (famous for their impressive Amiga 500 game Elfmania) to form Housemarque, which is still making games as of today.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The Last Days of Amiga – and the Lost Amiga CD64

“One way to help eliminate carbon emissions and thereby fight global warming may be to exploit fusion, the energy source of the sun and stars…” argues a new article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (shared by Slashdot reader DanDrollette).

Though fusion energy would involve controllng a “plasma” gas of positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons heated to 150 million degrees Celsius, progress is being made — and the upside could be tremendous:

One major advantage of using fusion as an energy source is that its underlying physics precludes either a fuel meltdown — such as what happened at Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daichi — or a runaway reaction, such as at Chernobyl. Furthermore, the amount of radioactive material that could be released in an accident in a fusion power plant system is much less than in a fission reactor. Consequently, a fusion system has much less capability to damage itself, and any damage would have much less dangerous consequences. As a result, current concepts for fusion systems may not necessitate an evacuation plan beyond the site boundary. Another advantage of fusion is that neither the fuel nor its products create the very long-lived radioactive waste that fission does, which means that fusion does not require long-term, geological storage…

When and how can fusion contribute to mitigating climate change? Private companies are in a hurry to develop fusion, and many say that they will be able to put commercial fusion power on the US electric grid in the early 2030s. The total private financing in this sector is impressive, at about $2 billion… After looking over the state of publicly and privately funded fusion research, the National Academies recommended that the United States embark upon a program to develop multiple preliminary designs for a fusion pilot plant by 2028, with the goal of putting a modest amount of net electricity on the U.S. electrical grid from a pilot plant starting sometime in the years between 2035 and 2040, use the pilot plant to study and develop technologies for fusion, and have a first-of-a-kind commercial fusion power plant operational by 2050. The United Kingdom has recently announced a plan to build a prototype fusion power plant by 2040. China has a plan to begin operation of a fusion engineering test reactor in the 2030s, while the European Union foresees operation of a demonstration fusion power plant in the 2050s…

We must look beyond the 2035 timeframe to see how fusion can make a major contribution, and how it can complement renewables… [P]roviding low-carbon electricity in the world market, including later in the century, is of great importance for holding climate change at bay.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Could Fusion Energy Provide a Safer Alternative to Nuclear Power?