< The Morality of the Electric Car

~starbreaker

This is why I try to buy secondhand goods when possible. If I'm buying something used that's still in acceptable condition, the original manufacturers aren't getting a cut and I feel like I'm not making things worse.

For example, I bought a used 2006 Nissan Sentra in 2008. It was off-lease and only had 30,000 miles on the meter. It now has 151,000 miles. I suspect I can get it to 250,000 before it finally dies on me as long as I'm diligent with maintenance.

Granted, I can't stop Nissan and other manufacturers from making new cars in the hope that they'll be sold, but I can at least refuse to buy new cars when good-enough used cars are available.

Likewise with computers. I'm typing this on a refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre M92P mid-tower machine originally manufactured in 2012. It's got an i7 CPU, I maxed out the RAM, and I added a 1TB SSD as its new main system drive; the original 2TB HDD is for music and photos. My personal laptop is a ThinkPad T60 originally manufactured in 2007. I upgraded that too. It's good enough.

Of course, my fountain pen is new, but I hope that isn't nearly as harmful as buying a new car or a new computer.

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