“If people are going to choose to play games, we want to be as efficient as we possibly can in delivering that experience, either via a console or a data center in a streamed environment,” said Microsoft’s vice president of cloud gaming, Kareem Choudhry in a March interview with WIRED.

The US and UK both manufacture more than they did 50 years ago (at least until the Covid-19 pandemic sharply reduced output), and Germany has been a net exporter since 2000 while continuing to drive down air pollution.

Illustration: Alvaro DominguezBut unfortunately, the packages on my counter and elsewhere in my kitchen, like my fancy organic sauerkraut (“Our passion for healthy, natural living is reflected in all our products”), told me very little that was relevant to climate change .

Amazon’s annual hardware event on Wednesday was not unlike its product announcements from years prior: The company unveiled a dizzying number of new Echo speakers, showed off how it's improving Alexa through sophisticated speech technology, and even revealed a couple of skunkworks projects—smart glasses and a smart ring—at the very end of its presentation.