31 ms·

Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of

Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay. There may be an interesting economic lesson here: it really is not that easy to externalize costs. It surely can be done (air pollution), but it requires some special circumstances for those costs not to be internalized in a different form. (These special circumstances might include information asymmetries, harm to a public good, enjoyed by people other than a firm's own customers, etc.--themselves classic risk factors for market failure.) By the same token, there probably are some truly externalized costs in this example, but I would expect them to be very minor and indirect. For example, most people probably do not pay the 'true' cost of their electricity. So to the extent electron wastes power, some of the cost will be internalized in the form of user dissatisfaction. But some will also be externalized either because the user doesn't know about the extra power consumption, or because the user herself doesn't fully internalize the costs of her power consumption and therefore doesn't care as much as she might if all costs were properly internalized.

bhauer 10y ago
> Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay. Precisely. I don't use Slack in part because its desktop application is irrationally bloated for its use-case. Although I have other reasons as well, they are enduring a cost--a small one to be sure, but presumably non-trivial in aggregate--in people refusing to use their service in part because their desktop application is poor. But I do agree with the general emotion underlying the frustration of "externalities" here. As someone who advocates for high-performance and efficient web applications, I have toyed with the question of whether developers should confront the morality of wasting energy by having selected poor/low-performance platforms. Put in a somewhat comedic tone: low-performance software contributes to climate change.
- nojvek 10y ago
  By walking just one day a year than taking my car, I can offset the electricity consumed by my laptop. You do have a point though. You make a difference where you can.
  - pharrington 10y ago
    The problem is that despite how good it feels, individuals simply optimizing their individual activity does not scale to the societal scope. Post-agrarian humans literally behave and think via shared infrastructure. The only way individuals can make lasting improvements to society is to improve the infrastructure.
    - Rapzid 10y ago
      Individuals changing their behaviour can lead to societal change though.
      - pharrington 10y ago
        Yes, but you are talking about contingencies. Optimism over dice rolls cannot excuse wasteful systems.
        Rapzid 10y ago
        I'm talking about how nearly all progressive progress progresses. It swells up from individuals.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Does it? Or maybe those individual pop up and do their progressive thing only when existing infrastructure and technological landscape lets them do that?
- jancsika 10y ago
  > Put in a somewhat comedic tone: low-performance software contributes to climate change. Number of developers who would donate the increased efficiency to "idle": $denominator. Number of developers who would fill the increased efficiency with more triangles: $numerator. I'd argue $numerator is sufficiently large that the premise of your joke doesn't hold.
brightball 10y ago
The real trick is whether or not users care about: A) This works on all of the platforms that we use vs B) Performance could be better on my computer It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...which is almost entirely because SSD's make them so much less noticeable if you start dipping into swap unless you're really working out your machine. For most users, just knowing it will work on their machine is a bigger influence in using the product...and therefore a greater influence on business...than the performance of that system. It's especially true with a chat system where the most important feature is that everybody on the team can get access.
- stiGGG 10y ago
  >It's especially true with a chat system where the most important feature is that everybody on the team can get access. That's a complete other story... All that big open source movement for decades and in 2017 we are still depending on proprietary systems to provide a chat(!) for a company.
- user5994461 10y ago
  > It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems... Really??? Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have. Don't try running on battery saving mode, seriously. I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can't watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions. ---- Fun Anecdote: I had to trial an entreprisey SaaS solution not long ago. A coworker gave me the name and I opened the site on my laptop (on the move outside of work, just taking a quick look). Their site froze my firefox for 30 seconds because these idiots put a high quality full screen video of a surfer in the background of the main page. Looks cool, doesn't it? https://www.wavefront.com/ https://www.wavefront.com/ Couldn't see the site. Had to be at work to read it, on my top end workstation, the video played smoothly there. Needless to say, didn't take the product seriously.
  - baddox 10y ago
    Different people have vastly different use cases. I haven't experienced a performance issue with desktop Slack or any other (non-game) application for many years. Sure, if I look at how much RAM Slack is using I'd probably conclude that it's more than it needs to be, but I haven't had an issue with RAM usage for, gee, probably ten years. As for battery, again, my laptop battery has been little more than a UPS for at least five years.
pharrington 10y ago
I don't understand. The cost is mostly externalized into, quite literally, massively distributed increased electricity consumption. That an individual's power bill may be subsidized only emphasizes that problem.
- pdabbadabba 10y ago
  It sounds like we agree. To the extent we're just talking about electricity costs, then it's true that easily written, but inefficient code may indeed externalize these costs to the extent that users are unaware of the added power consumption, or that the user herself does not pay the full cost of that electricity. But these electricity costs struck me as only a small part of the broader point I was responding to, which is what I framed the point the way I did.
  - pharrington 10y ago
    I contend that squandering the work and infrastructure involved in converting natural resources into electricity is the main problem with modern consumer software development. Any user's (lack of) perception of waste is irrelevant. The scope of the problem is not any individual literally paying a couple dollars more on their electric bill, but rather it's that gigawatt hours are literally being burned away because software developers who know their code will be running on machines the world over can't be assed to spend a little more time learning to practice their craft correctly. There is no broader point than converting natural resources into societal infrastructure. Be a responsible member of society. Don't obstinately ship wasteful code. I understand if you legitimately don't know any better, but if you're part of the community that's constantly writing blog posts about computers being so fast that its OK to burn the end users' CPU and storage just so you don't have to spend a couple more minutes thinking about what you're doing, you're adding harm to the world.
    - pdabbadabba 10y ago
      Again. I think we agree. You're just making a different point than the one I was making. I was making a technical but hopefully still constructive point about what is an externality and what is not. You seem more focused on making a case against shipping inefficient code. And you're point is a good one. It's just a little difficult to suss that out since you're framing it as standing in opposition to my related, but very different, observation about externalities.
seanp2k2 10y ago
Yep, and when the government doesn't properly tax those harm-to-public-good things like air pollution to balance the incentives and make it cheaper to do "the right thing" and pollute less, companies (which are made of real people and are not just unthinking machines) will do whatever they can to maximize profits. This is why it's so important to e.g. Increase the price of water to reflect the true cost in the Central Valley of CA instead of letting tons of farmers grow water-intensive crops in open-air, wasting tons of water just because it's cheap (then they complain about "is GROWING FOOD a waste of water?!?", completely un-ironically). Many businesses subsidize their operations using government funding, yet again ironically most of the rich white men running them are staunch opponents of public assistance programs despite owing most of their wealth to similar mechanisms, typically in conjunction with massive tax avoidance.
- hrxn 10y ago
  Found the Marxist...
- pdabbadabba 10y ago
  Pretty funny that the only reply here is 'found the Marxist' (maybe it was supposed to be a joke?) when, in reality, all you're suggesting is that the government set the conditions for the proper functioning of the market, which is an idea straight our of Hayek.

bhauer 10y ago

> Well, to the extent that these costs degrade the user experience, I'm not sure they really are externalizing them. Presumably they pay this cost in the form of decreased user satisfaction. It's just that this is a cost they are willing to pay. Precisely. I don't use Slack in part because its desktop application is irrationally bloated for its use-case. Although I have other reasons as well, they are enduring a cost--a small one to be sure, but presumably non-trivial in aggregate--in people refusing to use their service in part because their desktop application is poor. But I do agree with the general emotion underlying the frustration of "externalities" here. As someone who advocates for high-performance and efficient web applications, I have toyed with the question of whether developers should confront the morality of wasting energy by having selected poor/low-performance platforms. Put in a somewhat comedic tone: low-performance software contributes to climate change.

nojvek 10y ago
By walking just one day a year than taking my car, I can offset the electricity consumed by my laptop. You do have a point though. You make a difference where you can.
- pharrington 10y ago
  The problem is that despite how good it feels, individuals simply optimizing their individual activity does not scale to the societal scope. Post-agrarian humans literally behave and think via shared infrastructure. The only way individuals can make lasting improvements to society is to improve the infrastructure.
  - Rapzid 10y ago
    Individuals changing their behaviour can lead to societal change though.
    - pharrington 10y ago
      Yes, but you are talking about contingencies. Optimism over dice rolls cannot excuse wasteful systems.
      - Rapzid 10y ago
        I'm talking about how nearly all progressive progress progresses. It swells up from individuals.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Does it? Or maybe those individual pop up and do their progressive thing only when existing infrastructure and technological landscape lets them do that?
jancsika 10y ago
> Put in a somewhat comedic tone: low-performance software contributes to climate change. Number of developers who would donate the increased efficiency to "idle": $denominator. Number of developers who would fill the increased efficiency with more triangles: $numerator. I'd argue $numerator is sufficiently large that the premise of your joke doesn't hold.

brightball 10y ago

The real trick is whether or not users care about: A) This works on all of the platforms that we use vs B) Performance could be better on my computer It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems...which is almost entirely because SSD's make them so much less noticeable if you start dipping into swap unless you're really working out your machine. For most users, just knowing it will work on their machine is a bigger influence in using the product...and therefore a greater influence on business...than the performance of that system. It's especially true with a chat system where the most important feature is that everybody on the team can get access.

stiGGG 10y ago
>It's especially true with a chat system where the most important feature is that everybody on the team can get access. That's a complete other story... All that big open source movement for decades and in 2017 we are still depending on proprietary systems to provide a chat(!) for a company.
user5994461 10y ago
> It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I worked on a laptop where I experienced noticeable performance problems... Really??? Because personally, I keep having performance problems on all laptops I have. Don't try running on battery saving mode, seriously. I stop counting the 5+ years old laptops that have to be upgraded, they can't watch a youtube full HD video in good conditions. ---- Fun Anecdote: I had to trial an entreprisey SaaS solution not long ago. A coworker gave me the name and I opened the site on my laptop (on the move outside of work, just taking a quick look). Their site froze my firefox for 30 seconds because these idiots put a high quality full screen video of a surfer in the background of the main page. Looks cool, doesn't it? https://www.wavefront.com/ https://www.wavefront.com/ Couldn't see the site. Had to be at work to read it, on my top end workstation, the video played smoothly there. Needless to say, didn't take the product seriously.
- baddox 10y ago
  Different people have vastly different use cases. I haven't experienced a performance issue with desktop Slack or any other (non-game) application for many years. Sure, if I look at how much RAM Slack is using I'd probably conclude that it's more than it needs to be, but I haven't had an issue with RAM usage for, gee, probably ten years. As for battery, again, my laptop battery has been little more than a UPS for at least five years.

pharrington 10y ago

I don't understand. The cost is mostly externalized into, quite literally, massively distributed increased electricity consumption. That an individual's power bill may be subsidized only emphasizes that problem.

pdabbadabba 10y ago
It sounds like we agree. To the extent we're just talking about electricity costs, then it's true that easily written, but inefficient code may indeed externalize these costs to the extent that users are unaware of the added power consumption, or that the user herself does not pay the full cost of that electricity. But these electricity costs struck me as only a small part of the broader point I was responding to, which is what I framed the point the way I did.
- pharrington 10y ago
  I contend that squandering the work and infrastructure involved in converting natural resources into electricity is the main problem with modern consumer software development. Any user's (lack of) perception of waste is irrelevant. The scope of the problem is not any individual literally paying a couple dollars more on their electric bill, but rather it's that gigawatt hours are literally being burned away because software developers who know their code will be running on machines the world over can't be assed to spend a little more time learning to practice their craft correctly. There is no broader point than converting natural resources into societal infrastructure. Be a responsible member of society. Don't obstinately ship wasteful code. I understand if you legitimately don't know any better, but if you're part of the community that's constantly writing blog posts about computers being so fast that its OK to burn the end users' CPU and storage just so you don't have to spend a couple more minutes thinking about what you're doing, you're adding harm to the world.
  - pdabbadabba 10y ago
    Again. I think we agree. You're just making a different point than the one I was making. I was making a technical but hopefully still constructive point about what is an externality and what is not. You seem more focused on making a case against shipping inefficient code. And you're point is a good one. It's just a little difficult to suss that out since you're framing it as standing in opposition to my related, but very different, observation about externalities.

seanp2k2 10y ago

Yep, and when the government doesn't properly tax those harm-to-public-good things like air pollution to balance the incentives and make it cheaper to do "the right thing" and pollute less, companies (which are made of real people and are not just unthinking machines) will do whatever they can to maximize profits. This is why it's so important to e.g. Increase the price of water to reflect the true cost in the Central Valley of CA instead of letting tons of farmers grow water-intensive crops in open-air, wasting tons of water just because it's cheap (then they complain about "is GROWING FOOD a waste of water?!?", completely un-ironically). Many businesses subsidize their operations using government funding, yet again ironically most of the rich white men running them are staunch opponents of public assistance programs despite owing most of their wealth to similar mechanisms, typically in conjunction with massive tax avoidance.

hrxn 10y ago
Found the Marxist...
pdabbadabba 10y ago
Pretty funny that the only reply here is 'found the Marxist' (maybe it was supposed to be a joke?) when, in reality, all you're suggesting is that the government set the conditions for the proper functioning of the market, which is an idea straight our of Hayek.