5 ms·

Why? Because it’s cool to break the rules? Does it matter to you that these rules are trying to protect our civilization from dissolving in a heap of wildfires,

by oofbey 5y ago

Why? Because it’s cool to break the rules? Does it matter to you that these rules are trying to protect our civilization from dissolving in a heap of wildfires, floods, power outages, droughts, storms, etc? This stuff is not just hypothetical any more.

willis936 5y ago
Society is collapsing because of the idle power consumption of laptops?
- oofbey 5y ago
  Of course not. But here’s an analogy. “Nobody got fat by eating just one little scoop of ice cream.” It all adds up.
  - willis936 5y ago
    Regulators have the power to actually do something but instead do the policy equivalent of a clickbait youtube thumbnail. This isn't behavior to celebrate or praise. Policy needs to actually do something.
- russh 5y ago
  Computers account for about 3% of residential electricity use, so obviously it's the logical place to start. s/logical/lobbyist/
c3534l 5y ago
You probably waste more electricity running your dishwasher instead of by hand than running a laptop. If battery usage is a problem because of climate change, then tax carbon and you can decide to cut back or pay more on dish washing, food deliveries, big houses with huge heating cost and the like, and everyone who wants a cool laptop can spend their money (or carbon credits) on that. If that's what's bothersome, then regulate the problem, not try to micromanage people's hobbies - which brings illegitimacy to people who advocate for actual change, instead of scoring petty political points making it look like you're doing something by adding another useless regulation with a short shelf-life of relevancy.
- lmm 5y ago
  > You probably waste more electricity running your dishwasher instead of by hand than running a laptop. Handwashing wastes energy compared to using a dishwasher, because it uses significantly more water that costs energy to purify.
- Filligree 5y ago
  Dishwashers are, in fact, fabulously efficient. They use far less hot water than warning by hand, and the majority of the energy spent on dishwashing is spent on heating water.
  - Marsymars 5y ago
    > They use far less hot water than warning by hand This must be based on a horribly inefficient method of hand washing. Google says that a modern, efficient dishwasher uses about 3 gallons of water per load. I just went and measured the volume of my kitchen sink to roughly where it gets filled to when I'm washing an equivalent of a full dishwasher's load of dishes, and it came out to a bit over 3 gallons. If it's not summer, I then let my hot sink water sit until it's cooled down to room temperature to avoid wasting heat.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It’s funny how wrong people are about what consumes electricity and not. Washing dishes by hand is far less efficient than a dishwasher. It depends on exactly how you load it and how your water is heated, but running the dishwasher produces probably half the greenhouse gasses that washing by hand does. As a general rule of thumb, the guide here is to track heat and where it goes. Hot water down the drain is a bad thing to be avoided as much as possible. Dishwashers reuse a small amount of hot water repeatedly in an insulated box until it’s fully spent (from a cleaning perspective). Hand washing sends a continuous stream of hot, soapy water down the drain, wasting both water, soap, and the energy required to bring that water up to temperature.
  - c3534l 5y ago
    I wouldn't be wrong if you just charged me for carbon. I'm sure there's plenty of things people are wrong about carbon emissions and have no idea, because no one pays for the negative effects of pollution and therefor everyone does.
zbrozek 5y ago
Address the dirtiest sources and the largest sinks, not the symbolic tiny sinks. Your laptop using 6 watts of idle power is not going to make a meaningful difference.
- oofbey 5y ago
  Sure one laptop doesn’t matter. But if everybody in the country has one it does matter. 300 million laptops each drawing 6 watts 24/7 adds up to 15 terawatt*hrs per year, which is real power. That’s pushing 1% of all the coal-powered electricity in the country. A handful of policies like that, each of which just feels like a minor annoyance and thus pointless, but it adds up and starts to make a real difference.
  - zbrozek 5y ago
    That's an unrealistically pessimistic assumption though. Many laptops are off, not failing to sleep. The great majority of people aren't buying these niche devices. And the source should be cleaned up since that is a vastly bigger lever impacting all loads. This is just limiting consumer choice for a largely symbolic gesture. I would also be really surprised if the rule is kept up to date and relevant, vs left in the codebase to rot.
gruez 5y ago
>Does it matter to you that these rules are trying to protect our civilization from dissolving in a heap of wildfires, floods, power outages, droughts, storms, etc? This stuff is not just hypothetical any more. Half the issues you've listed are most certainly due to incompetence/mismanagement rather than PCs in CA/CO/HI/OR/VT using slightly more power. eg. wildfires: Gov. Gavin Newsom cut the fire prevention budget by $150 million https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/california/gov-newsom-overstated-fire-prevention-work-report/2577585/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/california/gov-newsom-overst... power outages: failure on PG&E's part to trim trees https://www.kqed.org/news/11737336/judge-pge-paid-out-stock-dividends-instead-of-trimming-trees https://www.kqed.org/news/11737336/judge-pge-paid-out-stock-...
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  Not going to get into the laptop discussion but the wildfires are 100% due to heat and drought, and those are much worse recently because of global warning. PG&E could bury ever cable, they could increase the fire prevention budget by 10 times over, and it wouldn't fix it.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >the wildfires are 100% due to heat and drought Well duh, but since we're talking about climate change we should be comparing against a counterfactual where climate change hasn't happened. I'm sure heat/drought existed prior to global warming. Did wild fires not exist back then? Should Newsom be let off the hook for his budget cuts because the forest was going to catch fire anyways due to global warming?
  - gillytech 5y ago
    You're saying that the wildfires are 100% caused by heat and drought? I think you should have a look at the huge heap of evidence pointing to poor forest management being the true culprit. It's a fact of nature that forests WILL burn and the more humans interfere with nature, the more unintended consequences we'll cause. There are plenty of natural ignition sources and forests are equipped to deal with relatively low intensity fires. Here's just one example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/25/wildfires-caused-by-bad-environmental-policy-are-causing-california-forests-to-be-net-co2-emitters/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/25/wildfire...

by oofbey 5y ago

willis936 5y ago

Society is collapsing because of the idle power consumption of laptops?

oofbey 5y ago
Of course not. But here’s an analogy. “Nobody got fat by eating just one little scoop of ice cream.” It all adds up.
- willis936 5y ago
  Regulators have the power to actually do something but instead do the policy equivalent of a clickbait youtube thumbnail. This isn't behavior to celebrate or praise. Policy needs to actually do something.
russh 5y ago
Computers account for about 3% of residential electricity use, so obviously it's the logical place to start. s/logical/lobbyist/

c3534l 5y ago

You probably waste more electricity running your dishwasher instead of by hand than running a laptop. If battery usage is a problem because of climate change, then tax carbon and you can decide to cut back or pay more on dish washing, food deliveries, big houses with huge heating cost and the like, and everyone who wants a cool laptop can spend their money (or carbon credits) on that. If that's what's bothersome, then regulate the problem, not try to micromanage people's hobbies - which brings illegitimacy to people who advocate for actual change, instead of scoring petty political points making it look like you're doing something by adding another useless regulation with a short shelf-life of relevancy.

lmm 5y ago
> You probably waste more electricity running your dishwasher instead of by hand than running a laptop. Handwashing wastes energy compared to using a dishwasher, because it uses significantly more water that costs energy to purify.
Filligree 5y ago
Dishwashers are, in fact, fabulously efficient. They use far less hot water than warning by hand, and the majority of the energy spent on dishwashing is spent on heating water.
- Marsymars 5y ago
  > They use far less hot water than warning by hand This must be based on a horribly inefficient method of hand washing. Google says that a modern, efficient dishwasher uses about 3 gallons of water per load. I just went and measured the volume of my kitchen sink to roughly where it gets filled to when I'm washing an equivalent of a full dishwasher's load of dishes, and it came out to a bit over 3 gallons. If it's not summer, I then let my hot sink water sit until it's cooled down to room temperature to avoid wasting heat.
ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s funny how wrong people are about what consumes electricity and not. Washing dishes by hand is far less efficient than a dishwasher. It depends on exactly how you load it and how your water is heated, but running the dishwasher produces probably half the greenhouse gasses that washing by hand does. As a general rule of thumb, the guide here is to track heat and where it goes. Hot water down the drain is a bad thing to be avoided as much as possible. Dishwashers reuse a small amount of hot water repeatedly in an insulated box until it’s fully spent (from a cleaning perspective). Hand washing sends a continuous stream of hot, soapy water down the drain, wasting both water, soap, and the energy required to bring that water up to temperature.
- c3534l 5y ago
  I wouldn't be wrong if you just charged me for carbon. I'm sure there's plenty of things people are wrong about carbon emissions and have no idea, because no one pays for the negative effects of pollution and therefor everyone does.

zbrozek 5y ago

Address the dirtiest sources and the largest sinks, not the symbolic tiny sinks. Your laptop using 6 watts of idle power is not going to make a meaningful difference.

oofbey 5y ago
Sure one laptop doesn’t matter. But if everybody in the country has one it does matter. 300 million laptops each drawing 6 watts 24/7 adds up to 15 terawatt*hrs per year, which is real power. That’s pushing 1% of all the coal-powered electricity in the country. A handful of policies like that, each of which just feels like a minor annoyance and thus pointless, but it adds up and starts to make a real difference.
- zbrozek 5y ago
  That's an unrealistically pessimistic assumption though. Many laptops are off, not failing to sleep. The great majority of people aren't buying these niche devices. And the source should be cleaned up since that is a vastly bigger lever impacting all loads. This is just limiting consumer choice for a largely symbolic gesture. I would also be really surprised if the rule is kept up to date and relevant, vs left in the codebase to rot.

gruez 5y ago

>Does it matter to you that these rules are trying to protect our civilization from dissolving in a heap of wildfires, floods, power outages, droughts, storms, etc? This stuff is not just hypothetical any more. Half the issues you've listed are most certainly due to incompetence/mismanagement rather than PCs in CA/CO/HI/OR/VT using slightly more power. eg. wildfires: Gov. Gavin Newsom cut the fire prevention budget by $150 million https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/california/gov-newsom-overstated-fire-prevention-work-report/2577585/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/california/gov-newsom-overst... power outages: failure on PG&E's part to trim trees https://www.kqed.org/news/11737336/judge-pge-paid-out-stock-dividends-instead-of-trimming-trees https://www.kqed.org/news/11737336/judge-pge-paid-out-stock-...

throwaway5752 5y ago
Not going to get into the laptop discussion but the wildfires are 100% due to heat and drought, and those are much worse recently because of global warning. PG&E could bury ever cable, they could increase the fire prevention budget by 10 times over, and it wouldn't fix it.
- gruez 5y ago
  >the wildfires are 100% due to heat and drought Well duh, but since we're talking about climate change we should be comparing against a counterfactual where climate change hasn't happened. I'm sure heat/drought existed prior to global warming. Did wild fires not exist back then? Should Newsom be let off the hook for his budget cuts because the forest was going to catch fire anyways due to global warming?
- gillytech 5y ago
  You're saying that the wildfires are 100% caused by heat and drought? I think you should have a look at the huge heap of evidence pointing to poor forest management being the true culprit. It's a fact of nature that forests WILL burn and the more humans interfere with nature, the more unintended consequences we'll cause. There are plenty of natural ignition sources and forests are equipped to deal with relatively low intensity fires. Here's just one example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/25/wildfires-caused-by-bad-environmental-policy-are-causing-california-forests-to-be-net-co2-emitters/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/25/wildfire...