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> we don't factor in pollution externalities into costs Suppose this is solved and it turns out your local electricity price literally doubles from $0.10/kW-hr

> we don't factor in pollution externalities into costs Suppose this is solved and it turns out your local electricity price literally doubles from $0.10/kW-hr to $0.20. Suppose your Electron app adds 10W to what you'd otherwise use, for 10 hours/day. Your power bill just went up by 1 cent per day, almost unnoticeable to an individual. I actually agree that to understand why the software ecosystem is screwed up in the ways it is, we should be looking for the economic/legal/otherwise systemic incentives driving the patterns. But that's different from "I can think of a way the world is bad according to my politics, that must be it."

camgunz 4y ago
> But that's different from "I can think of a way the world is bad according to my politics, that must be it." It's not productive to dismiss someone's argument based on their politics, unless I guess you think I'm an extremist (I'm not). Politics is a core part of how we understand our world, our societies, our institutions, and our cultures. I'm open to having my politics changed and I love to discuss them, but I won't be dismissed because I believe climate change is a huge threat, or for my other economic political views. --- Continuing in good faith, raw kilowatt hours diminish what a potential pollution cost externality regime might do, and I wouldn't say that a system based on them succeeds in factoring in pollution externalities. CO2 is more brass tacks. The global CO2 budget is ~40 gigatons of CO2 a year [0]. There's ~8 billion people around, making the per-capita carbon budget 5 tons of carbon/year. You could tax this in different ways: - Software producers have their software measured for energy use, paying a tax per N users per Wh - Individuals are allotted 5 tons of carbon/year for free; can pay $2/lb from 5-6 tons, $4/lb from 6-7 tons, etc. - Industrial sector participants are allotted 50 tons of carbon/year for free, etc. etc. [0]: https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/1917/2022/ https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/1917/2022/
ThrowAway158209 4y ago
Don't forget about scale. You need to multiply the numbers by 100s of millions of users, times the amount of time these apps are running (3651010), times the amount of apps (idk, per user like 10, 20, 40?). Plus of course the overhead from extra hops over the internet because apps are being request-happy...
- abecedarius 4y ago
  The proposal was that if dirty power were more realistically priced, then people would not use Electron apps. Code that's a hot spot in a data center already does get more attention to its efficiency, and the data centers already tend to be sited for clean power. The one correct bit here is that pricing the externalities would increase that trend of data-center optimization. (I guess I should add that I support carbon pricing.)

camgunz 4y ago

> But that's different from "I can think of a way the world is bad according to my politics, that must be it." It's not productive to dismiss someone's argument based on their politics, unless I guess you think I'm an extremist (I'm not). Politics is a core part of how we understand our world, our societies, our institutions, and our cultures. I'm open to having my politics changed and I love to discuss them, but I won't be dismissed because I believe climate change is a huge threat, or for my other economic political views. --- Continuing in good faith, raw kilowatt hours diminish what a potential pollution cost externality regime might do, and I wouldn't say that a system based on them succeeds in factoring in pollution externalities. CO2 is more brass tacks. The global CO2 budget is ~40 gigatons of CO2 a year [0]. There's ~8 billion people around, making the per-capita carbon budget 5 tons of carbon/year. You could tax this in different ways: - Software producers have their software measured for energy use, paying a tax per N users per Wh - Individuals are allotted 5 tons of carbon/year for free; can pay $2/lb from 5-6 tons, $4/lb from 6-7 tons, etc. - Industrial sector participants are allotted 50 tons of carbon/year for free, etc. etc. [0]: https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/1917/2022/ https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/1917/2022/

ThrowAway158209 4y ago

Don't forget about scale. You need to multiply the numbers by 100s of millions of users, times the amount of time these apps are running (3651010), times the amount of apps (idk, per user like 10, 20, 40?). Plus of course the overhead from extra hops over the internet because apps are being request-happy...

abecedarius 4y ago
The proposal was that if dirty power were more realistically priced, then people would not use Electron apps. Code that's a hot spot in a data center already does get more attention to its efficiency, and the data centers already tend to be sited for clean power. The one correct bit here is that pricing the externalities would increase that trend of data-center optimization. (I guess I should add that I support carbon pricing.)