5 ms·
That tweet thread is 100% wrong. I absolutely do have the moral authority to tell everyone that burning billions of joules per day in a bank of resistive elemen
by chowells 4y ago
That tweet thread is 100% wrong. I absolutely do have the moral authority to tell everyone that burning billions of joules per day in a bank of resistive elements and then dumping the heat directly into the atmosphere is morally wrong. It's not even a tough question. It is clearly a malicious (hypothetical) act being done only to hurt others.
So if there's an unambiguous case of morally abhorrent energy use, everything else is up for debate. That tweet thread goes off the rails early, as it's clear the author is financially incentivized to not understand the position he is arguing against. So it's no surprise the argument is nonsense.
- latchkey 4y agoIt opens a can of worms. If you start telling people how they should or should not use any form of energy, then you have to ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° at yourself first. https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/bitcoin-energy-consumption.png https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/bitcoin-energy-c... https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/ https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
- simondotau 4y ago> then you have to ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° at yourself first Yes, and?
- latchkey 4y agoIt is absurd as: your website makes money from Google Adsense and therefore is a waste of power because google is profiting off people advertising crap to others.
- noAnswer 4y agoI pledge to not spill 4.9 million barrels of oil into the gulf of mexico.
- latchkey 4y agoSo you don't ever take advantage of an ICE? Fly a plane? Drive a car? Nor do you ever get a delivery to your house. In other words, those things work because you directly or even indirectly support the system which causes those sorts of catastrophes to happen.
- bpye 4y agoIsn't this just the "yet you participate in society" meme? We all can and should attempt to reduce our impact, that might mean we don't own a car, or we fly less frequently and take trains instead, perhaps even just working from home... If I need to fly from North America to Europe, I really don't have a choice. You could do it by boat, but ships are largely powered by fossil fuels too. That doesn't mean I actively support fossil fuel companies.
- zx8080 4y ago> burning billions of joules per day in a bank of resistive elements and then dumping the heat directly into the atmosphere is morally wrong. Does this include mean computer gaming? How about watching movies? Is it morally wrong if done using computer "burning joules..."?
- stubish 4y agoIn most ethical frameworks, making many people happy vastly outweighs making a few people rich. In some ethical frameworks, making people happy is the most moral thing it is possible to do.
- somenameforme 4y agoJust imagine the amount of compute, mechanical and human, that's spent trying to force people to watch ads that they don't want to see to convince them to buy things that they don't need. Alternatively consider planned obsolescence. Devices are designed to break and be replaced rather than last today, as a rule. Consider just phones alone on this front. The amount of resources that consumes is unimaginable, and that goes well beyond just electricity or manpower. Ultimately our entire society is built around the largely arbitrary expenditure of absolutely massive amounts of energy and resources to accomplish tasks that, in most cases, are not especially useful or necessary. Optimizing GDP, a goal of most all developed nations now a day, is often just a proxy for increasing waste. Buying the same phone 20 times gives a 20x boost to GDP relative to buying it once. And yet this is the metric we've chosen as a measure for progress.
- WalterBright 4y agoThe history of moral rectitude justifying forcing such rectitude on others is very bad.