To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution • Hacker News Board

Re: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

#21

Post by kgwxd » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

aiCeivi9 wrote: post #14

erentz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a sensible way to go about it to me. Suddenly all those services that nobody would actually pay for, that are simply designed to hook people and consume their time, would go away. A whole lot of services that people would actually pay for would suddenly change in focus because now they wouldn’t be driven my ad metrics and engagement metrics. E.g. You’d be paying for email so your email provider would…

I hoped huge popularity of adblock would do the same, without the need for regulation. No need for clickbait title when visitors are only a cost.

If Mobile Safari and Chrome for Android supported extensions, it probably would already be ubiquitous.

Re: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

#22

Post by davidw » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

maximente wrote: post #13

erentz wrote: post #5

It’s interesting to see this article for me because it is similar to the “Bitcoin is bad because CO2” articles and arguments that arise from time to time. To which I’ve unsuccessfully attempted to argue you can’t really say Bitcoin is bad and shouldn’t be allowed to exist for that reason without also agreeing that other stupid things we do with computers should suffer the same fate. Which surprisingly attracts a fair…

carbon taxes are regressive insofar as the poor spend a larger % of their income on fuels than the rich and this is often not negotiable - people can't choose to e.g. not commute half an hour to work when they don't have much disposable income to start with, whereas the rich can generally pay for whatever quantity they want to consume already. so the point of the tax (reduce consumption) unfairly hits the poor.

It's possible to find ways to give some of the takings back to those who are less well off.

Re: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

#23

Post by hos234 » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

erentz wrote: post #5

It’s interesting to see this article for me because it is similar to the “Bitcoin is bad because CO2” articles and arguments that arise from time to time. To which I’ve unsuccessfully attempted to argue you can’t really say Bitcoin is bad and shouldn’t be allowed to exist for that reason without also agreeing that other stupid things we do with computers should suffer the same fate. Which surprisingly attracts a fair…

Hmm...how would it effect Porn? I would guess they are larger than Snapchat.

Re: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

#24

Post by cellularmitosis » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #9

maliker wrote: post #7

My cellphone (pocket computer) needs 10 Wh to run all day. For the same amount of energy, the lights in my office will run for 6 minutes. I'm not buying this "must decomputerize" pitch.

yes, but the masts, wifi, network and servers to support that consume a lot more than 10Wh

And when you divide that by millions of users, how many watt hours is it?

Re: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

#25

Post by ebetica0 » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #8

Stop computering in places where fossile fuel is used for electricity. Build datacenters next to cheap renewable or nuclear energy and access cold air and water. There are hundreds of abandoned industry sites near lakes and rivers in Northern Europe for example.

Believe it or not, cooling is almost never the bottleneck, aircooled datacenters can be built in relatively warm places like virginia. The infrastructure for datacenters is often the bottleneck - each one takes up the electricity of a small town and many out-of-the-way places don't have the infrastructure set up to support such things, nor do the local renewables provide enough energy to run the datacenters.

Re: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

#26

Post by fock » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

maliker wrote: post #7

My cellphone (pocket computer) needs 10 Wh to run all day. For the same amount of energy, the lights in my office will run for 6 minutes. I'm not buying this "must decomputerize" pitch.

unfortunately for most people (including myself) the cellphone is nothing more than a fashionable toy which needs permanent connectivity and data-influx to be relevant as well as regular replacement (because fashion). And this is consuming a lot more than 10Wh a day.

Technically I could (and probably would) still use my old Galaxy Nexus if I had a secure browser/mediaplayer and would only browse sites at the "complexity" of HN, had a chat app which wouldn't randomly hang the UI for seconds when task-switching (probably it would help having no emote-packs, videos-disguised-as-gifs and perfectly viable 720p-pictures as the inline-default) and the 3G network around was a little bit better... And yeah I (and a lot of other people) wouldn't miss a thing, GOOG and co. might have a little less cash in store and the craft of UX-designer might pay a little worse (BUT: all of this would have catastrophic consequences on the service oriented growth economy of the US which might not even hit Joe Doe very much if properly managed but would remove a little power of all the epsteins of this world, which of course can't happen...)

Re: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

#27

Post by huntie » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

xvedejas wrote: post #19

maximente wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

carbon taxes are regressive insofar as the poor spend a larger % of their income on fuels than the rich and this is often not negotiable - people can't choose to e.g. not commute half an hour to work when they don't have much disposable income to start with, whereas the rich can generally pay for whatever quantity they want to consume already. so the point of the tax (reduce consumption) unfairly hits the poor.

A Carbon tax would also disproportionately help the poor, especially the global poor, so it's not fair to call it regressive without finding a way to put some numbers on both the costs and benefits. Besides, the money gained from a carbon tax isn't lost, it can be reinvested in things like public transit infrastructure.

Public transit is not viable in most of the US.

Re: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

#28

Post by tomatotomato37 » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

xvedejas wrote: post #19

maximente wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

carbon taxes are regressive insofar as the poor spend a larger % of their income on fuels than the rich and this is often not negotiable - people can't choose to e.g. not commute half an hour to work when they don't have much disposable income to start with, whereas the rich can generally pay for whatever quantity they want to consume already. so the point of the tax (reduce consumption) unfairly hits the poor.

A Carbon tax would also disproportionately help the poor, especially the global poor, so it's not fair to call it regressive without finding a way to put some numbers on both the costs and benefits. Besides, the money gained from a carbon tax isn't lost, it can be reinvested in things like public transit infrastructure.

That climate benefit from a carbon tax would only start indirectly helping the poor in decades, while a carbon tax is a direct immediate burden; and you can't just tell them to "take one for the team and wait it out" as that just ends up with them burning down your capital while wearing traffic vests. Using the carbon tax for regular infrastructure purposes is also a bad idea because when it is working it will go down overtime as the public optimizes their carbon use, as it should. Tying it to unrelated societal maintenance creates a pervasive incentive for the government to somehow force the continual use of carbon (probably through questionably legal means) while sustaining the tax in order to get income up.

And all this also avoids the core issue in actually deciding if the unpaid externalize of a unit of carbon is $200, $20, or $0.02; if you can't even get people to universally agree if there is a crisis in the first place than how on earth are you going to get them to agree on the monetary value of said crisis.

Re: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

#29

Post by vertis » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 5:05 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #15

Alas, the author failed to do adequate research before getting on their high horse. Yes, cloud computing sucks power (which is then vented to the outside world, it could be recycled _and_ cut latency) but you know what pushes out more CO2? Poor house insulation.

This is what this article says to me. A poorly researched piece.

I'm not unsympathetic to the need to run computing from renewable energy, but this article seems like a stretch, especially when it tries to link in government surveillance, etc.

Re: To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution

#30

Post by vertis » Wed, Sep 18, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

kordlessagain wrote: post #12

WhompingWindows wrote: post #4

The author doesn't mention decarbonizing electricity in the first few paragraphs. He simply claims ML is driven by fossil-fuel electricity, when in reality the electricity mix for computation is increasingly green over time. Since computers don't need anything except electrons to run, it's all about power sector emissions here, and that's a bright spot in climate relative to transportation, industry, and agriculture…

The author also doesn't mention black holes, but there's a huge one at the center of our galaxy which will gladly do away with us and all our problems. Electron arguments aside, computers need matter and a lot of that matter in them is rare, which requires things like strip mining and other non-Earth-friendly activities. If we manage to pull off a walking/talking/joke cracking AI, it and its little AI buds will likel…

The article didn't really make that argument though. It could have gone into things like your strip mining example and that would have been better than a lot of the arguments used.