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German digital signage ban prompts confusion

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291–300 of 457 posts

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#291

Here in Germany, there was recently a leak in the news. It said that a single LED sign consumes as much energy as 10 single households[0]. Of course, the companies don't want to give any official information. That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion... [0] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/led-reklame...

> That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion... There is a widespread belief that Advertising serves no purpose to humanity. Advertising is like anything in life: In high doses it is harmful. In lower doses it is useful. If there are regulators in your country that prevent advertisers from making false claims, even better. Advertising has helped me hone onto products and services in my whole life…

> Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look.

Do you like being approach on the street by solicitors? Personally, I hate it. When I’m walking, I appreciate undisturbed personal space. I feel the same way about advertising. I don’t care that the company is proud. I want my personal space undisturbed. You can show me something if I ask, but to assume I care to see anything you have to offer is rude.

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because of the financial risks involved in constructing, operating and getting rid of them. The costs associated with Fukushima are estimated to be at least 200 billion dollars [1], Chernobyl 235 billion dollars [2]. Even leaving out disaster scenarios: A modern EPR nuclear power plant is at ~1.6 GW [3] at a cost of 11 billion euros, taking a decade or more to build, and about a billion dollars to tear down [4].…

You can't compare the price of a wind park with the price of a nuclear power plant, because the wind park does not offer base load. A wind park without base load is pretty useless. Base load is far more valuable. So if you say a power plant costs 12 billions, it is a steal compared to a two billion wind park. Most people will rather have electricity 24/7 than occasional electricity for 1/6th the price. Beside that, i…

> You can't compare the price of a wind park with the price of a nuclear power plant, because the wind park does not offer base load.

Agreed that base load is valuable... but why not go and reduce the amount of base load by both directly saving on load (e.g. by insulating houses or getting rid of advertising) and by making the base load that absolutely remains more flexible (e.g. by upgrading to a truly smart grid that can dynamically regulate consumption of loads)?

And for what it's worth, you can additionally also go and build even more wind energy. In times of ample wind, the now infinitely cheap electricity can be used in electrolysis to generate hydrogen as a base chemical for the industry and fuel for those very few applications that definitely need a combustion process (e.g. glass and metal foundries).

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a complete transformation of our power usage in any case, both to save energy demand and to make the grid more flexible: - insulate buildings so that they better retain heat. This one is massive - over a third of all energy consumption goes towards buildings [1]! - promote heat pumps (either to air or ground) because these are far more energy efficient for air conditioning and hot water generation - help poor…

Just a few comments: - the things you list are insanely expensive (just keep that in mind next time you say that nuclear power is expensive... you also need to figure these costs in when comparing to EE, because you wouldn't need to do this with nuclear) - PV with battery storage is great for autarky and reducing fossils, but won't reduce the need for base load after a week without sun in winter, when all the batteri…

> - the things you list are insanely expensive (just keep that in mind next time you say that nuclear power is expensive... you also need to figure these costs in when comparing to EE, because you wouldn't need to do this with nuclear)

We absolutely need to do this anyway and fast, because there will not be any massive amount of new nuclear power going online - even if we were to start out a buildout offensive in nuclear plants, it would take ten to fifteen years at best, and we need to conserve as much energy as we can in the meantime.

> - PV with battery storage is great for autarky and reducing fossils, but won't reduce the need for base load after a week without sun in winter, when all the batteries are empty..

Which is why industry needs to be incentivized to shut down in such times. China does it by force, we can offer financial incentives.

> Bio gas, hydro, geothermal.. they are all pretty must at their limits. there is just no way around either burning fossils, using nuclear or having an insane amount of storage.

Biogas has a lot of potential, as well as geothermal. We just need to get going after 16 years of sabotage by the conservatives.

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#294
post #62

My city banned billboard advertising once. All of them digital and non-digital. It was fabulous and finally felt like a place to live. Sadly it did not last long and their revival only reinforced how refreshing their absence was. I think we do not realize the value of visual space and pay a heavy price when we decide to monetize it.

I think similarly, I think advertisement is mass poisoning that we happen to allow, because it makes a lot of money go around. One of the cities that did away with billboards is Sao Paulo - really interesting case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#295
post #233
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And a lot of people either blindly trust this narrative, or intentionally spread misinformation with the sole goal to demonize Russia as much as possible. No one needs to demonise a country that commits genocide and has its military rape children, the Russians are plenty good at demonising themselves. > As far as I know, the goal of shelling (which for the time being does not target the reactors or the spent fuel s…

>No one needs to demonise a country that commits genocide and has its military rape children, "Genocide" became a meaningless word because it's used willy-nilly similarly to "terrorism". Even if we are to trust number of civilian deaths reported by Western and Ukrainian sources it's really far from being "genocide". IIRC in relative terms, the US invasion of Iraq with subsequent fight against ISIS is closer to "genoc…

> "Genocide" became a meaningless word because it's used willy-nilly similarly to "terrorism". Even if we are to trust number of civilian deaths reported by Western and Ukrainian sources it's really far from being "genocide". IIRC in relative terms, the US invasion of Iraq with subsequent fight against ISIS is closer to "genocide" than the invasion of Ukraine.

Genocide has a definition and even basing our assertions of just what Russia is admitting that they are doing they meet the definition of genocide, its not meaningless it just has a broader definition then most people know.

You can read the definition of genocide from here.

>> https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

>> In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

>> Killing members of the group;

>> Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

>> Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

>> Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

>> Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

You could argue about some of the points but Russia _proudly_ admits they are kidnapping Ukrainian children and forcibly relocating them to Russia. So they meet point 5 of the UN definition of genocide.

> And as for "rape children", it's yet another blatant demonization. The lies became so toxic, Zelensky even had to fire Denisova, the person responsible for distributing most of such claims without properly supporting them with evidence. Most of "Russian soldiers rape children" articles you read in the Western media were citing Denisova.

There are multiple counts of different atrocities that the Russians had committed if you want to discount the child rape go for it, but we plenty of evidence of Russia raping plenty of people in Ukraine.

> Oh wow... Are you incapable of critical thinking? Like at all? Russians can always physically cut wires in the territory they control.

Are you incapable of discussing something in a civil manner?. Please read the guidelines for hacker news https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> If they wanted, they could've easily bombed every substation in Ukraine with its missiles. But because they do have some humanitarian considerations, they don't do it (unlike some other countries). As we can see, Russia has no techincal trouble bombing stationary objects as far as the westernmost Ukraine.

Yes the country that is levelling cities, kidnapping and forcibly deporting children, and raping women (and allegedly children) has 'humanitarian considerations'.

Russia regularly uses civilian deaths as a part of its war machine they are trying to do it to Ukraine like they did it too Chechnya in Grozny. It's why they force civilians to stay in the cities they capture.

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#296
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building enough nuclear power plants to power a country also takes decades and is very non-trivial. The quicker we reach 90% carbon-free, the more carbon budget we have left to figure out the remaining 10%. Renewables are the quickest, cheapest way to do that.

>Building enough nuclear power plants to power a country also takes decades People in Germany said these things 10 years ago too. If Germany had started building nuclear in quantity 10 years ago then they would be coming online now and would get cheaper with each new plant. Instead you will have crippling and deindustrializing power prices for years to come.

If we had continued building renewables in quantity ten years ago we would be in much better shape now too. Unfortunately we did neither.

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty crazy. We used to spend 1400 KWh as a family of three. Didn't check the latest numbers as a family of four, but I don't expect a lot more. We even cook / bake a lot. What on earth are people spending electricity on?

Home server PC at around 100W. That adds a surprising amount, on it's own that's getting close to 1000KWh to run for a year. And then there's the main PC setup, running maybe 12hrs a day (inc. WFH). And that was build for gaming, so it's quite power-hungry, especially when the GPU is kept busy, working on Unity projects.

But on average? Does the average person have a home server? A desktop PC?

I don't know any non-techy person who isn't using a laptop exclusively, and then pretty rarely, as most things nowadays happen on the smart phone. AC is non-existent in Germany. So I'm really curious. I have a 24/7 Homeserver and laptop, and am at ~1200kwh a year.

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#298
post #69

Here in Germany, there was recently a leak in the news. It said that a single LED sign consumes as much energy as 10 single households[0]. Of course, the companies don't want to give any official information. That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion... [0] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/led-reklame...

Average power usage for a 1 person household in Germany is 1300 kwh/year (roughly, numbers vary, but not to a degree that it matters). That's about 150W sustained. So 1500W for a large sign, that's like 150 high power LED light bulbs, I guess that checks out. Anything that reduces ads in the public sphere is fine by me.

> 1300 kwh/year

Wow that is low. In most states in the South average household consumes that per month. https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/the-states-that-us...

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the source linked in the top comment, we are looking at a total consumption of 113.000 MWh per year for those displays. One third of that is at least around 30.000 MWh of saved energy.

So 0.005% at 560 TWh total consumption.

Well, in that case we shouldn't improve anything as long as children are starving to death in this world. That should be our only and biggest "bug" to fix. Feel free to recommend another one, but we'll pause all other improvements meanwhile. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: German digital signage ban prompts confusion

#300
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And a lot of people either blindly trust this narrative, or intentionally spread misinformation with the sole goal to demonize Russia as much as possible. No one needs to demonise a country that commits genocide and has its military rape children, the Russians are plenty good at demonising themselves. > As far as I know, the goal of shelling (which for the time being does not target the reactors or the spent fuel s…

But why don't they just cut the connection at the plant. Agreed about demonizing themselves, they do.

> But why don't they just cut the connection at the plant. Agreed about demonizing themselves, they do.

This assumes Russia is a rational actor, they could want to do it and try and have leverage to blame the Ukrainians they could want to do it and try and cause a disaster and blame the Ukrainians.

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