The Bullshit Web

But let me put it this way, I still reduce, reuse, and recycle even though I know that one unconscientous suburban family will essentially dwarf my lifelong efforts in a year of their average living.

I know that those efforts are futile for the end goal of environmental conservation. That doesn't mean that I'm going to stop doing them. Being dedicated to acting in accordance with an understanding of first principles is not a bad thing, even if those actions are relatively impotent or ineffectual in and of themselves in the current moment.

As far as changing out power sources to nominally sustainable forms, yes, I would still find issue with people wasting those resources, just as I would find issue with people running air conditioners with the windows open.

As far as compassion and unintended consequences, everyone might be here for a reason and maybe trashing the planet is part of that plan, but equally so I might be here to speak against trashing the planet as a part of said reason and said plan.

It boils down again to if you need to find a reason to justify minimizing unnecessary energy usage, we're not going to see eye to eye and I doubt any argument will sway either of us towards the other's camp. Chalk it up to different contexts.

This evening there was that broadcast on our national radio about "white zones", I don't know if you listened to it.

The 3 guests were directors in major telecommunication organisations and administrations of the country. They discussed how high-speed Internet should be available to everyone everywhere, and they declared that there should be fibre-to-home everywhere in the country.

But in 30 or 40 minutes of broadcast I think that they did not ask themselves once: why should everyone have access to optical fibre? does everyone need it? what for? can we define what real problems and needs are? can we define a set of stuff that really matter? why do we even need a high-speed access to read and fill administrative paperwork (without paper)? what can be done to achieve the same functions with low- or medium-speed Internet for everyone, by not wasting ressources?

I mean, it is crazy to be about to pour billions in something because... just because. Without a deep analysis of what is wanted and how to solve it. They have decided on a solution, but they have not defined the problem. They pretend to solve the case of a few people who are supposedly in trouble because they cannot fill important forms, but the real use will be that Jean-Pierre-Kevin and Rayanne will watch the same American blockbuster, each one on his own tablet or smartphone, but Rayanne will start watching it 10 minutes later, killing the global bandwidth because "eh! it's free".

At my place, the Internet speed was upgraded (I don't think anyone asked for it?), as a result people started using TV-over-xDSL, VOD and streaming like pigs, and now in the evenings the speed is worse than it used to be before the upgrade...

One must question the usage that is done with the infrastructure before spending billions building it, because the general consequence is a never ending abuse of the available infrastructure, whichever capacity it has.

(For Agu: " rel="nofollow">https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/le-telephone-sonne/le-t...)

   ftp -4o 1.htm https://www.nytimes.com

   du -h 1.htm

   206K

Could it have anything to do with the browser he is using?

Does it automatically load resources specified by someone other than the user, without any user input?

Above I specified www.nytimes.com. I did not specify any other sources. I got what I wanted: text/html. It came from the domain I specified. (I can use a client that does not do redirects.)

But what if I used a popular web browser to download the front page?

What would I get then? Maybe I would get more than just text, more than 206K and perhaps more from sources I did not specify.

If the user wants application/json instead of text/html, NYTimes has feeds for each section:

    curl  https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$1/index.jsonp

The user can use the json to create the html page she wants, client-side. Or she can let a browser javascript engine use it to construct the page that someone else wants, probably constructing it in a way that benefits advertisers.