Comment by shrike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shrike | Hacker News Reader

Good reference - https://processormatch.intel.com/Resources/Program%20for%20C...

The regulations seem reasonable. They are limited to regulating the amount of power used while desktop systems are at idle, not while "in use". They take into account the potential for accessories to be added by the end user, the "Expandability Score". This means "bigger" computers can consume more power at idle. The CEC defines 4 idle states; short-idle, long-idle, sleep and off. Each state is well defined -

* Short Idle is system in S0 state, display on, no applications loaded or running, after a fresh re-boot.

* Long Idle is the same as Short Idle except the screen is off.

* Sleep is Power State S3 (or equivalent if the system doesn't directly implement S3).

The regulations also specify the required default timeouts for transitioning between idle states, e.g. the screen should be turned off after 10 minutes without user input, it should enter S3 after 15, etc. These don't apply if the system ships without an OS installed, they explicitly say that an end-user is free to change the defaults.

There's nothing reasonable about these regulations. If we want people to use less electricity then raise taxes on electricity and the free market will sort it out. Power is fungible.

They probably wasted more energy while drafting these laws than they’re going to save.

Taking a step back, I don't see how we got from a government's role is to protect citizens from foreign invasion to determining what kind of computers gamers can buy through some byzantine energy scoring system. If you mentioned this as a possibility ten or twenty years ago as a slippery slope argument, most people would have thought you're crazy.

CAFE standards for automobile gas mileage have been around since 1975. Perhaps less a slippery slope and more the reality that America isn't a libertarian state?

That's exactly the point - sleep states and efficiency is indeed 'byzantine' and I don't see how you expect individual purchasers to understand it. 'Byzantine' complicated things are exactly where regulation is needed to help.

> sleep states and efficiency is indeed 'byzantine' and I don't see how you expect individual purchasers to understand it

You charge people a lot of money for electricity, and then this motivates them to learn it. A lot of 'byzantine' things are routine. A lot of the rituals we do with computers today would seem incredibly bizarre, and difficult to a person from 200 years ago. For example, on PCs, I hit the 'return' key to make a new line. Or on most computers, Cmd/Ctrl-V is often used to paste things. What does the letter V have to do with pasting anything? It's completely arbitrary and byzantine and the knowledge is frankly rarely mentioned and it's unclear to me how anyone learns it other than by mentorship. And yet, the entire population is more than happy to engage.

> You charge people a lot of money for electricity, and then this motivates them to learn it.

I challenge you to understand that, while this may seem reasonable to you, is not how humans operate. Especially in a household of multiple humans over which you have little/no direct control over, and multiple changes within a given month (the typical billing period for electricity). If you, your partner, your son, and your daughter have all gotten new, power hungry devices, and it's now also winter/snowing outside/aka the bill is expected to be high due to seasonal heating costs, and the a new, punitive rate plan has been put into effect, how could a non-technical consumer even start to address the change in electrical cost? Other than pay the now-exorbitant bill.

Regulations are the answer for the real world where people live. We can debate what the regulations themselves should say, but expecting human nature to suddenly change and that everyone should want to get an EE degree in their free time, just because their electricity bill is mysteriously higher, is not how I would approach trying to effect large sweeping cultural changes. Not when we can't even get a quorum of people vaccinated.

If people want to use less electricity, they need to have reasonable options to do so in the marketplace without needing a computer engineering degree to figure what sleep states their motherboard supports. That's one purpose of these regulatory mandates: to make the market more transparent and efficient.

Consumers shouldn't have to waste time sorting through products that are broken from day 1 in non-obvious ways.

> Consumers shouldn't have to waste time sorting through products that are broken from day 1 in non-obvious ways.

They're broken via legislation, not any fundamental part of the product.

Hm? This is a computer that doesn't have a lower-power mode when you're not using it.

How do you know which computer you need to buy to lower your energy consumption, if there's no transparency around which ones use lower energy? The point of regulations like this is to make this clear, and to force companies to compete on features they'd otherwise not care about.

The biggest problem with libertarian solutions is that they're regressive taxes, politically presented as "freedom".

Libertarians acknowledge the need for regulations. The importance is that they are stable and apply to everyone equally. Labels for food that list ingredients is great because it has been fair and stable as an example.

The regulation being discussed is fair and stable and applies to everyone equally. Most appliances in your house are energy regulated; it's actually odd that computers are not. So, if anything you're arguing for the regulations discussed.

"Letting the market decide" is not a form of regulation.

Maybe, I’m not am expert on this computer topic. I just wanted to highlight the libertarian opinion on regulations.

The main goal of libertarians is to get prices to work. The alternative that i fear we are heading towards is price controls then mandated requirements for output. E.g produce 100 loafs of bread today that will sell for $1.00 or off to jail you go.

Oh, just let The Free Market Fairy, solve our problems, eh? https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/

How is using taxes to get an outcome you want an example of the "free market"?

Parent comment explicitly invoked it:

> raise taxes on electricity and the free market will sort it out.

This explains the definitions and gives example calculations:

https://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/revi...

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