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Comment by tda | Hacker News Reader

This is because we don't price energy and raw materials as much as we value them. Putting a higher price on extracting natural resources will swiftly lead to less waste and less frivolous uses as they then become uneconomical. But as of now, compute is cheap and available, power is cheap and available; what else than wasteful use would you expect?

Hopefully not that corporation would somehow feel morally obliged to abide by some arbitrary standard and make less money along the way. But that is effectively what you are suggesting.

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As an interesting aside to carbon taxes and such (which appear to be working to a degree):

Was shopping for ETFs a while back and came across the WealthSimple SRI portfolio which is based on their funds. They use a normal ESG index but it also de-lists any companies in the top 25% of emissions for their category.

This would seem to help avoid some collusion and complacency in industries like software that are just at a natural advantage in absolute terms compared with, say, coal plants.

Of course, it's a retail investor and consumer driven thing which leaves too much on the table for some, but I think there's something to the idea of getting companies to compete on the rate of improvement relative to each industry, in addition to internalizing some of the costs through taxes.

Interesting take on how to value something, even if it is a top performer but wasteful in how it uses resources, the lack of efficiency make it rank lower.

Thing is, most top of category performers in anything are wasteful in some resource. I think kinda by definition. Lets go way out into left field and say even top performing artists and athletes are wasteful, because the slope of the gain to expensive curve flattens the higher up you get.

I think for large orgs to be high efficiency it has to be baked into their culture. If you don't have high efficiency, the worst thing you can do is also get large.

I think the gamedev world could be akin to digital coal, toxic work env, low pay. Your entire labor force could walk/pivot to something else if better any dimension you compensate them on changes.

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