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Comment by louloulou | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the electricity police strike again. You're allowed to use the electricity you paid for for some computations, but not for others.

Seems logical and enforceable.

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Some governments even force you to put insulation on your home or they won't give you a permit to build it! And then they only let you install an energy efficient furnace! And evil EU even forced appliance manufacturers to stop selling inefficient washing machines!

The EU has a long history of regulating energy waste, and outlawing crypto is a logical next step.

Thank god governments exist to decide when I'm using my own money too wastefully. Funny how the portion of my money they already took and spent is never spent wastefully in their eyes.

What is energy waste though? If I get more happy by mining Bitcoin than playing computer games, is it okay for me to use the energy I would have used for playing to mine instead?

I think that about 95 % of the activities that humans do professionally are a complete waste of time. Does it follow that I should be for banning these activities?

> Some governments even force you to put insulation on your home or they won't give you a permit to build it!

And then they point at the "evil foreign/investor buyers" when people complain of the exorbitant house prices.

Just like rifles. Surely there are things that could be done if we start thinking about the problem space.

You might consider changing 'rifles' to 'gun-control'. The movement against rifles, when looking at the problem space of preventable gun deaths, is political optics.

Don't mean to take a side here, but just because a rule sounds hard to enforce doesn't mean it doesn't have an effect in practice. People will often change their behaviour out of sheer societal pressure if something is explicitly banned, even if the ban is not enforceable. Saying "our society does not want/accept this" already accomplishes something, regardless of enforcement. An example would be the banned disposal of certain substances in residential solid waste or sewage systems.

Well, yes.

Please furnish a comprehensive list of your uses of electricity. We'd like to go through it and see which of them are wasteful. We'll let you know which ones you won't be allowed to do anymore.

Sometimes I pre-heat my electric car before removing the ice on the windshield because I'm a bit lazy and a prefer to wait until the ice has melted. I hope it's fine.

Otherwise I don't think I have a very wasteful usage of electricity.

> Otherwise I don't think I have a very wasteful usage of electricity.

Well, of course you don't think it's wasteful. But that's irrelevant. We're talking about putting the power to decide what's "wasteful" in somebody else's hands, maybe some appointed judges somewhere in the government. It doesn't seem like you want to put that power in my hands, though. Still waiting for that list. I'm ready to dictate which of your activities are worthy of electricity.

Power network neutrality is inequitable.

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