Comment by hetspookjee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hetspookjee | Hacker News Reader

Just copying another comment abotu the energy consumption of online adverising

"The online advertising ecosystem resides in the core of the Internet, and it is the sole source of funding for many online services. Therefore, it is an essential factor in the analysis of the Internet's energy footprint. As a result, in 2016, online advertising consumed 20–282 TWh of energy. In the same year, the total infrastructure consumption ranged from 791 to 1334 TWh. With extrapolated 2016 input factor values without uncertainties, online advertising consumed 106 TWh of energy and the infrastructure 1059 TWh. With the emission factor of 0.5656 kg CO2e/kWh, we calculated the carbon emissions of online advertising, and found it produces 60 Mt CO2e (between 12 and 159 Mt of CO2e when considering uncertainty). The share of fraudulent online advertising traffic was 13.87 Mt of CO2e emissions (between 2.65 and 36.78 Mt of CO2e when considering uncertainty)." The paper was: "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019592551...

It was the one of the five papers included in the authors PhD thesis, "Towards Sustainable Data Centers and ICT Services"

https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/38725/i...

Yes but if we start playing the “which energy use is more valid” game then quickly we realize energy is in the eye of the beholder, and the solution is a pollution tax. Bitcoin shouldn’t be outlawed anymore than video games (a totally useless tech from a society viewpoint) but HNers love their video games and Google paychecks.

Would you consider having USA impose environmental parity tariffs as a way to tax over-polluting countries (which are used by Apple because of the lack of environmental and human protections which make things cheaper to manufacturer over there)?

I have nuanced and specific views on this, but to summarize, I don't think we can ever rely on that as a solution. I think a more realistic solution is more exotic - chemicals in the atmosphere, giant mirrors in space, some sort of carbon sequestration, etc. The majority of environmental damage is to the immediate vicinity (air / water) of the factories, and the citizens of the nation will have to demand change from their leaders, just as happened in England and then America throughout the industrial revolution. The global environmental risks we need to solve in more advanced ways.

I partially agree with the eye of the beholder argument. But video-games, useless? Hard disagree. How about movies, books, theater, paintings? We should not move into a soulless society that only cares about "productive" activities.

Meanwhile, crypto and PoW are cool concepts that do the same as existing applications, just slower and at an enormous cost to everyone.

ok, but online advertising is used by / pays bills for maybe half of the whole industry, whereas crypto is used by what, 0.1% of internet users?

why not (get rid of) both?

When do we auto-organize as a species and ditch these primitive blame games and Mutually-Assured-Destruction madness such as competitive wasteful economics systems that cause people to drive hours to a place they don't like to "work at a job" doing something that is useless for the overall group and displeasing for the person doing it, simply due to dumb plumbing not organizing us. Maybe we should ask some machines how to run ourselves... (partially joking, but you know what I mean...Where is our group common sense and ability to hive-mind when we need it?)

Given the context I can only assume that this is intended to be a defence of the energy consumption of mining, but even so it's the most tone-deaf defense I can imagine. Excusez mon français, but gently caress the online advertising industry, and gently caress proof of work cryptocurrencies. Scourges of the modern world, the both of them.

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