How much energy powers a good life? Less than you're using, says new report | Hacker News Reader

How much energy powers a good life? Less than you're using, says new report

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5 pointsPanino7 comments

Just prior to Sept 11, 2001, President GW Bush was considering a statement about reducing electricity “vampires”, all the little chargers and small-drain devices unused sitting in live outlets and power strips. Thanks in part to OBL, we got seriously distracted. Energy consumption can be nudged in small and big ways with only a trivial impact in “satisfaction”, though your media device manufacturers will be to blame for a bunch of apparent discomforts. Just takes being slightly mindful and giving a small care, which is way too much for most Americans. So jacking the price of energy up til it hurts is probably the only way to reduce usage.

You can just regulate these things. California has. So no need for expending mental energy.

Though Americans will probably expand a great deal of mental energy on fighting and lamenting these things though as changing things for the better is perceived as unamerican by about a third of the population.

A bunch of this boils down to habits- which regulations does CA have on those? (Probably more than one.) We’ll take all the useful ones on default behavior of items that make sense.

I grew up in a household where my father went around shutting off unused lights and unplugging unused things. I have inherited this.

"Americans' greatest contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions comes from transportation, mostly from cars and trucks, according to the federal government."

Consent status: manufactured. https://theconversation.com/the-defense-department-is-worrie...

This is similar to those factoids that say "if everyone on the planet had the current American quality of life" we'd need 7 planet earths worth of resources.

The implication is it's impossible, and people start looking for reasons to genocide the non-americans.

The real takeaway should be that American lifestyles are often burning obscene amounts of energy just to make them miserable. (e.g. if you're stress eating and putting on weight that takes more energy than growing/eating what your doctor would recommend as a healthy diet, or burning coal that causes air pollution related heath issues) and that there's societies that are happier, healthier and wealthier because wasting energy isn't seen as a virtue.

People love their diets. They are even willing to do heart surgery to keep their diets! If doctors slapped live glucose monitors on their heart surgery patients and told them to follow a low carb diet (which can then be verified thanks to the glucose monitor) the vast majority of those surgeries would be unnecessary.

I can fully understand why people are unable to follow a proper diet that won't kill them but that's exactly what the glucose monitor is for. The only arguments against glucose monitoring is some misguided puritanical insistence on blaming people for their diet instead of recognizing that supermarkets are set up to make you buy low quality food that you make you overeat.

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