just a typical degrowther take
downvoters: is the video game industry unethical for making billions of players expend exponentially higher compute (= emissions) for something as frivolous as slightly better graphics?
downvoters: is the video game industry unethical for making billions of players expend exponentially higher compute (= emissions) for something as frivolous as slightly better graphics?
Quite literally yes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
The reason most people don't think so is because human brains are not wired to comprehend the danger that slow buildups of a negative create.
In general, the complete waste developers have been creating by allowing themselves to build extremely inefficient systems because moore's law, has been unethical.
Imagine if the single goal of car manufacturers became to create faster and faster consumer cars with higher and higher co2 emissions, even thought those cars sit in a parking lot 95% of the time and when in use are never exercised to their potential.
out of interest, how did you make this post? with moral standards as high as yours, you certainly wouldn't run something as wasteful as a full browser, right? especially when hackernews' html is this easy to parse manually. i'd gues you used curl? and as for your hardware? what did you personally find the most ethical choice there? and about those unethical ISPs? and how did you verify that HN's backend is efficient enough to be considered ethical?
if you take it to the logical conclusion, it just means that all forms of human life are immoral, by nature, and the least immoral human is basically a feral animal, and the most immoral ones are the opposite of that.
so to be moral, just stop being human.
it's just so obviously broken and misguided.
It seems as if you're attaching the same connotations to morality/ethics as you would to legality. If something is not perfectly moral/ethical, it doesn't mean you should never do it.
We over indulge, we waste electricity and water, we drive unnecessarily big cars because it's enjoyable. It's not moral or ethical, but it doesn't make you a bad person. When it's done en-masse, is encouraged, and corporations monetize it, is when it starts becoming a problem.
>If something is not perfectly moral/ethical, it doesn't mean you should never do it.
i think that when emissions are brought up in an argument, it's not usually this more nuanced take (that I also take some issue with, by the way, as it's impossible to do anything not en masse at 8b population)
instead, they are brought up to imply in sort of a smug way that the other party is somehow unethical, and that oneself, having morals as pure as they are, would never do such an unethical thing. hence the other party, and whatever they advocate, is wrong and bad. and the op blog post is a good example of this.
you are missing some simple arithmetic here. yes, x times y can get arbitrarily big if x does (and y is non-negative), but then changes in y would just have even more of an impact. take x to be population and y to be emission per person and you should see your mistake.
gp argued that stuff becomes problematic when done en masse. my issue with that is, if you disallow en-masse $thing, who’s going to gatekeep the tiny, exclusive, non-en-masse club allowed to do $thing?