Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

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If you're using more of it, because it's replacing corporate travel and going into the office and driving across town to see your friends and family and facetiming instead, then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy.

It's not like the majority of electricity use by computers is complete waste.

You can poo-hoo and say I don't want to live in the digital world, and want to spend more time flying around the world to work with people in person or actually see my mom, or buy physical paper in stores that's shipped there and write physical words on it and have the USPS physically ship it, but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.

If Google didn't exist, who knows how many more books I'd need to own, how much time I'd spend buying those books, how much energy I'd spend going to the stores to pick them up, or having them shipped.

It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.

While we all like to think that Facebook is a complete waste of time, what would you be spending your time doing otherwise? Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.

Not to mention, presumably, at least some people are getting some value from even the most wasteful pits of the Internet.

Not everything is Bitcoin.

You also seem to live in a different world. I urge you to start getting informed on what needs to be done in order to build hardware (hint: it does not grow on trees).

> then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy.

Instead of using all those caps, look at the numbers: we have them. We use more and more energy.

> but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.

Not sure if you really need the hint, but you shouldn't spend more time flying around the world.

> It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.

It is a fact that it isn't. Before Google, people were using less energy than we are now, period.

> Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.

The industry that gets you your memes on the hardware you call phone is anything but "close to nothing" when it comes to energy. I would say that you are in bad faith, but with all those examples you've giving, it seems like you are just uninformed.

So let me be blunt: your kids will most likely die because of how much energy we use (from one of the plethora of problems coming from that). At this point, we cannot do much about it, but the very least would be to be aware of it.

More energy because more people and more things are electrified & mechanical.

A massive portion of the world was basically living in the stone age and has been lifted into middle class lives over the last 60 years.

The population has also more than doubled.

This is like comparing apples to apes.

Sure, if you go back to when we were all monkeys, we are obviously using more energy per capita.

If you go back to WW2, The West is using far less energy per capita, even when you account for imports. And again, that's far less energy to produce far better lives. And both of those tr ends are continuing every year.

Sorry, you can't say, globally we use more energy, so every usage of energy is causing us to use more energy. It's not that simple.

> Sure, if you go back to when we were all monkeys, we are obviously using more energy per capita.

We keep using more and more energy per capita, period. You can go back 10 000 years, 200 years or 100 years, it's the same.

> If you go back to WW2, The West is using far less energy per capita, even when you account for imports.

This is blatantly wrong.

> Sorry, you can't say, globally we use more energy, so every usage of energy is causing us to use more energy. It's not that simple.

It is that simple: what you wrote is called a tautology: we use more energy, so we use more energy. And every new usage of energy is causing us to use more energy.

If you use more, you use more. How is that not simple? :-)

https://datacommons.org/tools/visualization#visType%3Dtimeli...

Ok, you show me a line. Where does it explain what it measures? It says "Energy used per capita", it doesn't say what energy it accounts for.

It most definitely does NOT account for the commute of the employees in China who worked on parts of your smartphone. Does it account for the use of TikTok? To what extent? Does it account for the AC in the datacenters used by TikTok outside the US?

How do you account for overall energy use being up massively, and rising at record breaking pace

According to the following references, most residential energy is used for heating and cooling. Most commercial energy is used for lighting, heating, and cooling. And most industrial energy is used in chemical production, petroleum and coal products, and paper production.

1: https://www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/publications/pdfs/cor...

2: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/industry.p...

Its not. For the US, energy use per capita has been trending downwards since 1979. For the developing worlds, increase in energy usage is tied to increasing living standards.

> For the US, energy use per capita has been trending downwards since 1979

It would be relevant if the US was completely isolated from the rest of the world. But guess what? The hardware you used to write this comment does not come from the US.

Not taking into account the energy that went into building and transporting your hardware where you are currently using is... well wrong.

> How do you account for overall energy use being up massively, and rising at record breaking pace

That has nothing to do with how much energy is spent on Google and the Internet vs how many more people there are, and how much more stuff the average person in developing economies has.

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