Paul Cantrell
Argh. No. Bad headline from The Guardian.
The actual research here is kind of interesting: most corporate data on the cloud is only used once. That’s interesting! Both cloud providers and corps could investigate ways to reduce this waste.
The path from that research to the headline, however, is…tortured.
Paul Cantrell
The chain of reasoning runs like this:
- Corporate cloud data is mostly only used once
- So probably that’s true of personal data too
- Memes and old emails are examples of that, probably
- Data centers have climate costs
- So don’t use “reply all” or post memes to save the planet
🤨🤨🤨
2/
Paul Cantrell
Telling people to save the climate by reducing memes and not using “reply all” is just…just…it’s the tech equivalent of telling people the best way to fight climate change is to run the dishwasher after midnight.
(Maybe it helps? a little? but (1) that’s not even •close• to your biggest individual contribution, (2) guilting individuals is a corporate responsibility dodge, and (3) we need systemic solutions, not piecemeal behavior change.)
I call BS on the article.
/end
Paul Cantrell
@virtulis
Heh. I like the term. And honestly paper drinking straws are probably several orders of magnitude more helpful to the planet than not posting a meme.
nu tas nekas :blobcatthumbsup:
@inthehands paper drinking straw-man argument
edit: didn't even mean this to be a reply, but yeah. Raise concern about real global issue, find a bullshit way to make it about personal choices.
Sheepie
@inthehands It’s the paper straws of the internet. Yeah it helps, but it’s such a minor inconsequential thing compared to the climate destruction the processing of the big AI companies are doing that it’s a cop-out and complete bullshit.
Paul Cantrell
@bastardsheep Yup https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112939851668968888
Bruce MacDonald
@inthehands Dang it Paul I've been running my dishwasher after midnight!
I got that idea when Xcel started talking about maybe someday trying time-of-day pricing in Minnesota, something that would Save Big Money.
(Economists say people respond to incentives. I'm just incredibly cheap.)
Seriously though I've found that my many years of individual quirky behaviors have not mattered ONE WHIT.
Discouraging. Some days I just want to say, Eff it. I'm hopping on a plane, to roar over my house.
Paul Cantrell
Addendum: I too favor running the dishwasher late, on the scientific principle of “eh, why not.” But when I was on Xcel’s time-based pricing pilot program, I found — much like @rationaldoge here — that it didn’t really make much difference.
Cat Hicks
@inthehands the actual research is so interesting! Even the part about how our beliefs about and perceptions of these transactions as "free" is interesting. Got murdered by this takeaway 😭
Paul Cantrell
@grimalkina
The path from academic research to mainstream press is one of tragedy and farce
Paul Cantrell
Second addendum: If forwarded emails / memes / social media posts are in fact incurring meaningful storage costs, then:
- Note that text storage costs are minuscule next to media attachments
- Note that media attachments are frequently forwarded unmodified
- We have perfectly good patterns for refcounted shared object storage that would make media forwarding costs close to zero
- And I imagine larger cloud email services may already use them
- So…yeah
aburka 🫣
@inthehands @rationaldoge if you run the dishwasher late because it saves you money due to incentive pricing, that's different IMO. Because it's the power company or public policy creating that incentive which could lead to collective action!
Paul Cantrell
@aburka @rationaldoge
A fascinating finding of Xcel’s pilot program is that the time-based price incentives basically did not work, despite seeming to have helped in other places: they didn’t alter behavior much, didn’t reduce environmental impact. Xcel sunsetted the program, and are back to the drawing board.
In our case, we have primarily electric heat, and heating the house through the night when power is cheap doesn’t make it warm the following afternoon when power is expensive, so….
aburka 🫣
@inthehands @rationaldoge hmm that's too bad, whether due to incentive pricing structure, insufficient education, weather conditions, etc?
Bruce MacDonald
@inthehands @aburka As the inscription on the sundial at the Lake Harriet Rose Garden says, "Count only the sunny days."
Your observation that incentive pricing didn't work well surprises me. But electricity already seems like a pretty good value around here and maybe the savings were not that Big?
Anything to forestall peaking generation and transmission woes, though.
I'd like to build a dashboard for my meter and keep a cold eye on it.
theothertom
@inthehands I’m not really sure if I’d be intreagued or horrified to learn the carbon cost of “send a meme jpg to your friend” vs. “put an advert next to it when they look at it”.
Dan Neuman
@tom @inthehands Running an ad blocker is a far better way to save energy than not communicating with your friends, I would guess.
Paul Cantrell
@dan613 @tom
Undoubtedly, and likely by many orders of magnitude.
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