These arguments seem as silly today as when gas cost 18 cents a gallon and people made fun of suggestions to consider making gas engines more efficient.
My first car got around 8MPG. Here we are 50 years later and my car’s gas engine (a Prius hybrid) only gets 6x better mileage (48 MPG).
Meanwhile, room-sized computers back then that required dedicated HVAC systems to keep them cool, have gone from hot noisy power-sucking monsters to palm-sized devices thousands of times faster that let us video-call anybody anywhere in the world any time we want, and they run for 24+ hours off of a thin battery.
I suspect that if we measure net watt-hours of power consumption per million CPU cycles they provide, we’d find today’s cell phones are the most power-efficient computers we’ve ever had, and they keep getting better. Cars … not so much.
Batteries have not significantly changed throughout my life, probably because nobody ever believed it would be feasible to power something like a vehicle that went 400 miles on them. Or even an aircraft for that matter. (The Wright Brother’s first powered flight stayed aloft for 12 seconds and flew 120 feet.)
I like to think that Elon Musk looked at that lack of innovation and said, “How can I create sufficient demand to make the evolution of battery technology take a quantum leap?” And the answer he came up with was, electric cars and battery-packs to store power from renewable energy sources. By extension, those vehicles can also act as battery-packs, since most of them are sitting unused most of the day. He did for the transportation industry what the transportation industry refused to do for itself. Why? Gas has always been way cheaper than it actually costs due to subsidies governments around the world give to Big Oil.
Anyway, it’s good that we’re having this debate. FINALLY!
I have solar panels on my house and I like to watch the app that shows power generation and consumption. It updates every 15 minutes are so, and I can tell when the A/C is running more steadily. The cooler it is inside, the more the A/C runs, but the less the refridgerator runs.
It bugs the crap out of me that the guy who re-habbed this house didn’t put any insulation or dry-wall on the interior side of the block walls, and they pass through so much heat in the summer time that it’s absurd. The previous owners did a bathroom addition years ago, and they didn’t put any insulation in the walls of that either. So if I close that door, in about an hour it’s as hot in there as it is outside.
It’s about time people start thinking about this stuff!
I’ve worked remotely for most of the past 10 years. My employers have never reimbursed me (or even offered) for the additional power it takes to cool the house and power my computer equipment while I’m home during the day. Now the recent tax law changes don’t let us deduct these expenses as “non-reimbursed work expenses” on the assumption that if our employer thought they’re worthwhile, they’d happily reimburse us for them. Yeah, right.
We’re having a severe drought here in the southwest. Yet Nestle is pumping millions of gallons of water out of the ground, putting it into non-biodegradable plastic containers, and shipping it out-of-state to places where it rains a lot.
Chandler has a bunch of fabs and data centers that are suddenly asking for increases to their city water allotments. Their City Council is realizing that each of these “consumers” are sucking up around one million gallons of water PER DAY, PER FACILITY, out of our water table to cool their equipment, and just releasing it into the air.
They’ve been told “no more water!” and if they need more, they’re going to have to start reclaiming it from the humid air they’re releasing to the environment. Nobody seems happy about it, but it’s clear our wasteful ways are starting to negatively impact our environment.
If you’re feeling oppressed in this discussion, you should review “Tragedy of the Commons”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSuETYEgY68
-David Schwartz
> On Jul 27, 2021, at 4:25 PM, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>
>
> All this stuff is funny!! My first computer was a Commodore 64. I think it was named that because it had 64k of RAM.... Remember that one could be extended with a tape drive and or flappy. I'm not sure if I had a flappy....
>
> Around that time I went into a business that was using a Commodore 64. Maybe that is all we needed?
>
> I do not recall the Gov regulating it because of all the power it had for that period.....
>
> The next year I bought a garage clone that had a 8088 - 8 bit CPU and 1MB of RAM of which 640k was addressable. Yikes what a power hungry beast...
>
>
>
>
> On 2021-07-27 15:04, Aaron Jones via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>> Those are some dangerous statements.
>> https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/06/chinas-greenhouse-gas-emissions-exceed-us-developed-world-report.html
>> If you think little Johnny playing fort nite is going to be the
>> deciding factor versus China producing more pollution than all other
>> developed nations combined I would disagree. But if you are war
>> hawking here and trying to bait us into a pollution debate so you can
>> get everyone to do the whole “war with China thing…” then you
>> got my reply and I admit I got baited.
>>> On Jul 27, 2021, at 2:58 PM, Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss
>>> <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>>> greg zegan via PLUG-discuss said on Tue, 27 Jul 2021 14:16:27
>>> +0000
>>> (UTC)
>> https://www.zerohedge.com/political/59-million-americans-prohibited-buying-high-end-dell-gaming-pcs
>>> Allow me to change the headline of this article to...
>>> "Six States Responsible Enough to Limit Computer Power Consumption"
>>> Anyone prioritizing their video game performance over the
>>> starvation,
>>> water wars, crop failures, climate refugees, underwater cities,
>>> deserts
>>> replacing farmland, and normalization of cat 5 hurricanes that will
>>> surely come if we don't handle this situation correctly, is an
>>> ethical
>>> cripple.
>>> And anyone, who just has to have that superburner computer, of an
>>> age
>>> not likely to live until 2060 is just borrowing on a future they
>>> know
>>> they won't repay.
>>> And it's not like you can't wait 4 years and have a computer using a
>>> couple hundred wats that performs like today's 1000 watt gargantuan.
>>> SteveT
>>> Steve Litt
>>> Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the
>>> Successful
>>> Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
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