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No one is ever concerned with how much energy is used to feed ads to the entire population of earth 24/7.
Please propose a law or regulation structure for significantly reducing or eliminating advertisements. I'm serious. I fucking hate ads. I just don't have a reasonable or effective way to get rid of them.
Edit: Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can't come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
In São Paulo, one of the biggest cities of the world, the municipality forbade by law all billboards and building disfiguring 'decorations' some 10 years ago. Since then, the city became much more bearable, aesthetically. Nothing special happened, everybody was happy, except a few bankrupt ads agencies. Maybe, you must be able to imagine that change is possible. However, there is this ideology, Americans seem to be so fond off, that seems to make such things very difficult.
New Jersey also banned billboards. That one is pretty easy and I vote that we should adopt that policy everywhere. It's much harder to control digital adspace, since you can do things like astroturf campaigns and product placement. Great point though! I like that law.
Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
Smart TV manufacturers: "Impossible!"
Ban advertising to minors/for products intended for children
Ban ads/branding visible from roadways to prevent distracted driving
Yes, those two are the most important and shouldn't even be that hard to push. There are many laws that were pushed "to protect the children", we might as well finally make some that actually do protect them.
Serve ads inside the ads. It’s more power efficient—kill two birds with one stone?
That's called product placement in a Disney movie
Didn't go too well with The Marvels lmao
Actually I don't know if there was any product placement in The Marvels because like the rest of the world, I've not seen it either.
ads don't go unless capitalism goes
Make sending unrequested data like ads and trackers to web clients a crime akin to gaining unrestricted access to computers. No need for a new law, just a new interpretation on an older one.
Most jurisdictions prohibit unauthorized access to computer systems. What if we just say, "running Javascript code that implements functionality not specifically requested by the user is unauthorized tampering".
What about this, if you buy a product, you no longer have to watch their ads. Anywhere.
Got a better one: just ban marketing outright
Are we all here because somebody “advertised” Lemmy on reddit?
Where does it stop though? Will TV and super bowl still exist?
What about Facebook, the credit bureaus and Twitter? They're all a waste of energy too.
Let's start with this and then we'll do those in order.
Same with porn. But I'm building a shake-power generator for fleshlites so it should balance out the power it pulls. Saving the earth one jack-off at a time.
Charging a hybrid car battery only takes 253.4 jerks. Pretty soon we will be expanding our charging service to parking lots across America and Canada! Most of them already have people willing to do it for you already ...they were doing it there anyway... Win/win.
Powerjerk (tm), we make perverts work for you!
Just roll up and say "Hey Jagoff, I need to get to x!" And you'll promptly be taken care of.*
*Do not give them drugs to speed up the process. We are serious about our drug-free workplace.
Edit: steal my idea and I'll find you
Energy isn't free. More power captured from jerking will increase food consumed, meaning more energy used in farming. You'll have to brand this as either a carbon
capturefapture system or as a weight loss program1 kilowatt hour is about 870kCal.
Humans are incredibly inefficient power generators. I can buy 1kWh of electricity from the grid for about 18 cents (generation…transmission is extra).
I don’t think I can buy 870kCal of food for 18 cents. Certainly not a healthy source. And that’s even assuming 100% efficiency. Any high school physics student will tell you that won’t happen.
Drinking one gallon of gasoline has enough calories to keep you alive for the rest of your life.
Join our team of Jerks. We have a stiff sign on bonus.
By chance are you good at "shooting ropes"? Our clients love ropes.
The new Weight Loss Jerkoff System could solve part of that
The studs at the local Blue Oyster don't call me Spider Man for no reason.
Porn is more beneficial for humanity than imaginary ownership.
Capitalism is based on imaginary ownership.
Nailed it.
Bur, what if they prematurely finish and my car isn't charged yet?
Fired!
I have one word for you:
Service Level Agreement.
I have an ancient hermetic method of getting off that requires neither computer or phone. Enquire within if you seek this ancient knowledge.
Please elaborate
For only $99 USD all will be explained via a one on one Webinar.
What a deal! I can't lose!
I am. Same loop of crap blasting on 20x massive screens 24/7 at the station.
Every store that keeps light on at night is also an ad.
My hate for them is one of the main drivers behind my radicalization.
My grandfather worked in the ad industry and couldn’t stand ads. He’s always mute the TV when they came on and we sat in uncomfortable silence.
What do you mean 'uncomfortable'?
Well I was like 25 when I took care of him for two weeks and a pretty hard partier so silence wasn’t really my thing at the time. I’m in my 40s with 4 kids so I’ll I love silence now. I’ll even stare at walls.
Well, we weren't very keen on talking in the family when I grew up. I can't remember if we sometimes talked while TV was muted because of ads, but when we didn't talk it didn't feel awkward. If anything, it felt awkward to ever talk to each other. Not the healthiest upbringing in my mind ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At least lighting has become more efficient than 20-30 years ago.
Yes but what about this whataboutism? And honestly I am fairly certain it ain't as much as Bitcoin. People usually focus on 1 thing to get it done because moving to the next. I bet you try to do that at work too.
No way ads consume less power than bitcoin. Just the lights for ads probably consume more than bitcoin, not even talking about creating ads, which I assume consumes a double digit percentage of the global work force.
I did a back of the envelope a few comments up. How it looks to me, just sending internet ads around the world consumes 20 times as much as all crypto mining combined.
You assume wrong. In the UK, about 0.3-0.5% of people work in marketing or advertising, and that's one of the most extremely financialised service economies in the whole world. No way is the number anywhere near even that high in countries where people actually work for a living.
Thanks for the correction. Slightly overestimated 😁
Yeah, I mean it's still an insanely high amount IMO, you're not wrong in the sense that it's "way too many people"
What are you on about?
Yes but what about this whataboutism?
Blockchain user.
Most people aren't loudly in favour of that, especially not the ones concerned with the power usage of blockchain
Perhaps, but you also never hear them complain about it anywhere near as loudly as people complaining about blockchains.
Yes, they’ll grumble about ads being annoying or YouTube blocking people who block ads, but the amount of power that gets wasted on this never even crosses anyone’s mind, meaning on some level, there exists agreement that advertisement are a necessary and responsible use of electricity while blockchains are not.
That's because ad serving doesn't set a lower bound on the electricity price. The value of crypto and the value of electricity are linked.
For the sake of simplicity I'll just say Bitcoin.
If the price of Bitcoin stays constant (big if), and the rate of Bitcoin per watt does too, then everyone would start mining until the demand for power is so high that the price increases until it's as high as the Bitcoin per watt.
Sure, they are unrealistic assumptions, but it's easier to see this way that the value of Bitcoin is (almost) the same as electricity. If it were lower, noone would mine it, if higher, people would buy electricity with bitcoin for a profit until the 2 equalize.
Electricity will never be much cheaper than Bitcoin, market forces will make sure of that, causing a huge environmental impact. Ads, however, only use as much electricity as they need to operate, their amount is not decided based on how much electricity they waste.
Honestly, it never fails to surprise me when on a presumable anticapitalist forum such as this one, someone makes a passionate argument in favor of some of the most ghastly corporate practices known to man, but sure, let's put that premise to the test, shall we?
Here's a good article on the power consumption of Bitcoin, which estimates around 110 TWh/yr.
Here's one on the electricity use of online advertising, which estimates somewhere between 6.5 GWh - 131 TWh/yr.
Shall we call it a draw? Keep in mind that online advertising is a fast growing industry (and likely to continue to grow in the future), whereas Bitcoin's power use isn't likely to grow too much, as the above article explains. Also keep in mind that this is JUST online advertising, and completely ignores print, TV, and those digital billboards that are spreading everywhere from Times Square to your local grocery store. Think about neon store signs, illuminated billboards, etc.
Also, that's just the cost of delivering ads to people (i.e. it doesn't even include the cost of producing them). Think about how many people work in advertising – all the offices they occupy, the computers, cameras, and whatever other equipment they use, business flights, what have you – and I'm pretty sure the carbon footprint of the entire industry far outstrips that of crypto.
But sure, crypto is the real problem.
I see you completely ignored my comment. The problem is not the amount of electricity used in itself, which the estimate of 6GWh-130TWh is as precise as shooting a dart at the moon.
Crypto uses energy for the sake of using energy. The value of crypto is based on the amount of energy used to create it. It's not valuable to society. That's what people is upset about. Crypto provides even less value to society than ads do.
Even you said it, ads spend energy because they employ people, those people generate value.
That's like saying we should stop heating homes because it consumes more energy than crypto mining. Hose heating improves the quality of life of people. Crypto does not.
Lets do an advertising tax 10% of all add revenue.
Unironically this.
I went and did some mafs.
This thing says the world consumes 180k TWh of energy per year.
Apparently, 48% of consumer web traffic is ads.. That is dystopian in itself, that means around half the content floating around the internet is stuff the client does not request but is pushed to them.
That would put the ad industry at 4500 TWh per year. However, this is back of the envelope.
Going off of this, a high estimate for crypto mining is 230 TWh.
That means the ad industry costs us around 20 times the cost of crypto in terms of power. Feel free to check me because I don't know shit about most of these things.
That said, this does not account for the entire ad industry, just the cost of sending internet ads around the world. Ads are made, ads are displayed in various media other than websites, and most importantly, ads have the sole purpose of driving further consumption, which all contributes to the societal costs of the ad industry.
48%? Fuck i love my adblocker
Tbf most ads are on text news articles, one image can take up thousands of times more data than a few words.
And it's cached... and there are CDNs... Still way more energy than you want, but not quite as panic inducing as it sounds.
Damn, I knew the numbers would be crazy, but that's absolutely bonkers.
Yea the rally against block chain tech is stupid as fuck. It consumes nothing in the grand scale...do people not realize a lot of large enterprises have ~200k nodes give or take? Bigger companies can have in the million range. 200k machines is a joke.
Edit: I can see a lot of people just hate block chain tech without understanding anything tech wise lol
The nodes aren’t the issue. It’s the fact that those nodes have to expend at least the same amount of energy every single time a record is added and the larger the ledger, the more energy is needed. Blockchain is somewhat unique in that regard.
It really feels like SOMEWHERE there was a legitimate use for this for very mission-critical stuff that might need to be immutable once published and kept for posterity...
...but then it just became yet another speculative asset to make magic money that fueled stupid monkey jpegs.
The pursuit of profit benefits mankind only by the occasional anomalous accident.
100%. Capitalism is great until it reaches a peak where people who provide no value except in the wealth they’ve amassed are the ones who gain the most from it. You can succeed simply by being born with wealth and having no other value because other people who do have value will need you.
This, exactly. Blockchain could have been used for tracking information publishing dates and such, but it is used for converting energy into IOUs
The point in OP is that "blockchain" was not a new thing. The Merkle Tree was patented in 1979, meaning that it has been free for decades. Most programmers might never have a use for it but they still encounter it every time they use git (which is older than bitcoin).
So, if you're not aware of this, that's because it is very technical and nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
You do understand what a DB is right? Like there's millions of them...hell right now typing out this comment has one marking it. And then you're downloading it to read it... that's a transaction. Except there are millions of people reading comments constantly on all social media platforms.
My comment here has more bits in it than a single transaction.
With the electricity used to validate a single crypto transaction you could do thousands or even millions of DB queries.
Yes, everything uses electricity. That's like saying that it's fine if you kill one cow per day to eat its ear and throw the rest because hundreds of them are killed every day in farms.
Wasting so much electricity in such a non efficient manner so a decentralization cult member can have his wet dream of using non-government money makes no sense.
DBs are not the same as a blockchain. A DB doesn’t have to hash all previous data before it every time the DB is written to. You can read and write to a specific spot in a DB without ever knowing anything else about the DB. With blockchain, inserts have to be successive and they have to reference every previous insert to validate that the entry series is unbroken. On top of that, for things like Bitcoin, every other client also has to validate it since the ledger is shared.
There’s a reason blockchain is significant. Otherwise, why didn’t stuff like Bitcoin exist prior to it? Databases, in some for or another, have existed for decades. Blockchains are immutable, that’s why. The order of entries matters and validation is a requirement.
DBs still update their tables every time someone writes to it. And there are millions of DBs being written to every second. It's absolutely comparable.
We're not comparing millions of DBs to a single blockchain. We're comparing 1 DB to 1 blockchain instance. If you had millions of blockchains, you would use exponentially more energy for the same data vs. a normal database. Updating tables is not the same thing as hashing and validating every prior entry in the table.
There aren't millions of block chains....lol your argument is bullshit.
There doesn’t need to be. My argument is not bullshit, you just don’t understand the differences between blockchain and a standard database and are pretending you do which makes the argument impossible for you to understand.
Lol no I do, you clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about. The amount of DBs we have alone, that's not counting any other compute servers or even WS dwarfs all the block chain out there. This article is a nothing burger and is complete bullshit. Even the study they referenced doesn't know the exact amount...as it points out .6 to 2.2% is their estimated use...but this shit article went with the higher numbers because it's great for people like you who hate any tech that you clearly don't understand.
Yeah, people tend hate what they don't understand. Especially when most people think think every blockchain performs exactly like bitcoin (which is proof of work). Bitcoin is slow and power hungry and would never actually be usable by the masses for everyday transactions. But it was the first and will likely be a "digital gold" for a long time
But it's not the only one and in time everyone will be using blockchain technology. It's so much more convenient and useful than most realize. The Solana blockchain has secured a big partnership with Visa that can be read up on if anyone is interested.
You don't even understand blockchain so I'm not sure what your edit is all about. You're comparing blockchain to a database in your replies as if they're comparable.
When it comes to power...it absolutely is comparable....but most of you have no clue how much compute we use daily in terms of power. Acting like the block chain sucks down anywhere near the amount of power we use on even in the corporate world is hilarious...you know a lot of colos have their own sub stations right?
The only person here who doesn't know what they're talking about is you. If you took a standard DB (MySQL or Postgres, for example) and took that same information and stored it on a blockchain instead, you'd use far more energy on the blockchain and the issue would only get exponentially worse as the chain got bigger. Normal DBs don't need to hash new entries or validate them against previous entries that are also hashed.
Yes because there are millions and millions of block chains...lol don't fool yourself into knowing what your talking about.
And yes DBs are only one DB no one ever has HA stacks or redundancy built in...lol
Are you dense, man? No one said that. They’re saying that one blockchain would take several hundred DBs to equal its energy use. You’re wrong and doubling down for some reason and it’s just making you look silly.
I said that genius...go check my posts...the fuck you arguing about? I literally said that the amount of DBs we have make the miniscule amount of large block chains out there look like nothing. Then you show up and say one DB isn't comparable to one large fucking blockchain....no shit.
You did not say that. That’s why you got downvoted to hell. Since you can’t be honest, I’m done here.
https://lemmy.world/comment/7226368
Yea totally didn't say that at all.
That's such a great point wtf
That is why I only block ads when I'm on a plane 👍
Or that tumble dryers in the USA alone use more energy than Bitcoin.
How much does facebook, the banking system Google search need and does it even make sense to compare this against a small country?
Instead of actually talking about it you're lazily using it to deflect criticism of unsustainable cryptocurrencies. Your input was worthless.