this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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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.
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".
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 ~~capture~~ fapture system or as a weight loss program
1 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.
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
Porn is more beneficial for humanity than imaginary ownership.
Capitalism is based on imaginary ownership.
Bur, what if they prematurely finish and my car isn't charged yet?
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)_/¯
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.
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.
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.
Blockchain user.
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.
This study estimates (with a considerable uncertainty) that the Internet amounts to around 5% of the world's energy usage.
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.
Or how much is spent on the global banking industry...
That's such a great point wtf
How much does facebook, the banking system Google search need and does it even make sense to compare this against a small country?
That is why I only block ads when I'm on a plane 👍