this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
1891 points (96.6% liked)

Memes

45876 readers
1368 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] alekwithak 415 points 10 months ago (43 children)

No one is ever concerned with how much energy is used to feed ads to the entire population of earth 24/7.

[–] [email protected] 153 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (11 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 95 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago

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!"

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Ban advertising to minors/for products intended for children

Ban ads/branding visible from roadways to prevent distracted driving

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] model_tar_gz 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Serve ads inside the ads. It’s more power efficient—kill two birds with one stone?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's called product placement in a Disney movie

[–] TheBat 4 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] redempt 6 points 10 months ago

ads don't go unless capitalism goes

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Got a better one: just ban marketing outright

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 63 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

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

[–] XeroxCool 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Join our team of Jerks. We have a stiff sign on bonus.

By chance are you good at "shooting ropes"? Our clients love ropes.

[–] MycelialMass 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The new Weight Loss Jerkoff System could solve part of that

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] jamyang 2 points 10 months ago

The studs at the local Blue Oyster don't call me Spider Man for no reason.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Porn is more beneficial for humanity than imaginary ownership.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] GratefullyGodless 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Bur, what if they prematurely finish and my car isn't charged yet?

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] xX_fnord_Xx 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I have an ancient hermetic method of getting off that requires neither computer or phone. Enquire within if you seek this ancient knowledge.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What do you mean 'uncomfortable'?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

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)_/¯

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Most people aren't loudly in favour of that, especially not the ones concerned with the power usage of blockchain

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] calcopiritus 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] foobaz 14 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Yes but what about this whataboutism?

Blockchain user.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Yewb 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Lets do an advertising tax 10% of all add revenue.

[–] alekwithak 8 points 10 months ago

Unironically this.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

48%? Fuck i love my adblocker

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Or how much is spent on the global banking industry...

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] FrankTheHealer 3 points 10 months ago

That's such a great point wtf

[–] CurlyMoustache 3 points 10 months ago

That is why I only block ads when I'm on a plane 👍

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

How much does facebook, the banking system Google search need and does it even make sense to compare this against a small country?

load more comments (32 replies)