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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

Do we? Let's compare some numbers.

Creating an average hamburger requires an input of 2-6 kWh of energy, from start to finish. At 15¢ USD/kWh, this gives us an upper limit of about 90¢ of electricity.

The average 14 kB web page takes about 0.000002 kWh to serve. You would need to serve that web page about 1-300,000 times to create the same energy demands of a single hamburger. A 14 mB web page, which would be a pretty heavy JavaScript app these days, would need about 1 to 3,000.

I think those are pretty good ways to use the energy.

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Slightly veering off topic but I honestly wonder how many burgers will I fry if I ask ChatGPT to make a fart app?

A tiny fraction of a burger.

Now open an average news site, with 100s of request, tens of ads, autoplaying video ads, tracking pixels, etc., using gigabytes of ram and a lot of cpu.

Then multiply that by the number of daily visitors.

Without "hamburgers" (food in general), we die, reducing the size of usesless content on websites doesn't really hurt anyone.

Now go to an average McDonalds, with hundreds of orders, automatically added value meals, customer rewards, etc. consuming thousands of cows and a lot of pastureland.

Then multiply that by the number of daily customers.

Without web pages (information in general), we return to the Dark Ages. Reducing the number of hamburgers people eat doesn't really hurt anyone.

Sure, but you've got to eat something.

Now, if mcdonalds padded 5kB of calories of a cheesburger with 10.000 kilobytes of calories in wasted food like news sites doo, it would be a different story. The ratio would be 200 kilos of wasted food for 100grams of usable beef.

You don't need to eat burgers though. You can eat food that consumes a small fraction of energy, calorie, land, and animal input of a burger. And we go to McDonalds because it's a dopamine luxury.

It's just an inconvenient truth for people who only care about the environmental impact of things that don't require a behavior change on their part. And that reveals an insincere, performative, scoldy aspect of their position.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Sure, but beef tastes good. I mean.. there are better ways to eat beef than mixed with soy at mcdonalds, but still...

What benefit does an individual get from downloading tens of megabytes of useless data to get ~5kB of useful data in an article? It wastes download time, bandwidth, users time (having to close the autoplaying ad), power/battery, etc.

> but beef tastes good

One could say the same for js libraries, Tailwind and shiny imaged on the web.

Beans also taste good, so does minimal web page.

So you're saying because people like diverse and good tasting food, that includes meats, that we can waste bandiwdth and energy or crappy websites? Yes, beans taste good, especially baked with barbecued meats... people want that, buy that, order that, pay that. People also want 5kB of news, they don't need or want the crap that comes with it, autplaying ads included.

Citation needed, it seems you haven't actually considered there are people on the other side of the coin here. I love the crap that comes with it, and that is not a joke or an exaggeration. I probably love it more than the beef you're eating which takes about an order of magnitude more energy to produce than the grass the beef ate did. To me it's a lovely, lovely way to spend energy.

I love advertising in particular. Advertisers are welcome to every megabyte they can get their hands on when it comes to optimizing for the Vickrey auction deathmatch that decides in the blink of an eye what I'm most likely to spend my money on, if only I knew it actually existed. I am unfortunately both a very picky consumer, and way too lazy painstakingly research everything on the market. I'm actually extremely grateful those 5/50/500 megabytes can go towards something actually useful like trying to figure out what I would like to buy rather than... Whatever else they would be used for, I guess. Project Gutenberg archive torrent seeding or whatever.

Just wondering how do you reached at the energy calculation for serving that 14k page?

For a user's access to a random web page anywhere, assuming it's not on a CDN near the user, you're looking at at ~10 routers/networks on the way involved in the connection. Did you take that into account?

If Reddit serves 20 billion page views per month, at an average of 5MB per page (these numbers are at least in the vicinity of being right), then reducing the page size by 10% would by your maths be worth 238,000 burgers, or a 50% reduction worth almost 1.2million burgers per month. That's hardly insignificant for a single (admittedly, very popular) website!

(In addition to what justmarc said about accounting for the whole network. Plus I suspect between feeding them and the indirect effects of their contribution to climate change, I suspect you're being generous about the cost of a burger.)

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