[ReaLNero]

To reduce emissions, they've started targeting the gaming industry? The meat industry emits orders of magnitude more pollution (even relative to the number of users of each)! Obviously, politicians would lose favor for targeting the meat industry, and thus have avoided fixing measures which would actually reduce emissions.

> They list consoles with taking a bulk of the emissions at 66%, and desktop computers at 31%. In spite of this, consoles are seemingly exempt from the bill.

My guess is the exemption is to tend to corporate interests? Absurd.

This bill does nothing to target Bitcoin mining (these people custom-build machines anyway).

Thoughtless bill through-and-through.

Perhaps this will make more kids build their own PCs, and thus fall in love with computing. Pointless hurdles like this kickstart a hacker's journey. A silver lining at last.

[nightski]

Not to mention meat is only 3% of emissions in the U.S. (of which the U.S. is the largest producer of emissions on a per capita basis). So if these gaming computers are a few orders of magnitude less than that (at idle speeds) it shows how ridiculous this is. Not to mention that these systems will just be shipped to the other 44 states (they aren't exactly dismantling them) so it's really just shuffling the problem elsewhere.

[SilverRed]

>it shows how ridiculous this is

Does it? If the other comment is to be believed, this law bans high end PCs which use more than 11W while in sleep mode. This is an absurd amount of power to draw. Most devices use less than 1W in sleep mode. Using so much power shows extremely inefficient design.

If this law can cause companies to fix their buggy firmware this could result in a massive power savings with virtually no effect to consumers since these devices never should have been using so much power anyway.

[Bancakes]

Some of us like to keep their PCs in performance governor, disable sleeping, disable, core parking, disable swapping, disable switching to iGPU. I want a responsive PC, not a PC that thinks it's a good time to lower the performance.

[onion2k]

My guess is the exemption is to tend to corporate interests? Absurd.

Its a law about how much energy PCs can use. Consoles aren't exempt; they're just not PCs.

They'd probably be allowed anyway because the law is about how much energy is used when the machine is idle, and consoles are pretty efficient when they're not doing much.

[0x008]

I think the real question is why we make a distinction by the use case of the hardware and not the hardware itself?

Under the hood consoles use the same chips and technologies as PCs and so do servers.

[ReaLNero]

> Its a law about how much energy PCs can use. Consoles aren't exempt; they're just not PCs.

I don't understand what distinction you're making -- the Earth is getting polluted all the same. It's still an exemption.

Consoles would likely still be allowed -- but that's more fair and future-proof.

[onion2k]

I don't understand what distinction you're making -- the Earth is getting polluted all the same. It's still an exemption.

That's not how laws work. For something to be exempt there would need to be a clause that specifically states "Consoles can pollute as much as they like". There isn't such a clause.

Saying they're exempt is like saying cars are exempt from the EPA's Cleaner Trucks Initiative (https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engin...). They're not exempt, they're just not trucks.

[NoPicklez]

Completely agree.

[seibelj]

If you let the uses of electricity become politicized, don’t be surprised when your electricity consumption gets banned. Bitcoin mining is no more useless than video gaming.