[paulmd]

> And they also should feel ashamed for what they get and consume, as it has a CO2 impact and their future is doomed if they use too much.

I loathe how this has turned into an easy way to dismiss any product you don't like, a thought-terminating cliche, because hey, you're not going to argue that your iphone is more important than the planet, right? What a jerk!

I have seriously had probably a dozen discussions where people insisted that wireless charging was bad because the extra 2.5w of power for 2 hours a day was contributing to global warming. And of course sending the delivery truck out a couple times a year with extra cables doesn't count - not that deliveries aren't efficient, but even a single extra delivery certainly uses more than the 1 kWH a year that wireless charging "wastes", plus the cables themselves, etc.

There isn't such a thing as a product that's not meant for you personally anymore, or a product that is built on the assumption of a different use-case/lifecycle from the one you wanted, or a product that's just bad. It's actually bad because you're a monster who's burning down the rainforests personally. And meanwhile all the things I like are pure unalloyed social-positives.

That's been the whole android/iphone lifecycle discussion for years now. Every single product anyone dislikes is now instantly labeled a "waste of sand" or whatever, because if you don't personally want to buy an RX 6400 it should actually be outlawed by the EU because it's bad for society and bad for the planet. It pretty much is godwin's law for tech discussions at this point.

As the old joke goes - "guy who never goes anywhere with nothing in his apartment except xbox and a mattress on the floor has the lowest carbon footprint but y'all ain't ready for that discussion". The efficiency difference between gaming for 8 hours a day on ampere and rdna2 for the rest of your life is utterly annihilated by taking a single vacation once in your life. And if you point that out people go into this dumb "well that's bad too!" mode, like everyone should just stare at a blank wall all day just because some other guy doesn't like apple products or whatever.

Being charitable I'm sure tons of people just have an extremely bad intuitive yardstick for what actually matters, but it's also kinda just turned into a way to shut down the discussion while virtue-signaling, and again, it always turns into this "all consumption is bad, actually" as if it's possible to exist in a capitalist society without consumption.

[hutzlibu]

"Being charitable I'm sure tons of people just have an extremely bad intuitive yardstick for what actually matters"

People on average just have very bad physic knowledge. No understanding of basic science at all. I actually think that we cannot solve climate change without fixing those knowledge holes - otherwise we just get more pointless activism (like the ones you mention) and ignorance.

[paulmd]

Yeah. And again, in fairness, I suppose it's counterintuitive how much energy is stored by a gallon of fuel, unless you have already been surprised by it in the past :) But even comparing to batteries, you have to stationary-bicycle for a long time to make the energy to charge even a single 18650. Hydrocarbon fuels are the rocketship that fueled the 20th century's insane industrialization (on top of their use as fertilizers, feedstock, etc) and things would look very different if we were still cranking the washing machine by hand, so to speak.

But I also agree with your point on the importance of "napkin math", understanding the relative order-of-magnitude of effects and being able to do some rough estimates on the spot, etc. I had some teachers who were big on doing this and I hear it's a fairly frequent interview question as well (often in the form of things like "how many ping-pong balls can you fit into a sedan").

Whole-systems thinking is another tough one, and unfortunately it's full of confounding effects that make this extremely difficult. Improving efficiency in one area but requiring a supply of physically-delivered goods is often not really a win in total. Another place this came up recently was discussion about the UA Flight 232 was that the FAA knows that having kids riding on lap in airplanes isn't ideal, but they allow it because the alternative (making people pay for a seat for children) would increase the number of car trips, which likely substantially increases the total death toll etc due to higher risk-per-mile.

Gotta be careful about "pushing the problem around", and that's an engineering lesson too. Making the application 10x faster but blowing up the DB is much worse - we can scale out to more containers if we need, but scaling the DB is hard. So even a "higher-efficiency system" (serialize JSON in C vs in java) might perform worse once it hits the wall. You haven't solved the problem, you've just pushed it around, and this is a worse place for a problem.