Maybe it meant the rate of energy consumption while the servers are rendering and sending the page. You'd have to multiply 30w with the time spent by the server doing all this stuff (probably less than a second) to get the total consumed energy. A web server consuming 30w of power per connected user sounds exaggerated to me. A high-end server CPU at full load probably pulls 200w and can handle at least 1000 users.
But this is an art project and I have no idea what expertise does the artist have, and I'm not an expert either.
Yes, watt hours or joules would work there but not watts. In general the figures all seem to assume 30 watts of power consumption at near-idle, which is completely ridiculous unless you happen to be using either a high end workstation or an antique.
The first page states an estimate of 50g of CO2 per visit, but I'm pretty sure reality is nowhere near that. At ~1000lbs CO2 per MWh for home electricity in the US (https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...), that's ~0.45g per Wh. My laptop only has a ~40 Wh battery, so I can't even be using anywhere near that - and that's already two orders of magnitude smaller.
Scrolling down the project page about half way, it's displaying 0.15 kcal for me. That's ~0.17 Wh, which would equate to only being able to do that ~235 times on a single charge for my laptop. That's very obviously nowhere near reality.
It's supposed to be "sciency", not science. Look to scientists for meaningful
energy to accounting. This a political art project, where accurate facts are not important.
So now it says 30wh, which seems just wrong. If the transaction took 10 seconds or so, during that short time it would have had to consume over 10 kilowatts of energy.
Neither journalists nor USians are very careful with their use of units. Imagine my dismay to find a Nordic person (who are usually so careful, precise and diligent!) forgetting to make sure she (?) make sure that power and energy were each separately accounted for.
The good news is that in 4 billion years, the sun will explode, and we'll have to teach unit-accounting to sluggards in the dark. (Wait. That's the good news?)
It's presented too dramatically IMO, but the core argument is one we need to raise awareness of: you use energy and emit carbon so a company can run code that in part grooms you into being a better consumer of their products.
Brick and Mortar stores do this too. Some ways are fun and nice like air conditioning and wine while browsing. Others not so much: facial recognition at Target's nationwide, and companies like ShopperTrak and others.
No matter if it's online or in person it's getting increasingly creepy. Any awareness of it a net positive, even if it is a tad dramatic.
Are you sure the subject is a complaint and not an exploration? It seemed more to be an exploration of the energetic and computational cost of serving an average Amazon user. I found it fascinating. 30 watts and 88MB to load a page of otherwise static content does seem a little ludicrous, and I've definitely thought the same thing about much of the content I see on the internet that loves loading a bunch of crap that slows my machine down to a halt.
Yes, it seems pretty clear that the author feels oppressed by Amazon: "To put it bluntly, the user is not just exploited by means of their free labor, but is also forced to assume the energy costs of such exploitation."
Leaving the author's admittedly sanctimonious tone aside (which I find a little grating), don't you think that the topic of energy costs of these "fat" applications is worthy of exploration?
Yes, I think that is interesting, but not enough for me to get over the oppression narrative. Furthermore, I am skeptical that there is anything there at all, I can't image that the energy I waste the few times a week I go to Amazon to be anything but a rounding error on my overall energy expenditure.
I get that, but hear me out. I think what's fascinating is not necessarily the rounding error on your overall energy expenditure, but the likely sheer overall cost of that on the whole. I think similar thoughts about bitcoin mining -- the truth us, if you add up a lot of this computation in aggregate, how much of it is wasteful as a whole to the organization or network paying for it? That number, while maybe not huge enough for many orgs to do anything about it, is still pretty large, and certainly interesting for me to think about.
Sure, but that applies to anything, does it not? If one multiplies anything one does by 7 billion there is a good chance a large number will come out. Maybe that is a little interesting at first glance but not in any larger sense.
The problem of web bloat isn't that you waste a little more electricity on a particular site once a week. It's that all the million users waste all that energy each - which multiplied by millions of users, and by most popular sites being bloated, adds up to possibly relevant amounts of electricity (and carbon emissions).
yep. they made sure to say their browser is firefox. the whole thing would have been a moot point if your browser is draining more energy than the pages you visit...
True. And you can address it yourself by blocking JS mainly, and ads, and be amazed at how snappily a web page renders (when it does, which is often but not always sans JS).
Never liked when Amazon increases the price a few days later after witnessing you researching something to buy. This is why I only purchase items 'on-the-spot' in a small window of time which allows me to escape such a practice.
They effectively trained you to buy more, faster. Bravo!
If you wait another week, the price usually falls again. Cammel3 is a good place to look to keep yourself sane on prices. Many 3rd party resellers mostly do it to get people to buy, I have seen much less from actual 'amazon sold' items.
> after witnessing you researching something to buy.
Amazon has never done that (different prices for different customers), their prices are the same for all users.
They didn't raise it because of anything you personally did.
Their prices just go up and down all the time randomly.
Leave the item in your shopping cart and check it daily (or more) and watch the price bounce around. You can use this to your advantage if you are not in a rush and wait for a good price. You can also use camelcamelcamel as a price tracker.
Well maybe they do? I know Amazon's algorithms are opaque to the user, but after several purchases on Amazon I noticed this trend of items I researched showing a small uptick in the price after a few days when I go to buy it. The price uptick is there for all users, but Amazon knows only one specific person will buy it, so the price is adjusted for that person and no-one else. After buying, the price goes back to its default in a few days.
Thus, the 8,724 pages of code that track and personalize user behavior and experience and were involuntarily loaded by the customer (me) through the browser, are evidence of Amazon’s core money-making strategy at work. Moreover, all the energy needed to load this relatively large amount of information was effectively unloaded on the customer (me), who ultimately assumed not just part of the economic cost of Amazon’s hidden monetization processes, but also a portion of its environmental footprint.
Holy crap. Are you telling me, when I visit a website, that it uses electricity? That I'm downloading code onto my computer? That when I tell my browser to load a webpage, that page loads against my will?
What is that supposed to mean? A watt(= 1 J/s) is a measure power so energy per unit of time. Shouldn't this rather be given in joule?