This is part of a larger UK campaign to make people feel bad about energy usage while Starmer is filling increasingly large amounts of UK infrastructure with AI stuff that requires 100x the amount of power.
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Only 100x?
Segregate your garbage so we can later throw it all into the same heap anyways.
Remember to turn off every power source when you leave home everyday the whole year to compensate for one day of McDonald's signboard glowing 24/7.
Lease an overpriced EV so that the planet may survive another billionaire's wedding.
This is our collective duty to pay for the lavish lifestyle of the 1%.
I just stopped buying stuff..I buy food, that's it. my garbage has gone from 3 bags biweekly, 2etal and 3 cardboard down to maybe 2 garbage, half a metal one and maybe 1 cardboard.
it's amazing how much garbage they force on us when we buy companies junk
sometimes there's more packaging costs then product...it's absurd.
Ok but have you considered that if literally every person on the planet did this, climate change would immediately be fixed??
You're just a HATER of practical solutions....... /s
If everyone turned off their smartphones for a day it would account for less than 1% of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet in that day.
If you have a fridge in your house it’s likely using almost 100 times more power than your smartphone. Your heating or air conditioning is using far more power. The steel industry, agricultural industry, transportation, are all pumping out greenhouse gasses at a rate that using electronics is negligible.
AI is becoming another one of those industries, but if everyone turned off their personal devices, they would still need to get up, go to work, which would likely use AI, because they need to buy groceries and pay rent and keep their home powered, and capitalism churns.
Being outraged at the systems around us is a good thing, pointing the outrage toward people living daily lives while wealthy corporations and people do everything in their power to do as little as possible for social good while farming maximum personal benefit, power, and profit is not.
Phone: under 5 watts. Heating: 10kW heat pump
Worrying about your phone energy cost would be fairly dumb. Usage/battery life can be a valid consideration of course.
This is the funny thing, Capitalism basically ensures, even if it were magically practical, it still wouldn't work. Even in utopia, where everyone was super-pooper efficient and saved 99% electricity usage overnight, just one profit-seeking business (and they're all profit seeking businesses) would buy up all the cheap electricity, use their enormous energy advantage to make a bazillion dollars, and use so much power that we'd go right back to 100% (or more) electricity consumption.
The narrative of the 'if every individual did ' is pure myth. Systemic problems can only be solved by systemic solutions.
"YOUR screen time is destroying the environment!" Says screen that is using electricity 24/7.
The fluorescent tubes to power this thing all day for months probably uses more power than my router does in its life time.
I agree with you. Most energy comes from renewables these days, and your wi-fi usage is a negligible amount in the scale of things. How about going after corporate energy waste like AI instead?
Individualistic solutions to systemic problems have zero chance of working.
they 100% work.
that's why they do it.
they make sure to shift the blame, to make sure the system remains unchanged and people who are profiting from what is basically omniside keep profiting from killing the planet and everyone in it.
And yet somehow bombs seem to grow on trees in the US and UK for dropping on innocent children by the IDF in Gaza.
This ad was a waste of the energy it took to print.
The light that powers that sign likely uses more power than is going to be saved by people turning their screens off because of it
Is that advert backlit ALL DAY?
~~Think. Think again.~~ Think about industrial energy use and lack of government enforcing landlords to install insulation and solar
Eh, I can give a pass to this because even if it wasn't this ad, another one would be in its place burning the same amount of energy.
If this university hadnt bought this meaningless advert it would have a tiny reduction in the demand for advertising potentially leading to less always lit billboards being made. So no, they dont get a pass for it.
If you wanted my screen time to be more efficient, please explain all these JS and CSS frameworks you are requiring me to load.
Updated version of the "turn the water off while you're brushing your teeth" ads in the 80s/90s. If you can afford ad spend, you're a bigger problem than the people targeted by it.
Data centers use massive amounts of power. Reducing that power consumption would be a net positive on the environment.
That said, looking at the site, I can't see anything that suggests they've done any research into that. Instead they seem to be promoting their research into keeping kids safe online, with the only mention of the OSA being a short description in their recent June report with no comment about anything to do with it's obvious shortcomings.
The climate after i send electromagnetic waves at 2.4 GHz frequency:
Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.
It’s cheaper and easier to make people feel bad than it is to take reasonable steps to actually solve our environmental problems. Plus, this option lets you be smug and judgmental.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Group
The uk government keeps giving them renewable energy subsidies because trees can regrow but ignore the fact that they cut down trees the other side of the world to burn them here. It releases all the carbon stored in the trees into the atmosphere and then they capture a small percentage of it back and pretend to be the good guys.
AI dataceter water cooling doesn't grow on trees.
Your showers are hurting the profits.
If my goal was to try and damage the organization of groups looking to drive environmental initiatives, this is what I'd do. One of the things, anyways.
Is this the sequel to "delete your old emails to save water"?
Ah the UEL, where you can do useful studies that don't require screen time:
MSc Artificial Intelligence
MSc Artificial Intelligence (with placement year)
MSc Big Data Technologies
MSc Big Data Technologies (with industrial placement)
MSc Blockchain and Financial Technologies
MSc Blockchain and Financial Technologies (with industrial placement)
MSc Cloud Computing
MSc Cloud Computing (with industrial placement)
MSc Computer Science
MSc Computer Science (with industrial placement)
MSc Computing
MSc Computing (with industrial placement)
Or Business and Finance where you can learn how to make people consume and buy mooooore!
Absolute fucking horseshit when we're talking about massively expanding our energy use to fuel AI datacenters and total surveillance. It's like scolding people for not recycling while increasingly making everything single-use plastics.
DO NOT, MY FRIENDS, BECOME ADDICTED TO ELECTRICITY
My thoughts are that this makes no sense at all.
As far as activities you can do in your leisure time go, browsing through your phone probably has less environmental impact than anything other than napping. Even say, reading a (physical) book is usually going to require you to go to a bookstore or library (or worse, have it delivered) which will have carbon expenditure.
I think they want to subtly train the masses to use less electricity because the new AI schemes need all of that extra power just to exist.
Did one of their worst students in graphic design make this?
It's fucking awful.
Why is "on trees" circled?
Why is the first "think" crossed out.
Why would I think again when they dismissed my first attempt?
What is the significance of the paper in the centre being torn?
Is WiFi the issue?
Is screen time the issue?
What if I use WiFi without my screen?
What if I put my phone in aeroplane mode?
Do they want us reading newspapers or some shit?
Isn't cutting down trees also kinda shit for the environment?
A high-end estimate of the energy cost of data transmission is 0.1 kWh per GB. If a household uses 350 GB per month, that's still only 35 kWh, a drop in the bucket compared to a typical household monthly energy usage that includes an electric stove, oven, refrigerator, freezer, microwave, tea kettle, air conditioner, and heater.
The back lights that it takes to light this electric billboard probably take more electricity than the total energy cost of 3 people being online on their phone (or maybe 2 people on a laptop, or maybe 1 person on a desktop).