And it only appears to check the size of downloaded assets and then whether the hosting provider is known to use renewables. Indeed not terribly exhaustive or useful.
I personally think it’s kind of dumb as hell. I’m not sure how you would know but also websites are a tiny fraction of emissions. If you want to lower emissions it’s much more effective to go for legislation local to you.
Pretty much. Being liberal myself, it drives me insane seeing the absolute triple people will buy into. Websites aren’t the things to target, let’s look at things like cruise ships and transitioning to renewable energy.
I’ve never seen low-information voter used as a racist dog whistle, at least not when it was first used during the Obama years. Has it been used differently since?
UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, 2012: Dumb and dumber: :
As the U.S. presidential campaign heats up, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are piling up money and shoring up their political bases. But they’re also going after a few million voters in a handful of swing states — voters considered critical to winning the election. And within this bloc of voters is a special camp: “low-information voters,” or LIVs, a term that keeps popping up in magazines and political blogs.
The term is mainly used by liberals to refer to those who vote conservative against their interests and the best interests of the nation. It assumes they vote that way because they lack sufficient information about issues. The assumption being, of course, that if only they had the real facts, they would vote differently — for both their own best interests and those of the nation.
The problem is that, as neutral as the term “low-information voters” may sound, it’s pejorative and used to express frustration with these voters, who (we’re told) act against their own best interests. Liberals tend to attribute the problem in large part to conscious Republican efforts at misinformation — say, on Fox News or talk radio — and in part to faulty information gleaned from friends, family and random sources.
to refer to those who vote conservative against their interests
They mean black people who don’t vote for them. That’s why it’s a dogwhistle. It became a lot more clear what they meant by that during the 2016 presidential election between Clinton and Trump. The implication being that the reason they weren’t voting for them was because they were intellectually inferior, and not because they were making a conscious and willing decision to not vote for a neoliberal hag.
I mean you’re probably not murdering anyone by using it, just wanted to tip you off of its problematic connotations.
Yeah, this goes into the same bin as carbon offset. Just because you had a couple trees planted in one part of the world you should not be allowed to polute the rivers in another part of the world.
Mostly seems a bit silly but I think if people were making any sort of large decisions based on it, I would probably raise an eyebrow. But I like the idea of people considering the environmental impact of everything they do. Crypto Bros sure could’ve used that lesson.
It’s not like it’s doing any harm unless people put too much stock into it. Like the energy star rating on my HVAC unit - it’s just information to me. It’s not like I’m making major decisions based off of it or getting the feel goods. No reason this can’t be like that.
Exactly. It also gives you an annual estimate of the electric costs. I have no idea how accurate it is, but since they all use the same rating, I can at least compare on the fly if I am so inclined.
Same as "carbon footprint" - meaningless greenwashed bullshit there to shift focus away from those responsible, and the true scale of the damage they're causing for money.
If anything - seeing that kind of certification would make me actively avoid a company because you know they're at best using it to virtue signal for profits, at worst and more likely, they're using it to cover up much much worse shit they're doing.
That tells us almost nothing about a website’s carbon impact. I could serve a 4k uhd movie from my personal website and it wouldn’t even be 1% of the impact from Reddit for 1 second. We need to know how much traffic a site gets for those numbers to matter.
While I understand and agree with you, the obvious counterargument is how many people get serviced and the generated value of them being served. I mean people won’t argue that a car is better than a bus because the car produces less carbon. What I think is the better way to highlight the ridiculousness of those icons, a newspaper website produces more carbon (if energy source is producing carbon) than a server that just return the certification icon. So newspaper website is worse? That is how this certification works… Low information density gets rewarded. Which is contra productive if the goal is an energy efficient web.
To be fair, the service in the screenshot, tries to estimate the average carbon over the year and collects data to improve estimated that counter some of my critic, but it doesn’t fix the ignorance to the kind of data provided and rewards low data density to some degree
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