Has anyone tallied the energy costs of cleaning and drying all those skeet rags? Or Kleenex production? Ecologically minded masturbators will just recycle it.
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The last thing I want to do at that moment is use my decoder ring. Especially since I would have just taken off my decoder ring.
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Nah, won’t work. Everybody will be instantly suspicious because the “video drivers” folder will be way too small to be a real driver package from AMD or Nvidia.
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That sounds sad and like no fun at all. Do you also shit and shower sub rosa?
[I swear I’m not trying to alliterate with s words this week. It just keeps happening!]
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It’s interesting to consider that software has a physical cost – that, for example, cranking it to a locker room spy cam video directly burns more coal than 'sturbing over a One Direction story on AO3 – but this particular article seems pretty weak. 6million kWh is like 3,500 barrels of oil, which cannot possibly manufacture and ship a lot of DVDs; if that figure is remotely accurate, there’s no story.
It’s also worth noting that energy expended in data centers is likely to be much cleaner than energy in general, since it’s all consumed as electricity, with an unusually high proportion of renewable sources.
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Also, what about the energy cost of reading online articles about the environmental impact of streaming porn?
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If that DLL loads, will the sticky bit get set?
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Oh wait, I missed the most obvious joke:
“As if i didn’t have enough shame while masturbating…”
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And Hurts Mother Nature. A Very Very deadly sin
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Anyone who takes the slightest glance at these figures can see that that’s exactly what they are doing. These zealots who hate and fear human sexuality are always going to clutch at any tiny hint of something that might support their views, because they have to ignore the greatest ever natural experiment on the subject of the effects of pornography that is playing out around us. Widespread internet availability since the late 90s is correlated with absolutely nothing that they can point to as a negative outcome, but of course, you can’t reason someone out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into.
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Unless you’re a paying customer you are getting porn in 720p video at a relatively low bitrate compared to Netflix
Also, why isn’t YouTube (or Facebook video) bad for the environment? Oh right – that would be a boring headline.
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Porn is in inherently sinful, though.
I agree here. It’s hard to see how a relatively meager 6GWh could be worse than drilling oil, shipping it to a refinery, shipping the products to another refinery to be turned into plastic pellets, mining bauxite, smelting that into aluminum (also energy expensive), shipping the plastic and aluminum to a DVD pressing plant, making the disk, box, insert, cover, and putting them all together, shipping them to a warehouse, breaking the shipments up and shipping the disks to stores, people driving to the store and picking up the disks and driving them home (or having them delivered), and this doesn’t count the energy costs of running the DVD player and its energy hungry spinning motor…
My gut tells me that you would never break even on that DVD compared to streaming video. Especially streaming to modern devices where the decoding happens in specialized circuitry in the GPU and is astoundingly efficient. That spinning disk in the DVD player and its cheapass MPEG2 decoder chip might well be less energy efficient per view.
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The major confounding variable would seem to be what effect trivial access to nigh-unlimited porn has on fertility rates.
Deferring or avoiding a first-world child is a fairly substantial ecological win, so if porn being the path of least resistance even modestly decreases the incentive (particularly of the ill-prepared) to face the challenge of actually finding sex partners that could pretty easily count for substantially more than the displaced DVDs and unproduced magazines.
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if Pornhub streams video as efficiently as Netflix… it used 5.967 million kWh in 2016.
To be fair, hiding Playboys from my mom took a lot of energy, too.
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I don’t think they’re making that case. The implicit case is it’s much worse than just not watching porn at all.
All things being equal, if everyone stopped watching porn, they’d just spend that time playing Candy Crush or dicking around on Facebook. So no real saving there on data transfer or energy usage.
Try jamming that genie back in the bottle, eh?
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I figured the argument wouldn’t be along the lines of power consumption, but on increased production of media to compensate for the increase in streaming. Ever Adam & Eve commercial I’ve heard always says you get free DVDs… It’d be like AOL cds in the 90s.
Is it just me or is boingboing is reporting very idiotic takes lately?
I mean, what’s the article saying besides things require energy?
We are making stuff up, but remember porn hurts nature.
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There’s also the bird population that illuminated office towers reap each night. On the other hand…
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“Streaming porn might not be helping the environment”
How many trees does it take to make a kleenex?
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