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Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by lotsofpulp on Monday April 10, 2023 @03:53PM (#35516632)
The cause and effect exists whether or not some commenter on HN writes about it.

The reason it is not “invoked” is because energy prices are sufficiently low (due to not pricing in externalities) that there exists little incentive for end users to optimize for power usage.

Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by gruez on Monday April 10, 2023 @04:39PM (#35517118)
>The reason it is not “invoked” is because energy prices are sufficiently low (due to not pricing in externalities) that there exists little incentive for end users to optimize for power usage.

You're right in principle, but in practice even factoring in externalities electricity prices won't be high enough for people to care. Using current US carbon intensity for electricity generation[1] and the higher end estimates for the social cost of carbon[2] gets us carbon costs of $0.142 per kWh. The average prices in US is $0.168. Adding in carbon costs would almost double the price, but there are countries with even higher electricity prices[4] and they're not exactly switching to more efficient software in droves to save energy.

[1] https://emissionsindex.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_carbon#Carbon_p...

[3] https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...

[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...

Re:Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox... by robotresearcher on Monday April 10, 2023 @10:29PM (#35520018)
Battery powered devices have battery life as the dominant user-sensible cost rather than the price of electricity.