You are quite right. There is an attitude now of don’t turn anything off. This goes for all devices, tv’s, sky boxes, smart meters, everything. Sure it’s draining less energy, but it’s still draining energy. There was a time my parents would shout at me to turn a light off if I leave the room, now no one bothers. Rely on “smart” meters to tell them how much they are wasting due to laziness. As for damaging your system, that’s nonsense. You do more harm by not shutting down and letting proper cleanups happen than not.
The simple fact is energy requirements are skyrocketing because lazy people are trying to use technology to plug the gaps where they are too lazy to do so. Take electric cars for instance, aside from the fact that they are making parts of the world uninhabitable for life, and are now looking to destroy the seas to provide the minerals, where is the power going to come from to power all the current cars and the exponential growth of them alongside the ever increasing population? Hundreds of thousands more people every day, none of whom can walk to the loo even so “need” a car.
I am afraid the whole thing is a joke, pushed by hippies. The real problem is there are too many people and the is ever increasing as medical science makes them live longer and prevents death, and this will only be solved by a drastic reduction in humans. So outcome, global warming is probably a good thing, in fact failing a meteor hitting, probably the only chance that the world has of surviving this human infection at all.

Many of them like the money and also the attention/power.....if they lost the latter two then maybe they might move on.

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Both are good ideas.

Another good idea would be to incentivize companies to make more power efficient components/systems through tax credits/etc, while also dis-incentivizing them from making less energy efficient parts/systems through penalties/fines/etc.

Who cares about the exact brand, especially when you are talking about the company putting the parts together (ie, not the CPU/GPU manufacturer).

Been buying Lenovo Thinkpads for years for my personal laptop. Now thinking about System76 for my next laptop, though if they go bust by the time I get my next laptop, I'll look at other quality business offerings. People love to brag about how powerful their gaming rigs are, but truth be told, you don't need that much for gaming.

Any serious ai/cryptography developer will give your modest gaming requirements a run for their money (for practically any hardware metric).

Heck, in some respects, even my more modest distributed systems development requirements are giving your gaming rig a run for its money. I might not need a gpu like yours, but my laptop has 64GB RAM and my personal server has 128GB RAM, 20TB of hard disks configured in RAID 10 and a 32 cores of cpu.

So yeah, when I hear people complaining that energy requirements is cramping their gaming, I roll my eyes.

At least as far as I bothered to look into this, the idle power consumption regulations were passed already in 2016 and high end workstations and gaming PCs would be exempt from them as long as their Expandability Score was not under 690, which doesn't seem like too difficult to reach unless the affected Alienware models have very few integrated USB-ports in a mATX or ITX motherboard where a discrete GPU tends to make it difficult to add any USB or Thunderbolt expansion cards without using raisers or blocking the airflow to the GPU.

The point is less what people need/want for gaming, and more so that people shouldn't be told what they need for gaming.

Yes, if people do a bunch of extra steps they can get around it all, but (imho) people shouldn't need to resort to such things just because some official wants to virtue signal and line their pockets & the pockets of their buddies.

system76.. meh looks way too expensive for what it offers
imho only linux fanatics buy them

That's a fine thought. Unfortunately, until the financial cost of computing hardware properfly reflects its environmental impact, they'll have to limit it in other ways.

I agree that picking on hardware is just the tip of the iceberg (its an easy target right now, its not making people complain too much).

They'll eventually also have to limit what you wear, where you go (if it involves travelling long distances), what you eat and a bunch of other things.

Brace yourself, unless you are very old, its coming within your lifetime as the world-wide impact of everyone wanting to live a "free" Westernized lifestyle becomes clearer and clearer.

Well, this particular Linux fanatic is getting paid quite a bit for what he knows so he'll stick to his expertise, thank you very much.

The thing is, they could(and imo should) get businesses(which have a bigger combined impact) to be more energy efficient if they want to save power. Also tax incentives/subsidies and penalties/fines should be the go to solutions before going straight to "bans".

No, they don't have to do any of those things to such an extent and people shouldn't just blindly accept them either....especially when there are ways/methods that don't limit to such a degree what people can do.

(examples: incentivizing companies to use more recycled materials in packaging, and to use less packaging materials to begin with....and perhaps also to produce goods closer to the markets they will be sold in, to reduce fuel requirements to transport goods)

That said: if you want to limit yourself in such ways, then by all means go right ahead, I won't stop you.

Well according to some, we should all bow down and accept whatever we're made to do (whether it be what PCs or PC parts we can buy/use, or other things) if it's for "the greater good".

As for me? I think Edgar Friendly says it best

I don't think we should have the regulation but leaving things as they are isn't doing any good. If people were more responsible and not wasteful then there'd be no need for the regulation. It's not just power that people waste. It's food, air, and other things. It's practically too late, as far as warming is going.

How much worse does it have to get before people take responsibility for their own actions?

All those PC's that were lost in the wildfires around the Mediterranean, and the floods in Germany, should reduce power usage and slow climate change a little. So us 'proper gamers' can use more power than ever before and not feel guilty about it. Win-win.

If officials went after corporations(gaming hardware makers or otherwise), who are often the biggest "offenders" when it comes to such waste/pollution, then they likely wouldn't need to impose on people much at all.

But a number of them get kickbac....donations from a number of companies, so obviously they won't often do that.

They count as people, too. :P

I think it would be an interesting analysis to compare all the user devices (smart phones, consoles, pcsm various smart devices) vs the corporate devices (aws, azure, google, etc). I'm not sure who would win.

My guess is, probably the consumer devices (there are a lot of computers in the data centers, but there is at least half a billion people in North America alone and all of them have at least a smart phone).

But yes, end-users are easier targets than corporate users.

I'm not sure listening to what an overwelming majority of expert opinions are saying is "blindly accepting". For example, I've heard A LOT that plastic doesn't recycle that well (it's a costly process and it degrades each time, so you can only reuse it once or twice).

Furthermore, ocean life is gradually getting converted to a giant pool of jelly fishes (this is coming from marine experts) and the Amazon forest is essentially getting cut down for beef (also coming from experts).

Overall, expert opinions are in terms of end-game environmental effects are ranging anywhere from "humans will become extinct" to "we're in for a rough ride and hundreds of millions of people will have to migrate" (ie, war). Even if we go with the most optimistic of those opinions, it is not a pretty picture.

I would love all of this not to be true, but there is what I would like (living forever, gaming all the time while being productive at work and a loving husband to my wife, eating all the sugar I want and not get fat, etc) and then there is what is (and to a large extent, what I want doesn't mean jack, I have some agency, but I'm not a godlike figure).