I didn’t know that! (And honestly, I don’t give a fuck about it)

A colleague of mine sent a (somehow indirect) link to this article on the team mailing list a couple of days ago. I know the guy had good intentions but title did not and neither the article.

For those of you too lazy to click the link and read the somehow obscene article, here’s the short version with “for dummies” explanations:
The title is “Google could save the world by going black”. Great! How? It appears that if Google will opt for a black background on the pages hosting their services, instead of the current white approach, it would make CRT screens consume less energy when a user will visit these pages (not that the CRT displays are a dying specie). As a natural consequence, there would be a worldwide energy savings in a value of about $75,000 per year. That’s right, not 75 millions, not 75 billions and definitely not 75 trillions – just seventy five thousands dollars a year.

Now for most people, including me, that’s enough cash to get a very good start in your family-life/career/business/etc. But what we are talking about here is a one-year time savings worldwide. Indeed every cent counts, but from this to saying that this would save the planet it’s a very long way. I would like to know how exactly is this sum of money involved into saving the world. Are we going to buy some stuff from the hardware store to create an ozone-problem-solving machine that hasn’t been invented yet? Are we going to get lots of tissues in order to absorb the water in the growing oceans? Will someone put this cash in bank so in 5000 years, through interest, we would have enough money to allocate for researchers trying to cure cancer or AIDS? What is the exact world-saving solution that would be adopted after saving this enormous amount of money or energy?

The most appropriate question would actually be: do you guys at TheInquirer live on this planet? Do you have any idea how much would be allocated from this sum for a person in year at the current world population? Also, have you ever thought that it is possible that you guys are consuming a lot more than that in hard-disk storage and internet bandwith with articles like this that say nothing?

After all, do you honestly believe that Google really gives a shit about such an amount of money? If I were Google I would have this message posted on each of my pages: We at Google are stealing $0.0000125 from your pocket YEARLY with this crappy white background (who the fuck ever approved this shit anyway?) – just let us know if you feel offended by this and we will change the background to black. I am pretty sure that there will be a couple of guys “feeling offended” and wanting a black background, but these guys will certainly not belong to the category of people that have brains.

TreeHugger at least had the decency to say about the number of saved kilowatts, and not to correlate this number with the world saving idea. It’s not that they do not have their guilt. Oh, they certainly do. First of all I don’t understand who the fuck approves this $1 researches to be posted on their website? And by the way, they also link to this blog, so it’s not even their study. Don’t you guys have an image or some standards to protect? I mean, did you just had to pick up on Google for no reason as the guy you are quoting, or what?

I am not a Google evangelist and I am pretty much interested about alternative energy, low-pollution and stuff like that. Honestly, I even feel bad when I have to put out my cigarette in an improper place. But this is completely pointless and it looks like it’s made by young ecologist wannabies trying to make their entrance in the ecological thing in order to get laid with lots of ecological young girls on some ecological mattresses with some ecological condoms.

However, an even bigger disappointment is that many important web communities have linked to this article and most of them insisted on also quoting the world-saving crap from the title. Well, a lot of the intelligent stuff out there was invented while sitting on a toilet, guys, but that has nothing to do with looking into the toilet for articles after you’re done sitting on it in the morning.