The Hidden Life of an Amazon User (opens in new tab)

Maybe it meant the rate of energy consumption while the servers are rendering and sending the page. You'd have to multiply 30w with the time spent by the server doing all this stuff (probably less than a second) to get the total consumed energy. A web server consuming 30w of power per connected user sounds exaggerated to me. A high-end server CPU at full load probably pulls 200w and can handle at least 1000 users.

But this is an art project and I have no idea what expertise does the artist have, and I'm not an expert either.

Yes, watt hours or joules would work there but not watts. In general the figures all seem to assume 30 watts of power consumption at near-idle, which is completely ridiculous unless you happen to be using either a high end workstation or an antique.

The first page states an estimate of 50g of CO2 per visit, but I'm pretty sure reality is nowhere near that. At ~1000lbs CO2 per MWh for home electricity in the US (https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...), that's ~0.45g per Wh. My laptop only has a ~40 Wh battery, so I can't even be using anywhere near that - and that's already two orders of magnitude smaller.

Accessing from a phone it would be even less significant - for example, this S7 replacement battery only holds 12.7 Wh (https://www.amazon.com/Galaxy-Battery-Replacement-Samsung-Co...).

Scrolling down the project page about half way, it's displaying 0.15 kcal for me. That's ~0.17 Wh, which would equate to only being able to do that ~235 times on a single charge for my laptop. That's very obviously nowhere near reality.

It's supposed to be "sciency", not science. Look to scientists for meaningful energy to accounting. This a political art project, where accurate facts are not important.

The unit appears to have been fixed to “wh”.

Neither journalists nor USians are very careful with their use of units. Imagine my dismay to find a Nordic person (who are usually so careful, precise and diligent!) forgetting to make sure she (?) make sure that power and energy were each separately accounted for.

The good news is that in 4 billion years, the sun will explode, and we'll have to teach unit-accounting to sluggards in the dark. (Wait. That's the good news?)

And those buttons sure look like amazon buttons

Are you sure the subject is a complaint and not an exploration? It seemed more to be an exploration of the energetic and computational cost of serving an average Amazon user. I found it fascinating. 30 watts and 88MB to load a page of otherwise static content does seem a little ludicrous, and I've definitely thought the same thing about much of the content I see on the internet that loves loading a bunch of crap that slows my machine down to a halt.

True. And you can address it yourself by blocking JS mainly, and ads, and be amazed at how snappily a web page renders (when it does, which is often but not always sans JS).

They effectively trained you to buy more, faster. Bravo!

If you wait another week, the price usually falls again. Cammel3 is a good place to look to keep yourself sane on prices. Many 3rd party resellers mostly do it to get people to buy, I have seen much less from actual 'amazon sold' items.

> after witnessing you researching something to buy.

Amazon has never done that (different prices for different customers), their prices are the same for all users.

They didn't raise it because of anything you personally did.

Their prices just go up and down all the time randomly.

Leave the item in your shopping cart and check it daily (or more) and watch the price bounce around. You can use this to your advantage if you are not in a rush and wait for a good price. You can also use camelcamelcamel as a price tracker.

It will come back to haunt Amazon as soon as they start to scale