Now, if mcdonalds padded 5kB of calories of a cheesburger with 10.000 kilobytes of calories in wasted food like news sites doo, it would be a different story. The ratio would be 200 kilos of wasted food for 100grams of usable beef.
You don't need to eat burgers though. You can eat food that consumes a small fraction of energy, calorie, land, and animal input of a burger. And we go to McDonalds because it's a dopamine luxury.
It's just an inconvenient truth for people who only care about the environmental impact of things that don't require a behavior change on their part. And that reveals an insincere, performative, scoldy aspect of their position.
Sure, but beef tastes good. I mean.. there are better ways to eat beef than mixed with soy at mcdonalds, but still...
What benefit does an individual get from downloading tens of megabytes of useless data to get ~5kB of useful data in an article? It wastes download time, bandwidth, users time (having to close the autoplaying ad), power/battery, etc.
So you're saying because people like diverse and good tasting food, that includes meats, that we can waste bandiwdth and energy or crappy websites? Yes, beans taste good, especially baked with barbecued meats... people want that, buy that, order that, pay that. People also want 5kB of news, they don't need or want the crap that comes with it, autplaying ads included.
Citation needed, it seems you haven't actually considered there are people on the other side of the coin here. I love the crap that comes with it, and that is not a joke or an exaggeration. I probably love it more than the beef you're eating which takes about an order of magnitude more energy to produce than the grass the beef ate did. To me it's a lovely, lovely way to spend energy.
I love advertising in particular. Advertisers are welcome to every megabyte they can get their hands on when it comes to optimizing for the Vickrey auction deathmatch that decides in the blink of an eye what I'm most likely to spend my money on, if only I knew it actually existed. I am unfortunately both a very picky consumer, and way too lazy painstakingly research everything on the market. I'm actually extremely grateful those 5/50/500 megabytes can go towards something actually useful like trying to figure out what I would like to buy rather than... Whatever else they would be used for, I guess. Project Gutenberg archive torrent seeding or whatever.
Now, if mcdonalds padded 5kB of calories of a cheesburger with 10.000 kilobytes of calories in wasted food like news sites doo, it would be a different story. The ratio would be 200 kilos of wasted food for 100grams of usable beef.