Sunday’s Doonesbury touched on one of my major ecological concerns: standby power and the LED lights that give them away. Trudeau is usually either earnest or obviously sarcastic in his strips, but this one’s hard to read. The (increasingly-mannish) Alex observes to her roommate, “Isn’t it thrilling? A roomful of technology in standby mode, ready to leap to life and serve us!”
There seems to be much debate over how much power devices in “standby” consume (also known as “vampire power“), there’s no question that our modern technologies are not costless. Those LEDs are twinkling reminders: “turn me off!”
