Actually, mains power should normally be a very good frequency source for a clock. Utilities periodically adjust the frequency such that the long term clock drift is near zero. From wikipedia:

So yes, 1w is a lot of power.

The parent's point was not to say that 1W is useless. (Indeed, as you point out, 1W can be put to great use.)

Instead, he made a very logical argument that if society's goal is to reduce wasted energy (a noble goal), then it is misguided to try to expend tremendous engineering effort trying to reduce a device from 1W down to 0W. If, instead, we improved the efficiency of a 75,000W SUV by a mere 0.1%, we will have saved two orders of magnitude more energy.

Attack the biggest problems first, not the smallest ones.

I believe that TFS means 'the only known recording of a particular live Woody Guthrie performance'.