Hacker News Reader

Comment by phartenfeller | Hacker News Reader

Here in Germany, there was recently a leak in the news. It said that a single LED sign consumes as much energy as 10 single households[0]. Of course, the companies don't want to give any official information. That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion...

[0] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/led-reklame...

View on HN

Average power usage for a 1 person household in Germany is 1300 kwh/year (roughly, numbers vary, but not to a degree that it matters).

That's about 150W sustained. So 1500W for a large sign, that's like 150 high power LED light bulbs, I guess that checks out.

Anything that reduces ads in the public sphere is fine by me.

Everyone lauds LEDs for being super energy efficient, but the reality is that they really aren't. It's just that they are being compared to even worse light sources that were so bad at efficiency it's hard to really grasp how much they sucked.

Is there a more efficient way of producing light? Because I don't know of any.

The one that's the most neglected is natural lighting. Light pipes, solar collectors, and microprism window treatments are all available.

The second thing is white paint. You need less outdoor lighting if the built environment absorbs less light.

This does not solve the problem of filling city centers with huge company logos, adverts, signs for casinos or night clubs.

You're going to need very long light pipes to use natural lighting for your digital signage at night. Are you really sure that's a better option?

It's the most efficient option we have, but that doesn't mean it's good.

In the 1800s the steam engine was the most efficient way of producing work from heat, but that still didn't make it objectively efficient.

I read a neat article recently that talked about the "Dubai Lamp". They're lightbulbs that Philips makes for Dubai that are twice as efficient as their standard LED bulbs. The difference is simple: LEDs are more efficient when run at lower power, so by increasing the number of LED elements in the bulbs and reducing the voltage across them you get 600 lumens for 3 W. For reference, California requires lightbulbs to operate at 80 lumens per watt or higher.

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...

Looks like they're bringing this idea to the rest of the world:

https://www.lighting.philips.co.uk/consumer/p/led-bulb/87195...

LEDs are super efficient, household LED bulbs retrofit for e14/e27 are just a terrible example of overdriven ones with bad lifetime. That has very little to do w/ properly constant current (not over) driven LEDs. (Edit overdriven - higher heat output and worse efficacy)

The max efficacy woulod be 683 lm/w. Blue LEDs can reach 1/3 of the theoretical maximum.

The lifetime is pretty good when driven correctly to be sure, I was just talking about raw efficiency. Underdrive a led as much as you want, but you'll still lose half of your energy to waste heat. The heat will just be spread out more and be less noticeable on each chip.

Like, I'm sure we can agree high power LEDs have gigantic heatsinks and fans for other reasons than cosmetic.

LEDs can light a medium-sized room with <5W. That's incredibly energy efficient.

Not when you consider that it's still heating the room with 3 of those watts.

If you asked me to build a house and I threw away more than half of the bricks you'd call me crazy. But when it comes to leds it's called "incredible efficiency". It's only efficient in comparison to the other options, not in any objective sense.

“Efficient” is a relative comparison. Any absolute threshold would be arbitrary anyway

Not really. Converting all the energy to work would be 100% efficiency, converting none of it would be 0%. It's an absolute measure.

Now sure there are subcategories where 100% efficiency is the maximum theoretical efficiency (like the carnot cycle limit of 37% for heat engines), but that's already misleading info if not specified.

You provide no points to refute my statement. Being bounded between 0% and 100% is irrelevant, unless you think only 100% efficient is not inefficient - which would be absurd due to the impossibility of obtaining an “efficient” label.

If they are so inefficient then where does the wasted energy go?

The wasted energy as per usual - heat/entropy. It's just that LEDs are the best we have.

Where it always goes, waste heat. In the case of LEDs, about 50% to 60% of the power draw escapes as heat. Of course, incandescents are much worse.

70% near heat would the very very efficient blue leds, properly driven and all. below that, i.e. 50-60 is just theoretically impossible.

I wonder what's the impact of online advertising as well.

>1300 kwh/year

this is extremely, extremely low. No heating, no cooling, no hot water, no car charging. A fridge alone tends to be over 400KW/h.

Edit: polycaster listed close to 5kWh/year for 3+ household. 1person being 2k. So, extremely low estimate.

Heating is a separate cost, rarely electric. Cooling - did you know that Germans aren’t big fans of A/C? Hot water - same as heating.

Besides, in Germany we don’t say “Car charging”, we say “eat healthy and ride your bike”.

>Heating is a separate cost, rarely electric.

Of course, geothermal pumps are still a better option than most.

You can call it geothermal, when it comes from underground pipes ;) District level heating still exists in some areas, also quite often there’s a single oil or gas boiler for a multi-apartment building.

With number 25 on cars per capita in the world and one of the biggest car industries and also obesity rates above average than EU.

'eat healthy and ride your bike' my ass

>With number 25 on cars per capita in the world

For one of the richest countries with one of the biggest car industries being only 25th is a great achievement in mobility. Yes, we could do better, but just compare it to the default country (#7 in car ownership, #2 if you exclude microstates).

>obesity rates above average than EU

47th in the global ranking, after Iceland. And USA is right after Oceania. It depends on the perspective.

It isn't about the absolute numbers (even though they aren't 'good' for Germany specially if you remove micro/extreme poor states), is the 'holier than thou' attitude from Germans. It's like an obese person going to the morbidly obese: 'here we don't stuff our mouths with food like you' while having no sense that they are just in a slightly better state than the ones they are chastising.

I do not understand your argument. We do not use personal cars as often as USA or some other countries, instead relying more on public transportation and bikes - as a result, electricity costs for transportation are quite low for individual households. What's your point? That less than 25% of population do not eat healthy and this is somehow relevant to the conversation?

Among the EU, germans drive more km per car than anyone else except Austria (data from 2000, can't find newer).

Among the EU, Germans rank 6th on car ownership per capita (2020 data).

Going these together, and it shows within the EU, Germans are the on the top of km per capita and not 'we drive less than others' (except maybe the US)

Your reply to someone asking about charging their EV(thus need to drive) was that in Germany that isn't a problem because there you eat healthy and cycle, which is a lie (you drive more than most/all of the EU). (as per cycling data, DE is 7th on daily usage of bikes in the EU, but couldn't find any data regarding number of kilometres though)

Data from 2000 is missing two decades of economic growth in Eastern Europe and major EU-funded investments in infrastructure in that region. But let's assume, Germany is still high in the ranks. What does it prove? In Europe the life style from Dublin to Warsaw isn't that different: we often live in an apartment rather than in a house in suburb, we rely on public transportation and have great networks, using a bike is a norm in many cities etc. This all means that electricity budget of an individual household is unlikely to include EV charging at the moment. This will be different from USA, where having individual house and traveling by cars is often the only option. So, what's your point exactly?

It's still very likely Germans drive more - Germany is very decentralized (which is amazing, e.g. no grid locks), and it has one of the best railroads in the world... still has likely one the best highways as well.

The only East European country that can possible change the stats would be Poland (but personally I don't believe that) - the rest are just too small.

You compare yourself to the most car-dependent and obese OECD country and then congratulate yourself, completely missing that Germany is very car-dependent and obese, and it's not exactly improving.

Also would not brag about public transport, - most of your rich neighbours do better.

Chain smoker laughing at a lung patient.

I think you completely missed the point of what I was saying and replying in the middle of the thread is not helping here. Please re-read it again, your comment does not make sense. I did not congratulate myself.

Well, infamously, German households tend to generate heat using gas, and not electricity. AC is rare. EVs are rare.

Either way, I wanted to know what the actual power draw of those signs is, and since it was given in multiples of a (German) single household, well, that's probably about the number they are working with.

> Well, infamously, German households tend to generate heat using gas, and not electricity.

This often only applies to heating the rooms. Boiling/heating water for cleaning dishes and bathing is often done via electricity in a boiler.

Yes which is why the 1300kWh/year is bogus. Gas usage is energy usage. If that is factored in it would be much higher I am sure.

Using gas is worse than use geothermal, unless you somehow have gas powered geo thermal pumps (and still worse than solar+geo thermal). So the energy use would be higher.

A small family fridge, with a F energy label (so pretty bad), will normally go for a total consumption of 270 kWh a year.

We are using 1000 kWh per year as a couple including hot water. With that we are very low in Germany, but even that is really without much optimization (though we lack some energy-intensive devices like a clothes dryer).

Newer devices sold in the EU are relatively energy efficient. A typical fridge-freezer combo uses 150kWh.

>A typical fridge-freezer combo uses 150kWh.

That would be a small <150L E class fridge, kept at 21C (with an air conditioner during the summer)

Fridge efficiency has not increased much in the last decades (LG infamously had an efficient but horrendously unreliable 'linear compressor') - the only part that can increase efficiency is the time(s) it gets opened and how good seals the fridge has, and ambient temperature. Also smaller compressor by design cannot be super efficient.

The newer devices part doesn't affect fridges all that much - vacuum cleaners have been limited, lightning requires LEDs (effectively) - which comes w/ its own issue of retrofitting, TVs (also relying on LEDs for backlight or OLED directly), power factor correction (for 75+W) and what not. Direct drive (brushless DC) and low temp washing for washing machines. Yet, there is no recent groundbreaking technology, it's just that the EU changed the efficiency labeling to prevent massive A+++ stuff.

No, these are much larger fridges.

https://www.otto.de/p/samsung-kuehl-gefrierkombination-bespo...

273l fridge plus 114l freezer, modeled power draw 134kWh. This is a premium product, a less expensive model (similar capacity) takes 166kWh.

https://www.otto.de/p/samsung-kuehl-gefrierkombination-rl36t...

As household made of 4 persons, with me permanently in Home-Office, have a consumption of roughly ~2300kWh/year, including heating, in Germany.

Waschmaschine and Dryer are almost on a daily basis used (the dryer is used less during hot season)

If you tend to buy energetic-efficient devices, your power bill is lower, in front of higher costs for the equipment.

There is a quote of the German Federal Statistical Office and the 3+ household is close to 5k.

I have major problems believing those numbers. Hot water alone eats up that much per year.

Hot water is often heated by gas, not electricity in Germany. Gas usage is counted and billed separately from electricity.

~2300kWh/year, including heating

And how do you achieve this? What is your energy source for heating?

I have a local warm station (nahwärme) that heats water locally with electricity and it is connected to a remote heating station (Fernwärme).

no its not? From my own bills over the last ten years or so, this figure is pretty spot on.

And I work from home on a gaming desktop...

> this is extremely, extremely low. No heating, no cooling, no hot water, no car charging. A fridge alone tends to be over 400KW/h

I have a fridge and my water is heated with electricity, I still end up at ~1500kwh per year, while working from home everyday.

Electric heating and cooling is extremely inefficient and barely used in Europe.

Not sure where this number comes from.

Statistisches Bundesamt says it's 1,958 kwh. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Enviro...

Interestingly, for 2 person households they state 3,196 kwh and for 3+ person households 4,919 kwh. Energy consumption scales worse than I expected. I assumed there would be more synergy in shared households.

I googled it. Your source is much better. But it's in the same ballpark, anyway.

Your source includes "Electricity for heating, hot water". Maybe this includes households using heat pumps for heating, so this could explain the difference?

Not just heat pumps, but also electric water heaters, which are standard issue for older apartment buildings (those without central hot water).

And also probably the single least efficient source of heat for a home. An apartment using resistive heat instead of a heat pump should not be allowed anymore.

Wait, what? How could electric resistive heating with its 100% efficiency possibly be less efficient than gas or oil, which are the main alternatives in use at this point?

Heat pumps have >100% efficiency, which makes them stand way out at the top, but they're an exception rather than the rule.

If the electricity for resistive heating is coming from a combustion process, it would be more efficient to burn that substance directly in the home to produce heat directly. Otherwise a lot of heat energy is lost being converted to electricity and traveling through the power lines.

That's pretty crazy. We used to spend 1400 KWh as a family of three. Didn't check the latest numbers as a family of four, but I don't expect a lot more. We even cook / bake a lot. What on earth are people spending electricity on?

How do you heat your appartmen/house? There might be quite some differences between oil, gas or heat-pump. I'm not sure whether these numbers include/exclude that part.

> What on earth are people spending electricity on?

I guess there are just a lot more appliances in use today and we're more lazy.

When I, approaching my 40s, compare our household with my parents household when I was a child there a various notable changes in habits:

- My mother hang the loundry to dry. We seldomly do this anymore, instead we're using a dryer. These things are insanely power-hungry.

- Electronics for entertainment and communication: A landline phone, a TV (for the evening news), a radio + casette player. Now I'm powering/charging at least 10 devices (like mobile, laptop, smart watch, tablet) at any given time.

- When dark outside, about 3 100W light bulbs would illumate the living space for 5 people. Now we have „power-saving” LEDs. But a lot of them. So many, I can't even compare them.

- When it was hot, well, you endure it. Now we have three ventilators (others start to use ACs, which has always been a very awkward thing to do in Germany).

Edit: I come to think, while a lot has to do with being lazy, another lot has to do with being selfish. Things like hanging the loundry. We use the dryer, so we safe time to do more productive things like working on our careers.

I find people’s continued use of tumble dryers pretty surprising.

The air will do it for free!

We have a space-efficient drying rack so we can dry indoors.

Air drying clothes indoor is pretty bad. It is slow, takes space, and leaves textile in a bad state (at least for cotton and wool). Drying outside is good but not possible everywhere and not always. Also things like sheets and towels really should not be left to dry indoor.

I live in a place where it rains all the time and the driest month in terms of humidity is 80%, sometimes if I can’t hang things outside clothes take so long to dry inside that I end up having to wash them again because they start to smell

> Air drying clothes indoor is pretty bad [because it] leaves textile in a bad state (at least for cotton and wool).

> Also things like sheets and towels really should not be left to dry indoor.

Can you elaborate on both statements? I currently leave everything, including sheets and towels, to air dry indoors.

Not the OP, but indoor drying in winter at least where I live has the issue that (a) it tends to be so slow that the wash sometimes starts smelling stale, (b) it's just extracting heat from the house by evaporation, so it's going to raise your heating bills anyhow, perhaps? (c) you might end up having issues with indoor humidity, such as moldy walls.

Heat pump or condensing dryers may well be a better option.

Almost certainly the perfect solution will be situational. I mean, if your house is too dry in the winter, a bit of extra humidity might even be a feature, after all...

> you might end up having issues with indoor humidity

Winter air tends to be much drier than summer air, so much so that my bath towels dry on the rack in the winter overnight, but may stay damp for a whole day in the summer.

That said, water will condense at heat bridges (?)(poorly/not insulated parts of the wall) in the winter, causing mold, if the place is poorly insulated.

> Winter air tends to be much drier than summer air

Where I lived before, that's still 80% (usually 90-95% in summer)

That's relative humidity, not absolute. Absolute humidity has an additional Arrhenius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation) factor. For instance, 100% relative humidity at 40 C is 51.1 g/cm^3, while at 20 C it's only 17.3 g/cm^3.

It greatly depends on where you live, and season. In my apartment in Bucharest, especially during the summer, clothes dry indoors in ~4h, and a bed sheet takes maybe 6h. In the winter, the time is usually double.

Still, drying clothes indoors has no ill effects, I have no idea where you got this. It's definitely better than exposing them to high temperatures like in most apartment tumble driers.

> during the summer, clothes dry indoors in ~4h, > drying clothes indoors has no ill effects

Maybe the first is why you think the second is always true? Where I live if I just leave laundry on a drying rack it won't dry for days, and once it is dryish it already smells stale and mouldy.

I'm glad that it works for you, but maybe the advice differs based on location, climate, maybe even architectural choices.

That's literally what they said in their first sentence.

Yes, and no.

They started out right and acknowledged that things can be different in different climates. But then in their second paragraph they made a categorical statement: “Still, drying clothes indoors has no ill effects, I have no idea where you got this.”

That is a general statement. They don’t think drying clothes indoors can have any ill effects. Ever. At any humidity level.

So they realise that the drying time can change quantitatively. What they miss is that there are qualitative effects which can happen too. And in their hurry they dismiss other people’s lived experience.

You're right, I do understand that if it takes days to dry, the dampness has a good chance of allowing mold to form, and that can be extremely harmful.

You can also shower in the rain. I have seen people doing it in the 90s in Hannover on the occupied "Sprengelgelände".

Clothes and bedclothes dried outside are much nicer than the same dried in a tumble dryer.

I don't have space (I live in an apartment), but I regularly did this in England. It takes slightly more time to hang them out vs. stuff them in the dryer, and (in England) you need to keep an eye on the weather, but they end up smelling fresher.

A good dose of UV light probably helps.

UV is also great at making some food stains disappear.

Why are ACs awkward in Germany?

Because they are power-hungry and everyone knows that.

More generally because the climate in central Europe is not like Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, California but hospitable during the summer season without AC.

AC makes it more comfortable during hot days but it is still doable without.

This is only true for private households. Since 10 years ACs are widely used in a business environment.

Meanwhile during the summer momnths offices in the US turn on the AC to such low temperatures that one needs to put on a sweater.

Remember that when you're too hot in an office, there's really nothing you can do about it and you just have to suffer. At least you have the option to do things like put on a sweater when you're too cold. Given that, it seems to make sense to keep the office at the coolest temperature preferred by anyone in it.

I like your logic And like lower temperatures when working. The idea that someone would ask for the whole company to be set at the temperature they want and everyone else wears a jumper quite funny.

My girlfriend strongly believes this comes from "patriarchal society" and specifically a "study" that said office thermostats are set based on an old formula designed in like the 60s and that only looked at how HVAC interacted with men.

I thought the idea that offices set thermostats to an actual standard instead of just whoever cries the loudest or has the most power to be almost laughable, so I looked for the "study" she got it from. Indeed, I don't remember the details, but the governmental bureaucracy involved in recommending HVAC did actually use a formula that was obsolete and didn't consider women. However, there was zero evidence in the study that anyone actually used that formula in consideration of anything.

Are they more power-hungry than heat? A window unit can be used in the room you sleep in, and if you've done a reasonable job at reducing leakage and insulation , and reducing light ingress (external shutters, etc.) can be pretty efficient. Even in San Diego with the sun bearing down on my flat we managed to have a pretty low load factor on our window AC to keep it around 24-25C at night.

Germans should be using heat pumps for their homes anyway, it can't be beaten for efficiency. Every time I mention this there's someone who doesn't know that heat pump systems don't require excavation: they don't.

This gets you air conditioning literally for free, and you get to be the one to frown at your neighbors for continuing to burn something to stay warm.

Only if you get an air-to-air heat pump, commonly called air conditioning.

Air-to-water heat pumps still only change the temperature of water, which is practically only useful for heating.

Except, modern AC is pretty efficient. I have a decent monoblock cooler in our apartment in Berlin. I also have a 1-second sampling power meter. The AC unit uses about 700 watts when active cooling, but of course it cycles so that's not all the time. We also only run it when it's 30+ during the daytime.

Overall, it's only added about 15-20kWh to our monthly usage. (2-person household, about 200kWh/month average)

Which brings us back to the original question:

> What on earth are people spending electricity on?

It's exactly that. An AC, probably one additional appliance among others, adds another 10% to the total and somehow we manage to frame this as efficient and thus the right thing to do.

That seems an entirely reasonable incremental usage. In particular when the using A/C allows you to sleep and not running it means you get too little sleep and of poor quality. When the nights at 30-35C and the humidity high, an A/C can be a blessing.

I don't know if it's what the OP meant but the standard "German window" is a shape that makes an AC a lot more difficult than in e.g. the US. You can't mount it in the window directly and the insulation required is relatively irregular.

https://deine-mobile-klimaanlage.de/abluftschlauch/

Anecdotally, doors within an apartment/house are also far less airtight than in the US.

(Germans take airflow in homes extremely seriously; es zieht / frische Luft! is perhaps the fundamental contradiction in the German culture.)

Also, traditional landline phones (no hands free short range radio etc) draw power from the telecom central office. They aren't on your standard grid so you are effectively paying for that electricity on your phone bill.

The numbers cited here included electricity for warm water and heating. Both are outrageously energy-intensive. The figured for electric appliances only are roughly in line with yours.

Home server PC at around 100W. That adds a surprising amount, on it's own that's getting close to 1000KWh to run for a year.

And then there's the main PC setup, running maybe 12hrs a day (inc. WFH). And that was build for gaming, so it's quite power-hungry, especially when the GPU is kept busy, working on Unity projects.

But on average? Does the average person have a home server? A desktop PC?

I don't know any non-techy person who isn't using a laptop exclusively, and then pretty rarely, as most things nowadays happen on the smart phone. AC is non-existent in Germany. So I'm really curious. I have a 24/7 Homeserver and laptop, and am at ~1200kwh a year.

I'd agree normal people don't have those things, but also add that things not mentioned — e.g. TVs, ovens, and fridge/freezers — will add up. At such a low average, even lighting will contribute non-negligibly.

Two questions though: how common are TVs in Germany? And how common is electric hot water for showers/baths? My sample size is pretty small (and mostly limited to Berlin).

I'd say TVs are still the norm, my social circle is 30~50 and o think everyone got one, for streaming mostly. As for the older generation it's also still a thing you just need to have. As for sizes, I think they've also increased over the last decade or two, but at least in the cities if you're limited to a smaller place I think people go for 40 rather than 50 inches. Can't really speak for the younger generations, but I feel they're more comfortable watching stuff on their phones, college students probably also due to financial or space reasons.

Hot water mostly comes from central heating with gas, some homes in my city have district heating. At least up until now, electric heating, be it for water or the whole apartment was way to expensive so that you'd only consider that if you really have no other choice, for example, an old building from 100+ years ago with retrofitted central heating might have an electric water heater for the kitchens as they only did the bathrooms.

It definitely can scale much better, we are using around 1800 kWh (2 parents, 1 small child) and I think it’s safe to say going below 1300 for one of us would be hard, especially when working from home. But we live in a flat and there are many 2 or three persons households in a whole house, probably with several computers and may be even tvs and certainly more lights. May be you do save a bit on cooking and the fridge, but cleaning things should roughly scale linearily.

Kids will make your washing machine run constantly; and the dryer...

2 person household without much saving is ~1500kWh in my experience.

LEDs and laptop instead of desktop computers lowered these stats quite a lot for me. I'm sure if I bought a newer fridge it would also help.

1500... per year?

I use more than that by myself per month. Granted, I have all electrical appliances, heat, and a car, but even without those I have to imagine I'd still use significantly more.

Thank god for being on hydro I guess.

That's got to be your car, otherwise the number is insane for one person. Maybe check if something is drawing more power than it should.

I have electric appliances, but heat and hot water is gas. I also have a ICE car.

'3+' covers 3, but also 4, 5, 6 and 7. That average really doesn't tell you much on how it scales.

Interesting that the equivalent in the US is about 10,000 kWh p.a. The delta is so large I thought there might have been a monthly/annual confusion.

I have lived in both countries and it didn't feel like there was much of a difference in electricity consumption.

My household has seen 1800 kWh of electricity consumption in 2021, a year in which I worked a full-time job on a computer and two displays at home. So did my wife. We have two little children.

While we might not be close to the average consumption in Germany, because our house is quite new, I'm regularly wondering what other households are doing with that much energy.

> 1300 kwh/year

Wow that is low. In most states in the South average household consumes that per month. https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/the-states-that-us...

Yeah that really surprised me. I live in a 1-bedroom in NYC and am almost at 1000 kWh/month, especially because of the recent heat waves.

> In most states in the South average household consumes that per month.

That's what happens when you live in cardboard houses in the middle of a literal desert.

In Europe more people live in better build houses or flats with centralised heating and no AC. I used 1500kwh last years while working full time from my living room and spent maybe 100 euros on heating

On the other hand, because of AC the American south also doesn’t have swaths of people dropping dead when the daily temperatures rise above 80F. And considering that’s a daily part of living in the US south for roughly 6 months of the year, that’s probably a good thing.

Average American "cardboard house" is better insulated than average European brick or concrete house. Having heavy walls make your house feel "sturdy" but it has nothing to do with energy efficiency. A lot of houses in Europe are just brick or concrete with no additional insulation. In US it's it's rare to have uninsulated houses.

In US more people live in very hot places like Texas and Arizona and people mostly live in single-family houses. Single-family houses obviously takes more energy to cool than "flats". Plus average American house/flat has twice the living area.

The South (which means southeast in US parlance) would be cardboard houses in the middle of a literal swamp. The houses in the middle of a literal desert are in the Southwest.

Germany also has mechanical signs that mechanically scroll different posters past a (full-size) viewing window. Banning the electronic ones won't cause there to be less ads.

1500W of LEDs is... rather bright; on the order of 150000 lumen. I guess there will be significant losses perhaps, but I sure hope most signage is using a lot less than that.

For context, this is what 100W of LED looks like [1]. Those signs don't come anywhere close to this.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsrAV1Qh4fs

That's what it looks like when you have a small module and put it in a flashlight. What does it look like as a 15m2 billboard?

> That is pretty high for no real value for society in my opinion...

There is a widespread belief that Advertising serves no purpose to humanity.

Advertising is like anything in life: In high doses it is harmful. In lower doses it is useful. If there are regulators in your country that prevent advertisers from making false claims, even better.

Advertising has helped me hone onto products and services in my whole life that I've found useful. Many times I would have not been able to find the product or service if it were not for that advertisement. [You could claim that I was "brainwashed" into buying that product but that could be applied to any interaction in life. For example, if my spouse convinced me to do something, it usually means the logic was sound and it is highly unlikely that I was brainwashed to do her bidding].

No one likes being aggressively marketed to. No one likes being duped. But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational.

Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look. By selling to you, the customer, we can make a profit and you can get the benefit from our product". Advertising can be a win-win.

Advertising can allow manufacturing at scale. It has helped bring about many the marvels of technology that would have cost millions of dollars a few decades ago to be just a few hundred (e.g. our laptops that are more powerful than supercomputers of of the 1990s). Without advertising many companies may not have reached the sales volume to keep bringing down costs year after year.

I could go on. Adverting is useful. Bad actors must be weeded out. However, Advertising in itself is useful.

> There is a widespread belief that advertising serves no purpose to humanity.

This is highly political and that 'belief' is indeed often ideological.

Free flow of information and awareness of products and services on offer is an important aspect of an open society and free market economics.

And beliefs that an open society, free flow of information and free market economics are good things are of course highly political and strongly ideological. They are just largely uncontested (at least amongst the types of people who read hn)

> They are just largely uncontested

I think this has a lot to do with the fact that the alternatives that have been tried have historically been either failures or catastrophes.

So much to be said about that trope... Are there seriously people who still believe in TINA? What a bleak way to see the world.

I'm curious about what alternative you have in mind if you think that living in an open and free society is bleak.

But I don't think that the current society is open and free. It is open-er and freer than what it replaced. It is also open-er and freer than some proposed alternatives. It is not the best, most open, and most free society that could ever be conceived.

I don't like political arguments on hn but if you're truly interested I can try to summarise them when I get home later.

Free flow of information is when big companies can wage psychological warfare on you without your consent.

You cannot just put free flow of information on a par with awareness of products and services, lol?

And the latter is fully achievable still without everything that is "advertising" today.

But lying, manipulating your emotions, etc. are efficient ways of doing ads. If something is OK when done poorly and harmful when optimised, maybe it was a bad thing in the first place?

Well, how about opening an online plattform for advertising then?

Stopp invading my space (public spaces, software, websites), and put ads there for people that are interested in being suggested products they might like. And, instead of tracking all my activity, put a form that I can fill out with the details I am comfortable with.

Not gonna happen, because they're paying people and companies to annoy you with the ads almost nobody wants to see

> But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational.

I don't disagree, but there are a few points that I see differently.

First of all, I think that what you're looking for is promotion, that is based on someone or some entity promoting your products and services, putting their face on it and leveraging their reputation of connoisseur of the matter at hand. It's based on trust and works best especially for tech products

Nobody buy smartphones based on adv, well except iPhone users that buy the brand iPhone - that could be seen as a confirmation of the trust based promotion, they trust Apple -, people watch reviews on YouTube channels that they trust.

Advertising is low effort. it's usually someone writing a script for you, pretending to be you, that it is the company that is talking directly to you, but it's in fact an agency that wrote a claim and a story to tell, to actually sell, not promote, the service or product in question by exploiting your feelings.

Secondly, I don't believe that advertising made laptops affordable, research did.

Super computers still cost millions and are an order or two of magnitude more powerful than you regular laptop of today.

> Nobody buy smartphones based on adv

What?? If there ever was proof that HN is completely clueless about reality not empathetic of their fellow humans. Ads are not brainwashing.

> What?? If there ever was proof that HN is completely clueless about reality not empathetic of their fellow humans

The simple answer is that the real disconnect is thinking that since someone comments on HN, he is some kind of a mythical creature.

I am a middle aged man from Italy that saw mobile phones birth when was 20 already.

Don't assume that your experience is my experience.

Nobody I know closely knows what HN is, they ask me what phone to buy or which laptop, because I've always been the "techie" of the family/group of friends and because they care about not wasting their money but can't navigate the bullshit they see in the ads.

I guess that "blast past fast" or "do what you can" don't really say anything about the device true capabilities and why one should spend their money to buy it.

unless the reason is "I will buy whatever rich people buy" or "I like the colour of this one"

Of course the iPhone ads work, because they don't promote the phone, they sell a way of life, a lifestyle, their target is the "cool kids" that want to be "content creators" and that appeals to their desire to be part of what is fashionable among their peers, but that's exactly what brainwashing is.

Ads is brainwashing and it's scientifically weaponized against the reference target.

repetita iuvant: they don't promote the product, they exploit your sentiments, desires, fears, whatever works, to make you buy the product. But are actually a bunch of lies.

Consumers can be served better by independent review of products in magazines, etc. Or if you really want to by catalogues put together by sellers. (I used those when I was younger quite a lot to discover and buy new things.)

The random road signs for biggest bank in the land, or one of the three telecom companies in the land, or for things like well known beverages is quite ridiculous. Almost everyone knows these companies exist already.

> But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational. Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look. By selling to you, the customer, we can make a profit and you can get the benefit from our product".

I cannot recall one single advertisement I ever saw in my life, other than some institutional/non-profit ads, which remotely fits that idyllic description. So it's really a moot point. "What if advertising were just calm factual information", well but it's not! It's definitely not! It's psychological warfare of moderate-to-high intensity. So what use is pretending it's something it's not? It's very disingenuous to pretend it can ever be "gentle, honest, and educational" (lol)

I also don't see how advertising is responsible for chip mass-production and Moore's law.

Are you thinking strictly in terms of massive, multi-national companies? For myself, it would be far more handy if I had seen ads for local plumbers, chimney repair, barbershops, etc. I try to support my local economy whenever I can, and I don't mind paying a premium for smaller shops since they usually do a better job, or are at least incentivized to do so.

When it comes to something like buying a car, I don't want to be advertised to since the manufacturer of that product 1) isn't a part of my community and 2) isn't supported by the people in my area.

I can absolutely think of cases where I would have liked to know what services are available for specific products, like chair making, or a project I have in mind, rather than having to ask around to figure out who even does it in my area. Obviously, I would still have to do some research to figure out if the person advertising is any good, but the fact that a small business has a budget for advertising is a very positive indicator that they are at least professional enough to have some revenue.

Advertising, when it relates to something a small business can exist within, reduces the amount of time and effort I have to put in to seeing how many competitors are in that space. It's not something that I'm thrilled about, but it does have benefit within certain circumstance.

>I can absolutely think of cases where I would have liked to know what services are available for specific products, like chair making, or a project I have in mind, rather than having to ask around to figure out who even does it in my area.

We had this, it was called phone books. And I guess a phone book is technically advertising, but there's clearly a difference between info and manipulation.

Yellow pages, also.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages

I don't mind advertising whenever I am actively looking for something.

What I have problems with is seeing ads when I don't want to see them.

Yeah I'm happy to throw out that baby with the advertising bathwater. Fuck it, I'll even break the news to the few friends in advertising that society has decided to evolve and that their services won't be needed any longer. But unfortunately, ads are how people prefer to pay online so we're stuck with it.

Good point, ads can be really useful. For me, the question is how much we are exposed to it, in which context, and the transparency about things being ads.

Examples: - Obvious ads vs. sneaky product placements - There should be spaces/times without ads allowed

Another thing that makes me wonder is big know companies (soda for example) constantly making ads. This is not the case of "Hey we made something new" as literally everybody knows the product for years. This constant cognitive exposure has some similarities to propaganda. We are not allowed to forget them.

> But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational.

This pretty much sums it up really good.

This assumes that there are new useful products out there. There might be, but I don’t see ads for any. I see ads for overpriced shit all the time.

> However, Advertising in itself is useful.

Total disagree. New trends, improvements communicate itself one or the other way. If I want a new X, I'd rather research on my own, best are objective tests, or worse then selective advertisements I choose to view.

Even non-aggressive mild advertisements that just try to snatch my attention involuntarily are just not needed and a pain. The world could be much better without that crap.

I don't buy the argument that advertisements were necessary for manufacutring at scale, any source?

> Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look.

Erm wtf what, no, just no, leave me alone please. I want to find you in a dedicated magazine / tests / reviews if your something is something I currently want, otherwise this attention grab is hostile.

You’re just negotiating who pays for searching and communication. You want to pay someone (a magazine or review site) to gather the data for you from the companies. Other people want the companies to pay so they get the information for free.

There’s a qualitative argument there as well, and whether to value not having to pay for ad-supported publications and services, but that’s essentially the question in the preference for or against advertising: who pays and who gets paid to make the right buyers and sellers aware of each other.

> Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look.

Do you like being approach on the street by solicitors? Personally, I hate it. When I’m walking, I appreciate undisturbed personal space. I feel the same way about advertising. I don’t care that the company is proud. I want my personal space undisturbed. You can show me something if I ask, but to assume I care to see anything you have to offer is rude.

There is one thing that extremely easy way to retain the "benefit" you claim: make advertising opt-in. Truly, continuously opt-in. Every time there is an ad, you have to tap "yes, I'd like to see it" (or "yes, show all ads for this movie", but not across movies). If there is truly advantages to ads, people will choose to see them.

I'd go even further: have different platforms compete as "and serving" places, basically opt-in targeted advertising sites. They aren't allowed to use any external data, just a questionnaire and your behaviour on the platform, and the user must choose to go to the site by entering it into their browser or looking it up on Google. No ads anywhere else.

If ads are truly as beneficial as you describe, people will go for it. Let the market decide whether ads are good for the consumer

> But there is a space for advertising that is gentler, honest and educational.

There is no such thing as honest advertising. The conflict of interest is inherent. The best information comes from third parties but even that gets corrupted by advertisers eventually.

> Think of advertising as a way of companies to say "Hey! here's something we're proud of -- please have a look.

When I want companies talking to me about products, I'll visit their website or I'll open their store app. In those cases it's not even advertising but information. I asked to see the products. Advertising is by definition an intrusion, uninvited.

Most of the time I don't want companies talking to me about offers. Their insistence is abuse.

That ideal of advertising you described is virtually non-existent. It's generally manipulation of the lowest sort concocted by sociopathic people.

> There is no such thing as honest advertising. The conflict of interest is inherent.

This is obviously untrue. Not only can a merchant engage in only honest advertising, there are those who do.

There's a conflict of interest every time a married man has a drink with an interested woman. That doesn't mean he cheats.

> There is a widespread belief that Advertising serves no purpose to humanity.

It's worse than that. Advertising persuades people to buy ever more stuff they don't need, thereby causing enormous damage to the planet. Advertising is among the top of things we should ban to reduce climate change.

They can also be RF noise nightmares because of the PWM they do.

I'm quite sure brand advertisers will not concur.

And they can go fuck off if they don't.

We're in a crisis and they want to waste energy we might need for heating households to manipulate people into buying shit they don't need?

That's not exactly a position that'll get them a lot of sympathy.

> to manipulate people into buying shit they don't need?

This is encouraged by our system, switching off screens at night won't change it. Attack the root cause not the very last symptom

Attack it on all fronts.

Why not both? Energy can be saved here that is needlessly wasted.

It barely delays the inevitable, it's less than a drop in the bucket, everything you gain there will be instantly counteracted 10 fold somewhere else because we don't want to face reality.

But sure, let's stop using plastic straws and switch off our routers at night while we continue absolutely ravaging this planet

This is part of "ravaging our planet". And if it will be counteracted then everything is useless anyway.

Of course, this is why the law is needed.

Of course. Same with tobacco and oil companies working against transparency for smoke health risks and climate change.

A large portion of the advertising is to get people to switch brands. A smaller portion is to get new customers. Banning advertisement increases the profits for the already established brands (for at least the short term).

Like higher quality / cheaper prices wouldn't spread by word of mouth... if anything advertising behemots are keeping actually improved products out of the spotlight by selling us whatever pays most in advertising costs, regardless of externalities.

I find that hard to believe, since most advertising is done by bigger brands.

What's the alternative with some high power lights aimed at a non-LED sign? I'd expect for similar brightness the power usage is going to be almost the same. Maybe even more because you're relying on reflected light rather than emitted light.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com