Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)

This is why i dont like these kind of studies. Clearly it does not take 60 hours to find a dead tree in the woods, break it down, and light it on fire.

I can't see any combination, length of time burned or length of time to gather the material, where it takes 60 hours to get a fire that outputs as much light as a single lightbulb over one hour.

Just use an LED that produces the same color. They 100% exist.

I agree that incandescent is better than cold LED. A little shopping and consumer research will 100% find you exactly the LED you want.

Sounds like you're looking for a color temperature even lower than 2700 which is usually the low end for standard bulbs. Two options that might work for you are 'smart' color changing bulbs that you can set to much warmer and dimmer values OR 'vintage' or amber glass bulbs, typically in a narrower bulb shape and sometimes with a smaller base (adapters are available).

> and yet my minuscule usage is nowadays categorically illegal /rant

No, even when the efficiency rules go into effect, using noncompliant bulbs will not be illegal. Stock up on your inefficient bulbs before August, and you can use them as long as you like.

I resent the banning of incandescent light bulbs for a practical reason: Heat.

In colder regions it's been common sense to use an incandescent light bulb to keep a space heated so it's just above freezing (above 0C or 32F) during the winter months.

This is to prevent things like plumbing and sensitive machinery from breaking due to ice formation. A full blown heater is generally complete overkill and impractical for this.

Unless someone has a drop-in replacement for incandescent light bulbs for heat generation purposes, I want them back. And no, LED light bulbs do not work: LEDs don't produce significant heat.

While I appreciate your reluctance, I’d recommend trying to find one of the Philips LED bulbs that dim like an incandescent bulb. I’m not sure they’re easy to find now, and to be honest I don’t remember the model name, but if you can find them they are wonderful. Basically they have multiple sets of diodes within them that dim at different rates which is an incredibly convincing “incandescent emulation”. They are a “whiter” light at high brightness and a nice warm glow at low brightness with a nice smooth transition between them.

You can buy Edison bulbs at Home Depot. They are very popular.

Don't they have "appliance" bulbs in your locale?

These are incandescent lamps designed to work in ovens, a territory unlikely to ever be colonized by LED bulbs.

Other than the slightly smaller wattage, they should fit your needs just fine. They work in normal sockets.

If you run a 100w incandescent lamp dimmed to 30 watts, it's lifespan will be increased to easily 100 years. (Aging is highly nonlinear with temperature)

So you will never have to deal with the inability to purchase a replacement.

It's not racist for bringing it up - it's racist for blaming immigrants when it's the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property, coupled with an out of control healthcare system, stagnant wages while corporate profits are huge, and lobbyists keeping politicians from meaningfully changing anything.

I couldn't take you seriously, anyway. 2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units, but you're trying to imply that each of those illegal border crossings took a housing unit or something like that. Perhaps people on Facebook are that dumb.

Blaming immigration on how much we aren’t building is a mental gymnastic I haven’t seen before.

Besides, those immigrants are the ones building those houses.

> supply is limited by the surface area of the earth

But US is not a small country, how can there be not enough land?

Do you think two working parents factors into this? My coworker's families have annual income over $1m/yr, b/c both mom and dad work.

In previous generations, with only one parent working, it is almost impossible to compete.

> There were 2.7 million illegal border crossings in FY 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna53517

> It’s unsustainable and people think you’re a racist for bringing it up so it never gets talked about.

Not to mention 3.7M live births in the US last year - and I know for a fact not a single one of those freeloaders has a job.

> Canada built 321,000 units of housing in 2021 but is in pace to have over 500,000 immigrants this year.

That sounds about right? Most housing units will house 2-3 people, and a lot will house quite a few more. Obv this excludes natural population growth, but Canada's fertility rate is lower than most of Europe, and one of the lowest in the Western world, so that's probably not a problem.

> but that comes with its own costs as well.

So does having a large plot of land to every single driver on the road driving past you. Even if it doesn't really show up in a municipal budget or in a mortgage payment, it's still very expensive to drive past a farm that is wide and not deep, but most people, most of the time don't want deep lots for aesthetic reasons, and even if you make deep lots taxi-cab geometry will get you anyway if the whole area is residential land anyway.

When it comes to residential land that is outside of environmentally protected zones, my position is simple. Allow land owners to build two or three houses. One primary one (6 bedrooms, say) and up to two smaller ones (2 bedrooms each) or one smaller one and one general use building (a workshop or many car garage). That way the frontage is used, we get housing stock for poorer families and we intermix ages and income levels in a way that is socially beneficial, since it's a lot harder to turn a blind eye to the problems of the lower-middle class if they're literally living on the same property that you own.

Plus it gives a way (for families that want it) for grandparents to live on the same land as their grandchildren without always being in the hair of their kids. Super win-win if both parents work and can rely on the grandparents for after-school hours. Plus it makes extended family gatherings more feasible as enough of a chunk of the family is nearby in the first place.

> It’s unsustainable and people think you’re a racist for bringing it up so it never gets talked about.

Yeah what's unsustainable is you living on 15 acres, we can build housing for everyone.

> Canada built 321,000 units of housing in 2021 but is in pace to have over 500,000 immigrants this year.

Given, unlike you, they need to be considered productive by the government to move to Canada, why would they not be allowed to be here?

> It’s unsustainable and people think you’re a racist for bringing it up so it never gets talked about.

Yeah what's unsustainable for the planet is you living on 15 acres in a 3000 sqft detached house, we can build housing for everyone.

> Canada built 321,000 units of housing in 2021 but is in pace to have over 500,000 immigrants this year.

Given, unlike you, they need to be considered productive by the government to move to Canada, why would they not be allowed to be here?

It's either racist or just clueless to blame immigrants when the housing units being built are not sufficient for domestic population growth. There is no way to make housing affordable without building a lot more of it, and most American cities could become significantly more dense without nearing the density of cities in Asia.

There is no housing availability crisis in rural and small town America, though obviously everyone can't have 15 acres. There are small towns across the US that would love some population growth and have plenty of housing available. The problem is that jobs are concentrated in cities with housing shortages.

Each time people start asking pointed questions about wealth distribution and the economic system you can almost count down the hours until one of these newspapers makes a "oh, look how much more of x you can get now than before". And I get it.

It's great that everyone can have a TV for 1/100 of what it cost in 1950 or whatever, but it does not solve the very obvious issues. People have problems paying rent, they have problems paying groceries. They see that they have to work more and more just to make the next month. And no cheap TV will help them do that, no matter how many "oh, but all is so much better now" articles are written.

I've called that argument "Maslow's Smartphone", after an instance where someone literally gave the affordability of smartphones as an argument for present-day wealth, utterly ignoring that both:

1. Telecoms, and increasingly smartphones, are not a luxury but a necessity for functioning in most of today's societies.

2. That a smartphone of and by itself is not sufficient for a thriving existence, with reference to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: food, shelter,

<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vwfb6/maslows...>

There's also Maslow's Swimming Pool, which surfaced in the context of the Greek austerity crisis of the 2010s:

Succinctly: "Yes, we've got a swimming pool. But that won't feed my children."

<https://www.dw.com/en/the-human-toll-of-greek-austerity/audi...>

<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3ey7d1/maslows...>

Another variant is to note people showing up to relief services (e.g., food bank, natural disaster aid stations) in SUVs or luxury cars. The fact that someone with evidence of past prosperity is now seeking aid doesn't mean that they're undeserving of same, or should be scorned. It's that misfortune is reaching far beyond its usual populations (the multi-generational poor, disabled, addicted, disempowered groups, etc.).

Julian Bond also calls out self-actualisation snake oil:

There's a special part of hell reserved for the snake oil selling charlatans who push some woo called Reversed Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's much loved by people who talk about "The Secret", life style coaches and executive training. "Be a nice self-actualised person, you'll be full of esteem which will allow you to love others who won't threaten your safety and so the universe will fulfill your bodies needs."

<https://web.archive.org/web/20190115030839/https://plus.goog...>

Yet another realisation (also through a G+ discussion) is that Maslow's Hierarchy is best considered not merely as a set of essential and nourishing goods and services, but as being those elements paired with security in those elements. The hand that offers whilst threatening, withdrawing, or threatening is not nurturing but the definition of abuse and trauma.

Living on a knife's edge, at all times, is not tenable.

So, rather than the pyramid of physiological needs, safety, belonging and love, esteem, and self-actualisation, I see:

- Physiological needs + security in those needs.

- Social needs + security in those.

- Esteem (recognition for accomplishments) + security in that status.

- Self-actualisation + security in those achievements.

Maslow splits out security as its own level, but that jars with my own experience of noting times where one or more (and in the worst instances: all) such needs were fulfilled either in a highly contingent manner ("I'll give you X if you do Y", or "If you do Y I'll withhold X"). That's the extreme of manipulation and precarity.

Finally, Yonatan Zunger's essay on "financial shock wealth" is an excellent reframing of the wealth/poverty discussion (from 2017):

<https://scribe.rip/newco/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6d...>

Globalization over the last several decades has greatly reduced inflation and allowed the first world to “gain” far more wealth than would have actually happened otherwise.

For instance, 70 years ago, more American cars were built in America. The money that consumers paid for cars went to American companies. This caused increased demand for (American) workers, which increased workers’ wages, and thus their spending power, and thus increased the price of goods. Their pay increased sufficiently to allow them to maintain, and in fact improve, their quality of life, because the inflation was driven by wage growth.

Compare to a globalized world. The money Americans spend on cars today mostly ends up in foreign nations. The demand for the produce of foreign companies pushes up wages in foreign countries, and causes inflation there. Americans get items for cheaper than they could be produced in their own nation, due to labor cost differences. The rub is that they’re not fueling their own economies, which leaves workers unable to afford items which cannot be produced elsewhere.

Services are just dependent on the cost of labor. Skilled people’s time is worth more than ever, that’s all services really buy.

I don't understand why this post is being downvoted. What is the point of more compute if everyone will get locked out of the "wealth pool" because they can no longer produce any value?

I was thinking about this recently. People will get evicted before not paying their cell phone bill, now. This would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.

That's a very limited view of the price of compute coming down so massively actually means. Just consider one field, medicine for example, and just one example from that: COVID vaccines.

#2 changes a lot when you consider that roughly 70% of US household debt is mortgage debt [1] and that the price of a home is much higher (on a relative basis) than it used to be.* That is to say, most Americans have a mortgage but don't really own a home. There's a maybe subtle but important difference between saying "most Americans own a home" and "the system now allows more Americans to take out debt to mortgage a home." If you disagree, consider if you would consider circumstances no different if we created a novel debt system for people to leverage their purchase of food while food prices increase by multiples; they may even be able to get more food than previously, they just carry disproportionate debt on it.

* I think this also needs to be put in the context of houses are also bigger than they used to be, but there is also a higher percentage of two-income households.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/american-debt-...

I believe replacing "weapons" for "systems" makes the statement more in line with concrete reality.

You must be incredibly out of touch if you think $40 a month is a reasonable budget for “great food.” 2 weeks worth of ham and cheese sandwiches alone would eat up the majority of that figure.

I'll take this as a teaching opportunity

Here's who can't practically afford that: Someone with 3 kids working 80 hours a week in service or truck driving. Or someone that is disabled. Or someone that has severe mental health issues.

There are quite a few prerequisites that you assume exist that just don't in a poor American household and the primary one that doesn't exist is time.

Beyond the time you need to plan, shop, cook, clean, you need:

-Motivation to do so

-Pots and pans

-Knowledge of cooking and nutrition

-A grocery store nearby (39.5 million Americans live in food deserts)

-A way to get there (Many can't afford cars or can't drive)

-Working water and electricity

TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans have none of the above

And whereas in other countries you may live in a multi-generation home or otherwise be able to do subsistence farming, that's not really possible without land of some sort which almost no poor people in America have.

Congratulations, you alone in the world have had this one genius thought that nobody else has ever thought of or considered, and definitely isn’t the first thing anyone who has spent zero time learning about any of the actual problems and just wants the most shallow possible dismissal of other peoples’ problems reaches for.

The entire problem is solved, everyone, crisis over.

$1.30 per day food budget? Not accurate in the affluent world.

1400-1800 calories for an average height adult male is a reasonable floor (and that's a non-obesity scale). The $1.30 per day budget might get you around 1/3 of that calorie requirement, without solely existing on something like rice.

You can get by on closer to ~$90-$120 per month, per adult, and actually bring in enough calories to not starve over time. That's a surviving floor. You can temporarily go a bit lower to scrape by ($50-$90), however that's not livable longer term, you'll suffer increasingly.

If you modestly augment with various free food assistance options (not talking about SNAP), you could stretch the lower ~$50-$90 category up to something more like the $120 category consistently.

Solar panel and led is cheap and pretty durable. I'd think batteries to run part of the night would be biggest issues at this point.

They last a lot longer than incandescent bulbs, though. In fact, I've been using LED lights for about 15 years now, and I'm not sure I've ever replaced one. Even the cheap ones. By comparison, incandescent bulbs had to be replaced all the time in my experience. My parents had a supply of them ready. Phosphorescent bulbs were a bit in between. They don't break, but they get dimmer and need more time to get to full brightness as they age.

Though perhaps I do recall a particular LED light that would overheat in a particular fixture. It's possible not all fixtures are equally suitable.

Huh. I replaced every light bulb in my house with Ikea LEDs about seven years ago. They cost between about 4 and 10 EUR apiece depending on size. I think three have since failed. This seems like _fairly_ good going, and certainly way better than the old incandescent and halogen bulbs I had.

There are definitely a range of quality when it comes to bulb manufacturers, heat dissipation is also important.

I got 10 LAP GU10 bulbs 6 years ago for use in en-suite bathrooms - 6 years later all 10 are still trucking along.

On the other hand, I had multiple Phillips B22 bulbs last at most 2 years.

They are made to fail fast, it's obviously by design. One simple thing I do in all my led light bulbs, that makes them last for an almost indefinite amount of time: remove the plastic bulb. One of the main reasons for one of the leds or one of the capacitors to fail, is the high temperatures reached during the operation of the device. Removing the bulb makes it a lot cooler, and in the last few years since I've been removing the bulbs, no led light has failed in my house. There's other things you can do, but this is the main one any consumer can do to fight back against this scourge of modern capitalism. I recommend Big Clive's Youtube channel for getting more tips like this one.

> I’ve already replace two out of three led light fixtures that are supposed to last at least a decade and it hasn’t even been 5 years.

I think you must be getting cheap bulbs. I bought a bunch before my kid was born, and he's 10 and none have gone out. I've even taken them with me when I moved.

Out of a set of 30 or so LEDs, I've had five fail.

Four of those are spots in either recessed or exposed cans, and I suspect temperature or moisture may be involved. (Another set matching three of the failed, in near-identical fixtures ... are doing fine.)

One was a stick-type bulb used in a closet which seemed to fizzle.

In all cases I suspect it was electronics rather than the LED elements themselves which failed.

Three-way LEDs are hugely superior to incandescent 3-way bulbs, which always seem to lose at least one filament within a few months. The LEDs are going strong years on.

I hope your heating is more energy efficient than heating with electric light bulbs though!

(And it should be - worst comes to worst basic electrical heating can be effectively 100% efficient, and heat pumps can do better)

Probably not in the summer time.

>Apparently, all you need is a trip to Costco and about $2,000 will buy you a year's supply...

The real issue is doing this while everyone else in the city is trying to do this at the same time.

Our supply chains are very very fragile, as COVID era panics have proved.

That's a good rule of thumb, thank you!

LEDs use more than 50% the energy of a CFL (numbers vary) so it's still more than an hour of work by these numbers.

LLMs are doing the same with written content.

I'm not going to blame pre BC humans for needing light, especially when nocturnal creatures existed. If anything this is an absolute win, we are still burning something in order to produce light, but what we burn is way less of a pollutant than wood.

I think people underestimated the value of Russia (they have a much lowe gdp, so they are small vs western countries) when in reality they do produce and provide a lot but at cut down prices because of corruption (or at the expense of their citizens)

Milton Friedman would say only the governments' money printing presses can cause it. A lot more simple, convincing and clearly logical to me...

No it's not.

Sometimes shifts in money flow happen alongside inflation, but inflation itself acts as a tax on savings and has basically no other long-term effect. In the long term inflation will make prices double and wages double and the effect is nothing. There's no actual difference between a $2 big mac and a $20 big mac.

What you're describing is changes in productivity and spending and overhead, not inflation.

No tech will be available to lift the standard of living in the same way that a reliable health care and social system, affordable housing and reasonable work life balance can. Telling people “you can’t afford health care, housing or retirement but look at how great self driving cars and phones are” is just condescending talk by the upper class to distract from growing inequality.

Different numbers, different stories.

https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/are-wages-rising-or-flat/ shows "average weekly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees" as being about the same now as 1970. (See also https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000031 and expand the range starting from 1964.)

Note also that 1970 was a peak. Pick 1990 and things are going well.

Or as https://www.hamiltonproject.org/publication/economic-fact/th... puts it "After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent.1 The U.S. economy has experienced long-term real wage stagnation and a persistent lack of economic progress for many workers." with footnote 1 saying "Cumulative real wage growth is sensitive to the particular method of inflation adjustment. Some researchers use the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) deflator, which implies even lower real wage growth, or the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) deflator, which implies higher real wage growth (Bivens and Mishel 2015; Sacerdote 2017)."

Still, wages haven't matched productivity increases. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

> Starting in the late 1970s policymakers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workers’ wages grew with productivity. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered. And anti-worker deregulatory pushes—from the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of anti-trust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and more—succeeded again and again.

Contrast it to GDP: https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/wa...

Or labors share of the economy: https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/ei...

I don't think anyone expected anything different but the housing and childcare benefits basically account for 80% of the welfare trap.

Oops, I didn't know flagging did this. Thanks.