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

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

#81

Post by shagie »

abakker wrote: post #23
mcv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bri…

You are lucky. I’ve personally had a lot of failures. I like that they don’t make heat and are brighter. (And I also like how they can be packed more densely on dedicated lighting circuits than traditional fixtures), but they are definitely prone to early failures.

There are a lot of cheap, poorly designed LED bulbs that put heat stress on critical components.

Technology Connections : A troubling trend in lighting? - https://youtu.be/fsIFxyOLJXM (It goes into how a number of LED bulb failures are because the lamp wasn't able to dissipate heat from the electronic components. It also shows how some higher quality LED bulbs are made so that they dissipate heat better - they don't make as much heat as an incandescent bulb, but there is still some and that is the cause of a lot of failures.)

The lamps you're not allowed to have. Exploring the Dubai lamps - https://youtu.be/klaJqofCsu4 is also interesting. They have a different design and it gets into the electronics.

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

#82

Post by toomuchtodo »

vineyardmike wrote: post #79
itake wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is actually well documented. There has been a notable increase in prices couples with an increase in women working (instead of staying home). It’s not a 1:1 increase of price to household income, but it’s well documented, and geographically correlated to rate of double-income households.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two-Income_Trap

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

#83

Post by 3pt14159 »

Auracle wrote: post #35
johnklos wrote: post #31

Considering that the amount of computing that could be rented for the price of a house every month could now be bought for $20, this isn't surprising. What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food.

Land/space are limited. I live where most on HN would consider very rural - the closest town is 600 people and a town of 20,000 is about 30 minutes from me. Even when I was buying a home back in 2011 there were basically no good plots of land for sale. What was there was about $10,000 an acre. I eventually got my house for $180,000 and it’s on 15 acres, meaning my 3,000 square foot house was basically only $30,000 wh…

> 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.

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

#84

Post by idopmstuff »

johnklos wrote: post #47
somewhat_drunk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units Only if you assume all 2.7 million people are now homeless. Price is a function of supply and demand. Obviously, increasing the number of people within a system without commensurately increasing housing will result in upward pressure on housing prices. You could argue that the system-wide effect is minimal, but you would need data to…

[flagged]

> The issue is that the person to whom I responded was trying to imply that the number of illegal border crossings being larger than the number of new housing units is somehow a gotcha. It's not.

It's not a "gotcha" - it's a significant amount of additional demand, which, given how supply and demand work, drives up prices.

> You fail basic common sense, too. Does every household have one person?

How many people per household affects the degree of the problem, but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. If you have 2.7m people coming in and you assume that for this population you average five people to a household, that's still roughly 1/3 of the new housing units being generated that are needed to house them. That's an enormous increase in demand, which pushes housing costs up.

To be clear, I think this is a problem of too little housing supply more than too much immigration (though I do oppose illegal immigration and have a strong preference for it ceasing entirely), but either way the problems suggested by the post that you're replying to are very clearly real.

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

#85

Post by badpun »

johnklos wrote: post #31

Considering that the amount of computing that could be rented for the price of a house every month could now be bought for $20, this isn't surprising. What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food.

> What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food.

1. Why is that surprising? That has been a natural state of human societies from the beginning of civilization. What would be really surprising is if things changed.

2. Roughly two thirds of Americans own a home. That stands in contradiction with your claim that most Americans cannot afford to own a home.

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

#86

Post by bumby »

johnklos wrote: post #31

Considering that the amount of computing that could be rented for the price of a house every month could now be bought for $20, this isn't surprising. What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food.

>What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food.

My personal opinion is that this hasn't changed much because human psychology hasn't changed much. We are a status-driven species and, lacking other measures, we revert to the easily quantifiable: wealth, house size, education credentialism, etc. to derive our place.

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

#87

Post by db48x »

soperj wrote: post #75
6DM wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a love hate relationship for led lights. They are more efficient, come in an array of colors for you to personalize your space. But I consider them expensive and a lot of them surprisingly don’t last that long, especially for their price. 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 hope the quality improves or there’s s…

> 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.

Yep. It is virtually always the power regulator that fails, rather than the LED itself. Lots of LED bulb and fixture manufacturers cheap out here. We could do better by running low voltage DC power in our homes, but even that isn’t a panacea.

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

#88

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

> Back in the prehistoric era a person would have to gather, chop and burn wood for roughly 10 hours a day for six days straight in order to produce the equivalent light of a modern lightbulb shining for about an hour.

This feels like a very odd comparison/metric. It doesn't really matter how many lumens/watts it has, I think a better metric is "How much does it take to 'comfortably' light a single room for 1 hour". Surely the amount of wood that would take is not the amount needed from chopping for 10 hours a day/six days straight. Even more than that, I am really suspicious of these numbers. 60 hours worth of wood chopping would give me a giant inferno bonfire that would last much more than an hour, so how was this comparison done?

The fact that modern technology is so relatively cheap means that we can afford to waste it or use it to unnecessary extremes, but that doesn't mean we should really use that as the base measure of comparison. I of course understand the overall point the article is trying to make, but the attempt at quantifying the numbers feels like comparing apples to oranges.

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

#89

Post by bumby »

badpun wrote: post #85
johnklos wrote: post #31

Considering that the amount of computing that could be rented for the price of a house every month could now be bought for $20, this isn't surprising. What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food.

> What's surprising is that with all these resources made available to the world, we still have systems that allow hoarding of wealth to such a degree that most people can't afford to own a home and many can barely afford rent and food. 1. Why is that surprising? That has been a natural state of human societies from the beginning of civilization. What would be really surprising is if things changed. 2. Roughly two th…

#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-...

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