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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)

#111

Post by ltbarcly3 »

misnome wrote: post #109
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who can't afford food? An egg costs like 30 cents, rice is like 20 cents a pound. Make some fried rice. Make a sandwich. The cost of great food is like $40 a month per person, with the bonus that they wouldn't be morbidly obese. Now explain why its unreasonable to expect people to eat high quality cheap food. (and no "poor people are too stupid" paternalistic arguments)

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.

The proof that this is not a problem is the rampant obesity and lack of people actually starving.

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

#112

Post by lumb63 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #53
imtringued wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which make it even more effective as a trap. If working more or increasing salary means losing your housing and childcare, it is a non-starter.

Regardless of which side of the political aisle one is on, this is one reason why UBI/a negative income tax should draw attention. I don’t know if it is the best solution, but it would empower those on welfare today by allowing them to direct their own funds, rather than infantilizing them by assuming “government knows best”. It would also prevent or mitigate the “welfare trap” and disincentivize abuse of the social welfare system, for instance people choosing not to work to receive benefits. The third benefit is it would be cheaper to administrate due to elimination of the smorgasbord of different welfare programs in existence today. Yet, here we are.

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

#113

Post by tetris11 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #88

> 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".…

I just found this stackexchange post[1], that claims 350g of wood would be enough to power 1Kwh, but a user points out that half the heat would be lost in exhaust.

Maybe that's what the article was referring to, a significant loss of energy to the efficiency of extracting meaningful work from burning wood, with stone age tools.

1: https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/a/4601

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

#114

Post by adventured »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #100
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.

Who can't afford food? An egg costs like 30 cents, rice is like 20 cents a pound. Make some fried rice. Make a sandwich. The cost of great food is like $40 a month per person, with the bonus that they wouldn't be morbidly obese. Now explain why its unreasonable to expect people to eat high quality cheap food. (and no "poor people are too stupid" paternalistic arguments)

$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.

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

#115

Post by ryeights »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #108
ryeights wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ham and cheese are both notoriously expensive though, and not especially healthy. One day of filet mignon would eat up the whole budget, but thats not an argument against what I said. As for out of touch, I grew up eating government peanut butter and free school lunches. Lots of years that is all I ate. Food assistance is great and we should do more, but jeff bezos hording wealth isn't causing people to starve as gp…

I’m a bit confused then… what exactly do you propose the average American should put in their sandwiches—your suggestion—at a $40/mo budget? Eggs and lentils?

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

#116

Post by ricketycricket »

ryeights wrote: post #104
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who can't afford food? An egg costs like 30 cents, rice is like 20 cents a pound. Make some fried rice. Make a sandwich. The cost of great food is like $40 a month per person, with the bonus that they wouldn't be morbidly obese. Now explain why its unreasonable to expect people to eat high quality cheap food. (and no "poor people are too stupid" paternalistic arguments)

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.

Not to mention the fruits and vegetables required for a balanced diet. Prices for produce in my area have gone through the roof. What about the family of four, the single parent, one of the many recently let go? The cost of basic goods and services has inflated as well, meaning less money for food. Sure, maybe there are people spending way too much eating out, but food scarcity is a real problem for many. And just saying you should be able to afford it and throwing around made up $ figures doesn't solve a thing.

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

#117

Post by mantas »

henry2023 wrote: post #63
Matheus28 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only they build those houses. They don't get to own them. Hard to imagine an undocumented immigrant having spare 250k cash for a downpayment. OP comment is a joke.

Legal immigrants and illegal migrants have to live somewhere too. Even if they don't have $$$, they still put pressure on the system from the bottom. And it bubbles up throughout the real estate pyramid.

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

#118

Post by colpabar »

sgift wrote: post #68
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. A cheap lamp on a table does little good when I can afford neither the table, the roof above it, nor the food to serve at that table.

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 hav…

My favorite is when fox news puts out pieces about how not-so-bad it is to be poor because some large percentage of poor people have refrigerators or some other home appliance.

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

#119

Post by joelfried »

I was all set to read and see whether they took LED manufacturers at their word for how long their bulbs lasted, and it turned out the article's source is nearly 30 years old.

Can we update the flair to say 1994, given that the embedded numbers date from that year? Regurgitating the data in 2017 doesn't make the information actually from 2017.

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

#120

Post by tiedieconderoga »

Buying an hour of fire feels quantitatively different from buying an hour of light.

When I go camping, my solar-fed LED lanterns are plenty bright, but I still need to cook and stay warm. I can do that using heat, which the efficient lights cannot produce in sufficient quantities.

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