121–130 of 343 posts
Wow, I had to check the math and with my assumptions it does in fact take >2 hours of minimum wage labor to power a CFL for 1 year ($7.25/hr, 0.14$ KWh). It's much higher than I expected. I had the notion that turning off CFLs was hardly worth my time but that's not entirely true.
Varies with electric rates of course, but this is still a useful estimate.
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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?
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#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…
> 70% of US household debt is mortgage debt I wonder what percentage of that was mortgage taken on an already paid off (or partly paid off) home in order to be able to buy consumer trinkets.
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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?
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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…
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 housi…
Is it racist to blame the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property and funding the politicians that let them do it, while also pushing for more immigration? I don't really think the comment was blaming immigrants, it was blaming immigration, and it's honestly really hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that adding more people to a place that already doesn't have enough housing for people won't make the problem worse.
> 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".…
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Things that can be produced and consumed all over seems to have been averaging down (from US perspective) but things that cannot be done somewhere else or have strong limits on their production (services, housing) have inflated a lot. We had inflation with a pool of items I think.
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 p…
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.
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Ironically, LEDs being so efficient means I need to use the central heating more often. My CFL TV used to provide some respite, not now I have an OLED.
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)
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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?