It's kinda mind blowing that we used whale oil for city street lights.
Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
151–160 of 343 posts
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are really drifting in to largely discredited mechantilism there, the belief that money should not flow out of the nation. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mercantilism.asp#:~:tex... .
Devils advocate: what are the limits of this? I.e., does it imply any arbitrarily boundary of commerce is invalid? It strikes me that most people would feel like spending money on your own family/tribe/community may be reasonable despite what mercantilism says as an economic concept.
> does it imply any arbitrarily boundary of commerce is invalid
Not invalid as much as leaves everyone in the measured system materially worse off. Mercantilism is simply a failed way to raise your own living standards. (It might be a good way to concentrate wealth within your system. But only within, not from without.)
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For some reason the doomers always forget that there hasn’t been a case of involuntary death from malnutrition in decades in America.
The argument seems to revolve around the fact that there will always be people who are way worse off than most others. It’s not particularly more surprising than the fact that there will also always be people who are way better off than most others.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#154> 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 think they meant a fire itself would need to burn 10 hours a day for 6 days a week - the chopping to support that fire. The light over the duration is as much as a lightbulb for one hour.
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.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Devils advocate: what are the limits of this? I.e., does it imply any arbitrarily boundary of commerce is invalid? It strikes me that most people would feel like spending money on your own family/tribe/community may be reasonable despite what mercantilism says as an economic concept.
> does it imply any arbitrarily boundary of commerce is invalid Not invalid as much as leaves everyone in the measured system materially worse off. Mercantilism is simply a failed way to raise your own living standards. (It might be a good way to concentrate wealth within your system. But only within, not from without.)
Isn’t this just playing a trick with system boundaries though?
If I hire my son to do my yard work instead of my neighbor, how does that make my son objectively worse off?
Within system/family, obviously this has increased wealth compared to hiring my neighbor.
Without system, it has only made me worse off to the proportion that I have "overpaid" my son. But because it's zero-sum, my son has benefited to the exact proportion that I've been made worse off.
Edit: Back to the context of globalization, "overpaying" my neighbor to build my car only makes me worse off to the same proportion s/he has been helped. When you factor in the concept of preference for psychological distance, that might be a worthy tradeoff. I.e., there's a psychological basis for valuing the financial well-being of my son/neighbor over the abstract person in another country* and this action seems logically consistent with that psychological framework.
* This isn't to say the decision is morally justified. That's a different argument than the economic one.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#156Earlier 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…
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…
I've used LEDs for much fewer years, both cheap and brand names, and have had multiple failures (from both camps).
I once complained to one of the brand companies and they said the same thing about overheating in poorly ventilated fixtures. One of this fixture was not closed, but somewhat narrow (open glass cone). If that actually was the problem for that bulb - ie. such an fixture is prone to overheating it's no wonder people are complaining about LED longevity.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until the very recent inflation increase, food has been cheaper than ever. It's been making up less and less of household budgets for decades. https://seekingalpha.com/article/92689-over-the-past-100-yea...
Now do housing.
Just buy 3 fewer iPhones every month, problem solved!
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This only makes sense if UBI is implemented as an alternative to current welfare programs, but to the extent that is done, I agree that it would be far better, allowing individuals to prioritize between needs, or even invest in their future.
I also like the idea of one lump sum showing how much people are getting from the government. It puts it up front and center, and the public can clearly decide how much is reasonable.
Last, if UBI is paid for with taxes, there would be no cliff, as net benefit would gradually taper then go negative as income increased.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> does it imply any arbitrarily boundary of commerce is invalid Not invalid as much as leaves everyone in the measured system materially worse off. Mercantilism is simply a failed way to raise your own living standards. (It might be a good way to concentrate wealth within your system. But only within, not from without.)
Isn’t this just playing a trick with system boundaries though? If I hire my son to do my yard work instead of my neighbor, how does that make my son objectively worse off? Within system/family, obviously this has increased wealth compared to hiring my neighbor. Without system, it has only made me worse off to the proportion that I have "overpaid" my son. But because it's zero-sum, my son has benefited to the exact pr…
> Isn’t this just playing a trick with system boundaries though
We agree. Consider the world to be your street and your country your neighbor and your houses. Paying your neighbor more to keep the money local doesn't work to make your "country" richer. It just helps concentrate wealth with your neighbor. Mercantilist protectionism is about redistributing, not increasing, domestic resources.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#160Considering 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.
Homeless people have cell phones. Why do you think great advancements bringing down the price of computing would solve housing?
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.