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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)

#261

Post by Auracle »

tqi wrote: post #67
Auracle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

First off, immigrants tend to have more children.

Second, if we're already at a deficit how does it make sense to throw more fuel on the fire?

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

#262

Post by Auracle »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #99
Auracle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

There are plenty of plots of land that are turned into dense developments in the area. Maybe someday someone will buy up my property along with my neighbors and do just that - it happened down the road not too long ago.

Not everywhere should be a suburban hellscape. For what it's worth my parent's lot where I grew up was 60 acres. Now there's no way you'd be able to buy something like that unless you were super patient and had ridiculous sums of money for the area. Again, there's less land for how many people there are.

What should I do? Plop more houses on my lot just to increase the housing supply?

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

#263

Post by Auracle »

api wrote: post #103
Auracle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

Again, I'm not blaming immigrants. I'm blaming immigration policy. There's a difference.

And yes, there is a way to make housing more affordable without building more of it. That's the entire point of my post. Supply and demand has two sides.

There is absolutely a housing price crisis in at least some of rural America. My wife's brother has been looking for a house for years but everything he can find in his price range as a teacher (which are paid OK in MN) is a complete dump. This is in town, which in our area means it's the cheapest housing.

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

#264

Post by dragonwriter »

Auracle wrote: post #261
tqi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

First off, immigrants tend to have more children. Second, if we're already at a deficit how does it make sense to throw more fuel on the fire?

> First off, immigrants tend to have more children

First, undocumented migrants intercepted at the border by CBP (which is what your source counts) are particularly unlikely to have more children in the United States. Second, the CBP report your source is based on counts encounters, not people, and notes “The large number of expulsions during the pandemic has contributed to a higher-than-usual number of migrants making multiple border crossing attempts, which means that total encounters somewhat overstate the number of unique individuals arriving at the border.”

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

#265

Post by Auracle »

codedokode wrote: post #64
Auracle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> supply is limited by the surface area of the earth But US is not a small country, how can there be not enough land?

It's all taken at this point in many areas. My parents could afford a 60 acre lot (again, in a rural area) on a construction worker and school bus driver's salary.

My wife is an accountant and I'm a programmer/photographer and the best we could afford is worse house on a lot 1/4 the size. There literally aren't lots that size around anymore. Usually when one goes up for sale a developer will buy it.

Sure, there's farmland in the area - but the farmers are using that.

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

#266

Post by Auracle »

dukeyukey wrote: post #73
Auracle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Clearly it's not about right. If supply and demand stay the same, prices should stay the same apart from inflation.

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

#267

Post by ltbarcly3 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #250
valval wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-04-13/... > Deaths attributed to malnutrition more than doubled, from about 650 in 2018 to roughly 1,400 in 2022, according to preliminary death certificate data from the California Department of Public Health. The same trend occurred nationwide, with malnutrition deaths more than doubling, from about 9,300 deaths in 2018 to roughly 20,500 in 2022, according to th…

These are people too elderly and feeble to take care of themselves, and often people who have medical conditions that prevent them from being able to absorb nutrition from food in addition to that. This has literally nothing to do with it being impossible to afford food.

Also in the same period there were around 300,000 deaths due to obesity with around 30,000 in california.

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

#268

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

badpun wrote: post #102
bumby wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#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.

Houses are many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and not infrequently $1M or more. A big flatscreen is maybe a couple $k. We're talking orders and orders of magnitude difference. I feel this goes together with "cut back on Starbucks" type advice. These things are just rounding errors.

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

#269

Post by tqi »

Auracle wrote: post #261
tqi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

First off, immigrants tend to have more children. Second, if we're already at a deficit how does it make sense to throw more fuel on the fire?

Why limit ourselves to only addressing one part of the equation? I say let's ban both immigration AND procreation!

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

#270

Post by earthboundkid »

_yb2s wrote: post #176
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".…

This is why I resent the laws banning incandescent lights. I consider myself an environmentalist, and am very careful about wasting electricity. I love the warm dim light from an incandescent and think it helps me fall asleep... the light from one incandescent dimmed to about 20-40W is all I need after sunset, and all I want. It's like sitting near a campfire. My house is solar powered, and I keep a window open witho…

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