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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)

#281
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't look or feel the same to me. I used to be in this camp before branching out and trying some different LEDs. Unless it is literally the glowing filament that you like looking at, which is reasonable, you can definitely find a bulb that looks and feels the same. That was my point in repeating myself saying that it 100% exists. If you’re not in a place to financially experiment with a few bulbs that’s diffe…

It just seems like a solution looking for a problem... incandescent lights are exactly the perfect solution for my use case, I am completely happy with them. The whole problem LED bulb mandates are trying to solve is mostly a problem of unnecessary and excessive lighting which is causing tons of light pollution, interrupting peoples circadian rhythm, etc. If people used a very dim light near their body just between s…

I live in a village of I genuinely hate it.

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

#282
post #176

> 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…

If you run a 100w incandescent lamp dimmed to 30 watts, it's lifespan will be increased to easily 100 years. (Aging is highly nonlinear with temperature)

So you will never have to deal with the inability to purchase a replacement.

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

#283
post #171
post #133

Earlier 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...

The basket of goods doesn't look random, and I wonder if it was chosen specifically and wrongly to make that point.

What would comparing random food prices prove? There is literally no benefit to comparing the price of let’s say dragonfruit when the average American doesn’t eat dragonfruit. Using common ingredients that’s always in demand sets a strong baseline.

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

#284
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except people have already done these experiments, and it turns out trichromacy is quite common among humans. If you actually dislike LED lighting then you should also notice issues with LED screens not just lightbulbs. Instead you like most people dislike bad LED lightbulbs which are common because most people are buying them without testing em. Which means most manufacturers don’t actually optimize for light qualit…

If the spectrum of the LEDs match the sensitivities of the eyes, then everything is fine. But LEDs are narrow spectrum; they won't reproduce color the same way as a broad spectrum light source will. As for LED screens, those are emissive and work great for simulating any color. However, they are not good light sources for lighting objects because they're narrow spectrum. If the object you're lighting up is broad-band…

You also run into the same issues with the images displayed via an LED screen.

There is no such thing as non distorted colors because even sunlight is also reflecting off objects in the environment. We are just used to seeing a decent approximation of what stuff probably looks like in full sunlight. It might be an old hack but changing a filaments temperature is only approximating what happens at different times of the day as the sun’s actual temperature and thus black body spectrum is constant what’s actually changing is the amount of atmosphere involved.

The truth is everyone doesn’t make the same corrections, individuals are simply fairly consistently with their approximation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you are using a tiny subset of a group to make broad assertions about the entire group. That is not logically valid. I accept there are sick people. But not all people are sick. Most poor people do in fact make themselves inexpensive food at home. That you and others want to claim it is impossible for them to do so is bizarre.

The thing you describe is not in those comments. Also please go answer the question over in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36232600 of what ingredients go in the sandwich.

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

#286
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just use an LED that produces the same color. They 100% exist. I agree that incandescent is better than cold LED. A little shopping and consumer research will 100% find you exactly the LED you want.

I truly cannot distinguish between real incandescent light and the "warm white" implemented on the Phillips Hue bulbs.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. It just cites “low income” as a risk factor for fun. The claim was that no one dies of involuntary malnutrition. The claim is false.

Right, but you are intentionally ignoring the context, intentionally misinterpreting the claim, and being pedantic. It's so lazy and dishonest to do a super literal close reading of what someone says and then debunk that. Your teachers failed you.

It's completely obvious that OP meant that otherwise healthy people aren't starving to death. That used to be common, millions of otherwise healthy people died in famines in Ireland and Ukraine and China not so long ago. People that were healthy couldn't find a way to get their hands on enough calories and they wasted away and died, and their children wasted away and died, gradually over months. That literally doesn't happen in the US and hasn't for a long long time, and if you are claiming it does you live in a land of make believe.

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

#288
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basket of goods doesn't look random, and I wonder if it was chosen specifically and wrongly to make that point.

What would comparing random food prices prove? There is literally no benefit to comparing the price of let’s say dragonfruit when the average American doesn’t eat dragonfruit. Using common ingredients that’s always in demand sets a strong baseline.

"Random" was probably the wrong word to use. "Properly representative of average food costs" is probably a better phrase.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The pandemic warped things a bit, but Canadian house prices have been tumbling down over the last year or so. Interest rates are probably a big part of that, but the UK is raising at roughly the same rates and prices aren't falling nearly as fast.
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