That's cool, but inflation is still hitting me harder than I expected at the grocery store with 3 hungry kids. This article and honestly a lot of articles by the WaPo seem tone deaf lately.
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Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
311–320 of 343 posts
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but the ingredients for what you are cooking are not going to be free either.
I feel like you're unclear on what poverty, homelessness, and hunger are. You have proposed that a homeless person obtain a phone, find a library that'll mail books, obtain a mailbox, have a book mailed to them, presumably pay for return postage, all so they can obtain recipes to cook on a stove they don't have with utensils they likely lack with ingredients they can't afford. Homeless people aren't in that situation…
>I feel like you're unclear on what poverty, homelessness, and hunger are.
And I feel like you do not understand that the average American is not homeless.
If you are homeless you are not going to be a person who is spending >$40/mo for food and needing a cook book to make cheap food interesting to eat. You will just buy cheap food until you bootstrap yourself back to a house and a stable job.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, the flip side of that is that they depress wages - not only for unskilled jobs. You probably wouldn't be happy if you're an accountant on one side of the building and in the other side the people working in the meat packing plant are making as much as you.
That’s a bit of a strawman position. I don’t think anyone is claiming there should be absolute equality. What they are saying is a particular group should not be scapegoated, particularly when that group is taken advantage of to subsidize the quality of life of those that are demonizing them. It comes down to having a nuanced understanding of the issue and rejecting overly simplistic (and wrong) mental models.
Again, I'm not blaming the people. If I were in their shoes I'd probably do the same thing. I'm blaming immigration policy. You shouldn't have politicians acting like they care about the price of housing while opposing doing anything to stem the tide of uncontrolled immigration.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ma…
You're neglecting the fact that not everyone gets stopped, people do visa overstays, etc.
We don't know what the true number is and that's part of the problem. If we're letting an unknown number of people in we aren't controlling for housing demand. All we have hard data on are how many are added to the immigration court backlog.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a bit of a strawman position. I don’t think anyone is claiming there should be absolute equality. What they are saying is a particular group should not be scapegoated, particularly when that group is taken advantage of to subsidize the quality of life of those that are demonizing them. It comes down to having a nuanced understanding of the issue and rejecting overly simplistic (and wrong) mental models.
Again, I'm not blaming the people. If I were in their shoes I'd probably do the same thing. I'm blaming immigration policy. You shouldn't have politicians acting like they care about the price of housing while opposing doing anything to stem the tide of uncontrolled immigration.
Except when you talk to people who care about the cost of construction and food. You know what industries tend to lobby politicians for more lax immigration policies? Agricultural, food production, and construction.
Why isn't the same argument being made about food? More people equals more demand, right? Shouldn't there be a commensurate increase in food costs? But people are able to mentally understand that immigrants are disproportionately providing the food supply. Not only are they more willing to do that work than native born Americans, they are also more productive in terms of both output and cost. If we were to employ only native born Americans in agriculture and meat-packing, costs are likely to go up, not down.
The same relationship holds for construction, especially in the south. Over 60% of housing costs are construction. Labor is a big part of that. Immigrants provide a disproportionate amount of that labor and they generally do so at lower cost. So by reducing immigration, you are going to increase the largest input to building homes in the hopes that you can bring down overall costs through reduction in demand.
Where that all balances in overall costs, I'm not sure. But I do know that overly simplistic models like "less immigration = lower housing costs" tend to miss those competing dynamics.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worry we’ll find the high speed strobe almost all LEDs emit are harmful for humans or animals. We’re told they strobe too fast for us to perceive (sometimes true, sometimes not). But unperceptible doesn’t mean it’s not harmful. A lot of people that use their iPhone’s slow motion video function indoors at night are surprised to see they are surrounded by a disco of blinking lights.
Is this even an LED exclusive problem? I was taught this is mainly due to alternating current, and is seen in filaments as well.
Filaments are slow to respond to alternating current. So they do wobble in brightness a bit, but they do not blink like an LED does, which fluctuates between 100% off and on.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
But home equity loans are often up to 85% of home equity. The point is inflated home prices allow people to inflate their lifestyle, regardless of what they’re spending it on. It’s about the system of revolving debt being propped up by inflated home values, not necessarily about what the debt is spent on.
I see, you're saying the loan is never paid back. Or is paid back only through more debt rolled over from something else. Ugh. I guess that's exactly how governments fund themselves. I don't see how a responsible person can even compete in that environment. It's like joining a sport where everyone's doping.
In this case, I don't think the revolving debt goes to governments because it's typically serviced by private entities. Rather, it's how people maintain an inflated lifestyle predicated on inflated home values.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ma…
You're neglecting the fact that not everyone gets stopped, people do visa overstays, etc. We don't know what the true number is and that's part of the problem. If we're letting an unknown number of people in we aren't controlling for housing demand. All we have hard data on are how many are added to the immigration court backlog.
> We don't know what the true number is and that's part of the problem
We have a pretty good idea, but it doesn't mostly come from border encounter tallies like the onrs you've cited.
> If we're letting an unknown number of people in we aren't controlling for housing demand.
Except for a sharp drop during the pandemic and a rebound to nearly the prior level afterwards, the illegally-present population has been basically flat for years, and on a longer term declining since, IIRC, the mid-late 00s.
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like you're unclear on what poverty, homelessness, and hunger are. You have proposed that a homeless person obtain a phone, find a library that'll mail books, obtain a mailbox, have a book mailed to them, presumably pay for return postage, all so they can obtain recipes to cook on a stove they don't have with utensils they likely lack with ingredients they can't afford. Homeless people aren't in that situation…
>I feel like you're unclear on what poverty, homelessness, and hunger are. And I feel like you do not understand that the average American is not homeless. If you are homeless you are not going to be a person who is spending >$40/mo for food and needing a cook book to make cheap food interesting to eat. You will just buy cheap food until you bootstrap yourself back to a house and a stable job.
Scroll up to where this comments thread says "You realize that there are people who are homeless", then talked about a box under a bridge, then not having a mailbox. Who did you think we were discussing?
Re: Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, I'm not blaming the people. If I were in their shoes I'd probably do the same thing. I'm blaming immigration policy. You shouldn't have politicians acting like they care about the price of housing while opposing doing anything to stem the tide of uncontrolled immigration.
Except when you talk to people who care about the cost of construction and food. You know what industries tend to lobby politicians for more lax immigration policies? Agricultural, food production, and construction. Why isn't the same argument being made about food? More people equals more demand, right? Shouldn't there be a commensurate increase in food costs? But people are able to mentally understand that immigran…
Well said.