161–170 of 343 posts
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I'm referring to light pollution, not the power source. It used to be that if you saw light at night, you knew humans were there - now we light millions of uninhabited acres.
What uninhabited land do we light up? Not familiar with what you’re referring to.
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.
It sounded miserly to me, but running lights was more expensive than I realized.
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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.
Consider a more dire twist: you have money to pay for a life-saving operation for either your own child or another child on the other side of the world. Are you saying there is should be no personal preference in this scenario?
I'm saying there are perfectly reasonable expectations to concentrate that wealth due to human psychology once you move away from the academic and abstract.
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> 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.
Right, but isn't there value in concentrating wealth to those who you have psychological proximity with? Consider a more dire twist: you have money to pay for a life-saving operation for either your own child or another child on the other side of the world. Are you saying there is should be no personal preference in this scenario? I'm saying there are perfectly reasonable expectations to concentrate that wealth due t…
Yes. That's why I said the difference isn't invalid. It's just more like a hidden redistributive tax.
In small doses, this is fine and a way democracies repay their patrons. In larger doses, it leaves everyone poor. Too poor to afford a life-saving operation for anyone around.
> 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".…
The power in a fire is mostly released as heat, both because they're "compact" piles of burning stuff, and because they're more or less "red/yellow" black body radiators. If it was all released as visible light, burning 3 kg of wood (about 12kWh) over 10 hours would be about the brightness as several kilowatts of metal halide stadium floodlamp.
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What uninhabited land do we light up? Not familiar with what you’re referring to.
Freeways, parking lots, commercial skyscrapers at night, storage facilities, etc
> millions of uninhabited acres.
Is my closet “uninhabited” when I’m not using it? If so, then yes, these are definitely some examples.
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Homeless people have cell phones. Why do you think great advancements bringing down the price of computing would solve housing?
I was thinking about this recently. People will get evicted before not paying their cell phone bill, now. This would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.
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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 reason…
The problem, IMO, with most UBI studies I’ve seen is that they inject money from outside the system without funding the system via taxes. That makes their economic conclusions largely invalid, in my opinion. Their findings typically amount to “if we give some of our citizens free money that fell from the sky, they can afford more”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homeless people have cell phones. Why do you think great advancements bringing down the price of computing would solve housing?
I was thinking about this recently. People will get evicted before not paying their cell phone bill, now. This would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.