> 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". Surely the amount of wood that would take is not the amount needed from chopping for 10 hours a day/six days straight. Even more than that, I am really suspicious of these numbers. 60 hours worth of wood chopping would give me a giant inferno bonfire that would last much more than an hour, so how was this comparison done?
The fact that modern technology is so relatively cheap means that we can afford to waste it or use it to unnecessary extremes, but that doesn't mean we should really use that as the base measure of comparison. I of course understand the overall point the article is trying to make, but the attempt at quantifying the numbers feels like comparing apples to oranges.
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 without even heat even in the winter - my utility bills are negative from my solar array.
Yet it is "normal" to create massive light pollution with hundreds of watts of LEDs, heating and lighting an entire house including unoccupied rooms, and nearly everybody has LED lights on the front porch and backyard that they leave on all night long. Pisses me off that lighting and electricity are so cheap that people have no regard for it, and yet my minuscule usage is nowadays categorically illegal /rant
There was an article posted here earlier this year[1] that pointed out the flaws in modern LEDs, and just how hard it is to get one that matches the color you want. It's a pretty long read, but the author does a really good job of showing just how much trouble he has getting comfortable lighting that actually lasts a long time.
As I mentioned in some other comments, I settled on a lamp with a fully adjustable color and brightness. It’s lots of diodes, and the net effect is very nice.
In other words, I’m agreeing with your article that the fixed bulbs typically don’t hit the mark.
Are you sure that your "fully adjustable" bulb is giving you the spectrum you think it is? Syonyk's posted a few RGB bulb reviews recently, and they tend to have a lot more blue light than you'd think. And if you use the RGB functions, they tend to get REALLY spiky instead of having a smooth emissions curve.
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 quality.
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 reflective (like paper with broadband black pigments), then everything is good. But as soon as you get narrow-band pigments, colors are going to be distorted.
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
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.
An incandescent has 10-15% brightness flicker at 120Hz. LEDs... vary. Some flicker a lot harder at 120Hz, some (mostly LED Christmas lights) are awful and flicker at 60Hz with a 50% duty cycle because they're a single diode rectifier.
Most LEDs flicker far faster, in the kHz range, which is theoretically beyond human impact, but we don't have many studies on it.
Incandescent flicker is also related to bulb wattage. A higher wattage bulb, with a thicker filament, will flicker less because it has more thermal inertia.
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.
A 240fps high speed is more than enough to observe a variety of LED flickering behaviors. Some flicker none (Bedtime Bulb is remarkable in the lack of flicker), some flicker at high enough frequency you can't really make out details, and others are just... gross.
Incandescents were "Deprecated but still available, and not many people worried about it" for about the past 7 years or so, and you could still find them at stores, if you cared.
Trump expressed his dislike for LED and CFL lighting, so, of course, the Biden administration went about actually banning sale of incandescents. I expect a robust black market in them for decades to come.
The overall energy use numbers really depend on how the bulbs are used - in many areas, lights are mostly used in the winter, when the heat is welcome. Saving energy on lighting and having to burn more natural gas or electricity for heat pumps is perhaps some savings over electricity, but not nearly the 5-6x often cited as "savings." In the summer, when the heat is unwelcome, the sun is up longer, so a well run home won't be using nearly as much artificial light.
I’m more familiar with the advancements in CRI in recent years than dUV (this is the first I’be heard of that) but LEDs can now be purchased with equivalent CRI.
The context of this discussion is incandescent color/perception/experience.
My point is that CRI alone isn't sufficient. Nor is CCT (correlated color temperature). In practice, two bulbs with the same CRI and color temperature can have drastically different tints.
It all boils down to how these measurements work. In practice, the vast vast majority of LED bulbs do not even remotely come close to the color reproduction of halogen. Not to mention the flicker response to 60hz wall power.
There are a handful of companies that produce extremely color accurate LEDs but they're expensive and have limited lifespan.
I can’t recommend Waveform Lighting’s 95 CRI products highly enough!
The wonderful warmth of incandescent (depending on your color temp prefs) with no wasted IR energy in the form of heat. What’s funny is that your mind will perceive it as hot because we’ve been conditioned to expect it from light at that color temp.
Reasonable price, too, but more expensive than bulbs from the big box store. For something that lasts 10-18 years, it’s worth it to me.
Well OK, I was more speaking in the context of a reading lamp. And I wanted more to point out that an LED lamp with smooth color and brightness spectrums allows for you to find a better sweet spot for comfortably reading at night.
They're not obvious visually when they switch from the white emitter, which has "some blue" to the RGB emitters, which have "lots of blue" as you head out in the red/orange spectrum, but your body's "blue sensors" certainly notice.
Unfortunately, our visual system isn't sensitive to the same things our melatonin inhibiting system is sensitive to, so without a spectrometer, you can't really tell what you're seeing.
It doesn't look or feel the same to me. Maybe something to do with CRI (I don't really understand that).
I am not switching to LEDs... It would be wasteful to throw away something that works great and replace it with something new that doesn't work as well. I like incandescent, and my 40 year old reading lamp and a few extra bulbs will last forever running a few hours a night dimmed to ~20W.
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 different. Stating that LEDs can’t produce the color you want is wrong. I would go as far as to say that you can find an LED that produces a color you prefer over incandescent.
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 sunset and sleep it wouldn't matter much how efficient it is.
Brightly lighting up our cities and houses is totally unnecessary and terrible for us, and terrible for the planet regardless of how efficient and cheap we can make it. It lowers quality of life for us, and other animals affected by the light pollution.
I would have no problem affording LED lights I don't want, but cannot afford to move someplace with enough land to escape the neighbors light pollution from their cheap LEDs... which makes it harder to sleep, impossible to enjoy the stars, etc.
Making it more efficient just means people will think even less before brightly lighting things up all night long that either don’t need lighting at all or don’t need it so bright. LEDs are so efficient and cheap that the result is massive light pollution. The solution to energy waste is to make light dimmer and more localized.
And I can't help but think my neighbor with literally hundreds of watts of LED bulbs around the outside of their house might not decide to light the night quite as often if they were all incandescents. I can read a newspaper by their lights, which aren't even aimed at me, about 3/8 mile away. It's absurd.
I live in a village of <100 people and its almost impossible to see the stars here. I can make out planets/brighter stars but most dim stars are obscured. We don’t even produce a whole lot of light pollution by ourselves, it’s mostly from nearby towns. And it’s only gotten worse in recent years.
I settled on an adjustable-temperature/brightness standing lamp. I don’t know the model, sorry. Being able to change the color/brightness on a spectrum is very nice.
Planning to buy some e26 bulbs that connect to Apple’s home automation. It’ll be the same process of buying all the popular models on Amazon that have fully adjustable color/brightness and settling on what I like best.
Sounds like you're looking for a color temperature even lower than 2700 which is usually the low end for standard bulbs. Two options that might work for you are 'smart' color changing bulbs that you can set to much warmer and dimmer values OR 'vintage' or amber glass bulbs, typically in a narrower bulb shape and sometimes with a smaller base (adapters are available).
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.
> and yet my minuscule usage is nowadays categorically illegal /rant
No, even when the efficiency rules go into effect, using noncompliant bulbs will not be illegal. Stock up on your inefficient bulbs before August, and you can use them as long as you like.
While I appreciate your reluctance, I’d recommend trying to find one of the Philips LED bulbs that dim like an incandescent bulb. I’m not sure they’re easy to find now, and to be honest I don’t remember the model name, but if you can find them they are wonderful. Basically they have multiple sets of diodes within them that dim at different rates which is an incredibly convincing “incandescent emulation”. They are a “whiter” light at high brightness and a nice warm glow at low brightness with a nice smooth transition between them.
They seem to be obsoleted, all I can find for them is new old stock anymore. Which I've bought up a bunch of, because the damned things keep failing on me. I've had a set of 5 in service for about 6 years, and so far I've had to replace 4 of them for various failures. They're facing down in a hanging lamp with glass globes around them, and I guess that's close enough to "recessed or enclosed" that they fry themselves. I have them in a few places, though I've also purchased... "some" incandescents, before they went out of availability. I should be good for the rest of my life at this point, especially since I run my incandescents dimmed. The wiki article on bulb rerating is informative - as you reduce power, lifespan is "fraction of rated power" to the -12 or -16 - it's some stupidly high exponent, and it's why a lot of people empirically noticed that "bulbs on dimmers never seem to burn out."
I resent the banning of incandescent light bulbs for a practical reason: Heat.
In colder regions it's been common sense to use an incandescent light bulb to keep a space heated so it's just above freezing (above 0C or 32F) during the winter months.
This is to prevent things like plumbing and sensitive machinery from breaking due to ice formation. A full blown heater is generally complete overkill and impractical for this.
Unless someone has a drop-in replacement for incandescent light bulbs for heat generation purposes, I want them back. And no, LED light bulbs do not work: LEDs don't produce significant heat.
> Surely there are other, more reliable ways, to keep a space heated during winter months?
Sure, there are plenty of other ways to keep a space heated.
They're all radically more expensive, and radically more failure prone, than a 60W or 100W bulb burning constantly, back when the bulb was $2 and the trouble lamp cord was $10.
And before anyone chimes in that "burning constantly" is a waste of electricity, most bulbs used for this purpose are behind a mechanism that opens and closes the circuit according to the ambient temperature so the bulb doesn't burn if it's warm enough.
I just found this stackexchange post[1], that claims 350g of wood would be enough to power 1Kwh, but a user points out that half the heat would be lost in exhaust.
Maybe that's what the article was referring to, a significant loss of energy to the efficiency of extracting meaningful work from burning wood, with stone age tools.
Indeed, you also can burn thousands of gallons of jet fuel and the tyres on a 747 actually spin fewer times than the tyres on a Citroen 2CV do just going to the supermarket.
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.
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.
I can't see any combination, length of time burned or length of time to gather the material, where it takes 60 hours to get a fire that outputs as much light as a single lightbulb over one hour.
However, a 60W incandescent bulb puts out about 800 lumens, which is about 64 candela. So one bulb-hour is indeed about 60 candle-hours. This is omnidirectional output, useful output may be less.
The original paper reports a 21 pounds of firewood was measured to produce 2.1 foot-candles (22 lux) for 3.4 hours. Overall useful fireplace output was estimated at about 1.7 lumen-hours per pound of wood, which is 10 lumens (just under 1 candela) on average for that 21 pound fire.
By focusing on light output, and not the heat output, I still think it's an incomplete comparison, as an LED bulb may be very bright and cheap to run, but it won't keep you very warm in a cave in prehistoric Zhoukoudian.
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.
Might not be far off if you don't have very effective tools (Peking Man had simple stone tools) or you've exhausted nearby suitable wood supplies like sticks you can just pick up or trees you can tackle, so you have to travel out and drag it back.
The original study estimated 10 pounds (5kg) of wood foraged, trimmed and dried per hour of labour. That sounds low with a saw and an axe (and very low with a chainsaw), but might be about right with primitive tools including travel and processing and wood stack maintenance (no tarps either).
This entire article is total bullshit, and could easily qualify as propaganda. The fact is that everything has gotten far more expensive, not cheaper. 30-40 years ago people used incandescent lights everywhere, AC transformers with pitiful efficiency and gas-guzzling V8s and nobody had to weep over their energy bill. Electricity and fuel has become staggeringly more expensive. It's only due to technological advances and higher efficiency that we can still somewhat afford that stuff at all.
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.
Things that can be produced and consumed all over seems to have been averaging down (from US perspective) but things that cannot be done somewhere else or have strong limits on their production (services, housing) have inflated a lot. We had inflation with a pool of items I think.
Globalization over the last several decades has greatly reduced inflation and allowed the first world to “gain” far more wealth than would have actually happened otherwise.
For instance, 70 years ago, more American cars were built in America. The money that consumers paid for cars went to American companies. This caused increased demand for (American) workers, which increased workers’ wages, and thus their spending power, and thus increased the price of goods. Their pay increased sufficiently to allow them to maintain, and in fact improve, their quality of life, because the inflation was driven by wage growth.
Compare to a globalized world. The money Americans spend on cars today mostly ends up in foreign nations. The demand for the produce of foreign companies pushes up wages in foreign countries, and causes inflation there. Americans get items for cheaper than they could be produced in their own nation, due to labor cost differences. The rub is that they’re not fueling their own economies, which leaves workers unable to afford items which cannot be produced elsewhere.
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.
> 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 to human psychology once you move away from the academic and abstract.
> isn't there value in concentrating wealth to those who you have psychological proximity with
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.
Ah, I see you point. Sorry it took me awhile to get there :)
Regarding "it leaves everyone poor", how is the case if it's zero sum? It seems like it comes down to how you define your metric of 'poor'. It seems like it presupposes there isn't enough money to go around, so it's better to have a few people rich and the rest destitute, rather than have everyone just be marginally poor.
Or are we getting into productivity incentive territory here?
Trade isn’t zero sum. Ricardian mechanics is what overturned mercantilism. You paying more for your neighbour to do work than someone down the street deprives you of money and everyone of economies of scale.
Doesn’t this break down once your utility function goes beyond strict economics? E.g., economics may say it’s best to let Taiwan specialize in semiconductors, but that may not be optimal once you factor in other dimensions like national security. Humans are not Homo Economicus
> economics may say it’s best to let Taiwan specialize in semiconductors, but that may not be optimal once you factor in other dimensions like national security. Humans are not Homo Economicus
And those other dimensions come at a cost. National security seems like a reasonable thing to pay a cost for. Enriching an oligarch does not. A lot of protectionism is about the latter.
Sure, just like the hypothetical yard work has a cost. I think what you’re illustrating is that protectionism doesn’t make people poorer per se, but it’s bad when it’s abused for individual purposes rather than broader purposes.
> what you’re illustrating is that protectionism doesn’t make people poorer per se
It makes people materially poorer and redistributes wealth, typically up. That is a fair price to pay in some circumstances, e.g. bolstering defence manufacturers.
So on some dimensions, protectionism can make people better off (eg more secure). It seems your issue isn’t that it makes “everyone” poorer (there seems to be a contradiction between your previous and last statement), but more so you aren’t comfortable with how the decision is made (eg by fiat)
If you son can make 4x the hourly rate doing something else and does not do that because he is doing yard work, then you have decreased wealth. The key is in the if.
I agree that forced labor completely changes the scenario. Nobody is forcing my son to do yard work in this scenario though. Both the neighbor and son are willing, but only one can do the work.
> does it imply any arbitrarily boundary of commerce is invalid?
Yes. It says exactly that.
Now, there are details that can change things either way. But the one thing about economics, that is known for about 3 centuries, is that usually arbitrary boundaries to commerce make people poorer. Usually, both on average and on the poor extreme. There is more variability of impact for rich people.
What if 100% of your economy's money goes out to foreign tax havens then?
Something that works for the general case should work for both extremes, because then that better informs usage for the general case (this applies to development too, imo).
If we know how to manage the economy when: no money is flowing out to foreign countries + all the money is flowing out to foreign countries, then we have a good idea of the best way to handle _some_ money flowing out to foreign countries.
That strikes me as true. I would argue that it increases consumption, but not necessarily "wealth". But with it comes the uncomfortable truth that what's bad for America might also mean it's good for other parts of the world.
I don't understand why this post is being downvoted. What is the point of more compute if everyone will get locked out of the "wealth pool" because they can no longer produce any value?
I agree, but let's not forget that the more (semantically) obvious reason why people get locked out of wealth has more to do with not being able to take it than with not being able to produce it.
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.
The price of a cell phone bill will make no difference to someone in an eviction situation and a cell phone is pretty much essential to participate in society today.
Rich people can virtue-signal all day long about how they live without a phone, but if you're poor and a potential employer or benefits office asks you for a phone number to process your application you can't afford to risk losing or delaying the opportunity.
It's really an easy choice - it's orders of magnitude cheaper than rent and gives you access to always up to date maps, news, employers and friends (who can maybe take you in for a while). It may be counterintuitive but really is rational.
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.
Each time people start asking pointed questions about wealth distribution and the economic system you can almost count down the hours until one of these newspapers makes a "oh, look how much more of x you can get now than before". And I get it.
It's great that everyone can have a TV for 1/100 of what it cost in 1950 or whatever, but it does not solve the very obvious issues. People have problems paying rent, they have problems paying groceries. They see that they have to work more and more just to make the next month. And no cheap TV will help them do that, no matter how many "oh, but all is so much better now" articles are written.
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.
My favorite is when fox news puts out pieces about how not-so-bad it is to be poor because some large percentage of poor people have refrigerators or some other home appliance.
I've called that argument "Maslow's Smartphone", after an instance where someone literally gave the affordability of smartphones as an argument for present-day wealth, utterly ignoring that both:
1. Telecoms, and increasingly smartphones, are not a luxury but a necessity for functioning in most of today's societies.
2. That a smartphone of and by itself is not sufficient for a thriving existence, with reference to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: food, shelter,
Another variant is to note people showing up to relief services (e.g., food bank, natural disaster aid stations) in SUVs or luxury cars. The fact that someone with evidence of past prosperity is now seeking aid doesn't mean that they're undeserving of same, or should be scorned. It's that misfortune is reaching far beyond its usual populations (the multi-generational poor, disabled, addicted, disempowered groups, etc.).
Julian Bond also calls out self-actualisation snake oil:
There's a special part of hell reserved for the snake oil selling charlatans who push some woo called Reversed Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's much loved by people who talk about "The Secret", life style coaches and executive training. "Be a nice self-actualised person, you'll be full of esteem which will allow you to love others who won't threaten your safety and so the universe will fulfill your bodies needs."
Yet another realisation (also through a G+ discussion) is that Maslow's Hierarchy is best considered not merely as a set of essential and nourishing goods and services, but as being those elements paired with security in those elements. The hand that offers whilst threatening, withdrawing, or threatening is not nurturing but the definition of abuse and trauma.
Living on a knife's edge, at all times, is not tenable.
So, rather than the pyramid of physiological needs, safety, belonging and love, esteem, and self-actualisation, I see:
- Physiological needs + security in those needs.
- Social needs + security in those.
- Esteem (recognition for accomplishments) + security in that status.
- Self-actualisation + security in those achievements.
Maslow splits out security as its own level, but that jars with my own experience of noting times where one or more (and in the worst instances: all) such needs were fulfilled either in a highly contingent manner ("I'll give you X if you do Y", or "If you do Y I'll withhold X"). That's the extreme of manipulation and precarity.
Finally, Yonatan Zunger's essay on "financial shock wealth" is an excellent reframing of the wealth/poverty discussion (from 2017):
> 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.
1. Why is that surprising? That has been a natural state of human societies from the beginning of civilization. What would be really surprising is if things changed.
2. Roughly two thirds of Americans own a home. That stands in contradiction with your claim that most Americans cannot afford to own a home.
#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 home." If you disagree, consider if you would consider circumstances no different if we created a novel debt system for people to leverage their purchase of food while food prices increase by multiples; they may even be able to get more food than previously, they just carry disproportionate debt on it.
* I think this also needs to be put in the context of houses are also bigger than they used to be, but there is also a higher percentage of two-income households.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, I was only making an analogy -- people refinancing over and over, vaguely like governments pay T-bill interest by issuing more T-bills, where there's no expectation that the principal can ever really get paid back.
I was about to mention Fannie and Freddie as a footnote about how the government might be involved in all this, but didn't think it was a big deal. Yet Google tells me they end up buying 70% of mortgages. So there's some flow here that I'd do well to understand.
I've wondered the same. It seems like the norm is to use home equity as a revolving line of credit, which obviously creates some weird incentives like keeping home values inflated.
Even if we look at only the resource of light, you'll find that over a billion people are still using kerosene lanterns, primarily in places with low electricity access. That's around 10 billion liters of kerosene still being used per year. It's more expensive, dangerous, unhealthy, and wasteful than a cheap LED light, but without electricity, it's still the best choice.
A laptop powerbank cost about as much as those and will run enough lighting to read for days.
Lower cost than that, there are C-grade prismatic cells. Usb/12V adapters exist for a single cell as well, although i'm not sure if they are in that form factor.
>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.
My personal opinion is that this hasn't changed much because human psychology hasn't changed much. We are a status-driven species and, lacking other measures, we revert to the easily quantifiable: wealth, house size, education credentialism, etc. to derive our place.
Who can't afford food? An egg costs like 30 cents, rice is like 20 cents a pound. Make some fried rice. Make a sandwich. The cost of great food is like $40 a month per person, with the bonus that they wouldn't be morbidly obese. Now explain why its unreasonable to expect people to eat high quality cheap food. (and no "poor people are too stupid" paternalistic arguments)
$1.30 per day food budget? Not accurate in the affluent world.
1400-1800 calories for an average height adult male is a reasonable floor (and that's a non-obesity scale). The $1.30 per day budget might get you around 1/3 of that calorie requirement, without solely existing on something like rice.
You can get by on closer to ~$90-$120 per month, per adult, and actually bring in enough calories to not starve over time. That's a surviving floor. You can temporarily go a bit lower to scrape by ($50-$90), however that's not livable longer term, you'll suffer increasingly.
If you modestly augment with various free food assistance options (not talking about SNAP), you could stretch the lower ~$50-$90 category up to something more like the $120 category consistently.
Here's who can't practically afford that: Someone with 3 kids working 80 hours a week in service or truck driving. Or someone that is disabled. Or someone that has severe mental health issues.
There are quite a few prerequisites that you assume exist that just don't in a poor American household and the primary one that doesn't exist is time.
Beyond the time you need to plan, shop, cook, clean, you need:
-Motivation to do so
-Pots and pans
-Knowledge of cooking and nutrition
-A grocery store nearby (39.5 million Americans live in food deserts)
-A way to get there (Many can't afford cars or can't drive)
-Working water and electricity
TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans have none of the above
And whereas in other countries you may live in a multi-generation home or otherwise be able to do subsistence farming, that's not really possible without land of some sort which almost no poor people in America have.
Normal people who are used to cooking at home see it as no big deal to whip up a simple meal.
Some of the rest of us encounter insurmountable obstacles in our own kitchens.
Personally, I haven't prepared a single meal at home since last October. I've been ordering delivery at an extraordinary markup.
Several bad experiences last year put me permanently off home meal preparation. I've tried all the alternatives. I'm desperate to save money; I'm desparate to eat better. I have been left with no other choice.
Basically 100% of my paychecks go to fund those meals because the alternatives are absolutely intractable, due to several of the above factors.
For starters, I'm not incapable of nuking a frozen meal, reheating leftovers, or hard boiling eggs, things like that. Those are backup strategies still employed.
It's difficult to explain succinctly what the barriers are, and without getting in a big debate about my abilities and limits. But in a nutshell:
Start with intractable problems with pest control. If I eat delivery, I get no bugs. If I prepare fresh meals, the cockroaches, gnats and other pests immediately descend. I can't avoid standing water/dirty dishes, and so the longer I try my hand in the kitchen, the worse the bugs get. I'm a renting tenant and 100% reliant on the landlord to do the pest control, and it's ineffective. If I want a deep treatment, I have to shut down my entire kitchen, tear it apart, and put it back together afterwards. So I am roundly cursed for even trying this.
Fitness - I'm not a young man anymore and as a beginner, my time in the kitchen is very inefficient. I could spend 2-3 hours at a time for one meal in a day. I couldn't sleep or rest enough to make it up, and living with this deficit took its toll, especially if stopping to rest meant I wouldn't eat or empty the dishes from the sink, and we're back to cockroaches.
Comptenence - since I never learned how to really cook or put recipes together, I find it amazingly hard to plan out meals and produce stuff that is appealing or even normal. I found it very difficult to collect recipes and work from them, especially when trying to manage fridge/pantry inventory, and oftentimes I wound up with something edible but really weird-tasting because I put together the wrong flavors. Or, my hunger would militate against knowing what I am doing and make it incredibly frustrating to remember all the steps in cooking.
Cooking meals from scratch requires planning and organization, which I found it hard to adapt into a kitchen context, and it was crazy-making if I was hungry for breakfast now and there was nothing but dirty dishes in the sink and I didn't know where to start.
I went to the hospital multiple times last year, because I was extraordinarily exhausted and I truly felt that my heart could fail any moment if I kept that all up. It was truly traumatic. If I could merely find a middle way to preparing simple meals once in a while, just to keep delivery costs down, I would do that, but for now, I'll follow the path of least fear and trembling.
I know you didn't ask for advice, but here's some anyways. Start simple. Ramen costs about 50 cents at the market and requires only the ability to boil water and wait 5 minutes. If pests are a concern, wash and dry. dishes afterwards.
Then you can start with pasta which takes slightly longer to boil and you can get a pre-made jar of pasta sauce to put on it. You can even put cold pasta sauce on a hot pasta and it will warm up.
Neither of these dishes will harm you if you mess up cooking them, and both take less than 30 minutes. Practice makes perfect, so you can iterate and try new things.
I've had pretty intense past problems in the past, I found the best ways to address them are keeping all food and sealed containers, preferably glass jars with a ceiling lid. Doing dishes and avoiding standing water also helps. The idea is the star of the bugs. If there is no food they won't come looking.
As a side note not intended to be aggressive or attacking, if the idea of boiling pasta or Ramen induces fear or anxiety, you should seek medical help. Not everyone is typical, but everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow.
You're right: I didn't ask for advice, and I consider yours to be a chauvinistic and arrogant gesture based on totally not reading or understanding my previous post. Please leave me alone.
Sorry you feel that way. You said you were desperate so I thought I'd offer some simple advice. Despite your aggression, I hope you overcome your fears and figure out how to cook for yourself and not rely on exorbitant prices from restaurants
Maybe they didn't. Maybe their sibling died and their ex left them with the kids from the last relationship and now they're looking after 3 kids they never expected to have to care for on their own.
This is the poor people are too stupid and helpless argument. It is not true.
Your list of reasons is really just betraying how little you think poor people are like yourself. You are portraying them as helpless animals.
Also, lack of motivation as a reason they can't boil an egg, so they just go hungry instead? Do you even care about reality or just scoring internet points?
Right, I'm saying they aren't dumb. If what you are saying is true they would have to not only be dumb, but barely have human level intelligence. You believe that your friends and neighbors are completely incompetent at things that are trivially easy, and they have no hope of ever figuring it out on their own.
You are actually claiming that there are tens of millions of adult humans, who have lived 20, 30 years, and are literally incapable of procuring one pot. You are saying they can't independently manage to acquire the cooking skills to boil rice. It's just absurd.
Meanwhile those same people are statistically obese. Somehow despite living without electricity, money, pots, illiterate and 50 miles from the nearest grocery store they eat enough to be obese (can you explain how they get enough food to eat too much despite it being impossible for them to acquire groceries at all?) and yet it is unreasonable to think they might boil an egg.
I get not understanding, but can you try not to be so obnoxious about it, please? It's clear you don't have these problems. If they seem to you to be absurd struggles to have, read some Albert Camus.
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.
You must be incredibly out of touch if you think $40 a month is a reasonable budget for “great food.” 2 weeks worth of ham and cheese sandwiches alone would eat up the majority of that figure.
Not to mention the fruits and vegetables required for a balanced diet. Prices for produce in my area have gone through the roof. What about the family of four, the single parent, one of the many recently let go? The cost of basic goods and services has inflated as well, meaning less money for food. Sure, maybe there are people spending way too much eating out, but food scarcity is a real problem for many. And just saying you should be able to afford it and throwing around made up $ figures doesn't solve a thing.
Ham and cheese are both notoriously expensive though, and not especially healthy. One day of filet mignon would eat up the whole budget, but thats not an argument against what I said.
As for out of touch, I grew up eating government peanut butter and free school lunches. Lots of years that is all I ate. Food assistance is great and we should do more, but jeff bezos hording wealth isn't causing people to starve as gp suggests, food is incredibly cheap. The idea people are starving is rediculous.
I’m a bit confused then… what exactly do you propose the average American should put in their sandwiches—your suggestion—at a $40/mo budget? Eggs and lentils?
I live on only a bit more than that myself. I batch cook all of my meals for the week on Sunday mornings. It's simple food, all made from raw ingredients. I don't eat any sandwiches, though, since bread is usually highly processed and not cheap.
Nothing is objectively “bad” about that, but it is an insane stretch to call that “great food.” That is subsistence eating.
Moreover—can you put beans, rice, eggs, and mixed veggies in a sandwich? Because a sandwich was one of OP’s “$40/mo” suggestions. A food budget where a simple ham and cheese sandwich is an unimaginable luxury is ridiculous to propose as a reasonable target.
Why isn't it great food? People line up to get rice, veggies, and beans, onion, and chicken in a tortilla at Chipotle, but if you combine those ingredients at home you are 'subsistence eating'?
Well you seem to be skipping over the fresh cilantro, herbs and spices, marinating time, and expert preparation found in a Chipotle. Do you understand what it takes to build and maintain a respectable and functional spice rack?
Not to mention the spoilage that goes on. The rice and beans can keep long-term, but you'll need to do logistics on chicken, tortillas etc to keep fresh ones in the pipeline without wasting any, which you can't afford either.
Look, I've had food boxes before. The food box is an amazing wondrous bit of charity where you can get a ton of free food just for asking. There's cereal, I've gotten big hunks of frozen meat, dry beans and rice, I've gotten bits of candy and such, lots of staples, powdered milk, canned chickpeas and spinach and you-name-it.
However the food boxes only go so far. They won't cook the meals for you. They won't give you the utensils, pots and pans. You don't get any fats, oils, herbs, spices, or seasonings. they won't tell you which ingredients combine in a flavorful way. You don't get any recipes that use these ingredients and don't call for something you don't have.
Now you boil some water, throw in some beans and rice plain, and cook until soft. Go ahead, throw in some string beans for vitamins, and some kind of protein. Spoil yourself! Then try to choke that down in the absence of salt, butter, or anything that might impart flavor. How long until you're going to just kill yourself?
Well there you go, add chicken and tortillas to the mix and your budget doubles just for dinner. People generally enjoy eating more than just the bare-bones, most minimal staples.
Dodging the question… provide me one example of a nutritious set of sandwich ingredients that can be procured at a cost of 43¢ per serving (assuming you spend a generous third of your $1.30 a day budget on just a sandwich). Bread alone would cost that much.
Great, now I need to own a car and afford gas to drive 40mi to the nearest library. (More importantly, now I need to have a kitchen to cook in.)
You realize that there are people who are homeless and who live in areas that don't have any support systems for homelessness (e.g. homeless shelters), right?
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 because they needed someone to write down "how to make rice in a pot", nor are they likely to have discretionary income for your proposals.
>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?
Our knowledge of what is healthy is spotty at best, but plenty of countries that eat a lot of ham and cheese (France, Spain, Italy) are fairly OK health-wise, so it certainly seems to indicate that there is nothing seriously wrong about either.
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.
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.
> 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 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
> Malnutrition is particularly common among older people, especially those who are ill, low-income, homebound, or without reliable access to healthy food or medical services. It can result from not eating enough but also from poor eating habits that lead to nutritional deficiencies. The majority of deaths in California from malnutrition last year occurred in residents 85 and older.
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.
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.
I suppose it's a matter of definition for the word "involuntary" at this point. What I mean is that everyone who is willing and able will have enough food stamps to get enough nutrition for the month - no matter your living situation.
Like the parent said, you seem to be disputing my original claim out of spite and in bad faith.
Is "wealth" the right comparison when you are talking about affording rent and food? I think it is spending that matters. There is an approximately fixed amount of land in the world, an approximately fixed amount of housing and food that can be produced per year. Jeff Bezos has a lot of wealth, but it's just a number and doesn't affect anyone else unless he spends it, using it to consume a portion of the world's available resources and thus increasing the price of them for everyone else.
How is that surprising? Those systems are what made that progress possible in the first place. Unless we stop advancing as a species I don't think they will ever go away.
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 when you account for the land price.
Obviously building vertically helps in cities, but that comes with its own costs as well.
It’s supply and demand and supply is limited by the surface area of the earth. In the short term countries could absolutely help themselves by limiting immigration. Population growth has outpaced new housing for the last 20 years in the US: https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced...
Not only they build those houses. They don't get to own them. Hard to imagine an undocumented immigrant having spare 250k cash for a downpayment. OP comment is a joke.
I guess they all just live in the woods then. News to me.
People taking up rental units still take up supply. If landlords are having a hard time renting out their units, they aren't going to increase their prices.
Legal immigrants and illegal migrants have to live somewhere too. Even if they don't have $$$, they still put pressure on the system from the bottom. And it bubbles up throughout the real estate pyramid.
That is not what the parent said and you put words in his mouth. Immigration is not the reason too few housing is build, but it is the reason demand outstrips the limited capacity to build more. The opposite is for example happening in Japan which has with a stagnant/declining population a relaxed housing market.
If immigration is an order of magnitude higher than natality, it's fair to say it's a relevant factor. I don't think that's shifting blame, only pointing out that without immigration, there might be more homes built than new people born.
...and the same folks who rail against immigration can often be found lamenting the low national birth rate. It makes one suspect their complaint isn't with the rate of population growth, but with its hue.
Don’t forget about all those lazy old people who aren’t contributing and just taking up space… usually too much space (an old couple in a 3 bedroom house)
> 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.”
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.
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 everyone can't have 15 acres. There are small towns across the US that would love some population growth and have plenty of housing available. The problem is that jobs are concentrated in cities with housing shortages.
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.
> 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.
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.
So does having a large plot of land to every single driver on the road driving past you. Even if it doesn't really show up in a municipal budget or in a mortgage payment, it's still very expensive to drive past a farm that is wide and not deep, but most people, most of the time don't want deep lots for aesthetic reasons, and even if you make deep lots taxi-cab geometry will get you anyway if the whole area is residential land anyway.
When it comes to residential land that is outside of environmentally protected zones, my position is simple. Allow land owners to build two or three houses. One primary one (6 bedrooms, say) and up to two smaller ones (2 bedrooms each) or one smaller one and one general use building (a workshop or many car garage). That way the frontage is used, we get housing stock for poorer families and we intermix ages and income levels in a way that is socially beneficial, since it's a lot harder to turn a blind eye to the problems of the lower-middle class if they're literally living on the same property that you own.
Plus it gives a way (for families that want it) for grandparents to live on the same land as their grandchildren without always being in the hair of their kids. Super win-win if both parents work and can rely on the grandparents for after-school hours. Plus it makes extended family gatherings more feasible as enough of a chunk of the family is nearby in the first place.
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.
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?
It's not racist for bringing it up - it's racist for blaming immigrants when it's the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property, coupled with an out of control healthcare system, stagnant wages while corporate profits are huge, and lobbyists keeping politicians from meaningfully changing anything.
I couldn't take you seriously, anyway. 2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units, but you're trying to imply that each of those illegal border crossings took a housing unit or something like that. Perhaps people on Facebook are that dumb.
>2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units
Only if you assume all 2.7 million people are now homeless.
Price is a function of supply and demand. Obviously, increasing the number of people within a system without commensurately increasing housing will result in upward pressure on housing prices.
You could argue that the system-wide effect is minimal, but you would need data to do that, which you haven't provided.
From the article I linked: "For the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2022, CBP stopped migrants more than 2,766,582 times, compared to 1.72 million times for fiscal 2021, the previous yearly high. "
Those are 2.7 million STOPS. It's not an estimate. The means the number of people actually crossing is higher. Those stopped are generally given a court date and released into the country. Someone transporting drugs wouldn't be.
Like most large systems, economies are complicated. A counter-point is that unskilled immigration also drives down many essential costs, like food and construction. Immigrants tend to work for less and are disproportionately represented in the agriculture, construction, and meat-packing industries. So in some ways they may increase demand costs while also bringing down supply costs.
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.
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.
Food is a bit different in that we export a fair amount; it's not like we're running up against the limits of what our farmland can produce. For what it's worth I absolutely abhor the phrases "they're more willing to do that work" or "it's work that American's won't do." You're missing the last part of that sentence: for that pay.
Of course costs will go up. So will pay. You're right in that in the case of food it's hard to say how that would all equalize. However, are we to rely on what's essentially an underclass forever? That seems pretty dystopian, and unsustainable.
Home prices I'd argue wouldn't be affected as much. The "dumb" labor in building houses is pretty cheap. Framing, roofing, etc. isn't much of the labor cost and they aren't on the jobsite for that long. Skilled work such as plumbers, electricians, and the like cost much more. There are kind of inbetween jobs such as drywall taping and tiling and I don't know how much of that is done with immigrant labor. In my experience it's basically none but I could be off on that.
I think we probably agree on some of the broad strokes, but interpret the details differently.
Regardless about how much we export, prices are tightly coupled to supply and demand. If your theory holds, we should see a commensurate increase in cost. It doesn't matter if net exports go down unless there are effects from steep tariffs.
I agree that a large part of that many Americans are unwilling to do that work for that pay. And yet they are beneficiaries of that low-pay work in the form of low food costs. I find it particularly unsettling when those who directly benefit simultaneously demonize the immigrants who they derive some of that benefit. However, there have been studies showing that Americans underproduce migrant labor in industries like agriculture. So it's not just the pay, it the ability to produce. Similar work quotes farmers as saying they literally can't hire Americans to do the work. Unless I suppose you want to pay them salaries that risk farms being unsustainable financially. The extension of these points is if you were to hire Americans at an American wage, you get both less production and a higher cost while simultaneously risking the solvency of the farms.
I also agree that the use of an immigrant underclass is dystopian. Especially when you factor in the abuse that occurs in workplaces where employees are fearful of recourse due to their immigration status. And yet it happens and one of the often used excuses is that it's necessary to essentially subsidize a certain quality of life for Americans.
FWIW, it's usually termed "general" labor rather than "dumb" labor. You're point here seems to contradict your previous point that immigration also brings down the wages of skilled jobs. They way they do both is if they are represented in both skilled and unskilled employees.
As far as construction, this is largely region-dependent. (That's why I put the south in the original response. It's especially reliant on immigrant labor.) A rough rule of thumb is that labor is 20-40% of construction cost. Regardless, in my region, immigrants are the bulk of skilled labor as well. Again, anecdotal, but once you peel back the thin veneer, you can see how much of the American lifestyle relies on immigrant labor. And simply banning them in the hope that it increases housing availability will have many second order effects.
Completely absurd what reactions you get when you point up obvious facts, like immigration increasing demand for housing.
This is especially true for cities, as that is where migrants obviously want to go and where new construction is much harder.
Pretending that it is somehow not the case, is making things just worse and worse.
>Obviously, increasing the number of people within a system without commensurately increasing housing will result in upward pressure on housing prices.
That was the explicit intent of prop 13. Triggering the NIMBYtastrophe and privatizing commensurate increases in rents and land values was an entirely deliberate and cynical wealth grab that drove millions into poverty in California.
I get that we're supposed to be more angry at immigrants than Howard Jarvis and his friends though.
Just as we're supposed to be upset at "AI taking jobs" rather than deliberate trade policy.
> The issue is that the person to whom I responded was trying to imply that the number of illegal border crossings being larger than the number of new housing units is somehow a gotcha. It's not.
It's not a "gotcha" - it's a significant amount of additional demand, which, given how supply and demand work, drives up prices.
> You fail basic common sense, too. Does every household have one person?
How many people per household affects the degree of the problem, but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. If you have 2.7m people coming in and you assume that for this population you average five people to a household, that's still roughly 1/3 of the new housing units being generated that are needed to house them. That's an enormous increase in demand, which pushes housing costs up.
To be clear, I think this is a problem of too little housing supply more than too much immigration (though I do oppose illegal immigration and have a strong preference for it ceasing entirely), but either way the problems suggested by the post that you're replying to are very clearly real.
Just know that the people endorsing mass importation of immigrants are the same ones hoarding property.
They benefit directly from the cheap labor (even child-cheap labor [1]), from the depressed wages, and indirectly from the enlarged voter base of their political friends.
When you deflect the conversation towards racism and related name-calling, you're acting as an agent on behalf of the lords, doing exactly what they want you to do [2]: flinging mud at other peasants, rather than at the lords themselves.
I think one of the best ways to avoid being agentized by the elite class is to just be more skeptical in general, especially when you encounter emotional argumentation. Accusations of racism in particular is a huge red flag. This tactic is by design intended to shut down a discussion rather than engage with it.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28415546 - It is far better for upper class to ensure that people discuss and focus on issues like gender and skin colour than the class differences. Hence, they ensured that this is the issue plebs would hear all over on the media and shift their attention from class divides to gender and skin colour.
I'm not "blaming immigrants." That's exactly the attitude I'm talking about when I say you're called racist. I'm blaming our governments for allowing and/or encouraging it. It's completely insane to open the floodgates when housing prices are through the roof.
I don't understand how you could think millions of people coming over here couldn't affect the supply side of supply and demand, but considering your list of grievances I think it's pretty clear where you lie on the political spectrum and couldn't possibly blame immigration for anything.
Point me towards where people are "hoarding" property. Rental units don't count as they still contribute to the housing supply.
Wages have also been depressed for a long time by immigrant labor, from illegal immigration to H1Bs. Healthcare costs are, again, increased by (illegal) immigration. Illegal immigrants can go to the ER, get treated for free, and we're all stuck with the costs.
None of these are the only causes, but it's a contributing factor and one side of the political spectrum won't acknowledge it and the other pretends to while still allowing it for big businesses' sake.
> It's not racist for bringing it up - it's racist for blaming immigrants when it's the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property
Is it racist to blame the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property and funding the politicians that let them do it, while also pushing for more immigration? I don't really think the comment was blaming immigrants, it was blaming immigration, and it's honestly really hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that adding more people to a place that already doesn't have enough housing for people won't make the problem worse.
> Yeah what's unsustainable is you living on 15 acres, we can build housing for everyone.
Heaven forbid I live on 1/4 of the land that my parents had even though I have a far greater income. I guess I shouldn't have bought the place? Or I should somehow subdivide the lot even though it's quite narrow and hilly/forested? Fuck nature, I guess.
> Given, unlike you, they need to be considered productive by the government to move to Canada, why would they not be allowed to be here?
That was literally the point of my post, but because you didn't seem to get it: because that amount might be so high as to drive housing costs further up when people are already struggling to rent/buy a home. A government should serve its own people, first and foremost. If that means immigration helps them (as it absolutely can) - great! If it means that too much immigration instead hurts their citizens, it should be dialed back.
This is actually well documented. There has been a notable increase in prices couples with an increase in women working (instead of staying home). It’s not a 1:1 increase of price to household income, but it’s well documented, and geographically correlated to rate of double-income households.
The wiki summary suggest rising costs causes both parents to work, but my postulation is the opposite: two family working causes rising costs: Women wanting to work has caused families to have more disposable income, causing inflation for everyone.
I was all set to read and see whether they took LED manufacturers at their word for how long their bulbs lasted, and it turned out the article's source is nearly 30 years old.
Can we update the flair to say 1994, given that the embedded numbers date from that year? Regurgitating the data in 2017 doesn't make the information actually from 2017.
Mildly weird piece, in that it's really measuring two things; lighting efficiency (and only at an extremely low resolution, implying a whole-system efficiency that doesn't change between the invention of the light bulb and the fluorescent light) and wage growth. 60 hours of work may have bought 72 hours of electric light in 1880, but rather more in 1990, say, for a combination of both reasons.
That said, LED bulbs do still feel like a bit of a sea-change; since they showed up, lighting is cheap enough that most people don't really have to think about it at all.
> Mildly weird piece, in that it's really measuring two things
True, but I think it's an interesting metric. I don't think it maps well to everything, but it is cool that it is a combination of two things since a lot of our technology has just gotten better and better over the years. I mean, just look at how incredible computers are. Power efficient, performant machines that can allow someone to work a job from anywhere, start a business, learn, etc and you can get a decent used one for $300 USD. One hell of a time to be alive, all things considered.
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 some system out there so I can get a reliable lightbulb that lasts and/or doesn’t randomly flicker.
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 brightness as they age.
Though perhaps I do recall a particular LED light that would overheat in a particular fixture. It's possible not all fixtures are equally suitable.
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.
You are lucky. I’ve personally had a lot of failures. I like that they don’t make heat and are brighter. (And I also like how they can be packed more densely on dedicated lighting circuits than traditional fixtures), but they are definitely prone to early failures.
There are a lot of cheap, poorly designed LED bulbs that put heat stress on critical components.
Technology Connections : A troubling trend in lighting? - https://youtu.be/fsIFxyOLJXM (It goes into how a number of LED bulb failures are because the lamp wasn't able to dissipate heat from the electronic components. It also shows how some higher quality LED bulbs are made so that they dissipate heat better - they don't make as much heat as an incandescent bulb, but there is still some and that is the cause of a lot of failures.)
The lamps you're not allowed to have. Exploring the Dubai lamps - https://youtu.be/klaJqofCsu4 is also interesting. They have a different design and it gets into the electronics.
> 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 think you must be getting cheap bulbs. I bought a bunch before my kid was born, and he's 10 and none have gone out. I've even taken them with me when I moved.
Yep. It is virtually always the power regulator that fails, rather than the LED itself. Lots of LED bulb and fixture manufacturers cheap out here. We could do better by running low voltage DC power in our homes, but even that isn’t a panacea.
> I bought a bunch before my kid was born, and he's 10 and none have gone out.
You can't buy those bulbs anymore, both literally, and they truly don't make them like that anymore. I have new ones and old ones, the old ones weigh three times as much. There were more components run at a lower limit of peak capacity. I move my old bulbs when I move because new ones won't last as long.
Huh. I replaced every light bulb in my house with Ikea LEDs about seven years ago. They cost between about 4 and 10 EUR apiece depending on size. I think three have since failed. This seems like _fairly_ good going, and certainly way better than the old incandescent and halogen bulbs I had.
Out of a set of 30 or so LEDs, I've had five fail.
Four of those are spots in either recessed or exposed cans, and I suspect temperature or moisture may be involved. (Another set matching three of the failed, in near-identical fixtures ... are doing fine.)
One was a stick-type bulb used in a closet which seemed to fizzle.
In all cases I suspect it was electronics rather than the LED elements themselves which failed.
Three-way LEDs are hugely superior to incandescent 3-way bulbs, which always seem to lose at least one filament within a few months. The LEDs are going strong years on.
They are made to fail fast, it's obviously by design. One simple thing I do in all my led light bulbs, that makes them last for an almost indefinite amount of time: remove the plastic bulb. One of the main reasons for one of the leds or one of the capacitors to fail, is the high temperatures reached during the operation of the device. Removing the bulb makes it a lot cooler, and in the last few years since I've been removing the bulbs, no led light has failed in my house. There's other things you can do, but this is the main one any consumer can do to fight back against this scourge of modern capitalism. I recommend Big Clive's Youtube channel for getting more tips like this one.
When I first embarked on this quest to make my led bulbs stop failing, I saw a video of a russian guy that, beyond removing the bul itself, drilled roles on the base of the device, and plugged screws on them to create passive cooling. Not very safe, since the screws have access to the inside of the fixture, and can eventually touch the wires and become live, I wouldn't personally do it myself.
As for drilling holes on the bulb itself, I'm pretty sure it would not reduce the temperature as much as simply removing it, and in my experience, the luminosity is even better without those cheap plastic bulbs anyway.
If we are just looking at "Fun" numbers it might make sense to include house prices. After all I need a power socket to plug in my light bulb vs say a candle or lamp I can fire up anywhere.
LEDs released->electricity bill reduced->money freed up->wages increase->price of everything else increases
It's nice to see these efficiency gains aren't entirely eaten up in this way and the is some ultimate benefit for humans, $1 2023 >= $1 1990 as far as lighting, and wages are up. You can have the lights on more and keep the same quality of life in all other regards. But this can be used to mask growing inequality, just take some but not all of the gains, e.g. by artificially limiting housing supply, QoL still improves so no revolution.
Light bulbs are also nearly 100% efficient, minus whatever fraction of light seeps out through windows or similar. As is just about anything else electric. Unfortunately that heat is usually suboptimally distributed, and pales in comparison to the heat pump effective efficiency which as you mentioned can go well above 100%.
Heat pumps achieve greater thermal output than the input energy, unlike electric resistance heating.
The latter is 100% efficient (all energy in is delivered as heat). Heat pumps exceed 100% efficiency, and can deliver 3 to 6 times the heat energy as input, as they are moving heat from the exterior environment to the heated space.
One way I like to think about progress: there are things that are (basically) post-scarcity. Things that have become either too cheap to meter or close to it (for an average "western" consumer, at least).
Light. Water. Ice. Calories (if not picky). Entertainment (radio, youtube, etc). Information (google, Wikipedia).
We still have a ways to go, but that's a good damn start.
I agree. My personal term for this is "weakly post scarcity." It's the point at which the median member of a society will more often suffer from excessive consumption of $thing than they suffer from deprivation of $thing.
There will never be true post-scarcity in our finite universe. A lot of services and goods can become weakly post scarcity in that they'll exhaust someone's finite time (watching YouTube or other entertainment) or destroy their body (drinking alcohol) before the median person will run out of money to personally consume more of them.
The weakly post scarcity environment brings new challenges but they are largely better ones to grapple with than those of a high scarcity environment.
In 2008 when the financial crisis hit, I had some friends that got their news from Zero Henge got into a panic spiral. One of them was seriously thinking of quickly buying a plot of land and farming it so he wouldn't starve to death when the economy collapsed.
I had to explain to him that no, he won't starve to death. Even if money ceases to exist overnight, the government will step in and forcibly collect the food from farmers if need be and distribute it to the cities.
As a part of the argument I worked out what it takes to feed an adult for a year with storable staples. There's "preppers" that have helpfully prepared lists of things to buy with nutrition profiles, etc...
Apparently, all you need is a trip to Costco and about $2,000 will buy you a year's supply of salt, sugar, oil, lentils, dried fruits, nuts, flour, etc...
You can scrape together that much money even if you're unemployed!
Wow, I had to check the math and with my assumptions it does in fact take >2 hours of minimum wage labor to power a CFL for 1 year ($7.25/hr, 0.14$ KWh). It's much higher than I expected. I had the notion that turning off CFLs was hardly worth my time but that's not entirely true.
William D. Nordhaus. Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not. in The Economics of New Goods ed. Timothy F. Bresnahan, Robert J. Gordon. U. Chicago Press (1996)
Buying an hour of fire feels quantitatively different from buying an hour of light.
When I go camping, my solar-fed LED lanterns are plenty bright, but I still need to cook and stay warm. I can do that using heat, which the efficient lights cannot produce in sufficient quantities.
> I can do that using heat, which the efficient lights cannot produce in sufficient quantities.
Ever tried an infrared lightbulb? (They often put them in bathrooms as something you can turn on after you shower to dry the bathroom out more quickly, usually in combination with a vent fan.)
It's stupid comparison, as others have pointed out.
Also, why not 100 or 1000 years? Previous generations had their spiel of "our goal is to make things better for the next generation". That doesn't seem to hold true as much these days. Within my lifetime power went from being "cheap" when I was a kid to jumping up massively in price (some thanks to Russia) so it's not really so great anyway. And maybe I can buy 51 years of light, but my generation can't buy a fucking house to live in.
As a millennial the saddest thing is that we don't have enough political clout to pull rank and get things solved for the zoomers ahead of time.
Perhaps if we pulled together and voted (bc ofc only older people vote in large numbers)...but I think the crux of the issue, around the world even, is that the only candidates we have to vote for are in their 70s.
What we need is more 30-40 candidates, if mils and zooms of voting age pull together we could get some real change.
In Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night" written 1939–41 but set earlier in the century, the protagonist illustrates the cheapness and miserly ways of his father by complaining how always he's yelling people to turn off the unneeded lights.
It sounded miserly to me, but running lights was more expensive than I realized.
The conversation about the grid being born and how rapidly early power systems paid themselves off made me think about how substantially easier it is to produce light now than over historical periods. I believe the economics term for this would be that photons are extremely deflationary relative to labor?
I'm not going to blame pre BC humans for needing light, especially when nocturnal creatures existed. If anything this is an absolute win, we are still burning something in order to produce light, but what we burn is way less of a pollutant than wood.
Innovation is the key factor of economic growth in industrialized economies. Innovation produces wealth , which in turn produces innovation sort of cycle. Light has in sorts been dematerialized, i.e we get more output per raw material of input (think of coal in a furnace vs. LEDs powered by a modern grid)
> I believe the economics term for this would be that photons are extremely deflationary relative to labor?
Maybe, but I think most economists would say that technology caused productivity to increase to previously unimaginable levels, so today's labor can create way more photons than in the past.
As pessimistic as I can be, thinks like this are why am not extremely worried about the future. Even if we decline a lot and oil cost $1,000 a barrel - that is still an absolute bargain compared with what people have lived through in the past.
If you reduced it to something like joules per hour we could compare it to smartphone usage or driving or even total energy used per year. Would be a funny way to compare productivity gains that are rooted in physics
We used to sit around campfires telling stories, playing music, and dancing. We now have portable campfires that only require pushing a button to observe other people doing that.
Inflation is the economics version of "software getting slower faster than hardware gets faster". In other words, the increased output is being diverted to areas that don't produce value.
Sometimes shifts in money flow happen alongside inflation, but inflation itself acts as a tax on savings and has basically no other long-term effect. In the long term inflation will make prices double and wages double and the effect is nothing. There's no actual difference between a $2 big mac and a $20 big mac.
What you're describing is changes in productivity and spending and overhead, not inflation.
I think people underestimated the value of Russia (they have a much lowe gdp, so they are small vs western countries) when in reality they do produce and provide a lot but at cut down prices because of corruption (or at the expense of their citizens)
Everything I ever saw points to rising real wages over spans larger than 20 years. e.g., https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N (there's quite the dip after 2008). Could you provide a source?
Note also that 1970 was a peak. Pick 1990 and things are going well.
Or as https://www.hamiltonproject.org/publication/economic-fact/th... puts it "After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent.1 The U.S. economy has experienced long-term real wage stagnation and a persistent lack of economic progress for many workers." with footnote 1 saying "Cumulative real wage growth is sensitive to the particular method of inflation adjustment. Some researchers use the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) deflator, which implies even lower real wage growth, or the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) deflator, which implies higher real wage growth (Bivens and Mishel 2015; Sacerdote 2017)."
> Starting in the late 1970s policymakers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workers’ wages grew with productivity. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered. And anti-worker deregulatory pushes—from the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of anti-trust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and more—succeeded again and again.
50% wage share? I have heard that neoclassical economists still use 0.7 and when you tell them that this is wrong or doesn't work across countries (e.g. you've been cherry picking the data) they ignore you or treat you as some kind of crank.
I thought GDP wasn't a real measure? Are we selectively choosing when and if GDP is a real measure, but specifically only when it's beneficial to the side I am arguing for?
Yet if you take into account welfare payments and programs, total income growth has been large. If you make 20K a year, you get about 40K of additional government welfare. If you make 45k a year, you get zero.
For a vast number of Americans, increasing wage is a bad thing.
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 welfare system, for instance people choosing not to work to receive benefits. The third benefit is it would be cheaper to administrate due to elimination of the smorgasbord of different welfare programs in existence today. Yet, here we are.
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.
Agreed that it’s great from a transparency perspective. At the moment it is very complicated to track the value/cost of welfare. That makes it very easy for both sides to argue that it is too much or little - very few know what it is.
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”.
We’ve had many technological advancements, but few touch on concrete problems that actually save time or reduce costs for individuals. I suspect the next few decades will have more impact in this regard than the last 50 years.
Full self driving might be an example in the near future that will measurably lift standards of living for many. More automation, AI and robotics are the key.
No tech will be available to lift the standard of living in the same way that a reliable health care and social system, affordable housing and reasonable work life balance can. Telling people “you can’t afford health care, housing or retirement but look at how great self driving cars and phones are” is just condescending talk by the upper class to distract from growing inequality.
Healthcare is largely tech. Housing is human technology . Retirement is just accumulated savings, which go further with less expensive goods and services.
Since everything you mention that we need more of is human technology, why are you so convinced that more technology will not benefit people?
I’m certain there was a point in history where everyone was largely equal with very very little. Was this better?
> 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". Surely the amount of wood that would take is not the amount needed from chopping for 10 hours a day/six days straight. Even more than that, I am really suspicious of these numbers. 60 hours worth of wood chopping would give me a giant inferno bonfire that would last much more than an hour, so how was this comparison done?
The fact that modern technology is so relatively cheap means that we can afford to waste it or use it to unnecessary extremes, but that doesn't mean we should really use that as the base measure of comparison. I of course understand the overall point the article is trying to make, but the attempt at quantifying the numbers feels like comparing apples to oranges.
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 without even heat even in the winter - my utility bills are negative from my solar array.
Yet it is "normal" to create massive light pollution with hundreds of watts of LEDs, heating and lighting an entire house including unoccupied rooms, and nearly everybody has LED lights on the front porch and backyard that they leave on all night long. Pisses me off that lighting and electricity are so cheap that people have no regard for it, and yet my minuscule usage is nowadays categorically illegal /rant
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.
There was an article posted here earlier this year[1] that pointed out the flaws in modern LEDs, and just how hard it is to get one that matches the color you want. It's a pretty long read, but the author does a really good job of showing just how much trouble he has getting comfortable lighting that actually lasts a long time.
[1] https://nymag.com/strategist/article/led-light-bulbs-investi...
As I mentioned in some other comments, I settled on a lamp with a fully adjustable color and brightness. It’s lots of diodes, and the net effect is very nice.
In other words, I’m agreeing with your article that the fixed bulbs typically don’t hit the mark.
Are you sure that your "fully adjustable" bulb is giving you the spectrum you think it is? Syonyk's posted a few RGB bulb reviews recently, and they tend to have a lot more blue light than you'd think. And if you use the RGB functions, they tend to get REALLY spiky instead of having a smooth emissions curve.
https://www.sevarg.net/2023/04/08/ecosmart-smart-bulb-review... + https://www.sevarg.net/2023/03/11/philips-smart-wifi-bulbs/ + https://www.sevarg.net/2023/02/26/feit-electric-wifi-rgb-bul...
I’m lighting a room, not a science experiment
If you're not lighting a science experiment, you are the science experiment.
(or something like that)
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 quality.
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 reflective (like paper with broadband black pigments), then everything is good. But as soon as you get narrow-band pigments, colors are going to be distorted.
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
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.
LEDs flicker differently.
An incandescent has 10-15% brightness flicker at 120Hz. LEDs... vary. Some flicker a lot harder at 120Hz, some (mostly LED Christmas lights) are awful and flicker at 60Hz with a 50% duty cycle because they're a single diode rectifier.
Most LEDs flicker far faster, in the kHz range, which is theoretically beyond human impact, but we don't have many studies on it.
Incandescent flicker is also related to bulb wattage. A higher wattage bulb, with a thicker filament, will flicker less because it has more thermal inertia.
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.
Not new at all. Many of those blinking lights are not even LEDs.
Try it.
A 240fps high speed is more than enough to observe a variety of LED flickering behaviors. Some flicker none (Bedtime Bulb is remarkable in the lack of flicker), some flicker at high enough frequency you can't really make out details, and others are just... gross.
The color spectrum I’m talking about is just temperature, not really RGB.
I like the warm parts of the spectrum more than incandescents, which is really my whole point.
They don't. Even the highest end ultra high CRI bulbs don't have the same CRI and dUV as a good halogen bulb for example.
I'd thought halogens weren't being banned, but apparently they are (in the US).
Though the concern seems to be mercury content --- CFLs are also subject to the ban, according to April 2022 accounts:
<https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3463992-biden-...>
Yeah.
Incandescents were "Deprecated but still available, and not many people worried about it" for about the past 7 years or so, and you could still find them at stores, if you cared.
Trump expressed his dislike for LED and CFL lighting, so, of course, the Biden administration went about actually banning sale of incandescents. I expect a robust black market in them for decades to come.
The overall energy use numbers really depend on how the bulbs are used - in many areas, lights are mostly used in the winter, when the heat is welcome. Saving energy on lighting and having to burn more natural gas or electricity for heat pumps is perhaps some savings over electricity, but not nearly the 5-6x often cited as "savings." In the summer, when the heat is unwelcome, the sun is up longer, so a well run home won't be using nearly as much artificial light.
I’m more familiar with the advancements in CRI in recent years than dUV (this is the first I’be heard of that) but LEDs can now be purchased with equivalent CRI.
The context of this discussion is incandescent color/perception/experience.
My point is that CRI alone isn't sufficient. Nor is CCT (correlated color temperature). In practice, two bulbs with the same CRI and color temperature can have drastically different tints.
It all boils down to how these measurements work. In practice, the vast vast majority of LED bulbs do not even remotely come close to the color reproduction of halogen. Not to mention the flicker response to 60hz wall power.
There are a handful of companies that produce extremely color accurate LEDs but they're expensive and have limited lifespan.
Check out this resource for more info: https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-the-difference... https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/calculate-duv-from-cie...
I can’t recommend Waveform Lighting’s 95 CRI products highly enough!
The wonderful warmth of incandescent (depending on your color temp prefs) with no wasted IR energy in the form of heat. What’s funny is that your mind will perceive it as hot because we’ve been conditioned to expect it from light at that color temp.
Reasonable price, too, but more expensive than bulbs from the big box store. For something that lasts 10-18 years, it’s worth it to me.
Their bulbs don't last anywhere near that long for me but I continue to buy them because nothing else comes close in terms of color rendition.
I find the 3700k is perfect for my tastes.
Well OK, I was more speaking in the context of a reading lamp. And I wanted more to point out that an LED lamp with smooth color and brightness spectrums allows for you to find a better sweet spot for comfortably reading at night.
I truly cannot distinguish between real incandescent light and the "warm white" implemented on the Phillips Hue bulbs.
Visually, no, probably not.
But in terms of your body's melatonin production and sleep, the Philips smart bulbs can get very peaky in terms of blue, in the range that matters.
https://www.sevarg.net/2023/03/11/philips-smart-wifi-bulbs/
They're not obvious visually when they switch from the white emitter, which has "some blue" to the RGB emitters, which have "lots of blue" as you head out in the red/orange spectrum, but your body's "blue sensors" certainly notice.
Unfortunately, our visual system isn't sensitive to the same things our melatonin inhibiting system is sensitive to, so without a spectrometer, you can't really tell what you're seeing.
It doesn't look or feel the same to me. Maybe something to do with CRI (I don't really understand that).
I am not switching to LEDs... It would be wasteful to throw away something that works great and replace it with something new that doesn't work as well. I like incandescent, and my 40 year old reading lamp and a few extra bulbs will last forever running a few hours a night dimmed to ~20W.
> 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 different. Stating that LEDs can’t produce the color you want is wrong. I would go as far as to say that you can find an LED that produces a color you prefer over incandescent.
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 sunset and sleep it wouldn't matter much how efficient it is.
Brightly lighting up our cities and houses is totally unnecessary and terrible for us, and terrible for the planet regardless of how efficient and cheap we can make it. It lowers quality of life for us, and other animals affected by the light pollution.
I would have no problem affording LED lights I don't want, but cannot afford to move someplace with enough land to escape the neighbors light pollution from their cheap LEDs... which makes it harder to sleep, impossible to enjoy the stars, etc.
No, the problem they are trying to solve is not light pollution, it is that incandescent bulbs use several times as much electricity as LEDs.
Making it more efficient just means people will think even less before brightly lighting things up all night long that either don’t need lighting at all or don’t need it so bright. LEDs are so efficient and cheap that the result is massive light pollution. The solution to energy waste is to make light dimmer and more localized.
That would be the case if LEDs weren’t so, so much more efficient. Like 5x more efficient, easily.
5-6x, yes.
And I can't help but think my neighbor with literally hundreds of watts of LED bulbs around the outside of their house might not decide to light the night quite as often if they were all incandescents. I can read a newspaper by their lights, which aren't even aimed at me, about 3/8 mile away. It's absurd.
Noises of crotchety old fart grumbling in the distance
I live in a village of <100 people and its almost impossible to see the stars here. I can make out planets/brighter stars but most dim stars are obscured. We don’t even produce a whole lot of light pollution by ourselves, it’s mostly from nearby towns. And it’s only gotten worse in recent years.
I genuinely hate it.
What’s your recommendation for a quality sub-2700K bulb?
I settled on an adjustable-temperature/brightness standing lamp. I don’t know the model, sorry. Being able to change the color/brightness on a spectrum is very nice.
Planning to buy some e26 bulbs that connect to Apple’s home automation. It’ll be the same process of buying all the popular models on Amazon that have fully adjustable color/brightness and settling on what I like best.
"This is why I resent the laws banning incandescent lights."
and
"my 40 year old reading lamp and a few extra bulbs will last forever running a few hours a night dimmed to ~20W."
You resent the laws although they barely affect you. And it's time for me to take a break from discussion threads.
Rough service incandescent bulbs are exempt and will last decades driven at a quarter power.
Sure it's a special order, but it's a special case.
Sounds like you're looking for a color temperature even lower than 2700 which is usually the low end for standard bulbs. Two options that might work for you are 'smart' color changing bulbs that you can set to much warmer and dimmer values OR 'vintage' or amber glass bulbs, typically in a narrower bulb shape and sometimes with a smaller base (adapters are available).
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.
> and yet my minuscule usage is nowadays categorically illegal /rant
No, even when the efficiency rules go into effect, using noncompliant bulbs will not be illegal. Stock up on your inefficient bulbs before August, and you can use them as long as you like.
While I appreciate your reluctance, I’d recommend trying to find one of the Philips LED bulbs that dim like an incandescent bulb. I’m not sure they’re easy to find now, and to be honest I don’t remember the model name, but if you can find them they are wonderful. Basically they have multiple sets of diodes within them that dim at different rates which is an incredibly convincing “incandescent emulation”. They are a “whiter” light at high brightness and a nice warm glow at low brightness with a nice smooth transition between them.
Philips Warm Glow.
They seem to be obsoleted, all I can find for them is new old stock anymore. Which I've bought up a bunch of, because the damned things keep failing on me. I've had a set of 5 in service for about 6 years, and so far I've had to replace 4 of them for various failures. They're facing down in a hanging lamp with glass globes around them, and I guess that's close enough to "recessed or enclosed" that they fry themselves. I have them in a few places, though I've also purchased... "some" incandescents, before they went out of availability. I should be good for the rest of my life at this point, especially since I run my incandescents dimmed. The wiki article on bulb rerating is informative - as you reduce power, lifespan is "fraction of rated power" to the -12 or -16 - it's some stupidly high exponent, and it's why a lot of people empirically noticed that "bulbs on dimmers never seem to burn out."
Don't they have "appliance" bulbs in your locale?
These are incandescent lamps designed to work in ovens, a territory unlikely to ever be colonized by LED bulbs.
Other than the slightly smaller wattage, they should fit your needs just fine. They work in normal sockets.
I resent the banning of incandescent light bulbs for a practical reason: Heat.
In colder regions it's been common sense to use an incandescent light bulb to keep a space heated so it's just above freezing (above 0C or 32F) during the winter months.
This is to prevent things like plumbing and sensitive machinery from breaking due to ice formation. A full blown heater is generally complete overkill and impractical for this.
Unless someone has a drop-in replacement for incandescent light bulbs for heat generation purposes, I want them back. And no, LED light bulbs do not work: LEDs don't produce significant heat.
Simple Deluxe 150W Reptile Heat Lamp Bulb
https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Deluxe-150W-Reptile-Heat/dp/B0...
This almost sounds like the popular xkcd around CPU overheating being a feature: https://xkcd.com/1172/
Surely there are other, more reliable ways, to keep a space heated during winter months?
> Surely there are other, more reliable ways, to keep a space heated during winter months?
Sure, there are plenty of other ways to keep a space heated.
They're all radically more expensive, and radically more failure prone, than a 60W or 100W bulb burning constantly, back when the bulb was $2 and the trouble lamp cord was $10.
And before anyone chimes in that "burning constantly" is a waste of electricity, most bulbs used for this purpose are behind a mechanism that opens and closes the circuit according to the ambient temperature so the bulb doesn't burn if it's warm enough.
You can buy Edison bulbs at Home Depot. They are very popular.
I just found this stackexchange post[1], that claims 350g of wood would be enough to power 1Kwh, but a user points out that half the heat would be lost in exhaust.
Maybe that's what the article was referring to, a significant loss of energy to the efficiency of extracting meaningful work from burning wood, with stone age tools.
1: https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/a/4601
Indeed, you also can burn thousands of gallons of jet fuel and the tyres on a 747 actually spin fewer times than the tyres on a Citroen 2CV do just going to the supermarket.
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.
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.
I can't see any combination, length of time burned or length of time to gather the material, where it takes 60 hours to get a fire that outputs as much light as a single lightbulb over one hour.
However, a 60W incandescent bulb puts out about 800 lumens, which is about 64 candela. So one bulb-hour is indeed about 60 candle-hours. This is omnidirectional output, useful output may be less.
The original paper reports a 21 pounds of firewood was measured to produce 2.1 foot-candles (22 lux) for 3.4 hours. Overall useful fireplace output was estimated at about 1.7 lumen-hours per pound of wood, which is 10 lumens (just under 1 candela) on average for that 21 pound fire.
By focusing on light output, and not the heat output, I still think it's an incomplete comparison, as an LED bulb may be very bright and cheap to run, but it won't keep you very warm in a cave in prehistoric Zhoukoudian.
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.
Might not be far off if you don't have very effective tools (Peking Man had simple stone tools) or you've exhausted nearby suitable wood supplies like sticks you can just pick up or trees you can tackle, so you have to travel out and drag it back.
The original study estimated 10 pounds (5kg) of wood foraged, trimmed and dried per hour of labour. That sounds low with a saw and an axe (and very low with a chainsaw), but might be about right with primitive tools including travel and processing and wood stack maintenance (no tarps either).
Nordhaus makes clear in the actual paper that it's a very, very rough estimate based on a reconstruction of wood burning in their own fireplace.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36234570
This entire article is total bullshit, and could easily qualify as propaganda. The fact is that everything has gotten far more expensive, not cheaper. 30-40 years ago people used incandescent lights everywhere, AC transformers with pitiful efficiency and gas-guzzling V8s and nobody had to weep over their energy bill. Electricity and fuel has become staggeringly more expensive. It's only due to technological advances and higher efficiency that we can still somewhat afford that stuff at all.
Also the fact the wood would be used for heating and/or cooking too
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.
Things that can be produced and consumed all over seems to have been averaging down (from US perspective) but things that cannot be done somewhere else or have strong limits on their production (services, housing) have inflated a lot. We had inflation with a pool of items I think.
Globalization over the last several decades has greatly reduced inflation and allowed the first world to “gain” far more wealth than would have actually happened otherwise.
For instance, 70 years ago, more American cars were built in America. The money that consumers paid for cars went to American companies. This caused increased demand for (American) workers, which increased workers’ wages, and thus their spending power, and thus increased the price of goods. Their pay increased sufficiently to allow them to maintain, and in fact improve, their quality of life, because the inflation was driven by wage growth.
Compare to a globalized world. The money Americans spend on cars today mostly ends up in foreign nations. The demand for the produce of foreign companies pushes up wages in foreign countries, and causes inflation there. Americans get items for cheaper than they could be produced in their own nation, due to labor cost differences. The rub is that they’re not fueling their own economies, which leaves workers unable to afford items which cannot be produced elsewhere.
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.)
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.
> 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 to human psychology once you move away from the academic and abstract.
> isn't there value in concentrating wealth to those who you have psychological proximity with
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.
Ah, I see you point. Sorry it took me awhile to get there :)
Regarding "it leaves everyone poor", how is the case if it's zero sum? It seems like it comes down to how you define your metric of 'poor'. It seems like it presupposes there isn't enough money to go around, so it's better to have a few people rich and the rest destitute, rather than have everyone just be marginally poor.
Or are we getting into productivity incentive territory here?
> how is the case if it's zero sum
Trade isn’t zero sum. Ricardian mechanics is what overturned mercantilism. You paying more for your neighbour to do work than someone down the street deprives you of money and everyone of economies of scale.
Doesn’t this break down once your utility function goes beyond strict economics? E.g., economics may say it’s best to let Taiwan specialize in semiconductors, but that may not be optimal once you factor in other dimensions like national security. Humans are not Homo Economicus
> economics may say it’s best to let Taiwan specialize in semiconductors, but that may not be optimal once you factor in other dimensions like national security. Humans are not Homo Economicus
And those other dimensions come at a cost. National security seems like a reasonable thing to pay a cost for. Enriching an oligarch does not. A lot of protectionism is about the latter.
Sure, just like the hypothetical yard work has a cost. I think what you’re illustrating is that protectionism doesn’t make people poorer per se, but it’s bad when it’s abused for individual purposes rather than broader purposes.
> what you’re illustrating is that protectionism doesn’t make people poorer per se
It makes people materially poorer and redistributes wealth, typically up. That is a fair price to pay in some circumstances, e.g. bolstering defence manufacturers.
So on some dimensions, protectionism can make people better off (eg more secure). It seems your issue isn’t that it makes “everyone” poorer (there seems to be a contradiction between your previous and last statement), but more so you aren’t comfortable with how the decision is made (eg by fiat)
If you son can make 4x the hourly rate doing something else and does not do that because he is doing yard work, then you have decreased wealth. The key is in the if.
I agree that forced labor completely changes the scenario. Nobody is forcing my son to do yard work in this scenario though. Both the neighbor and son are willing, but only one can do the work.
> does it imply any arbitrarily boundary of commerce is invalid?
Yes. It says exactly that.
Now, there are details that can change things either way. But the one thing about economics, that is known for about 3 centuries, is that usually arbitrary boundaries to commerce make people poorer. Usually, both on average and on the poor extreme. There is more variability of impact for rich people.
I’m not doubting that claim but do you have any further reading to back it up?
You want any introductory textbook on economics.
Just avoid anything advanced enough to have a small focus.
What if 100% of your economy's money goes out to foreign tax havens then?
Something that works for the general case should work for both extremes, because then that better informs usage for the general case (this applies to development too, imo).
If we know how to manage the economy when: no money is flowing out to foreign countries + all the money is flowing out to foreign countries, then we have a good idea of the best way to handle _some_ money flowing out to foreign countries.
That strikes me as true. I would argue that it increases consumption, but not necessarily "wealth". But with it comes the uncomfortable truth that what's bad for America might also mean it's good for other parts of the world.
Services are just dependent on the cost of labor. Skilled people’s time is worth more than ever, that’s all services really buy.
Homeless people have cell phones. Why do you think great advancements bringing down the price of computing would solve housing?
I don't understand why this post is being downvoted. What is the point of more compute if everyone will get locked out of the "wealth pool" because they can no longer produce any value?
I agree, but let's not forget that the more (semantically) obvious reason why people get locked out of wealth has more to do with not being able to take it than with not being able to produce it.
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.
The price of a cell phone bill will make no difference to someone in an eviction situation and a cell phone is pretty much essential to participate in society today.
Rich people can virtue-signal all day long about how they live without a phone, but if you're poor and a potential employer or benefits office asks you for a phone number to process your application you can't afford to risk losing or delaying the opportunity.
>Rich people can virtue-signal...
I understand that it makes sense in a lot of cases.
If you are close to being evicted, you probably have a subsidized cell phone plan (at least in the US).
It's really an easy choice - it's orders of magnitude cheaper than rent and gives you access to always up to date maps, news, employers and friends (who can maybe take you in for a while). It may be counterintuitive but really is rational.
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.
This. A cheap lamp on a table does little good when I can afford neither the table, the roof above it, nor the food to serve at that table.
Each time people start asking pointed questions about wealth distribution and the economic system you can almost count down the hours until one of these newspapers makes a "oh, look how much more of x you can get now than before". And I get it.
It's great that everyone can have a TV for 1/100 of what it cost in 1950 or whatever, but it does not solve the very obvious issues. People have problems paying rent, they have problems paying groceries. They see that they have to work more and more just to make the next month. And no cheap TV will help them do that, no matter how many "oh, but all is so much better now" articles are written.
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.
"Random" was probably the wrong word to use. "Properly representative of average food costs" is probably a better phrase.
Now do housing.
Just buy 3 fewer iPhones every month, problem solved!
My favorite is when fox news puts out pieces about how not-so-bad it is to be poor because some large percentage of poor people have refrigerators or some other home appliance.
I've called that argument "Maslow's Smartphone", after an instance where someone literally gave the affordability of smartphones as an argument for present-day wealth, utterly ignoring that both:
1. Telecoms, and increasingly smartphones, are not a luxury but a necessity for functioning in most of today's societies.
2. That a smartphone of and by itself is not sufficient for a thriving existence, with reference to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: food, shelter,
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vwfb6/maslows...>
There's also Maslow's Swimming Pool, which surfaced in the context of the Greek austerity crisis of the 2010s:
Succinctly: "Yes, we've got a swimming pool. But that won't feed my children."
<https://www.dw.com/en/the-human-toll-of-greek-austerity/audi...>
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3ey7d1/maslows...>
Another variant is to note people showing up to relief services (e.g., food bank, natural disaster aid stations) in SUVs or luxury cars. The fact that someone with evidence of past prosperity is now seeking aid doesn't mean that they're undeserving of same, or should be scorned. It's that misfortune is reaching far beyond its usual populations (the multi-generational poor, disabled, addicted, disempowered groups, etc.).
Julian Bond also calls out self-actualisation snake oil:
There's a special part of hell reserved for the snake oil selling charlatans who push some woo called Reversed Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's much loved by people who talk about "The Secret", life style coaches and executive training. "Be a nice self-actualised person, you'll be full of esteem which will allow you to love others who won't threaten your safety and so the universe will fulfill your bodies needs."
<https://web.archive.org/web/20190115030839/https://plus.goog...>
Yet another realisation (also through a G+ discussion) is that Maslow's Hierarchy is best considered not merely as a set of essential and nourishing goods and services, but as being those elements paired with security in those elements. The hand that offers whilst threatening, withdrawing, or threatening is not nurturing but the definition of abuse and trauma.
Living on a knife's edge, at all times, is not tenable.
So, rather than the pyramid of physiological needs, safety, belonging and love, esteem, and self-actualisation, I see:
- Physiological needs + security in those needs.
- Social needs + security in those.
- Esteem (recognition for accomplishments) + security in that status.
- Self-actualisation + security in those achievements.
Maslow splits out security as its own level, but that jars with my own experience of noting times where one or more (and in the worst instances: all) such needs were fulfilled either in a highly contingent manner ("I'll give you X if you do Y", or "If you do Y I'll withhold X"). That's the extreme of manipulation and precarity.
Finally, Yonatan Zunger's essay on "financial shock wealth" is an excellent reframing of the wealth/poverty discussion (from 2017):
<https://scribe.rip/newco/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6d...>
> 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.
1. Why is that surprising? That has been a natural state of human societies from the beginning of civilization. What would be really surprising is if things changed.
2. Roughly two thirds of Americans own a home. That stands in contradiction with your claim that most Americans cannot afford to own a home.
#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 home." If you disagree, consider if you would consider circumstances no different if we created a novel debt system for people to leverage their purchase of food while food prices increase by multiples; they may even be able to get more food than previously, they just carry disproportionate debt on it.
* I think this also needs to be put in the context of houses are also bigger than they used to be, but there is also a higher percentage of two-income households.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/american-debt-...
> 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.
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.
Sure, I was only making an analogy -- people refinancing over and over, vaguely like governments pay T-bill interest by issuing more T-bills, where there's no expectation that the principal can ever really get paid back.
I was about to mention Fannie and Freddie as a footnote about how the government might be involved in all this, but didn't think it was a big deal. Yet Google tells me they end up buying 70% of mortgages. So there's some flow here that I'd do well to understand.
I've wondered the same. It seems like the norm is to use home equity as a revolving line of credit, which obviously creates some weird incentives like keeping home values inflated.
I believe replacing "weapons" for "systems" makes the statement more in line with concrete reality.
Even if we look at only the resource of light, you'll find that over a billion people are still using kerosene lanterns, primarily in places with low electricity access. That's around 10 billion liters of kerosene still being used per year. It's more expensive, dangerous, unhealthy, and wasteful than a cheap LED light, but without electricity, it's still the best choice.
Solar panel and led is cheap and pretty durable. I'd think batteries to run part of the night would be biggest issues at this point.
A laptop powerbank cost about as much as those and will run enough lighting to read for days.
Lower cost than that, there are C-grade prismatic cells. Usb/12V adapters exist for a single cell as well, although i'm not sure if they are in that form factor.
>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.
My personal opinion is that this hasn't changed much because human psychology hasn't changed much. We are a status-driven species and, lacking other measures, we revert to the easily quantifiable: wealth, house size, education credentialism, etc. to derive our place.
Who can't afford food? An egg costs like 30 cents, rice is like 20 cents a pound. Make some fried rice. Make a sandwich. The cost of great food is like $40 a month per person, with the bonus that they wouldn't be morbidly obese. Now explain why its unreasonable to expect people to eat high quality cheap food. (and no "poor people are too stupid" paternalistic arguments)
$1.30 per day food budget? Not accurate in the affluent world.
1400-1800 calories for an average height adult male is a reasonable floor (and that's a non-obesity scale). The $1.30 per day budget might get you around 1/3 of that calorie requirement, without solely existing on something like rice.
You can get by on closer to ~$90-$120 per month, per adult, and actually bring in enough calories to not starve over time. That's a surviving floor. You can temporarily go a bit lower to scrape by ($50-$90), however that's not livable longer term, you'll suffer increasingly.
If you modestly augment with various free food assistance options (not talking about SNAP), you could stretch the lower ~$50-$90 category up to something more like the $120 category consistently.
I'll take this as a teaching opportunity
Here's who can't practically afford that: Someone with 3 kids working 80 hours a week in service or truck driving. Or someone that is disabled. Or someone that has severe mental health issues.
There are quite a few prerequisites that you assume exist that just don't in a poor American household and the primary one that doesn't exist is time.
Beyond the time you need to plan, shop, cook, clean, you need:
-Motivation to do so
-Pots and pans
-Knowledge of cooking and nutrition
-A grocery store nearby (39.5 million Americans live in food deserts)
-A way to get there (Many can't afford cars or can't drive)
-Working water and electricity
TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans have none of the above
And whereas in other countries you may live in a multi-generation home or otherwise be able to do subsistence farming, that's not really possible without land of some sort which almost no poor people in America have.
Thank you for explaining this.
Normal people who are used to cooking at home see it as no big deal to whip up a simple meal.
Some of the rest of us encounter insurmountable obstacles in our own kitchens.
Personally, I haven't prepared a single meal at home since last October. I've been ordering delivery at an extraordinary markup.
Several bad experiences last year put me permanently off home meal preparation. I've tried all the alternatives. I'm desperate to save money; I'm desparate to eat better. I have been left with no other choice.
Basically 100% of my paychecks go to fund those meals because the alternatives are absolutely intractable, due to several of the above factors.
I appreciate your vulnerability and candor and hope that your situation improves soon
I'm very curious what your insurmountable obstacles and bad experiences with home meal preparation are.
Most people can't imagine being unable to use the microwave or boil water.
For starters, I'm not incapable of nuking a frozen meal, reheating leftovers, or hard boiling eggs, things like that. Those are backup strategies still employed.
It's difficult to explain succinctly what the barriers are, and without getting in a big debate about my abilities and limits. But in a nutshell:
Start with intractable problems with pest control. If I eat delivery, I get no bugs. If I prepare fresh meals, the cockroaches, gnats and other pests immediately descend. I can't avoid standing water/dirty dishes, and so the longer I try my hand in the kitchen, the worse the bugs get. I'm a renting tenant and 100% reliant on the landlord to do the pest control, and it's ineffective. If I want a deep treatment, I have to shut down my entire kitchen, tear it apart, and put it back together afterwards. So I am roundly cursed for even trying this.
Fitness - I'm not a young man anymore and as a beginner, my time in the kitchen is very inefficient. I could spend 2-3 hours at a time for one meal in a day. I couldn't sleep or rest enough to make it up, and living with this deficit took its toll, especially if stopping to rest meant I wouldn't eat or empty the dishes from the sink, and we're back to cockroaches.
Comptenence - since I never learned how to really cook or put recipes together, I find it amazingly hard to plan out meals and produce stuff that is appealing or even normal. I found it very difficult to collect recipes and work from them, especially when trying to manage fridge/pantry inventory, and oftentimes I wound up with something edible but really weird-tasting because I put together the wrong flavors. Or, my hunger would militate against knowing what I am doing and make it incredibly frustrating to remember all the steps in cooking.
Cooking meals from scratch requires planning and organization, which I found it hard to adapt into a kitchen context, and it was crazy-making if I was hungry for breakfast now and there was nothing but dirty dishes in the sink and I didn't know where to start.
I went to the hospital multiple times last year, because I was extraordinarily exhausted and I truly felt that my heart could fail any moment if I kept that all up. It was truly traumatic. If I could merely find a middle way to preparing simple meals once in a while, just to keep delivery costs down, I would do that, but for now, I'll follow the path of least fear and trembling.
I know you didn't ask for advice, but here's some anyways. Start simple. Ramen costs about 50 cents at the market and requires only the ability to boil water and wait 5 minutes. If pests are a concern, wash and dry. dishes afterwards.
Then you can start with pasta which takes slightly longer to boil and you can get a pre-made jar of pasta sauce to put on it. You can even put cold pasta sauce on a hot pasta and it will warm up.
Neither of these dishes will harm you if you mess up cooking them, and both take less than 30 minutes. Practice makes perfect, so you can iterate and try new things.
I've had pretty intense past problems in the past, I found the best ways to address them are keeping all food and sealed containers, preferably glass jars with a ceiling lid. Doing dishes and avoiding standing water also helps. The idea is the star of the bugs. If there is no food they won't come looking.
As a side note not intended to be aggressive or attacking, if the idea of boiling pasta or Ramen induces fear or anxiety, you should seek medical help. Not everyone is typical, but everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow.
You're right: I didn't ask for advice, and I consider yours to be a chauvinistic and arrogant gesture based on totally not reading or understanding my previous post. Please leave me alone.
Sorry you feel that way. You said you were desperate so I thought I'd offer some simple advice. Despite your aggression, I hope you overcome your fears and figure out how to cook for yourself and not rely on exorbitant prices from restaurants
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This is everyone's problem if we ever hope to retire
Maybe they didn't. Maybe their sibling died and their ex left them with the kids from the last relationship and now they're looking after 3 kids they never expected to have to care for on their own.
This is the poor people are too stupid and helpless argument. It is not true.
Your list of reasons is really just betraying how little you think poor people are like yourself. You are portraying them as helpless animals.
Also, lack of motivation as a reason they can't boil an egg, so they just go hungry instead? Do you even care about reality or just scoring internet points?
These are not dumb people, they are my friends and neighbors who are being systematically oppressed.
Unless you're working a blue collar job in America you don't see this
Right, I'm saying they aren't dumb. If what you are saying is true they would have to not only be dumb, but barely have human level intelligence. You believe that your friends and neighbors are completely incompetent at things that are trivially easy, and they have no hope of ever figuring it out on their own.
You are actually claiming that there are tens of millions of adult humans, who have lived 20, 30 years, and are literally incapable of procuring one pot. You are saying they can't independently manage to acquire the cooking skills to boil rice. It's just absurd.
Meanwhile those same people are statistically obese. Somehow despite living without electricity, money, pots, illiterate and 50 miles from the nearest grocery store they eat enough to be obese (can you explain how they get enough food to eat too much despite it being impossible for them to acquire groceries at all?) and yet it is unreasonable to think they might boil an egg.
> and they have no hope of ever figuring it out on their own.
It's not a case of not understanding, or not having the skills, or it being “unreasonable to think they might” do anything.
https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine...
https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2022/04/12/its-not-about-the...
I get not understanding, but can you try not to be so obnoxious about it, please? It's clear you don't have these problems. If they seem to you to be absurd struggles to have, read some Albert Camus.
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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I love both the spoons theory (and it's popping up everywhere) and Camus!
The evidence doesn't match your theory that it's trivially easy. Which will you discard?
> Also, lack of motivation as a reason they can't boil an egg, so they just go hungry instead?
You haven't heard of depressed people? A lot of homeless people are depressed, which is why they don't work.
You must be incredibly out of touch if you think $40 a month is a reasonable budget for “great food.” 2 weeks worth of ham and cheese sandwiches alone would eat up the majority of that figure.
Not to mention the fruits and vegetables required for a balanced diet. Prices for produce in my area have gone through the roof. What about the family of four, the single parent, one of the many recently let go? The cost of basic goods and services has inflated as well, meaning less money for food. Sure, maybe there are people spending way too much eating out, but food scarcity is a real problem for many. And just saying you should be able to afford it and throwing around made up $ figures doesn't solve a thing.
Ham and cheese are both notoriously expensive though, and not especially healthy. One day of filet mignon would eat up the whole budget, but thats not an argument against what I said.
As for out of touch, I grew up eating government peanut butter and free school lunches. Lots of years that is all I ate. Food assistance is great and we should do more, but jeff bezos hording wealth isn't causing people to starve as gp suggests, food is incredibly cheap. The idea people are starving is rediculous.
I’m a bit confused then… what exactly do you propose the average American should put in their sandwiches—your suggestion—at a $40/mo budget? Eggs and lentils?
I live on only a bit more than that myself. I batch cook all of my meals for the week on Sunday mornings. It's simple food, all made from raw ingredients. I don't eat any sandwiches, though, since bread is usually highly processed and not cheap.
What is so bad about beans, rice and eggs with some onions and cheap canned veggies that it's insane to suggest that kind of budget?
Nothing is objectively “bad” about that, but it is an insane stretch to call that “great food.” That is subsistence eating.
Moreover—can you put beans, rice, eggs, and mixed veggies in a sandwich? Because a sandwich was one of OP’s “$40/mo” suggestions. A food budget where a simple ham and cheese sandwich is an unimaginable luxury is ridiculous to propose as a reasonable target.
Why isn't it great food? People line up to get rice, veggies, and beans, onion, and chicken in a tortilla at Chipotle, but if you combine those ingredients at home you are 'subsistence eating'?
Well you seem to be skipping over the fresh cilantro, herbs and spices, marinating time, and expert preparation found in a Chipotle. Do you understand what it takes to build and maintain a respectable and functional spice rack?
Not to mention the spoilage that goes on. The rice and beans can keep long-term, but you'll need to do logistics on chicken, tortillas etc to keep fresh ones in the pipeline without wasting any, which you can't afford either.
Look, I've had food boxes before. The food box is an amazing wondrous bit of charity where you can get a ton of free food just for asking. There's cereal, I've gotten big hunks of frozen meat, dry beans and rice, I've gotten bits of candy and such, lots of staples, powdered milk, canned chickpeas and spinach and you-name-it.
However the food boxes only go so far. They won't cook the meals for you. They won't give you the utensils, pots and pans. You don't get any fats, oils, herbs, spices, or seasonings. they won't tell you which ingredients combine in a flavorful way. You don't get any recipes that use these ingredients and don't call for something you don't have.
Now you boil some water, throw in some beans and rice plain, and cook until soft. Go ahead, throw in some string beans for vitamins, and some kind of protein. Spoil yourself! Then try to choke that down in the absence of salt, butter, or anything that might impart flavor. How long until you're going to just kill yourself?
Well there you go, add chicken and tortillas to the mix and your budget doubles just for dinner. People generally enjoy eating more than just the bare-bones, most minimal staples.
Anyone in the US can go to a library and borrow a cookbook for free. If you are out of ideas you can do that too.
Dodging the question… provide me one example of a nutritious set of sandwich ingredients that can be procured at a cost of 43¢ per serving (assuming you spend a generous third of your $1.30 a day budget on just a sandwich). Bread alone would cost that much.
Great, now I need to own a car and afford gas to drive 40mi to the nearest library. (More importantly, now I need to have a kitchen to cook in.)
You realize that there are people who are homeless and who live in areas that don't have any support systems for homelessness (e.g. homeless shelters), right?
YouTube has a lot of recipes, plus shows you exactly what to do - for people who haven't learnt to cook from their parents.
But of course, there will always be people falling through any cracks. That does not mean that the original piece of advice isn't sound, though.
Libraries can mail books to you.
"To: Cardboard Box under the 5th Street Bridge"?
You can rent a mailbox if you don't have one.
For free?
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 because they needed someone to write down "how to make rice in a pot", nor are they likely to have discretionary income for your proposals.
>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?
>Who did you think we were discussing?
People who spend >$40 per month on food who live 40 miles away from the nearest library.
"not especially healthy"
Our knowledge of what is healthy is spotty at best, but plenty of countries that eat a lot of ham and cheese (France, Spain, Italy) are fairly OK health-wise, so it certainly seems to indicate that there is nothing seriously wrong about either.
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.
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 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
> Malnutrition is particularly common among older people, especially those who are ill, low-income, homebound, or without reliable access to healthy food or medical services. It can result from not eating enough but also from poor eating habits that lead to nutritional deficiencies. The majority of deaths in California from malnutrition last year occurred in residents 85 and older.
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.
> People that were healthy couldn't find a way to get their hands on enough calories...
That sure sounds like the "low-income, homebound, or without reliable access to healthy food" bit from my quote.
> It's completely obvious that OP meant that otherwise healthy people aren't starving to death.
The chances of zero people having done that in a country of 330 million people "in decades", as asserted, is quite slim.
https://www.mtshastanews.com/story/news/2021/02/05/living-an... is a case of a physically healthy man starving to death in SF.
https://www.newsweek.com/2023/01/20/starved-death-american-j... is a case of someone starving to death in jail for want of $100 bail.
I rather suspect other examples can be found.
I suppose it's a matter of definition for the word "involuntary" at this point. What I mean is that everyone who is willing and able will have enough food stamps to get enough nutrition for the month - no matter your living situation.
Like the parent said, you seem to be disputing my original claim out of spite and in bad faith.
This is the _second_ obvious thing people go for when trying to achieve the same.
If there was no restriction on what or where you could build that would change. Everyone can afford food in the US. Google “rice and beans”
Is "wealth" the right comparison when you are talking about affording rent and food? I think it is spending that matters. There is an approximately fixed amount of land in the world, an approximately fixed amount of housing and food that can be produced per year. Jeff Bezos has a lot of wealth, but it's just a number and doesn't affect anyone else unless he spends it, using it to consume a portion of the world's available resources and thus increasing the price of them for everyone else.
Housing shortages are due to policy, not hoarding. With good policy, total wealth is probably going to increase.
Totally agree, although my comment on the topic reeks of anger aha, yours is admiringly restrained.
How is that surprising? Those systems are what made that progress possible in the first place. Unless we stop advancing as a species I don't think they will ever go away.
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 when you account for the land price.
Obviously building vertically helps in cities, but that comes with its own costs as well.
It’s supply and demand and supply is limited by the surface area of the earth. In the short term countries could absolutely help themselves by limiting immigration. Population growth has outpaced new housing for the last 20 years in the US: https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced...
There were 2.7 million illegal border crossings in FY 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna53517
1.6 million housing units were built in 2021: https://www.builderonline.com/data-analysis/housing-activity....
Canada built 321,000 units of housing in 2021 but is in pace to have over 500,000 immigrants this year.
It’s unsustainable and people think you’re a racist for bringing it up so it never gets talked about.
Blaming immigration on how much we aren’t building is a mental gymnastic I haven’t seen before.
Besides, those immigrants are the ones building those houses.
Not only they build those houses. They don't get to own them. Hard to imagine an undocumented immigrant having spare 250k cash for a downpayment. OP comment is a joke.
I guess they all just live in the woods then. News to me.
People taking up rental units still take up supply. If landlords are having a hard time renting out their units, they aren't going to increase their prices.
Legal immigrants and illegal migrants have to live somewhere too. Even if they don't have $$$, they still put pressure on the system from the bottom. And it bubbles up throughout the real estate pyramid.
That is not what the parent said and you put words in his mouth. Immigration is not the reason too few housing is build, but it is the reason demand outstrips the limited capacity to build more. The opposite is for example happening in Japan which has with a stagnant/declining population a relaxed housing market.
If immigration is an order of magnitude higher than natality, it's fair to say it's a relevant factor. I don't think that's shifting blame, only pointing out that without immigration, there might be more homes built than new people born.
> 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.
...and the same folks who rail against immigration can often be found lamenting the low national birth rate. It makes one suspect their complaint isn't with the rate of population growth, but with its hue.
wow this really made me think
Don’t forget about all those lazy old people who aren’t contributing and just taking up space… usually too much space (an old couple in a 3 bedroom house)
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.”
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.
Source? Immigration courts are more backed up than they ever have been.
Why limit ourselves to only addressing one part of the equation? I say let's ban both immigration AND procreation!
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 everyone can't have 15 acres. There are small towns across the US that would love some population growth and have plenty of housing available. The problem is that jobs are concentrated in cities with housing shortages.
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.
> 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.
> but that comes with its own costs as well.
So does having a large plot of land to every single driver on the road driving past you. Even if it doesn't really show up in a municipal budget or in a mortgage payment, it's still very expensive to drive past a farm that is wide and not deep, but most people, most of the time don't want deep lots for aesthetic reasons, and even if you make deep lots taxi-cab geometry will get you anyway if the whole area is residential land anyway.
When it comes to residential land that is outside of environmentally protected zones, my position is simple. Allow land owners to build two or three houses. One primary one (6 bedrooms, say) and up to two smaller ones (2 bedrooms each) or one smaller one and one general use building (a workshop or many car garage). That way the frontage is used, we get housing stock for poorer families and we intermix ages and income levels in a way that is socially beneficial, since it's a lot harder to turn a blind eye to the problems of the lower-middle class if they're literally living on the same property that you own.
Plus it gives a way (for families that want it) for grandparents to live on the same land as their grandchildren without always being in the hair of their kids. Super win-win if both parents work and can rely on the grandparents for after-school hours. Plus it makes extended family gatherings more feasible as enough of a chunk of the family is nearby in the first place.
> supply is limited by the surface area of the earth
But US is not a small country, how can there be not enough land?
There is plenty of land, but not where most people want to live.
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.
> 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 move to Canada, why would they not be allowed to be here?
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?
It's not racist for bringing it up - it's racist for blaming immigrants when it's the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property, coupled with an out of control healthcare system, stagnant wages while corporate profits are huge, and lobbyists keeping politicians from meaningfully changing anything.
I couldn't take you seriously, anyway. 2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units, but you're trying to imply that each of those illegal border crossings took a housing unit or something like that. Perhaps people on Facebook are that dumb.
>2.7 million illegal border crossings have zero to do with 1.6 million housing units
Only if you assume all 2.7 million people are now homeless.
Price is a function of supply and demand. Obviously, increasing the number of people within a system without commensurately increasing housing will result in upward pressure on housing prices.
You could argue that the system-wide effect is minimal, but you would need data to do that, which you haven't provided.
One person ferrying drugs over the border weekly would be 52 illegal border crossings a year, and no change in population.
From the article I linked: "For the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2022, CBP stopped migrants more than 2,766,582 times, compared to 1.72 million times for fiscal 2021, the previous yearly high. "
Those are 2.7 million STOPS. It's not an estimate. The means the number of people actually crossing is higher. Those stopped are generally given a court date and released into the country. Someone transporting drugs wouldn't be.
Like most large systems, economies are complicated. A counter-point is that unskilled immigration also drives down many essential costs, like food and construction. Immigrants tend to work for less and are disproportionately represented in the agriculture, construction, and meat-packing industries. So in some ways they may increase demand costs while also bringing down supply costs.
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.
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.
Food is a bit different in that we export a fair amount; it's not like we're running up against the limits of what our farmland can produce. For what it's worth I absolutely abhor the phrases "they're more willing to do that work" or "it's work that American's won't do." You're missing the last part of that sentence: for that pay.
Of course costs will go up. So will pay. You're right in that in the case of food it's hard to say how that would all equalize. However, are we to rely on what's essentially an underclass forever? That seems pretty dystopian, and unsustainable.
Home prices I'd argue wouldn't be affected as much. The "dumb" labor in building houses is pretty cheap. Framing, roofing, etc. isn't much of the labor cost and they aren't on the jobsite for that long. Skilled work such as plumbers, electricians, and the like cost much more. There are kind of inbetween jobs such as drywall taping and tiling and I don't know how much of that is done with immigrant labor. In my experience it's basically none but I could be off on that.
I think we probably agree on some of the broad strokes, but interpret the details differently.
Regardless about how much we export, prices are tightly coupled to supply and demand. If your theory holds, we should see a commensurate increase in cost. It doesn't matter if net exports go down unless there are effects from steep tariffs.
I agree that a large part of that many Americans are unwilling to do that work for that pay. And yet they are beneficiaries of that low-pay work in the form of low food costs. I find it particularly unsettling when those who directly benefit simultaneously demonize the immigrants who they derive some of that benefit. However, there have been studies showing that Americans underproduce migrant labor in industries like agriculture. So it's not just the pay, it the ability to produce. Similar work quotes farmers as saying they literally can't hire Americans to do the work. Unless I suppose you want to pay them salaries that risk farms being unsustainable financially. The extension of these points is if you were to hire Americans at an American wage, you get both less production and a higher cost while simultaneously risking the solvency of the farms.
I also agree that the use of an immigrant underclass is dystopian. Especially when you factor in the abuse that occurs in workplaces where employees are fearful of recourse due to their immigration status. And yet it happens and one of the often used excuses is that it's necessary to essentially subsidize a certain quality of life for Americans.
FWIW, it's usually termed "general" labor rather than "dumb" labor. You're point here seems to contradict your previous point that immigration also brings down the wages of skilled jobs. They way they do both is if they are represented in both skilled and unskilled employees.
As far as construction, this is largely region-dependent. (That's why I put the south in the original response. It's especially reliant on immigrant labor.) A rough rule of thumb is that labor is 20-40% of construction cost. Regardless, in my region, immigrants are the bulk of skilled labor as well. Again, anecdotal, but once you peel back the thin veneer, you can see how much of the American lifestyle relies on immigrant labor. And simply banning them in the hope that it increases housing availability will have many second order effects.
Well said.
Completely absurd what reactions you get when you point up obvious facts, like immigration increasing demand for housing.
This is especially true for cities, as that is where migrants obviously want to go and where new construction is much harder. Pretending that it is somehow not the case, is making things just worse and worse.
>Obviously, increasing the number of people within a system without commensurately increasing housing will result in upward pressure on housing prices.
That was the explicit intent of prop 13. Triggering the NIMBYtastrophe and privatizing commensurate increases in rents and land values was an entirely deliberate and cynical wealth grab that drove millions into poverty in California.
I get that we're supposed to be more angry at immigrants than Howard Jarvis and his friends though.
Just as we're supposed to be upset at "AI taking jobs" rather than deliberate trade policy.
Scapegoats have gotta goat.
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> The issue is that the person to whom I responded was trying to imply that the number of illegal border crossings being larger than the number of new housing units is somehow a gotcha. It's not.
It's not a "gotcha" - it's a significant amount of additional demand, which, given how supply and demand work, drives up prices.
> You fail basic common sense, too. Does every household have one person?
How many people per household affects the degree of the problem, but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. If you have 2.7m people coming in and you assume that for this population you average five people to a household, that's still roughly 1/3 of the new housing units being generated that are needed to house them. That's an enormous increase in demand, which pushes housing costs up.
To be clear, I think this is a problem of too little housing supply more than too much immigration (though I do oppose illegal immigration and have a strong preference for it ceasing entirely), but either way the problems suggested by the post that you're replying to are very clearly real.
You two are talking past eachother. You did not address his argument.
Just know that the people endorsing mass importation of immigrants are the same ones hoarding property.
They benefit directly from the cheap labor (even child-cheap labor [1]), from the depressed wages, and indirectly from the enlarged voter base of their political friends.
When you deflect the conversation towards racism and related name-calling, you're acting as an agent on behalf of the lords, doing exactly what they want you to do [2]: flinging mud at other peasants, rather than at the lords themselves.
I think one of the best ways to avoid being agentized by the elite class is to just be more skeptical in general, especially when you encounter emotional argumentation. Accusations of racism in particular is a huge red flag. This tactic is by design intended to shut down a discussion rather than engage with it.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/12/child-labor-is...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28415546 - It is far better for upper class to ensure that people discuss and focus on issues like gender and skin colour than the class differences. Hence, they ensured that this is the issue plebs would hear all over on the media and shift their attention from class divides to gender and skin colour.
I'm not "blaming immigrants." That's exactly the attitude I'm talking about when I say you're called racist. I'm blaming our governments for allowing and/or encouraging it. It's completely insane to open the floodgates when housing prices are through the roof.
I don't understand how you could think millions of people coming over here couldn't affect the supply side of supply and demand, but considering your list of grievances I think it's pretty clear where you lie on the political spectrum and couldn't possibly blame immigration for anything.
Point me towards where people are "hoarding" property. Rental units don't count as they still contribute to the housing supply.
Wages have also been depressed for a long time by immigrant labor, from illegal immigration to H1Bs. Healthcare costs are, again, increased by (illegal) immigration. Illegal immigrants can go to the ER, get treated for free, and we're all stuck with the costs.
None of these are the only causes, but it's a contributing factor and one side of the political spectrum won't acknowledge it and the other pretends to while still allowing it for big businesses' sake.
> It's not racist for bringing it up - it's racist for blaming immigrants when it's the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property
Is it racist to blame the wealthy buying up and hoarding land and property and funding the politicians that let them do it, while also pushing for more immigration? I don't really think the comment was blaming immigrants, it was blaming immigration, and it's honestly really hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that adding more people to a place that already doesn't have enough housing for people won't make the problem worse.
> It’s unsustainable and people think you’re a racist for bringing it up so it never gets talked about.
Yeah what's unsustainable is you living on 15 acres, 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 move to Canada, why would they not be allowed to be here?
> Yeah what's unsustainable is you living on 15 acres, we can build housing for everyone.
Heaven forbid I live on 1/4 of the land that my parents had even though I have a far greater income. I guess I shouldn't have bought the place? Or I should somehow subdivide the lot even though it's quite narrow and hilly/forested? Fuck nature, I guess.
> Given, unlike you, they need to be considered productive by the government to move to Canada, why would they not be allowed to be here?
That was literally the point of my post, but because you didn't seem to get it: because that amount might be so high as to drive housing costs further up when people are already struggling to rent/buy a home. A government should serve its own people, first and foremost. If that means immigration helps them (as it absolutely can) - great! If it means that too much immigration instead hurts their citizens, it should be dialed back.
Do you think two working parents factors into this? My coworker's families have annual income over $1m/yr, b/c both mom and dad work.
In previous generations, with only one parent working, it is almost impossible to compete.
This is actually well documented. There has been a notable increase in prices couples with an increase in women working (instead of staying home). It’s not a 1:1 increase of price to household income, but it’s well documented, and geographically correlated to rate of double-income households.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two-Income_Trap
The wiki summary suggest rising costs causes both parents to work, but my postulation is the opposite: two family working causes rising costs: Women wanting to work has caused families to have more disposable income, causing inflation for everyone.
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I was all set to read and see whether they took LED manufacturers at their word for how long their bulbs lasted, and it turned out the article's source is nearly 30 years old.
Can we update the flair to say 1994, given that the embedded numbers date from that year? Regurgitating the data in 2017 doesn't make the information actually from 2017.
And for LED lights, it’s almost always the ballast circuitry that fails, not the actual LEDs.
LED lighting lifetime needs to be measured as an assembly, not just the LED component.
Mildly weird piece, in that it's really measuring two things; lighting efficiency (and only at an extremely low resolution, implying a whole-system efficiency that doesn't change between the invention of the light bulb and the fluorescent light) and wage growth. 60 hours of work may have bought 72 hours of electric light in 1880, but rather more in 1990, say, for a combination of both reasons.
That said, LED bulbs do still feel like a bit of a sea-change; since they showed up, lighting is cheap enough that most people don't really have to think about it at all.
> Mildly weird piece, in that it's really measuring two things
True, but I think it's an interesting metric. I don't think it maps well to everything, but it is cool that it is a combination of two things since a lot of our technology has just gotten better and better over the years. I mean, just look at how incredible computers are. Power efficient, performant machines that can allow someone to work a job from anywhere, start a business, learn, etc and you can get a decent used one for $300 USD. One hell of a time to be alive, all things considered.
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 some system out there so I can get a reliable lightbulb that lasts and/or doesn’t randomly flicker.
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 brightness as they age.
Though perhaps I do recall a particular LED light that would overheat in a particular fixture. It's possible not all fixtures are equally suitable.
> incandescent bulbs had to be replaced all the time in my experience
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
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.
You are lucky. I’ve personally had a lot of failures. I like that they don’t make heat and are brighter. (And I also like how they can be packed more densely on dedicated lighting circuits than traditional fixtures), but they are definitely prone to early failures.
There are a lot of cheap, poorly designed LED bulbs that put heat stress on critical components.
Technology Connections : A troubling trend in lighting? - https://youtu.be/fsIFxyOLJXM (It goes into how a number of LED bulb failures are because the lamp wasn't able to dissipate heat from the electronic components. It also shows how some higher quality LED bulbs are made so that they dissipate heat better - they don't make as much heat as an incandescent bulb, but there is still some and that is the cause of a lot of failures.)
The lamps you're not allowed to have. Exploring the Dubai lamps - https://youtu.be/klaJqofCsu4 is also interesting. They have a different design and it gets into the electronics.
>You are lucky. I’ve personally had a lot of failures.
Or perhaps you're unlucky. LEDs on the whole have longer lives than incandescent bulbs do.
Under lab conditions they do.
> 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 think you must be getting cheap bulbs. I bought a bunch before my kid was born, and he's 10 and none have gone out. I've even taken them with me when I moved.
Yep. It is virtually always the power regulator that fails, rather than the LED itself. Lots of LED bulb and fixture manufacturers cheap out here. We could do better by running low voltage DC power in our homes, but even that isn’t a panacea.
> I bought a bunch before my kid was born, and he's 10 and none have gone out.
You can't buy those bulbs anymore, both literally, and they truly don't make them like that anymore. I have new ones and old ones, the old ones weigh three times as much. There were more components run at a lower limit of peak capacity. I move my old bulbs when I move because new ones won't last as long.
Huh. I replaced every light bulb in my house with Ikea LEDs about seven years ago. They cost between about 4 and 10 EUR apiece depending on size. I think three have since failed. This seems like _fairly_ good going, and certainly way better than the old incandescent and halogen bulbs I had.
Out of a set of 30 or so LEDs, I've had five fail.
Four of those are spots in either recessed or exposed cans, and I suspect temperature or moisture may be involved. (Another set matching three of the failed, in near-identical fixtures ... are doing fine.)
One was a stick-type bulb used in a closet which seemed to fizzle.
In all cases I suspect it was electronics rather than the LED elements themselves which failed.
Three-way LEDs are hugely superior to incandescent 3-way bulbs, which always seem to lose at least one filament within a few months. The LEDs are going strong years on.
There are definitely a range of quality when it comes to bulb manufacturers, heat dissipation is also important.
I got 10 LAP GU10 bulbs 6 years ago for use in en-suite bathrooms - 6 years later all 10 are still trucking along.
On the other hand, I had multiple Phillips B22 bulbs last at most 2 years.
They are made to fail fast, it's obviously by design. One simple thing I do in all my led light bulbs, that makes them last for an almost indefinite amount of time: remove the plastic bulb. One of the main reasons for one of the leds or one of the capacitors to fail, is the high temperatures reached during the operation of the device. Removing the bulb makes it a lot cooler, and in the last few years since I've been removing the bulbs, no led light has failed in my house. There's other things you can do, but this is the main one any consumer can do to fight back against this scourge of modern capitalism. I recommend Big Clive's Youtube channel for getting more tips like this one.
Huh, I wonder if drilled ventilation holes would work too...
When I first embarked on this quest to make my led bulbs stop failing, I saw a video of a russian guy that, beyond removing the bul itself, drilled roles on the base of the device, and plugged screws on them to create passive cooling. Not very safe, since the screws have access to the inside of the fixture, and can eventually touch the wires and become live, I wouldn't personally do it myself.
As for drilling holes on the bulb itself, I'm pretty sure it would not reduce the temperature as much as simply removing it, and in my experience, the luminosity is even better without those cheap plastic bulbs anyway.
If we are just looking at "Fun" numbers it might make sense to include house prices. After all I need a power socket to plug in my light bulb vs say a candle or lamp I can fire up anywhere.
LEDs released->electricity bill reduced->money freed up->wages increase->price of everything else increases
It's nice to see these efficiency gains aren't entirely eaten up in this way and the is some ultimate benefit for humans, $1 2023 >= $1 1990 as far as lighting, and wages are up. You can have the lights on more and keep the same quality of life in all other regards. But this can be used to mask growing inequality, just take some but not all of the gains, e.g. by artificially limiting housing supply, QoL still improves so no revolution.
Ironically, LEDs being so efficient means I need to use the central heating more often.
My CFL TV used to provide some respite, not now I have an OLED.
I hope your heating is more energy efficient than heating with electric light bulbs though!
(And it should be - worst comes to worst basic electrical heating can be effectively 100% efficient, and heat pumps can do better)
Light bulbs are resistive heaters, and they are also 100% efficient at making heat. Some of it just bounces around the room as light first.
Light bulbs are also nearly 100% efficient, minus whatever fraction of light seeps out through windows or similar. As is just about anything else electric. Unfortunately that heat is usually suboptimally distributed, and pales in comparison to the heat pump effective efficiency which as you mentioned can go well above 100%.
When is electric heating not 100% efficient? I thought they were by definition.
Heat pumps achieve greater thermal output than the input energy, unlike electric resistance heating.
The latter is 100% efficient (all energy in is delivered as heat). Heat pumps exceed 100% efficiency, and can deliver 3 to 6 times the heat energy as input, as they are moving heat from the exterior environment to the heated space.
Probably not in the summer time.
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One way I like to think about progress: there are things that are (basically) post-scarcity. Things that have become either too cheap to meter or close to it (for an average "western" consumer, at least).
Light. Water. Ice. Calories (if not picky). Entertainment (radio, youtube, etc). Information (google, Wikipedia).
We still have a ways to go, but that's a good damn start.
I agree. My personal term for this is "weakly post scarcity." It's the point at which the median member of a society will more often suffer from excessive consumption of $thing than they suffer from deprivation of $thing.
There will never be true post-scarcity in our finite universe. A lot of services and goods can become weakly post scarcity in that they'll exhaust someone's finite time (watching YouTube or other entertainment) or destroy their body (drinking alcohol) before the median person will run out of money to personally consume more of them.
The weakly post scarcity environment brings new challenges but they are largely better ones to grapple with than those of a high scarcity environment.
In 2008 when the financial crisis hit, I had some friends that got their news from Zero Henge got into a panic spiral. One of them was seriously thinking of quickly buying a plot of land and farming it so he wouldn't starve to death when the economy collapsed.
I had to explain to him that no, he won't starve to death. Even if money ceases to exist overnight, the government will step in and forcibly collect the food from farmers if need be and distribute it to the cities.
As a part of the argument I worked out what it takes to feed an adult for a year with storable staples. There's "preppers" that have helpfully prepared lists of things to buy with nutrition profiles, etc...
Apparently, all you need is a trip to Costco and about $2,000 will buy you a year's supply of salt, sugar, oil, lentils, dried fruits, nuts, flour, etc...
You can scrape together that much money even if you're unemployed!
>Apparently, all you need is a trip to Costco and about $2,000 will buy you a year's supply...
The real issue is doing this while everyone else in the city is trying to do this at the same time.
Our supply chains are very very fragile, as COVID era panics have proved.
So the preppers were right all along...?
In some sense.
It really depends on how much you are willing to prepare for low probability events.
Would you wear a bullet proof vest every day?
Wow, I had to check the math and with my assumptions it does in fact take >2 hours of minimum wage labor to power a CFL for 1 year ($7.25/hr, 0.14$ KWh). It's much higher than I expected. I had the notion that turning off CFLs was hardly worth my time but that's not entirely true.
Roughly $1 to use one watt for a year. 14 watt bulb takes $14 to light for a year.
Varies with electric rates of course, but this is still a useful estimate.
That's a good rule of thumb, thank you!
Except this is 2023 and most CFLs are being rapidly replaced with LEDs which require far less power.
LEDs use more than 50% the energy of a CFL (numbers vary) so it's still more than an hour of work by these numbers.
That is entirely dependent on one's financial condition.
You might prefer the actual paper:
William D. Nordhaus. Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not. in The Economics of New Goods ed. Timothy F. Bresnahan, Robert J. Gordon. U. Chicago Press (1996)
http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6064
Also, note that some of the data is Norhaus's (an economist) rough modern reconstructions at their home, such as burning wood in their own fireplace.
Buying an hour of fire feels quantitatively different from buying an hour of light.
When I go camping, my solar-fed LED lanterns are plenty bright, but I still need to cook and stay warm. I can do that using heat, which the efficient lights cannot produce in sufficient quantities.
> I can do that using heat, which the efficient lights cannot produce in sufficient quantities.
Ever tried an infrared lightbulb? (They often put them in bathrooms as something you can turn on after you shower to dry the bathroom out more quickly, usually in combination with a vent fan.)
(2017)
Take anything you hear from the Cato Institute with a large pinch of salt and climate change denial BS filtering.
It's stupid comparison, as others have pointed out.
Also, why not 100 or 1000 years? Previous generations had their spiel of "our goal is to make things better for the next generation". That doesn't seem to hold true as much these days. Within my lifetime power went from being "cheap" when I was a kid to jumping up massively in price (some thanks to Russia) so it's not really so great anyway. And maybe I can buy 51 years of light, but my generation can't buy a fucking house to live in.
As a millennial the saddest thing is that we don't have enough political clout to pull rank and get things solved for the zoomers ahead of time.
Perhaps if we pulled together and voted (bc ofc only older people vote in large numbers)...but I think the crux of the issue, around the world even, is that the only candidates we have to vote for are in their 70s.
What we need is more 30-40 candidates, if mils and zooms of voting age pull together we could get some real change.
In Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night" written 1939–41 but set earlier in the century, the protagonist illustrates the cheapness and miserly ways of his father by complaining how always he's yelling people to turn off the unneeded lights.
It sounded miserly to me, but running lights was more expensive than I realized.
The conversation about the grid being born and how rapidly early power systems paid themselves off made me think about how substantially easier it is to produce light now than over historical periods. I believe the economics term for this would be that photons are extremely deflationary relative to labor?
We’ve turned what used to be an exceptionally precious commodity (light, especially after the sun set) into a pollutant. Go us.
I'm not going to blame pre BC humans for needing light, especially when nocturnal creatures existed. If anything this is an absolute win, we are still burning something in order to produce light, but what we burn is way less of a pollutant than wood.
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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rWBCyNMfCAE
SHIFTLOCKERDUDE
2 months ago
Tornado took it down last night
Sounds like someone somewhere also didn't like it ...
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
From the GP:
> millions of uninhabited acres.
Is my closet “uninhabited” when I’m not using it? If so, then yes, these are definitely some examples.
I was thinking of all the street lamps on completely empty roads in the middle of nowhere.
LLMs are doing the same with written content.
Innovation is the key factor of economic growth in industrialized economies. Innovation produces wealth , which in turn produces innovation sort of cycle. Light has in sorts been dematerialized, i.e we get more output per raw material of input (think of coal in a furnace vs. LEDs powered by a modern grid)
> I believe the economics term for this would be that photons are extremely deflationary relative to labor?
Maybe, but I think most economists would say that technology caused productivity to increase to previously unimaginable levels, so today's labor can create way more photons than in the past.
As pessimistic as I can be, thinks like this are why am not extremely worried about the future. Even if we decline a lot and oil cost $1,000 a barrel - that is still an absolute bargain compared with what people have lived through in the past.
If you reduced it to something like joules per hour we could compare it to smartphone usage or driving or even total energy used per year. Would be a funny way to compare productivity gains that are rooted in physics
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/iJLVa
We used to sit around campfires telling stories, playing music, and dancing. We now have portable campfires that only require pushing a button to observe other people doing that.
Yea but nowdays the amount of work to buy a home to turn on your lights from takes 30x what it used too. So what's it really matter...
"Light is cheaper than in the past". "Sun, and Linux kernel updates, still free". News at 9.
Imagine how much more work you can now do by messing up your circadian rhythms rather than resting after sundown!
It's kinda mind blowing that we used whale oil for city street lights.
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.
Inflation is the economics version of "software getting slower faster than hardware gets faster". In other words, the increased output is being diverted to areas that don't produce value.
No it's not.
Sometimes shifts in money flow happen alongside inflation, but inflation itself acts as a tax on savings and has basically no other long-term effect. In the long term inflation will make prices double and wages double and the effect is nothing. There's no actual difference between a $2 big mac and a $20 big mac.
What you're describing is changes in productivity and spending and overhead, not inflation.
I think people underestimated the value of Russia (they have a much lowe gdp, so they are small vs western countries) when in reality they do produce and provide a lot but at cut down prices because of corruption (or at the expense of their citizens)
Milton Friedman would say only the governments' money printing presses can cause it. A lot more simple, convincing and clearly logical to me...
It really is that simple, but certain people benefit from muddying the water and describing any increase in price as inflation.
(2017)
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Next thing they'll be doing aspirins and mobile phones.
Big reveal, both Genghis Khan and Louis XIV couldn't afford them.
American wages have been stagnated for over 30 years.
Everything I ever saw points to rising real wages over spans larger than 20 years. e.g., https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N (there's quite the dip after 2008). Could you provide a source?
Different numbers, different stories.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/are-wages-rising-or-flat/ shows "average weekly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees" as being about the same now as 1970. (See also https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000031 and expand the range starting from 1964.)
Note also that 1970 was a peak. Pick 1990 and things are going well.
Or as https://www.hamiltonproject.org/publication/economic-fact/th... puts it "After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent.1 The U.S. economy has experienced long-term real wage stagnation and a persistent lack of economic progress for many workers." with footnote 1 saying "Cumulative real wage growth is sensitive to the particular method of inflation adjustment. Some researchers use the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) deflator, which implies even lower real wage growth, or the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) deflator, which implies higher real wage growth (Bivens and Mishel 2015; Sacerdote 2017)."
Still, wages haven't matched productivity increases. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
> Starting in the late 1970s policymakers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workers’ wages grew with productivity. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered. And anti-worker deregulatory pushes—from the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of anti-trust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and more—succeeded again and again.
Contrast it to GDP: https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/wa...
Or labors share of the economy: https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/ei...
50% wage share? I have heard that neoclassical economists still use 0.7 and when you tell them that this is wrong or doesn't work across countries (e.g. you've been cherry picking the data) they ignore you or treat you as some kind of crank.
I thought GDP wasn't a real measure? Are we selectively choosing when and if GDP is a real measure, but specifically only when it's beneficial to the side I am arguing for?
Yet if you take into account welfare payments and programs, total income growth has been large. If you make 20K a year, you get about 40K of additional government welfare. If you make 45k a year, you get zero.
For a vast number of Americans, increasing wage is a bad thing.
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-warped-welfare-syste...
I don't think anyone expected anything different but the housing and childcare benefits basically account for 80% of the welfare trap.
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 welfare system, for instance people choosing not to work to receive benefits. The third benefit is it would be cheaper to administrate due to elimination of the smorgasbord of different welfare programs in existence today. Yet, here we are.
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.
Agreed that it’s great from a transparency perspective. At the moment it is very complicated to track the value/cost of welfare. That makes it very easy for both sides to argue that it is too much or little - very few know what it is.
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”.
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We’ve had many technological advancements, but few touch on concrete problems that actually save time or reduce costs for individuals. I suspect the next few decades will have more impact in this regard than the last 50 years.
Full self driving might be an example in the near future that will measurably lift standards of living for many. More automation, AI and robotics are the key.
No tech will be available to lift the standard of living in the same way that a reliable health care and social system, affordable housing and reasonable work life balance can. Telling people “you can’t afford health care, housing or retirement but look at how great self driving cars and phones are” is just condescending talk by the upper class to distract from growing inequality.
Healthcare is largely tech. Housing is human technology . Retirement is just accumulated savings, which go further with less expensive goods and services.
Since everything you mention that we need more of is human technology, why are you so convinced that more technology will not benefit people?
I’m certain there was a point in history where everyone was largely equal with very very little. Was this better?
Not the last few!
This thread needs a Mod. Knew it would have racism and I were stupid enough to read along.
"If you flag the bad comment, that alerts moderators. In egregious cases, email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look at it sooner."
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179759>
Oops, I didn't know flagging did this. Thanks.