25 ms·
Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
- fennecfoxy 3y agoIt'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.
- thumbuddy 3y agoYea 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...
- wolfram74 3y agoThe 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?
- theandrewbailey 3y ago> 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.
- bombcar 3y agoWe’ve turned what used to be an exceptionally precious commodity (light, especially after the sun set) into a pollutant. Go us.
- HPsquared 3y agoLLMs are doing the same with written content.
- nmz 3y agoI'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.
- bombcar 3y agoI'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.
- imtringued 3y agohttps://youtube.com/watch?v=rWBCyNMfCAE https://youtube.com/watch?v=rWBCyNMfCAE
- bombcar 3y agoSHIFTLOCKERDUDE 2 months ago Tornado took it down last night Sounds like someone somewhere also didn't like it ...
- pfannkuchen 3y agoWhat uninhabited land do we light up? Not familiar with what you’re referring to.
- 3y ago
- wnc3141 3y agoInnovation 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)
- stuckinhell 3y agoThat'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.
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- theandrewbailey 3y ago(2017)
- HPsquared 3y agoInflation 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.
- csomar 3y agoI 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)
- ajkdhcb2 3y agoMilton Friedman would say only the governments' money printing presses can cause it. A lot more simple, convincing and clearly logical to me...
- barelyauser 3y agoIt really is that simple, but certain people benefit from muddying the water and describing any increase in price as inflation.
- Dylan16807 3y agoNo 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.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago(2017) Take anything you hear from the Cato Institute with a large pinch of salt and climate change denial BS filtering.
- rsynnott 3y agoMildly 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.
- 6DM 3y agoI 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mcv 3y agoThey 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.
- abakker 3y agoYou 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.
- USB5 3y agoAmerican wages have been stagnated for over 30 years.
- osigurdson 3y agoWe’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.
- rqtwteye 3y agoNo 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.
- osigurdson 3y agoHealthcare 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?
- xapata 3y agoNot the last few!
- ketzu 3y agoEverything I ever saw points to rising real wages over spans larger than 20 years. e.g., https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N (there's quite the dip after 2008). Could you provide a source?
- cat_plus_plus 3y agoImagine how much more work you can now do by messing up your circadian rhythms rather than resting after sundown!
- johnklos 3y agoConsidering 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.
- maxerickson 3y agoHousing shortages are due to policy, not hoarding. With good policy, total wealth is probably going to increase.
- fennecfoxy 3y agoTotally agree, although my comment on the topic reeks of anger aha, yours is admiringly restrained.
- Auracle 3y agoLand/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-home-construction-for-20-years/ 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 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna53517 1.6 million housing units were built in 2021: https://www.builderonline.com/data-analysis/housing-activity-in-2021-ends-on-strong-note_o#:~:text=An%20estimated%201%2C595%2C100%20housing%20units,of%20Housing%20and%20Urban%20Development 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.
- bgirard 3y agoWow, 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.
- qingcharles 3y agoExcept this is 2023 and most CFLs are being rapidly replaced with LEDs which require far less power.
- aidenn0 3y agoLEDs use more than 50% the energy of a CFL (numbers vary) so it's still more than an hour of work by these numbers.
- barelyauser 3y agoThat is entirely dependent on one's financial condition.
- aaronax 3y agoRoughly $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.
- bgirard 3y agoThat's a good rule of thumb, thank you!
- linusg789 3y agohttps://ghostarchive.org/archive/iJLVa https://ghostarchive.org/archive/iJLVa
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> 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.
- tsss 3y agoThis 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.
- tetris11 3y agoI 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 https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/a/4601
- pests 3y agoI 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.
- Dah00n 3y agoThis thread needs a Mod. Knew it would have racism and I were stupid enough to read along.
- dredmorbius 3y ago"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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179759>
- Dah00n 3y agoOops, I didn't know flagging did this. Thanks.
- joelfried 3y agoI 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.
- seventytwo 3y agoAnd 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.
- tiedieconderoga 3y agoBuying 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.
- derefr 3y ago> 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.)
- contingencies 3y ago"Light is cheaper than in the past". "Sun, and Linux kernel updates, still free". News at 9.
- z3t4 3y agoIt's kinda mind blowing that we used whale oil for city street lights.
- labrador 3y agoIn 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.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y agoNext thing they'll be doing aspirins and mobile phones. Big reveal, both Genghis Khan and Louis XIV couldn't afford them.
- zitterbewegung 3y agoIf 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
- wolverine876 3y agoYou 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 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.
- patmcc 3y agoOne 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.
- philipkglass 3y agoI 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.
- jiggawatts 3y agoIn 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!
- fooker 3y ago>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.
- NovaDudely 3y agoAs 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.
- keithalewis 3y agoWe 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.