Oddbean

I was thinking this morning about how we leave LED lights on all the time and don't even care, yet our grandparents would walk around turning off the lights whenever they left a room, and it got me thinking about the real #debasement adjusted electricity cost of 1960 vs today. In 1960 an oz of #gold was $35, and a kwh of #electricity was 2.6 cents. So you could buy 1346 kwh for an oz of gold, which you could earn with 12.7 hours of labor at the #medianwage of $2.75/hr. This also meant you could buy 105.8 kwh of electricity with an hour of your time. A #lightbulb would use 60 watts, so would use a kwh every 16.5 hours. Today an oz of gold is about $2600, which you can earn in 76.74 hours at today's median wage of $33.88, and the cost per kwh of electricity has "gone up" to about 16.5 cents meaning you could buy 15,757 kwhs with an oz of Gold, and you can buy 205.33 kwh with an hour of your time. Relative to gold electricity has dropped in price 91.5%. But #wages have dropped in value relative to gold by 83.45%. So relative to hourly wages, the meaningful metric to people, electricity has reduced in price by only about 1/2. However, in addition to the price of electricity falling substantially, the #electronics we use are also much more efficient. Today an LED light bulb will use only 10 watts, 6 times less than in 1960, and gives you 100 hours of light for only 1 kwh. 6 times more light for half the price, or 12 times more light for the same price! A 91.7% reduction in cost for lighting our homes relative to our labor hours. On the median hourly wage today you can get over 20,000 hours of light from a single lightbulb for 1 hour of labor. In 1960 you could only get just over 1700 hours of light. Not to mention the cost to replace the light bulbs going down as well, due to their longer durability. This is a substantial improvement by almost any metric. But what if wages had stayed the same relative to Gold because the world lived on a sound monetary standard the entire time? If in 1960 an oz of gold could buy you 1346 kwh which would give you 16.5 hours of light each, that works out to 22,209 hours of light per oz of Gold. Since it would take you 12.7 hours to earn that oz of gold, 1 hour of median labor would get you 1748.74 hours of light. Fast forward to today, cheaper electricity + more efficient electronics, an oz of gold will give you 15,757 kwhs of electricity which can power an LED bulb for 100 hours each. So an oz of gold now gives us 1,575,700 hours of light vs 22,209 hours in 1960. This means if wages had stayed the same relative to Gold then you would get 124,070.9 hours of light from an hour of your labor, instead of the 20,000 hours you can actually get today. All vs the 1748.74 hours of light you could get for the same hour of labor 64 years ago. 124,070.9 / 1748.74 = 70.94 71 times more light for the same amount of gold, thanks to efficiency gains in our light bulbs and improvements to our electricity generating capacity bringing the cost of energy down. The world is getting incredibly cheaper all around us all the time, we just don't see it thanks to the FIAT system. Due to this FIAT debasement, 83% of the efficiency/technological gains has been taken from us all. This is the real theft. Monetary Inflation is theft, the growth rate of the M2 is the true inflation rate, not the CPI. Inflation doesn't just rob us of our past earnings in the form of our savings, it reduces our future earnings too by debasing our wages. ₿ clears the fog of debasement we've been living under, truly revealing the world of abundance we live in TODAY. If we embrace its simplicity as the best savings instrument ever discovered and/or created by humanity, then we will all truly prosper having freed ourselves from the yoke of bondage that is the centrally controlled FIAT currencies of the world. You really don't need to work so much. Have a new perspective, lower your time preference, live as frugally as possible within your means and do whatever you can to save as much of your money in BTC and you will be free of the drudgery much more quickly. Buy second hand whenever possible, learn how to cook at home and buy tools that assist you in that endeavor such as a quality blender / slow cooker / pressure cooker / rice cooker / bread maker etc. When you're free, you'll be able to use your time for more useful and important endeavors such as thinking / writing / inventing / volunteering and so on, and also have more time to spend with your family and friends. Contrary to what many today feel, life is worth living and it can be much more meaningful. The future is bright and full of hope, you just have to leave the cave to see it.

👇👇Fabulous Analysis!👇👇 nostr:nevent1qqsw7wkvvntydcvmn6jmeagqkdd7r97hkgtsc48q8acjs0ahkndjptspzdmhxue69uhk7enxvd5xz6tw9ec82c30qgst0n75wtleqdzpa3kd2ka4qmuhgss35mngu5jjt4pyg5tfhksr7ksrqsqqqqqpplxzqn nostr:nevent1qqsw7wkvvntydcvmn6jmeagqkdd7r97hkgtsc48q8acjs0ahkndjptspzdmhxue69uhk7enxvd5xz6tw9ec82c30qgst0n75wtleqdzpa3kd2ka4qmuhgss35mngu5jjt4pyg5tfhksr7ksrqsqqqqqpplxzqn

These some notes I'll read with the family. nostr:nevent1qqsw7wkvvntydcvmn6jmeagqkdd7r97hkgtsc48q8acjs0ahkndjptspzemhxue69uhhqatjwpkx2un9d3shjtnrdakj7q3qkl8aguhljq6yrmrv64dm2phew3pprfhx3ef9yh2zg3gkn0dq8adqxpqqqqqqzzfrf0x

Ultimately, all prices will be measured in sat/joule or, in English prose terms: <subjective value> divided by <proof of work>. nostr:nevent1qqsw7wkvvntydcvmn6jmeagqkdd7r97hkgtsc48q8acjs0ahkndjptspzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtczyzmul4rjl7grgs0vdn24hdgxl96yyydxu689y5jagfz9z6da5ql45qcyqqqqqqg3jwm76

This is a really well done post, thank you One quibble, in 1960 the cost of bullet replacement was $0, as replacements were available for free from the electric company. Or more accurately, factored into the cost of the electricity. with modern bulbs lasting so much longer, I don't think this changes the math much or the comclusions at all

The LED light bulbs removes a whole spectrum of life enhancing wavelengths.... e.g infra red and near infra red etc... It's cheaper because because you are getting an inferior product. This is no different from saying your box of cereal is cheaper when they substituted it with cheaper harmful ingredients and a smaller box. You just got scammed and walked away thinking you had a win. This is how fiat works.

Well the older bulbs (incandescent) would output a more visible natural light that has wavelengths similar to the sun. If you google led fluorescent incandescent and sun light and click images you will see the the difference in outputs. Sunlight being the best and incandescent very similar. The saving in watts is because led and fluorescent lights have sharp limited wavelengths. Our eyes haven't evolved properly for this so can irritate or sometimes cause damage as pupils will dilate or constrict accordingly or may fail to do so as it is not getting its appropriate input. (Some sunglasses can be damaging due to this) Our skin uses light also and some believe our organs using the more deeper penetrable wavelengths. Repair etc Think plants also. But for just visual sake, it is much better to have a broad balanced light spectrum as opposed to a few sharp concentrated waves. A better idea is just to do your calculation on an incandescent 60w on today's wages (or ounce of gold) vs the past. We have made things a bit better in some areas like automotive travel being more efficient so maybe an interesting calculation is how many hours of wages (or ounces of gold) to travel 60 miles vs the past. If cars have become more efficient due to technology, has society benefited? Or was this stolen through inflation? Try find cars with similar brake horse power.

I think this is partially true. LED’s are just efficient showing only wavelengths you can see. Traditional halogen and incandescents are just controlled tiny fires. Most of the energy is wasted in heat rather than visible light. I wouldn’t say LED’s are an inferior product based on that.

Correct Like a noisy hot engine with wasted energy. In this case though we are getting unwanted excess which can be a detriment. So this is a much better example of tech giving us everything we got before and only cutting what was considered totally useless (unless you like the sound of loud v8s 😁 The difference.. The heat caused from the resistance in the tungsten filament with the flow of electrons is similar but the warmth is of little annoyance maybe sometimes welcome but for our discussion we are only considering the visual spectrum at this stage. The loss of the overall balanced spectrum from not using an incandescent and its Smooth output would be a loss of quality. Cars function if built better can provide same distant with same watts and no impediments. If we could build a light source with the same amount of lumens and the whole visual spectrum we can do a better like for like scenario. Eating rice is definitely more efficient if we only consider macro nutrients against eating steak milk and fruit... but we are dismissing any vitamins and minerals that would much be better to have in our diet. Sorry for the dumb examples Great discussions here on nostr and props to the thread originator for getting us thinking.

I believe the higher quality LED lights with high CRI and R values solves a lot of this with quality of light. This full spectrum lighting would only really be useful for grow lights and current LED grow lights are designed to have those wavelengths for photosynthesis.

Yeah I mentioned plants further down. We could also carry cri torches around also to further efficiency... Listening to 32/96 kbit/s music would be more efficient as opposed 256/320 kbit/s I would prefer and enjoy the higher rate though. Likewise I would prefer an environment with less of a synthetic like spectrum as I could do without the irritation and headaches but sadly energy consumption is expensive and obtaining incandescents are getting harder.

GM y'all! I was going over the September electric bills for my new place and comparing them to my old place and I noticed something interesting. In August/September of 2022 I used 1140 KWH of #electricity in 31 days and I received a bill of $161.89. That works out to be 36.8 KWH a day for $0.142 a KWH. My August/September 2024 bill shows I used 1164 KWH over 30 days and I'm being charged $149.12. That works out to be 38.8 KWH a day and $0.128 a KWH. Over 2 years I was able to use MORE #energy in FEWER days and I was charged LESS overall for it. $0.128 / $0.142 = 90.1% A 9.9% drop in energy costs over 2 years. Roughly 5% a year in savings. This is the #productivity gains of society, that I talked about in the quoted below previous post, being #manifest. It's a beautiful thing to see. nostr:nevent1qqsw7wkvvntydcvmn6jmeagqkdd7r97hkgtsc48q8acjs0ahkndjptsprpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuendwsh8w6t69e3xj730qgst0n75wtleqdzpa3kd2ka4qmuhgss35mngu5jjt4pyg5tfhksr7ksrqsqqqqqpj8vj6r