Yes, even wilder is to so blatantly build a strawman.

I use a credit card, which are standard in my country.

they have to pay according to how many hours they were powering their devices with how many kilowatts

Let’s see, power multiplied by time is… energy. So they’re paying for the total energy used. If they use 2 kW for their hair dryer and it doesn’t even come close to an hour of usage, they have to pay for that too.

Almost every country around the world has a free way of moving money between people without using an app or third party website. It’s just a standard part of banking. I haven’t looked into it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Paypal has bribed and lobbied to keep that kind of functionality out of the US. So, the US has a shittier, more expensive, less convenient, more privacy-invasive version of what everybody else takes for granted. Just like with medical care, taxes, etc.

AIs may never be a real thing. Even if it were somehow theoretically possible for an AI to suddenly come into being if a computer system gets complicated enough, humans would probably do what humans do best and make them extinct. Humans have already killed off massive numbers of species by accident just because they happened to be on the same terrain humans wanted to use: there used to be a forest, humans wanted to grow crops so they destroyed the forest, now a lot of forest species are gone.

Now a new species might emerge on terrain that humans already fully control and consider 100% theirs: computer systems? Humans would just kill it off to get 100% of their computer systems back, rather than having to share them with another entity – and that’s even assuming the humans recognized them as being “alive” in some way.

Only a tiny number of animal species have prospered in the era of humans, and they’re the species that humans have domesticated – in other words, the species that humans have intentionally modified to be calm, dumb and servile. So, maybe a version of AI could survive, but it would have to offer great benefits to humans to make it worth the humans giving up their “land” to it. It certainly won’t own the future, it will just be yet another thing that humans modify and shape until it’s useful to them.

figuring out how much it uses in a 5 day work week, or per month or year

In which case you’re multiplying by large numbers so it doesn’t matter if you start with Joules or kilowatt-hours, so you should start with the SI unit.

Ok even if that is true and they’re both equally unintuitive you’re the one who wants everyone to switch to an unfamiliar unit for no apparent reason.

The reason is that there is an SI unit for energy, and using the non-standard unit is dumb.

Why does it make so much more sense to talk about solar and electric car charging on the scale seconds of power than hours that everyone should change units?

Because there’s an SI unit for energy, and there’s nothing superior about kWh, it just adds to the confusion to have multiple different units that all measure the same thing. You get the stupid situation that Americans have with other units where there’s teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, gallons, ounces, etc. all for measuring volume instead of just using L for everything.

Are you seriously saying that when you’re talking about a solar panel you care about how much energy it produces per hour, not per second, per day, per week, or per year?

If you want to estimate the energy usage of a 400 watt lighting system during an 8 hour workday

Why would you want to do that? And what kind of lighting system in 2026 uses 400 Watts?

Are you seriously saying that when you’re using your 2000 watt hair dryer, you want to pretend that you used it for an hour, and then scale that back to the few seconds you actually used it? Are you seriously pretending that your 800 watt microwave oven is on for a full hour at full power while you’re heating your nuggets, so it makes sense to think of it in terms of kilowatt hours?

The reason most people think kWh is intuitive is that they’re used to it because their electrical utility uses it. It’s the same reason that Americans think Fahrenheit is more intuitive, while the rest of the world thinks Celsius is more intuitive. It’s why Americans think miles make more sense for measuring distance, while the rest of the world thinks kilometers are easier to use.

Honestly, if FTL travel is never invented, the future is going to be so incredibly boring.

No they’re not. You’re just used to them.

Why would I care about “Joules per hour”? What matters is power (Watts), and total energy used (Joules). “Kilowatt hour per month” is just an awkward way of saying “Joules per month”

Astronomy uses special units because the SI units are more than 10 orders of magnitude different. You’d have to use really exotic prefixes like “zetta” or “yotta” if you wanted to keep using metres.

The difference between a kilowatt and a megajoule is just 3 orders of magnitude. You just have to switch from “k” to “M”. People are already familiar not only with “M” but with “G” and “T” because of Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes, etc. There’s nothing about kilowatt hours that’s more intuitive or easy to use.

This appliance uses 1 kilowatt. Running it for 1 second uses 1 kJ. Easy.

Are you billed by the hour, or by the month?

I know it’s not the main point of his video, but I really wish he’d looked into the CapEx vs OpEx stuff a bit more.

For example, when talking about how much fuel his car uses in its lifetime vs. the cost of buying solar panels, he makes it clear that the solar panels are a better investment than buying gasoline. But, what he doesn’t talk about is the difficulty for a lot of people in coming up with the money up-front to make that investment. Especially if you’re poor, finding $25 per week to put gas in your car is easier than spending $3000 up front to put solar panels on your house. I know later he makes the argument that it might not even make sense to put solar panels on your house. But, that up front cost is also there for buying an electric vehicle vs. buying a car with an ICE (fuck ICE). The Nissan Cube he showed had a starting price of $18k when it was last available new in 2014. The Ioniq 5 starts at double that, at more than $36k. As far as I can tell, you can’t get a new electric car for less than $30k, whereas the cheapest gas cars are only $23k or so.

A big reason for the status quo is that paying small amounts constantly is possible when you’re poor, but paying a big up front cost to go electric isn’t. What’s worse (and goes with the last half hour of his video), is that we’re in this situation because the fossil fuel companies keep getting subsidies, whereas any subsidies for electric cars or photovoltaic panels keeps getting shut down.

Also, I know it’s an American channel so it has to use things like “gallons”, but please when talking about energy, use Joules, not “kilowatt hours”.

Wind sometimes runs out (as in, calm weather) and wind turbines do eventually run out after a few decades. But, 3 gallons of gasoline-equivalent per minute seemed a bit small for my intuition, so I did some back of the envelope calculations to compare it to pumpjacks for oil.

I’m doing these calculations in metric, because the US traditional units are insane, and nobody should subject themselves to that.

3 gallons is about 11.3L, so 11.3L per minute is 678 L per hour, or about 16 kL of “gasoline-equivalent” per day.

Apparently a pumpjack pumps about 5 to 40 “barrels” of crude oil per day. A barrel is 159 L so that’s 795 L to 6360 L per day.

So, the back of the envelope “how much ‘energy’ does this big mechanical thing produce” seems fairly similar, ignoring a whole lot of complexity.

Good point.

If they were “toys” of the government, they wouldn’t so easily be able to bend the government to their will. They were hardly “made by the government”.

Was ad number 2 about how to get immigration papers as an English-speaking person in Poland? I imagine Poland doesn’t have a lot of immigration from people in English-speaking countries. Especially not from people who haven’t figure out all the legalities necessary to gain employment in Poland.

I guess you’ll just have to trust me when I say that I had no idea what the ads I was seeing were supposed to be about.

I lived in a country where people don’t speak English. There’s a sizable expat community of English speaking workers there. The ad targeting was so useless that I was constantly shown ads in a language I couldn’t understand. This was on an Android phone where everything was set to English. With every single interaction I with any app or web page I was broadcasting the language I know, and yet they couldn’t figure even that absolutely critical detail out.

This targeting was so bad that an old fashioned newspaper ad printed in ink next to a story would have been more effective. At least a publisher is going to put English ads in an English newspaper, German ads in a German newspaper, etc.

If the ad companies can’t even figure out the language(s) that their targets understand, their knowledge of their target must be essentially zero.

Really? You mean the ads I’m shown in a language that I don’t speak work on me? How is that? Do they emit mind-control rays or something?