You also have to count purchasing cost, and a paid for appliance versus a several hundred dollar appliance that you wind up replacing every XX number of years may very well mean the old appliance wins out. But that's a tricky numbers game with a great many variables.

That's the reason people are usually screwed when they've bought a gas guzzler and want to trade it in for a more economical car. The differences in mileage may be a benefit, but insurance and the $$$$$$$$ you put down for the new car in the first place may mean you don't break even until 10-20 years down the road, and by then some number of people would be buying another car in the first place.

Interesting puzzle:

Quick, without doing any math is it better to replace your 12 mpg truck with a 22 mpg truck or your 32mpg commuter with a 42mpg commuter? Or are they the same?






Dun dun dun, if you said 12 mpg with 22mpg you got the right answer. Now go grab a pencil and prove it to yourself since I know you won't believe me.

What you're saying isn't that tricky, when I say pay for itself, it does. You're talking saving over 200 USD electricity, that's not hard to calculate, it's fucking easy. If it costs 400 dollars to replace it and it breaks every 3 years you'll still save money.

If you're referring to the regulations they talked about for the Soviet Union and East Germany, it should be noted that I was referring to how regulations work here in the U.S.A. I don't want to put a label on myself, but if you want to have a better understanding of my thinking on this issue, this link would do a better job. See the limited government section.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_libertarianism
And this one - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market_environmentalism
I don't see this being a problem if people are capable of producing their own power.

The wrong answer, depending whether or not entirely if it was the right question to begin with. And if you're talking about saving money, the correct answer is trading in the 12 MPG vehicle for a 42 MPG vehicle if 1) you can make up the expense of the vehicle within the time you'd get a new one, and 2) do not ambush yourself by thinking if you have a higher mileage car it's an excuse to drive everywhere more often, and 3) get the vehicle that's useful to you; if you need a truck that gets 12 MPG for specific purposes and then go get a tiny econobox, you're not helping yourself any.

And if you can shave off $200 a month in your electricity bill and not be spending close to nothing a month, and if your goal is to save money, you're doing something very wrong. A far more realistic difference between new appliances and old ones is still more complicated than looking at a couple numbers you hope are right before you bring it home, and the savings may be more like $200 a year.

The reason most people would trade a 12 mpg rig in for a 22 mpg rig is they'd be in the same class of vehicle (usually a light truck or minivan). For most people it's an option of trading same for same, it goes without saying that the more mpg you can trade up the better. The mindscrew that most people fail at is thinking switching out their 32 mpg rig for a 42 mpg rig is a better deal than trading the their 12 mpg rig for a 22 mpg rig. This assumes similar distance driven.

So the right answer is 12 mpg for the 22 mpg, this is the biggest savings. This has very real applications, many folks misunderstood the cash for clunkers program the US ran recently, thinking people were trading in shitty trucks and buying another truck and that this was a waste. They misunderstood that this was better overall investment of the dollars spent than buying everyone who already had a fuel efficient car an even more fuel efficient car.

Appliance savings are always dollars per year in the US, if you've bought an appliance in the last couple of decades you should have come across this. Yes, a new washing machine can easily save you 200 USD per year in electricity over a 35 year old one. This will pay for an average cost washing machine in 2 years time. The Energy Star Program requires a percentage improvement in energy usage out of manufacturers every year, so each new machine will be even better, though only marginally from year to year.
If they can produce clean energy, sure. Right now we're still burning natural gas and topping mountains for coal, though, so energy savings are a big deal.

Yeah, clean energy, and with some deregulation, I think we will have more clean energy options available. Solar is my favorite. Some farmers, but not all obviously, had wind generators with battery backup before the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. That was halted for the most part because of that act. I often wonder if clean energy would have caught on long ago if that act had never been passed.

I doubt it because if you look where energy usage spiked it wasn't in farming. I think we would have seen essentially the same evolution. If you want individual production to go up the biggest thing you can do is try and change any local laws that don't require the grid to buy back energy you push onto it or let them buy it back at wholesale rates (if they are willing to sell to me at wholesale then I'm happy to sell back at the same rate, otherwise it's legalized extortion and price fixing).

I'll agree that that is the best way to get individual production up at the moment. PURPA helps with this. However, if an efficient way of storing power becomes readily available (battery storage sucks), I don't think the grid will be nearly as necessary.

I'm actually hopeful some of these new gen batteries under research, one of them has got to be the real deal. Retail we don't have anything great, you are right. It sucks, but we'll solve that one too, I hope.

Just curious, what batteries are you hopeful for? I haven't kept up on them, I just figured that batteries are a lost cause.

Up here in Canada, there used to be a commercial of a washing machine repair man (for either Mayfair or Maytag brand or something like that; can't remember) who'd never ever get a call, because the product he's there to provide service for would never break down.

This thread reminds me of that commercial - well, the fact that I don't believe I've seen it in the past 10yrs, whereas it was a staple of Cdn television in the years prior to the past decade.

Every once in awhile you get stories about people doing crazy stuff with graphene or whatever. Some of it will come to market, and when it does, I'm building a giant exoskeleton to walk around in!
In the US this was The Maytag Repairman. Maytag is a good brand but it's just a brand now, I think Whirlpool owns Maytag and makes all the Kirkland brand appliances as well.

Sounds pretty cool. I'm gonna go ahead and poop on your parade and just say that an exoskeleton like that would be a huge waste of resources for one person. I can't help being a boring practical thinker about things like that :) But hell, if you can make it yourself, I say go for it.

One other thing I always think of when talking about planned obsolescence is the movie Robocop. It really is an awesome satire.

The last thing I have to add before going back to my internet-less home is that the subtitles at the 24:39 minute mark cracked me up a bit. It would just kill me if I knew that guy was suffering stomach pains because he couldn't full fart.

Yeah, it sucks. It's kind of funny, that my prewar kitchen [edit]OVEN[/edit] is still operating, and i've baked a cheesecake in it two days ago. About 80 years of operation.