Your ZIP Code and Your Life Expectancy (nytimes.com) 61
New submitter moogmachine shares a report: New data on electricity consumption has offered an insight into Americans' level of wariness in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic: Many appeared to be staying home to avoid the virus even before lockdown orders were issued in March. The data, on consumption in homes in 30 states, shows that energy use began to rise in many states about a week before stay-at-home orders were issued but after states of emergency were declared. The data comes from Sense, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that sells a device to help homeowners track energy use through a smartphone app. The information comes with some caveats. For instance, the devices tend to be popular with tech-savvy early adopters, and the typical Sense home is larger than most. Overall data came from about 5,000 of the devices across 30 states that were geographically representative of the country, the company said.
Like a recent study of electricity use in New York City apartments, the Sense data shows a sharp rise in consumption, with most of the increase coming during the day, when in normal times many people would be at work or school. Across all 30 states, the company reported a 22 percent average increase in overall domestic consumption from March 10 to April 10 this year compared with 2019. The data was adjusted to account for weather differences. Broken down by date and state -- the company looked at data for California, New York and seven other states individually -- the results are even more intriguing. George Zavaliagkos, the company's vice president of technology, said that when he first started looking at the data, he expected to see a rise in energy use in a given state when that state's government issued a lockdown order. California was the first state to order a statewide lockdown, on March 19. New York and other states followed quickly.
Like a recent study of electricity use in New York City apartments, the Sense data shows a sharp rise in consumption, with most of the increase coming during the day, when in normal times many people would be at work or school. Across all 30 states, the company reported a 22 percent average increase in overall domestic consumption from March 10 to April 10 this year compared with 2019. The data was adjusted to account for weather differences. Broken down by date and state -- the company looked at data for California, New York and seven other states individually -- the results are even more intriguing. George Zavaliagkos, the company's vice president of technology, said that when he first started looking at the data, he expected to see a rise in energy use in a given state when that state's government issued a lockdown order. California was the first state to order a statewide lockdown, on March 19. New York and other states followed quickly.
How many krispy kremes in my zip? (Score:1)
I know, I know, correlation is not causation.
wtf does tfa have to do with life expectancy??? (Score:3, Insightful)
I only read the summary like every other casual schmuck on this site, and neither the words "life" nor "expectancy" show up anywhere in that summary. Quit trying to gaslight Slashdot with shitty headlines and red banners. We gaslight ourselves fine without all the extra help.
Stupid headline (Score:5, Insightful)
I was expecting a real article on the actual topic and to see something about rich vs poor or regional things like hot vs cold, urban vs rural. Not some bullshit PR / advertisement from some startup selling home automation toys.
Re:Stupid headline (Score:5, Informative)
Does not match article. Article says nothing about higher life expectancy.
You need to look at the article above the one that's quoted in TFS to read the one that matches the headline. The NYT put two articles on one page; Slashdot editors weren't paying attention and created the headline for the first article, instead of for the second one which the submitter was referring to.
It's not the editor's fault (Score:1)
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Please turn on javascript so our site will work properly. And by properly we mean our shiny bullshit will break anyway.
Maybe it was for the best - I think I'd prefer to hear sci-like babbling over zip code data than the slashvertisment for smart cloud home !Apps! crap.
It is totally the editors' fault (Score:3)
Zip code is statistically imprecise (Score:1)
I just go by my Slashdot userid instead. It's looking positive.
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She got a superstitious mind [youtube.com]
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Those with a negative Slashdot userid really need to be looked into... oh, wait, that's Karma Score!
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I'll volunteer to do the extensive looking into for the Karma superstition.
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First you need to gain a few more positive mod points...
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I held "excellent Karma" for 10 years before you even got here.
There is barely an ounce of intellectual honesty left on Slashdot, and "-1, I have no argument but it hurts my leftist feelings" the new moderation norm.
And, I know what "points" actually matter now.
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Seems to confirm, people don't need government telling us, how to save ourselves... Can we get it back to focus on what it is supposed to focus on — upholding laws and defending borders — please? Leaving our lives to us?
The government only upholds the laws that it is interested in. Defending the borders hasn't been one of those things for quite some time.
As for leaving your life to you, unfortunately a huge percent of the population would very much like to tell everyone else what to do with their lives (and their money).
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The government is made of the people you chose to represent you.
Sadly, a majority of idiots are happy with their own representative. It's YOUR representative that is the problem, naturally.
I don't get the whole "defend the borders" thing, well I get it but I don't see how it's a priority. What would we defend the borders from? Goods produced by child labor? Unsafely handled produce? Products that violate trademarks and copyright? Any person desperate enough to want to get a job and pay taxes without a socia
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tribalism, xenophobia, ...
Usually people make up some fake excuse or rationalization when they base their position on emotions or irrational beliefs, rather than on facts and carefully considered ethnics. Excuses such as: "They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
It's easy to explain what this
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Or, maybe the facts and "ethnics" were seriously considered, but the person priors didn't match yours and they had no need to virtue signal, so they came to a different conclusion?
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Some of it is subjective, some of it is not. We can't get to the juicy stuff if we can't even agree on basic provable principles.
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Well, if we'd not let in so many illegals that work illegally for the LOW pay....from decades back....
We'd then have higher wages for those jobs worked fo
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Well, if we'd not let in so many illegals that work illegally for the LOW pay....from decades bac
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There's a difference between migrant and illegal migrant labor.
The former can be controlled as to how many are let in, etc....to balance with US citizen work needs as well as labor costs/pay.....
The un-regulated latter influx of cheap labor breaks down the living wage being paid to people here legally to work and live.....
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Maybe because those plants would have to pay decent wages to hire legal citizens? Instead, we have the government taxing some citizens to pay others that can find a job that pays more than what the government is handing out.
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The government is made of the people you chose to represent you.
Not really. The government is made up of people that a majority chose. Mob rule, in other words. If not for a strong constitution with civil rights and limits on what the majority can choose to grant themselves, we just devolve into a nation of looters.
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The government is made of the people you chose to represent you.
Sadly, a majority of idiots are happy with their own representative. It's YOUR representative that is the problem, naturally.
People evaluate their congresspeople based on how much pork they bring home. People evaluate Congress as a whole based on how much money is wasted on pork. :-)
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That may be because there are too many to choose from...
I know that — indeed, my post was aimed at them.
The "Troll" moderation of it is a sign, I hit the target :)
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As for leaving your life to you, unfortunately a huge percent of the population would very much like to tell everyone else what to do with their lives (and their money).
A key difference between anarchists and libertarians is that anarchists don't make a pretense of being interested in other people. Many of the laws that ostensibly infringe on personal liberties are motivated by the reality that many personal decisions impact others. We all agree that murder is a personal decision that should be heavily restricted and punished due to the impact on others. The only difference between murder and is the belief that the impact on others either doesn't exist or is insignific
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Well duh, the lockdown orders came very late in the states with the worst cases. Cuomo waited until March to lock down and still hasn't locked down many school functions (free breakfast, lunch and dinner in packed halls) and subway and other packed transportation methods.
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Not to mention mandating that nursing homes take CoVID-19 infected [nbcnews.com]. Sending sick right to those most affected. No wonder why half of all nursing home deaths happened in the greater NYC area...
Cuomo's been a disaster on this. Combined with the clown De Blasio, they are responsible for nearly half the CoVID-19 deaths in the the US.
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I think New York's worse problem is going to turn out to be Coumo's order to send discharged Covid patients back to nursing homes. Compare New York's numbers to Florida's, where the Health Secretary took a VERY strong stand to defend the nursing homes.
Re: So, we don't need government telling us... (Score:1)
That was part of Medicare/Medicaid directives.
Part of the ObamaCare implementations required cost cutting across hospital. One way was to minimize stocks of unused items like PPE and ventilators as Medicare stopped covering stockpiling and reduce the amount of time hospital reimbursements were covered when patients have "other care" options.
The whole epidemic has been made worse by socializing healthcare which also minimizes coverage. See what happened in Europe, they still can't walk further than a few kil
I've been using more electricity (Score:3)
Not because I'm at home, but because it has been a very cold April and May so far.
I used about 320KWh in the mid April to mid May billing cycle. In the warmer months it's usually more like 215KWh. In winter months, closer to 500KWh.
There is a separate bill from another company for natural gas for the water heater, stove and furnace.
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Wait, you have a natural gas furnace, but your electric bill goes up when it's cold? How does that work?
Perhaps he has space heaters for individual rooms, versus the furnace which is for the full house. It may be more economical to only keep some of the rooms warmed some of the time.
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Wait, you have a natural gas furnace, but your electric bill goes up when it's cold? How does that work?
There are fans to push the hot air through the house and pull the cold air back in. And electric filters.
This is a survey of nerds who spent $300 (Score:3)
From the summary: "The data comes from Sense, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that sells a device to help homeowners track energy use through a smartphone app. The information comes with some caveats. For instance, the devices tend to be popular with tech-savvy early adopters, and the typical Sense home is larger than most"
The device costs $300 on amazon. They say they wont charge a monthly fee for the service but apparently they are tracking and sharing your data.
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Any worse than the smart meters the utilities* use? They probably have the same data, just more of it.
*Electricity, water, gas, etc.
Amazing insight (Score:3, Funny)
Tech bros with $500 privacy invading devices controlled by apps stayed home. Great stuff.
The article is dancing around the issue (Score:2)
Basically folks on the lower end of the Socio-Economic ladder are much more likely to live in multi-generational homes (fancy way to say you live with your parents and their parents too).
You're also much more likely to work in an essential business (Groceries, manufacturing, blue collar work, restaurant) where you don't have paid sick leave and where you can't just go on unemployment because your job's closed.
Basically they younger workers are bringing the virus home to their granda
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California tech companies started having their people work from home up to two weeks before the shutdown (Apple mandatory Mar. 8, Amazon and Google Mar. 12, with at least some of those companies allowing voluntary WFH for a week or more before that), so the effect in California may be exaggerated because of tech savvy people being likely to work in tech. Not sure about other areas.
Think of the children... (Score:2)
We've all been trained to believe we'll be dead by 72 by our parents... but that's the average age, and for every kid who posted a dead at 7 on the scoreboard, we have to factor that into the average. I'll be around til 100, trust me.
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If you were born today, your life expectancy is 75 years (not 72).
But if you made it to age 70, then you can expect to live to age 84.
And if you somehow make it to age 80, then you can expect to have another 8 years ahead of you.
Of course, new technologies could change all of that, but caveat emptor [youtube.com].
i am careful with consumption (Score:2)
i dont keep lights on in every room of the house, i dont leave BIG televisions on blaring loudly all day long, i dont keep big botnetted desktop PCs running 24/7/365, i only have a couple laptops and an AM/FM radio for electronics, i abandoned TV long ago since it is such a spammy piece of crap with 75% advertising,
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Thank you for sharing. It's a real shame that they don't give out medals for out-of-the-blue virtue signaling, you would get at least a silver.
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I mean, lights aren't really a drain anymore. You can leave a whole house lit for what usedto only light one room. And even BIG TVs don't really matter anymore either, the average laptop draws more power. A gaming laptop certainly will. Feel free to not watch TV, but power consumption shouldn't be a reason.
HVAC, appliances and anything that's doing computation (laptops, desktops) are the real energy hogs these days. Unless you have old appliances/light bulbs/TVs. Those things will suck down the juice r
Arizona Theory (Score:2)
I would suspect the AZ power usage going down against the trend may be associated with an unusually cool and pleasant March & April. It was open-window weather rather than air conditioning weather.
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From the article:
The data was adjusted to account for weather differences.
Of course, that's no guarantee that they did it correctly, but....
Crazy (Score:3)
Tech-Savvy People? (Score:5, Funny)
the devices tend to be popular with tech-savvy early adopters
No, I'd say it was popular with hipsters who pose as tech savvy. Real tech-savvy people don't need a gadget to tell them that a washing machine uses more electricity than a light bulb.
Re:Tech-Savvy People? (Score:4, Interesting)
FTFA:-
the devices tend to be popular with tech-savvy early adopters
No, I'd say it was popular with hipsters who pose as tech savvy. Real tech-savvy people don't need a gadget to tell them that a washing machine uses more electricity than a light bulb.
Identifying differences in power consumption between devices isn't the point of such a power-monitoring system (and, yes, I have one, though not this brand). The point is to identify patterns in usage and deviations from patterns. If you're using unexpected amounts of power, you find out why.
For one example: When I first got mine, I discovered I had a phantom 400W draw somewhere in the house. It turned out that it was a temperature-activated fan in the attic, intended to keep the attic cool on hot days, but the fan was overpowered and inefficient as well as installed badly so it didn't move as much air as it should for such a beast of a fan. Rather than replace it, I instead installed a couple of turbine ventilators in the roof, which are powered by the hot air flowing through them. The result was that the fan then ran so rarely that it wasn't worth replacing it (and it actually did move enough hot air out of the attic that it paid for itself in reduced AC costs when it needed to run).
For another example, I'm now on a time-of-use plan that makes my electricity dirt cheap most of the day (3.4 cents per kWh) but pretty expensive for a few hours a day (34 cents per kWh). I have monitoring set up so that my phone alerts me if the current cost per hour rises above a certain threshold. This basically only happens if someone turns on a high-draw appliance (or starts charging one of the EVs -- the chargers normally refuse to charge during peak hours, but this can be overidden) during peak hours, so I can look into what's going on.
I also monitor overall consumption and periodically do an analysis to figure out what can be turned off or unplugged. The home monitor has the ability to monitor individual circuits, which helps, but I do end up going around with the kill-a-watt device to measure individual draws. I obviously know the difference between a washing machine and an (LED) light, but with many "smarter" appliances it's really not clear how much they use. The label tells you about their maximum draw, but not about their pattern of consumption.
Actual NYT article, has BOTH topics content... (Score:1)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0... [nytimes.com]