"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to.”
George Orwell, from "1984"
February 28, 2017 - The government surveys TV use because it’s a component of a household’s overall energy consumption.
This just in from Correspondent Fran - thanks, Fran! - It's an article headlined "Americans have fewer TVs on average than they did in 2009 -And the number of households with no TVs at all grew."
It shows a societal move away from technology, specifically Television. I grew up watching hour upon hour of TV every day, as did everyone else. I now watch a half an hour per day, perhaps an hour. So my own TV use has decreased very significantly. There was no "I"m going to watch less TV" moment. Just the way it went.
"Americans went from having an average of 2.6 TVs per household in 2009 to having 2.3 TVs in 2015." That's an 11% drop, in one year. Did you notice they took care to withhold the percentage, as printing it would have been more impactful? I had to do the math.
Following that same pattern of hedging, we read "in 2015...39 percent of households had more than three TVs, whereas 44 percent had more than three TVs in 2009."
The gave you the numbers, but didn't note the percentage of the drop, as doing so would have been more impactful. "The number of households that had more than three TV's dropped five percent." That's more impactful.
That money quote up at the top of this post, "The government surveys TV use because it’s a component of a household’s overall energy consumption." Well, if that's true, did they break out washers and driers in that way? They consume way more power than TV's, at least they did before the clandestine weaponization of the Television:
"Last September, the Natural Resources Defense Council hired a third-party research firm to study TV energy use and found that several TV manufacturers were building their TVs to narrowly pass federal energy use tests, while consuming much more electricity if any of the TVs' baseline settings were changed."
So the fair-seeming, nattily-dressed sociopaths at the top of the Television Manufacturing control pyramid are lying to you about basically everything, including your TV's power consumption. Did you notice the article doesn't mention who the companies are, or if anything's being done to stop them, you know, like Great-Satan VW, who built a similar work-around, emissions?
But you can see how we're stepping back from the brink, here, I believe. Phone consumption is dropping, TV consumption is dropping, Computer consumption is dropping. Vinyl is rising. Technology can go out of fashion like Three Martini Lunches did.
I'm consuming less TV and didn't even notice it happening, on my way to getting there.
February 28, 2017 - Americans have fewer TVs on average than they did in 2009 - And the number of households with no TVs at all grew.
Americans went from having an average of 2.6 TVs per household in 2009 to having 2.3 TVs in 2015, according to survey data from the US Energy Information Agency (EIA).
The data comes from the agency’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), which has been conducted periodically since the 1970s to understand American energy use. The 2015 survey included 5,600 respondents who were contacted in person and then given an option to follow up by mail or online. A fine-detail report on the survey results is due to be released in April 2017.
The latest data shows that in 2015, 2.6 percent of households had no TV at all, a jump from the previous four surveys in 2009, 2005, 2001, and 1997 in which a steady 1.2 to 1.3 percent of households didn’t own a TV. The 2015 data also showed that the number of people with three TVs or more dropped in 2015. That year, 39 percent of households had more than three TVs, whereas 44 percent had more than three TVs in 2009.
Interestingly, the number of households with one or two TVs increased in 2015 to 58 percent, from 54 percent in 2009.
The EIA doesn’t go into what has caused this shift, but it does note that “younger households tend to have a lower concentration of televisions per person and a higher concentration of portable devices such as laptops and smartphones. Older households are more likely to have higher concentrations of desktop computers.” (Anecdotally, the Ars staff seems to agree that having one or two really nice TVs for family viewing as well as auxiliary devices for streamed media is preferable to having several just-okay TVs.)
The government surveys TV use because it’s a component of a household’s overall energy consumption. According to the EIA, about 6 percent of all electricity consumption in US homes comes from TVs, cable boxes, DVRs, video game consoles, and other peripheral equipment.
As TVs get bigger and higher in resolution, they can demand a lot more electricity, too. Last September, the Natural Resources Defense Council hired a third-party research firm to study TV energy use and found that several TV manufacturers were building their TVs to narrowly pass federal energy use tests, while consuming much more electricity if any of the TVs' baseline settings were changed.