100 Watts for us, 11,000 Watts for US

An earlier post turned me on to the fact that a human being uses about 100 watts in our daily activities. That seems like a pretty good deal to me, we can do all sorts of things for only 100 watts -run jump, hide, think, etc. But it turns out that as an American we use about 11,000 watts. Now when I think about that, I say to myself, ""Myself, that's a real ton of energy". Especialy if you listen to Bob Black, who thinks that 90 percent of all work is just combatting the work of others with nothing really productive being accomplished. So if we are blowing 11,000 watts on doing things which are only 10 productive, Houston, we have a problem.

Which brings me around to our 100 energy slaves that we have cranking away for us. Here's some of them pictured above and critiqued in this article by Elizabeth Grossman. The bodies of the fallen, used up in our day to day duties. Did they make the world a better place? Apparently not so much as one would think, which, after taking into account all the resources to build these things, the new gain in efficiency turn out to be damn near nothing. I love computing, but what's the point? Show me some numbers to make me a believer.