Who the hell measures energy in joules?
That's a little under 1kWh. Or playing your gaming PC for 3 hours.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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I'd much prefer to pay an artist to be using their PC for three hours than a corporation
1kWh 3hrs playtime. Not on gaming PC of today. Only my 32" 240Hz display itself consumes more than that.
As an American I appreciate how they included both metric (Joules) and imperial (hours running a microwave) measurements
I only know how long bald eagles burn for.
How do I convert microwave hours to bald eagle burn time (in number of football games including all dead ball times and the halftime shows)?
Truly every time period of human civilization had something in it that would make future generations shake their heads in disbelief.
"How could they use gigawatthours for crypto farms and useless AI applications while fully aware of a climate crisis caused by fossil fuels?", a student might ask his history teacher some day. "Because they were dumb as fuck.", the teacher might answer.
Did you see the stockarket?!
Stonkrocket
They definitely need to make measures like this widely available.
3.4 megajoules = 944 watt hours
Microwaves are typically rated at 1200-1500 watts, sometimes more. Do they actually use that much? I'm not sure, stuff typically uses less than the rated power on the label.
That's watts, not watt hours though, so it's like microwaving something for a little under an hour, which is unrelatable for most people.
But take your 300 watt gaming PC, play on it for 3 hours, suddenly you're at 900 watt hours and that's probably easier to picture for most people.
Except when you do that, you only get 3 hours of boring lame video games, rather than 5 whole seconds of thrilling slop.
Thank you for the conversion. We have a common unit for electrical energy already, and megajoules is not it. Trying to make it sound like a bigger number by changing the unit only muddies the waters and honestly makes me slightly less sympathetic to the issue.
Seriously?
Joules are the SI unit for energy measurement. 1 Joule = 1 Watt second, so 3600 Joules = 1 Watt Hour
They teach this in middle school.
Ok, but when it comes to electrical energy nobody uses "watt seconds" in the real world. Devices use hundreds of watts, and run for minutes and hours. Dividing by 3.6 million isn't exactly easy mental math to get the unit (kWh) we all see on our electric bills.
Yeah, that's true, but joules typically isn't used today. When people talk about energy consumption it's almost always in watts or watt-hours. I've seen/heard people use joules less than 5 times since college.
Ive seen more 700-1200 watt microwaves.
Lighting the planet on fire for SpongeBob police chase videos
Probably more like Spongebob with bouncing juggs videos