> You're using a toy example to strawman the Joule counterpoint.

Not a toy example. That's exactly how I estimate energy consumption for off the shelf devices. And for battery life (W*h but still).

> 100W light bulb and know exactly what it will cost you, and not a world where half your bulbs claim to be 100W but are actually 14W with 100W-incandescent-equivalent and such.

If you've lived with lighting you're responsible for, you've replaced bulbs. You know the different technologies and the packages say how much power they require.

To take your example, your 14 Watt lightbulb would use about 0.35kWh per day if running all day, or about 10kWh per month of nonstop usage. At 0.15$/kWh, that's about a dollar and fifty cents, assuming you'd want to leave it on all day and night.

All of that math can be done in your head too, if you're willing to approximate the number of hours in a day to 25 and the numbers of days in a month to 30.

>In the end there's no practical utility to this. We just pretend that we're living in a world where you get a 100W light bulb and know exactly what it will cost you, and not a world where half your bulbs claim to be 100W but are actually 14W with 100W-incandescent-equivalent and such.

Where i live, the pricing is based on the amount of energy "consumed" during a month. plus we use 220v.

i use the kwh extensively, my induction cooker is rated at 1300Watts so i know by running it for 1 hour i am consuming 1.3kwh.

my monthly "consumption" before installing a 5kwh solar on-grid used to be around 300Kwh during summer months so over time i have learned to "reduce" my monthly usage, aka kwh by reducing my electric hot water geyser( going to solar water heater) (2kw geyser).

the kwh is definitely a good indicator for me