Whoa! Five hours of TV per day. At first I thought this was hyperbole, but a quick trip to Google confirmed it's an accurate metric. That's an absolutely staggering amount of TV.
Assuming an adult with a full-time job gets home and has supper on the table by 6pm, we're talking about watching from 6-11pm. That doesn't sound that staggering to me.
And that's not allowing for folks who watch the morning news, or folks who work shifts or stay-at-home parents who watch during the day.
Again, take the article's advice: don't judge the numbers by your experience. While a lot of people on HN might fill their time gaming, coding, watching streaming video, etc, we're not a typical cohort.
it sounds absolutely staggering to me that a person would subject their home environment to that level of disruptive noise and advertisement spam.
I understand that you're suggesting that people having TV on in the background accounts for a lot of this, but to me that just makes it even more surprising and, honestly, disturbing. this kind of thing takes a toll on a person's unconscious mind.
Walk into a lot of bars/restaurant, airports, etc. etc. and you'll have TVs in the background. I know a lot of people whose first instinct when they walk into a room is to turn on the TV. Can't stand it myself but it's very common behavior.
It is, but it's easy to see where it comes from. When I was a kid, I'd usually catch 30-60 minutes before school, depending on how early I got up. School finished at 3:15, I'd be back by 3:30 in time to watch kid's programming until 5:30. Then there was a dull gap with Neighbours or The Weakest Link. Then the Simpsons had a slot at 6:00... and so on.
So that's a good 3-3.5 hours most days of the week. On a Saturday it wouldn't be uncommon to watch morning TV for 2-3 hours. I was brought up as a BBC person, so adverts weren't really a problem, but if you watch another channel there are probably folks who watch an hour of ads a day.
While I was writing up my thesis and I was doing mind-numbing stuff like processing data or making figures, I often put Netflix on in the background and could easily fit in 5-6 episodes a day.
When I was a kid I was allowed 5 hours of TV per week. News was excluded, and a football game only took two hours back then. But, yeah: 5 hours a day is quite a bit.
How do they measure that? Is it done by some TVmeters, or just self-reporting?
There is a possibility that TV is on for five hours, but nobody really watches it that much.
Measuring TV viewership has been going on for 50 years. They're not so dumb as to just measure the time the TV spends emitting photons.
Today Neilsen uses multiple techniques. In addition to self-reporting via diaries, local people meters are deployed in measured homes. When a person sits in front of the TV they identify themselves to the LPM by pressing their ID button in order to indicate someone is in front of the TV.
Yes there may be error in this since it's just-in-time self-reporting, but viewership numbers have been robust and consistent for a very long time.
They're also only getting metrics from people willing to be Neilsen reporters. What kind of compensation do they offer to do this? How many people refuse, because they can't be bothered with it? Is someone who makes $150k going to have any interest in being a part of this? If not, then the results are skewed because you're only getting the lower-income people. What about people who don't have a TV; how are they measuring that?
I posit that viewership numbers have been "robust and consistent" because they're picking people who fit that.
It presumes, of course, that there aren't multiple ways that viewership is measured beyond just nielsen, and that in 50 years no one considered this possibility and developed methods to unskew the data.
You might wish to consider how many people in the US make "$150k", and then reconsider if excluding them would be representative.
Also, all the cable providers sell aggregate/anonymous statistics about TV viewership. Because of SDV, they know what channel your Cable box is tuned to.
Making $150k in the US is nothing remarkable, especially if you're a dual-earner family. Good luck affording decent housing in many metro areas if you make less than that.
So what? That's irrelevant, because housing costs vary dramatically in different markets. $150k isn't going to buy you a nice house in Silicon Valley, maybe an efficiency condo at best.
According to your link, San Jose is #2, right behind Seattle, for software engineers as far as salary/CoL ratio. So it really doesn't get much better than Silicon Valley's insane cost of living. It's just like I said: the housing costs may be lower elsewhere, but the salaries are even lower so it isn't worth it. Seattle is the only exception, and it's not that much better.
I can personally tell you that salaries for your run of the mill enterprise senior softwares developer is between $120K and $145K in Atlanta and you can easily buy a house in the burbs with a good school system for less than $400k.
From what I've seen, the same is true for at least the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.
