10.4 million years of human time invested on Facebook every year. That's 28,493 days per day.
So, what about Facebook?
Baer's underlying assumptions are that the energy cost of drying clothes is "normal" and the loss of energy consumption represents a loss to the economy.
It might be the case that that is only true in terms of dollars, but not in terms of economic production.
The production of energy is based largely on the industrial "extractive" industries of metals and energy. Raising energy demand by using electricity or gas to artificially dry clothes raises the relative price of those energy sources by increasing demand, which leads to higher prices for all other classes of energy consumers.
Higher energy costs to consumers and businesses decreases the amount of capital available to invest in marketing, production and consumption, the three principal productive functions of capitalism. Obviously, if energy were infinitely expensive, those three functions would be zero. Conversely (and I use the term perversely), if energy were free, then production and consumption could rise, which is good for profits.
Similarly, drying clothes is largely a 'nonproductive' consumption of energy. It is a great convenience everywhere, and dramatically improves the quality of life in very humid climates, but the act of drying itself does not result in subsequent production of goods or services, other than that of producing the energy, noted above.
Oh, yeah, back to Facebook. What happens when you take 31 million years worth of human labor (in 8 hour shifts) and spend it on Facebook every year?
Yup. Multiply 1 billion users times 15 minutes per day (average usage on Facebook, Sept. 2012) = 10.4 million years. Measured at eight hours per day (average working shift, to represent an economic scale), it works out to 31.2 million years -- of shift work.
How much would 31.2 million woman-years (ok, person-years) of labor change the world economic output, over that same Facebook year, had it not been "invested" in staring at Facebook, but in all other types of human activities?
I'll bet there's several million pizzas, millions of barrels of beer, an eternity of cell phone minutes, and an endless line of supertankers of gasoline that didn't get consumed during that time that would otherwise have been gleefully contributed to total economic output.
Instead, 26.45 Jigglewatts of electric energy was released to the atmosphere as heat (I totally made up Jigglewatts, just you so know) and resulted in the melting of all the ice in Greenland (ditto, eh?) and Texas. And it was all spent by 1 billion people staring at Facebook. Not shopping, not driving, not working. Just sitting. And staring.
Now, there's a clothesline for you. Not only is Facebook extraordinarily annoying, but it's killing the Polar Bears, and making oil barons rich.