32 thoughts on “Crony Light Bulbs”

  1. It’s always amusing to hear the Howling over Light Bulbs.

    I guess in a few days we will see some whinging over solar panels.

    1. Leftist view of the world:

      Can I buy what I want? No.
      Can I make decisions with my own property? No.
      Can I keep most of my own money? No.
      What can I make a choice to do? Get an abortion.

        1. So, you didn’t contradict a single one of my points. I lament the fact that the propertlyess get to vote themselves the property of others. I lament that you don’t want personal individual freedom except to get stoned and kill a gestating human being.

          1. Rightist View of the World:

            Can I buy what I want? Yes, including nuclear weapons
            Can I make decisions with my own property? Yes, including dumping toxic waste into the water supply of millions.
            Can I keep most of my own money? Yes, even if i acquired it through fraud or force.
            What can I make a choice to do? Why any choice, as long as nobody with more money can stop me.

    3. Wow dn-guy you are seriously disturbed.

      How about phoning 9-1-1 and asking for help before you hurt yourself.

      Seriously.

      1. He should actually dial 9-9-9 or 1-1-2 over there in the UK…

        British subjects have suffered under the lunacy of an incandescent ban for 3-5 years longer than United States’ citizens. Apparently, this early ban has sufficiently lowered the expectation and standard of quality of life for British subjects enough that their view of anyone fighting against such a ban is seen as “whinging”.

        Luckily, there are still people on THIS side of the pond who think that it is healthy and proper to fight against such onerous regulations and impositions on our freedom. The real shame is that there is such a large percentage of the industrialized world that is blind to the economic damage caused by the ever-growing amount of government regulation under the guise of “protecting society from evil carbon output”.

  2. Here is something to howl about.

    Dehumidifiers.

    They are subject to strict energy standards . . . not! The gummint puts its EnergyStar label on qualifying dehumidifiers, but you are not forced to purchase an EnergyStar qualified unit.

    One thing that is regulated is that they are Freon Free. They are Freon Free and they break down. After a season or two. And if you want to dispose of your broken dehumidifier, in the People’s Republic named after a Founding Father, you get billed for the dispatch of a HazMat team, because there is left-over not-Freon in it.

    Oh, and most of the new EnergyStar models are less energy efficient (yes, less energy efficient — I measured this with my Kill-A-Watt meter and a water measuring cup I purloined from the kitchen in a side-by-side comparison with a pre EnergyStar pre not-Freon unit that still runs). The manufacturers boost their efficiency ratings under the artificial gummint test conditions by using continuous fan, which lowers the efficiency — a lot — in on/off operation controlled by the humidistat in normal use — and EPA is only slowly catching wise to this.

  3. You guys should go easy on dn-guy. You see, his parents raised him under the light of incandescent bulbs, whose glowing tungsten filaments colored everything he saw and read during his formative years. It was only a few years ago that he realized the horror of what they had done to him, with the long term psychological effects of the red-shifted spectrum only later becoming apparent in so many ways. Of course he denounced them publicly for their evil illumination, and disowned them as primitive, wasteful relics of a bygone era that will be swept into the dustbin of history. (His parents, I mean, not the tungsten light bulbs.)

    The whole experience has shattered his psyche like a burned-out 150-Watt Phillips soft-white dropped from a ceiling fixture by a fumble-fingered parent, but without the two-week mercury hazmat cleanup of the CFL he’s now forcing his parents to use.

    1. Not-so-funny story about CFLs:

      I purchased a few colored CFL bulbs for my porch lights for the holidays when they were on sale at the hardware store. I dropped the second bulb on my porch within 30 seconds of opening the package. It hit the stool I was climbing on, shattering as glass is wont to do.

      It took me over 5 minutes just to find the proper cleanup procedure online, then another 20 minutes cleaning up the mess with a piece of stiff paperboard, dust pan, and masking tape.

      The whole s–tin’ works is sitting in a ziploc bag on my porch over a month later because the local Solid Waste Agency’s website is a hot mess and there is no accurate information on where I can take this little bag of joy.

      The only CFLs I have in my house are colored, and used for holidays. I have one LED bulb which I got for free, and it is in a spare bedroom that rarely gets used. All of my other primary lights in the house are on dimmers, and have incandescents coming up on 8+ years of age. I really need to get out and gobble up as many replacements as I can while I still can, since there isn’t a single reliable dimmable alternative to an incandescent at this point.

      2. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I’ve had 30 or 40 CFL’s busted in the yard during storms with no obvious ill effects on my goldfish pond. (The lighting rigs could’ve lit up a runway.) The mercury disperses naturally through wind and rain, going back into the soil or washing into a waterway. All told over the years I’ve probably busted close to a hundred of them in various unsuitable applications., mostly in work lights that occasionally get dropped. Indoors I just leave most of them on 24 hour a day to extend their service life.

        2. Actually the problem has moved on to whoever eats the heron that ate all my goldfish. ^_^

          Interestingly enough, the heron’s murder spree was witnessed by a police officer who sat chatting with his wife (who was expecting) while watching the fishy murder unfold without lifting a finger. I guess he figured it was part of the cycle of life, or part of the life-cycle of environmental mercury, or something.

          3. Yes, but he was armed while watching a very large bird eat all his brother-in-law’s goldfish. He could’ve at least hollered “freeze!” and waved his arms. Heck, LA cops would’ve riddled the yard with so many bullets that the resulting lead pollution would swamp the mercury issue.

  4. Here’s an important question: has anyone calculated how many CFLs will wind up in city landfills? “There are businesses that recycle CFLs” is the wrong answer. A lot of folks are not going to make a special trip to Home Depot just to throw away a light bulb. (Especially if they don’t normally shop there.) CFLs are going to the city landfills, like it or not. How many?

    When they introduced plastic bags to replace paper, people didn’t give landfills a thought back then, either.

    1. I would guess half end up in landfills. Same as old school flourescent tubes.

      Until a few years ago there were very few places to recycle flourescents.

      Now I take them to Lowes.

  5. Has anyone here ever heard of “fluorons” and the Fluoron Theory?

    There was this fellow by the name of Loren Smith out of Chicago who made the speaking circuit of conservative/Libertarian groups in the early 70’s. I think he was genuinely committed to the cause, but his talk was “schtick” meant to provide comic relief at Young Americans for Freedom, College Republicans, and related gatherings. He would come to the podium wearing a hard hat, holding a beer and a cigar, and introducing himself as “Mayor Daley’s representative”, poking fun at how Mayor Richard Daley, certainly no movement Conservative, was on the outs with the left wing of his own party.

    Among his lines was the “Fluoron Theory.” Keep in mind that a lot of this went over my head because I was too young to know about the fluoridation of water controversy, that is, until I say it lampooned in Dr. Strangelove. Now why a Conservative would make fun of a Conservative conspiracy theory I think had something to do with the William F Buckley Conservative Movement, that is, WFB’s efforts to make conservatism intellectually respectful and purging some of the “kook” elements. It was also satire of Liberals thinking that WFB’s Movement Conservatives were the “kook” elements who believed in water fluoridation as a Pinko plot.

    Anyway, fluorons are these subatomic particles, smaller than the electron and shaped like the Soviet hammer-and-sickle emblem, that are emitted by the common type of fluorescent light found especially in schools and in government offices. What happens is that sometimes one of these fluorons passes into your brain and explodes one of your brain cells, turning that cell into a Communist ideologue.

    If only a few cells are exploded, you turn into a Liberal, some more, into a Radical before you are turned into a full-fledged Communist. Anyway, a good reason not to have fluorescent lamps in your home.

  6. I just stocked up, a case (120) each of 100W and 60W bulbs. Should last until the ban is overturned or LED bulbs get cheap.

    Maybe dn-guy can post his address and we can get him to recycle all the CFL bulbs we are tossing out.

    2. Apparently they did. Here’s a story out of Ottawa about an injured bird center that’s in trouble because all their incubators take 100-Watt incandescent bulbs. Another liberal oopsie.

Comments are closed.