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Comment by merpnderp | Hacker News Reader

Given GE's political clout, their negative income tax rate, their patents on CFL bulbs, and how quickly LED's displaced CFL's making it obvious there was a better solution on the horizon, I'm guessing the corruption was on the side pushing the CFL bulbs. It certainly wasn't the lobby for commoditized $.10/bulb incandescents.

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Well, it wasn't really about light bulb pricing. It was about conservative vs liberal. Light bulbs were just a handy talking point that could be used in stump speeches as a psuedo-argumentum-ad-absurdum of the left. E.g, "And now they're trying to tell you to get rid of your light bulbs? C'mon!"

Honestly, it was because the mandate came when CFLs were still a bit buzzy (or otherwise immature technologically), so it seemed like a quality sacrifice. (no longer of course; we can probably discuss infinitely whether the mandate helped or hindered the tech).

CFLs are still a quality sacrifice if you care about ease of responsible disposal and the quality of the light. It's fascinating to me to see the divide between people who think fluorescent light is fine and people who are repelled by it.

CFLs also supposedly have a shorter life than incandescents if turned on and off frequently.

My spouse used to be one of the folks who are repelled by fluorescent light. She also failed to notice when I started quietly replacing incandescents with good-quality CFLs.

She did eventually catch on to me, but fortunately the event convinced her to reconsider her opinion.

Light quality really does depend on the bulb. A lot of bulbs are of a color temperature that's neither warm enough, nor close enough to daylight to have a nice feeling. Personally, I've found that the 5500k daylight bulbs to give a much nicer light than even incandescent, but a lot of that is subjective, and most places don't really have a good place to compare light quality.

I actually could not stand fluorscent lights for many years (I would get massive headaches). I recently moved into a new place, and after I light burnt out I was surprised to see a CFL. No issues with headaches and a nice warm white.

CFLs do release mercury, but it's still less mercury than released by coal plants powering inefficient incandescents. Not that I support the ban. And I think there are other problems with CFLs, like causing cancer and affecting sleep (bluer lights cause the brain to produce less melatonin.)

Given that LEDs were inevitably rolling out right about now anyway, helping CFL tech seems totally unnecessary and probably corrupt.

Speaking of which, what kind of light bulbs are people buying these days?

My experience with LED bulbs is that it's hard to find anything as bright as halogens. (I live in an apartment where the main light source takes candelabra-base bulbs, sigh.) They also have super dodgy power supplies and if I put too many on the same circuit the RFI causes my carbon monoxide detector to go off!

I also haven't found any with both a daylight color temperature and a decent CRI. I would like to be able to look at my ColorChecker passport and see the same colors as on my calibrated display. As it stands now if I want to see what color something is in my apartment, I take a picture, apply the profile corrections, and look at it on my monitor!

Any suggestions?

They're not as bright as halogens for sure, but I'm a huge, huge fan of my Philips Hue lights. I share an apartment and brought the lights from my old one; the biggest downer is that they're not dimmer-friendly, so I've had to replace a couple with standard soft-white LEDs, but I love the color range (yeah, they're crappy at green--I don't need green lights) and the configurability to change the way the environment feels.

> what kind of light bulbs are people buying these days

You can't get incandescents anymore in the UK, and I've just bought some halogens in the same form factor. 25× more expensive upfront, but even nicer light.

Set up a few 72W incandescents that you turn on to preview colors?

I am interested in your general question though. My Cree TW have passable colored light, but are just too damn anemic both temperature and intensity. I'm thinking of augmenting with some higher intensity non-CRI-optimized LEDS.

Just because it's a handy talking point doesn't mean it's not true. They did, indeed, tell you to get rid of your light bulbs, and back that up with a law.

(Of course, it's more complicated than partisans might prefer, given that the incandescent ban was supported/sponsored by at least some GOP lawmakers and that when they retook Congress the GOP's efforts to repeal the ban were pro forma at best. But it's still completely true that pushy nanny-state types, of either party, told people to get rid of their light bulbs.)

If they had only told us, that would have been one thing. I could then ignore them and still have useful lighting.

Of course they had to go and ban the only useful light source available.

Yeah I got an LED, because I wanted to test it because they are supposed to be the future. Turns out it is really huge (much bigger than the one I replaced) so it will only fit in some of my lamps and it is extremely yellow. Still that beats the one I tried before, which wasn't able to light anything after the sun had gone down and had such a white color it made everything look like a morgue.

In theory I am supposed to save money and improve the environment, but I have wasted a lot of money buying not good enough bulbs that were far more expensive than real bulbs and I got a car so that ruins the environmental savings times twenty.

If instead of being nanny staters they had put a tax on CO2, that might incentives me to drive slightly less, which would save much more CO2.

Alameda municiple power was participating in the "community night out" events (where you are supposed to have a BBQ on the sidewalk and the police and FD come by and reach out to the community) -- and they were handing out LED bulbs, with the goal to replace all bulbs with LED bulbs by some year.

I love the LED bulbs because I have my workshop, an area in my garage, my laundry room and my walk-in closet all with LED bulbs as I never turn them off.

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