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Comment by SV_BubbleTime | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone remember when lightbulbs were a thin glass bubble and a piece of wire? Compare that in a landfill to this thing. Something that is effectively gone in 10 years if crushed and left outside vs this that many part will look the same in 1000.

I guess I enjoy the extreme hypocritical nature of "smart home" things from people that talk about climate change and living wages and etc. You're buying future-landfill trash from slaves because you think it's neat that your lights are on timers....

On the other hand, to be fair... I have "dumb" LEDs that I like (Reveals because I know what color should look like) and obviously there is a break-even point of not spending 95% of your power in heat when you want it for light. It's really just the "smart" parts that I find just so unnecessary.

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I prefer smart light switches to smart bulbs myself. It seems like a cleaner, less wasteful way of getting what i really want - the ability to turn lights on and off from an app/through voice.

Putting all this circuitry into a bulb with a limited lifespan seems silly to me, like the old TV/VCR combos. When I used to sell televisions we always steered people away from those because invariably one would fail before the other, making the device far less useful.

Those light bulbs took like 10x the power for the same amount of light and dumped 100ws of heat to light a room in a time you might be trying to cool it. I don't think there's any reasonable way to argue incandescent light bulbs as the environmentally friendly option.

Depends if you are calculating the costs in the summer or the winter.

My point is you are comparing to cheap garbage that took components and rare metals from around the world shipped on tankers to China where they were produced in harmful conditions, then shipped back around the world where they work for a year and are thrown in the landfill to sit for 1000.

The cost of those lightbulbs is not nearly as easy as the efficiency sticker on the box.

I'd be willing to bet the embodied manufacturing energy in a shitty Walmart bulb is greater than the energy it will save over its short 18 month lifespan.

Also frankly landfilled electronics are harmless.

Climate change is on track to seriously mess up the world over the next 100 years. In that time, a bunch of these in landfill will..still be there, doing nothing.

It's like the absurdity of worrying about land filled plastic waste: it's not actually the problem. It was oil in the ground before, now it's much less flowable oil in the ground again. It's the stuff getting everywhere else in the biosphere which is an issue, not material stably stored underground.

Which means they were 100% efficient during winter.

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