Only the government can save us, part 1

OK, all you die-hard liberals might as well just skip this series. You won't agree with anything I say, it'll just give you ulcers, you don't need that. Go have a beer with barry and chill, and wait a while, and I'll be on to something maybe you can read without imploding.

For the rest of us:

Why the Government can't think its way out of a hole it dug itself.

Two days ago (as of writing) Congress failed to reverse an idiot decision. The decision was to outlaw the production and sale of 'inefficient' lighting sources, like Incandescent bulbs.

Instead, they want us to use 'Green' sources, like CFLs. In fact, when they're done, it's likely that the only light sources we can have will be LED-based and CFLs or long-tube fluorescents. Why is this bad? After all, everyone knows that CFLs are far more efficient than incandescents, have a longer lifetime, and will cost less once the government is done ensuring that they have no competition. And no one cares about LEDs, because they only put light out in a fairly directional cone, so any general-purpose light will have to have lots of LEDs in it, and that's gotta be expensive. (Actually, no sarcasm there.)

Well, it's all a scam, and it isn't hard to follow the money. CFLs are produced in significant numbers only in one country: China. And since every business in China belongs to the government (and because the only real discipline in China seems to be in the Red Army, guess who gets the money you spend on CFLs?) But then, it has been the US's pleasure to give money to China, hand-over-fist, since the Clinton administration (when Billy Clinton handed Red China all the scientists and science at a major American satellite company, what looked on the outside like a business deal to get work for the sat company, but really amounted to handing Red China the navigation and targeting technology developed in the US to use for ICBMs aimed at America. But I digress.)

So what's so wrong with CFL's?

First, they aren't as efficient as we're told, because the measurement system used to determine the efficiency of light bulbs is a) a carefully guarded secret, apparently even from the bulb testers b) very selective in what is measured and calculated on, and c) hag-ridden by politics. The first means that you can look at seven boxes with edison-base incandescent light bulbs and find seven different ways of telling you how much power they consume, and how much light you get from them, and never find a way to make a coherent comparison. At this point in time, almost all industry-labeling for lightbulbs is meaningless drivel.

The second means that there is no level playing field at all. For instance, the power labeling on CFLs utterly ignores the heat generated from the base, while the incandescent has all of its functional bits in the glass envelope, so all the heat generated comes right from where it is measured. The obvious comparison is how much light you get, compared to how much heat you emit. Ignoring the heat generated by the converters and ballast in the base of CFLs makes them look fantastic: 7.5W for the same light as you'd get from a 60W bulb! (Of course, if you remember the first characteristic of bulb efficiency measurements, it also means that you can't actually prove that any of those 60-watt-equivalent CFL's produces 60W of anything!)

And of course, the third means that no matter how bad CFLs are, because our current government claims that they're better, you'd better accept that they're better, even if they aren't.

Stay tuned...