*If you have enough light to read it
Probably the biggest joke these days is that, while the Lefties have been screaming about all of the "civil liberties" Bushitler and his band of evil cronies are taking from us, one of our most precious liberties of all, choice, really is being taken from us.
Except that it’s not much of a joke, is it?
In case you haven’t been following the light bulb story, you’d better read this [link broken].
Like the light bulbs, themselves, we are so screwed.
My first thought after reading it was, can you imagine the run people are going to make on incandescent bulbs as the end draws near? We’ll be stocking up not for a few days, not for a few months, not for a few years — but for a lifetime.
I’d add these thoughts to the article:
- It might be illegal to manufacture and sell incandescents, but not illegal to use. As such, I don’t see any reason why we won’t be able to buy them online from Canada. If that’s true, then we can’t quite put this in the ‘Crisis’ category — but it’s close. The real crisis is that it’s happening at all.
- When it comes to saving electricity, focusing on light bulbs is, truthfully, one of the most brain-dead things imaginable. Nothing — repeat, nothing — in your entire house uses less electricity than a light bulb with the exception of the plug-in charger for your cellphone. Every time you let your electric clothes dryer run 5 minutes too long, you’ve just burned up all of your light bulb "savings" for the past year. If you really want to see how brutal and destructive our misconceptions about electrical usage can be, read this.
- Murder and suicide rates will go up. You read it here first. I’ve studied some very interesting books on the effect of light on human beings, and — let me assure you — the stark white-blue light from a fluorescent will make certain edgy people all the edgier, and push some of them right over the aforementioned edge. If your life is horrid and ugly — and you look around you and the stark fluorescent light just makes it all the more horrid and uglier — that might be all it takes.
- It’s possible they’ll eventually invent one that will put out a warm, human-friendly yellowish light, like an incandescent, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It seems that if it were possible, they would have done it long before now.
- Like me, you’ve probably already read some horror stories about fluorescent lights breaking and the clean-up involved, since the mercury dust they contain is officially a ‘biohazardous waste material’. I read some woman was charged three thousand dollars for a visit from the local HAZMAT team.
Which means, what you’re really going to end up with is tons of mercury dust scattered throughout the environment as people sneak them into the trash can. As their health fails, janitors, garbagemen and dumpsite workers will be the first to file class-action lawsuits, just as asbestos workers have done before them.
That brings us to the terrorist angle. Want to shut down a government building? Simple. Just drop a fluorescent bulb right in the middle of the main doorway and call the HAZMAT team. You’ll have that baby shut down for a good five or six hours as they get the toxic mess cleaned up. By law, they’ll have to evacuate the entire building.
"Look out! He’s got a bomb!"
"No, it’s worse! It’s a light bulb!!
And, personally, the absolute worst aspect is that fluorescents don’t dim, which is obviously critical when it comes to controlling one’s environment. I dim my two 25-watters sitting on my computer table all of the time, depending on whether I’m reading the monitor, a book, watching a movie, looking for that thumbtack I just dropped on the carpet, etc. As I understand it, there are fluorescents that are 3-way, but the problem is that their idea of what "dim" is might differ wildly from mine when I’m trying to watch a movie and want them really dim — but still lit. Plus, unlike slapping a dimmer on a regular bulb, a 3-way fluorescent requires a special socket, which means you’ll be buying a whole new lamp. And you can just bet that the new lamp, which might have cost you $29 at Wal-Mart in the old days, is going to cost you $79 because of its ‘modern, advanced’ features. Hey, you wanted to save the planet, right?
Maybe it’s time someone compiled a list of all the things we like so we’ll have something to check off as they’re taken away.