News time.

[elfs]

You can take my incandescent lightbulb only from my cold dead hand. Yes, compact flourescent lightbulbs will save the Earth. They'll also contaminate your soil and, Gods forbid, you should break one and turn your house into a Superfund site.

An article in the NY Times Magazine this weekend shows how the farm bill distorts our food chain to our detriment. A dollar can buy 1200 calories of Twinkie but only 250 calories of carrots. Carrots are a root vegetable. Twinkies are 39 chemically processed ingredients, yet the subsidies of the farm bill make the soybeans, corns, and wheat ingredients of a Twinkie so cheap that carrots can't compete. I've often thought it perverse that Pepsi was cheaper than milk.

The current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

And given the recent brouhahah over the communalist milk system we have in this country, the whole thing seems sadly more twisted than it should.

I was gonna write about the officer who dealt with Pat Tillman's parents and said he resisted their inquiries into his death because he believed their rage was motivated by their atheism; after all, if they were believers they'd expect Tillman to have gotten a better deal in Heaven, right? But Sparky says it better.

Meanwhile, the NY Times reports that seven of the eight rebuilding programs that the Pentagon and the Executive tout as successes are in fact dismal failures. Mostly due to plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenence, looting, and lack of knowledge on how to use the facility. Even better, the Executive's people disagreed with the basis of the report, claiming that actually teaching the Iraqis how to use the equipment would be "colonialism" and "micromanaging!"

Lest we think anything better is going on at home, The Washington Post follows up with news that of $854 million that our allies offered for relief in the days following Katrina, only $40 million was ever used. Much of it was wasted. The "we don't need no help" attitude that came from the Executive was so pervasive that cargo containers of medical supplies donated by Italy were left to rot at cargo terminals and decayed in the Louisiana sunlight. The incompetence, malfeasance, and malevolence of our current administration continues to be breathtaking.

Comments

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

Are LED household bulbs a reasonable alternative? Though environmentally sound as far as disposal goes, incandescents are still on the energy hog side of things and produce some to lots of heat.

[solarbird]

No, not yet. Hopefully they will be soon. See other comments on this same message for several people commenting on LEDs currently, and my commentary on WTF is up with this writer's hate-on for CFLs.

Something I don't mention is that light output quality depends upon the bulb you buy. Some of them are junk - Ikea, I'm looking in your direction. But there's a lot more variety in light output in CFLs (in both quality and spectrum) than incandescent. I prefer a more daylight-style light and have uses for true full-spectrum, both of which are easier to get in CFL than incandescent.

Which isn't to say that there aren't places right now for incandescent. Bathrooms, for example. Short usage cycles wear out the electronics in CFLs more quickly. And if you're in an environment where you're likely to get breakage, get the kinds with the plastic outer shell rather than the bare-spiral bulbs. They look better anyway and don't actually cost any more in my experience.

[woggie.livejournal.com]

I've never understood the drive toward CFLs. What's wrong with LED bulbs, fergawdsakes? They use less energy than CFLs, and don't pose an enormous cost and health risk if you drop one.

Don't these people think??

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Well, for one thing, looking at one of the sites selling LED bulbs and noting the sentence at the top of the page saying "To get familiar with LED light bulbs, we recommend you experiment with different lighting combinations and see how their reduced light output works for you." At the bottom of the page, they have a comparison between 60W incandescent bulbs and one of their 2W LED bulbs, concluding that one LED bulb at $34.95 plus $12.00 of electricity was more than $350 cheaper than the 40 incandescent bulbs ($40.20) and $360.00 of electricity over the 60,000 hour lifespan of the LED bulb. It's funny, though, how the comparison doesn't mention that you'll need 38 of the $34.95 LED bulbs to have the same lumen output as the 60W incandescents, making the total cost of the LED bulbs for the same illumination almost $1800, more than four times the total cost of the incandescent bulbs for the same illumination.

For spot lighting, LED bulbs can be very effcient. For area lighting, their price/performance ratio still sucks rocks.

[ben-raccoon.livejournal.com]

Simply because a $25 LED bulb the size of a $2 incandescent puts out about as much light as your standard christmas light. It'd require at least for or five to illuminate a 10' by 10' room even remotely as well as a single incandescent. Not to mention, the only place you can get them even *that* cheap is at thinkgeek.com.

[solarbird]

LEDs are actually less efficient than CFLs, though the difference is small, and both are dramatically better than incandescent bulbs. (That's in lumens/watt, not that nonsense marketing people tend to call "equivalency.") That said, I'm all for LED lamps - and look forward them to getting bright enough for general lighting usage, which they are as of yet not close to comparable. I have some LED emergency lighting and portable lamps, but they just aren't there for general room lighting yet.

Plus, see below about my not getting why the mercury in CFLs is supposed to be so much scarier than the mercury in tube-style florescent bulbs. Those've been in use for decades and there's been no mass outbreak of mercury poisoning.

[kenshardik]

Thanks for the CFL info. It's very frightening to think of so much mercury in such a fragile container....

And is it any wonder why people here in the U.S. are obese when one dollar can buy you a buttload of Little Debbie snack cakes?

[solarbird]

It's no more mercury than in any other florescent lamp. Actually, it's quite a bit less. I don't see why CFLs are supposed to be a huge terror to this guy, when there have been millions of long-tube bulbs in use for decades.

I personally buy the CFLs with the second external (plastic) decorative casing. No exposed glass, nothing fragile. And a second containment layer.

I do think the CFL recycling should be easier. Right now you have to take them someplace like a Home Depot. I'd rather there were more places.

[kenshardik]

Another concern is that the average person may simply throw the bulb away when it burns out. I don't know if there's anything on CFLs to remind the owner to dispose of the bulb properly or not, and I don't really trust that everyone will dispose of them properly.

[solarbird]

True! But again, no different from tubes.