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[scriver]

How to tell the difference between a conspiracy theory and a plausible hypothesis:

Are they assuming the conspirators are competent? If yes, it's bogus.


All real-life "conspiracies" are covering up people's incompetence and petty corruption. All the leaked data from intelligence agencies points to idiots with lots of money flailing in the dark.

Have you heard of the light bulb conspiracy?

[Frumple]

Which one? I don't remember details, at all, because I care significantly less about most conspiracy theories than I do bowel movements, but I'm pretty sure I've seen mention of at least three different ones involving light bulbs over the years.

[scriver]

This one

[TamerVirus]

This one

You telling me that the crew behind the DF tileset is a lightbulb cartel?!?

[Iduno]

This one

You telling me that the crew behind the DF tileset is a lightbulb cartel?!?

Well, it was mostly GE and friends.

[Reelya]

The lightbulb cartel wasn't particularly effective however. Someone else started making lightbulbs cheaper, and they couldn't do anything about that. It also lasted about a decade.

This fact also questions the overall cost thing:

Some engineers deemed the life expectancy of 1,000 hours reasonable for most bulbs, and that a longer lifetime came at the expense of efficiency. Engineers argued that longer bulb life caused the increase of heat and decrease of light if bulbs lasted longer than 1,000 hours. They argued the result of wasted electricity. Long-life incandescent bulbs were available that lasted up to 2,500 hours. These were less energy-efficient, producing less light per watt.

So, it's not as cut and dried as they say. Incandescent bulbs were really cheap, and part of the agreement was lowering manufacturing costs and standardizing total lifetime. The electricity to run them costs a lot more. If it is true that the shorter-lived bulbs were more energy efficient, then it's not cut and dried that this was at the consumer's expense. It could be a win-win situation, in fact.

[ChairmanPoo]

If

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I truly, truly hope that the harsh reality of medical work in triage conditions never gets publicly reported. People are paranoid are upset about fake stories like this, there'll be murders if they ever hear the real ones.

OH BOY

GUESS WHAT TIME IT IS

MOTHER, CAN I HAVE PRIVATIZED HEALTHCARE?

FOR CONSUMER FREEDOM?

Y-YES...

[ACTUALLY INSTITUTES DEATH PANELS LIKE A 2008 CAMPAIGN AD]

T R I A G E   T I M E

And of course, it's falling on a county of mostly Latino people thanks to the actions of a white governor and mostly white anti-mask freaks. God fucking bless America.

[Reelya]

If

There's no if. electricity right now here is 28 cents per kwh, so if you were running a 100 watt bulb, then for the 1000 hours it costs about 50 cents for the bulb and 2.8 * 1000 = $28 for the electricity for 1000 hours at that wattage. If they use lighter filaments, the bulbs burn out quicker but they also don't need as much total wattage to pass through them, so you can get a lower watt bulb but still get the same brightness. The cost of the bulb itself was a minuscule amount of the total cost to run it. 50 cents for the bulb over 1000 hours adds up to 0.05 cents per hour for the bulb compared to the 2.8 cents for the electricity. For am incandescent bulb to last twice as long you need a much heavier filament, which means you're pushing more juice through it for the same brightness. So, having the long-lasting bulbs would have been a false economy here, but people see the (tiny) physical expense while ignoring the much bigger expense of electricity, since you can see it and that's paid after the event. Everyone fixates on the physical bulbs here, and it makes almost no sense to do that.

[ChairmanPoo]

There is a very big "if", which is that you're taking a cartel's justifications at face value. If they were concerned about energy efficiency, they would have focused on selecting more efficient lightbulbs, which may or may not have resulted in lower lightbulb lifespans. They didn't, they focused on how many hours did each lightbulb last.  That's kind of suspicious.

To quote a more recent example, remember when apple was caught slowing down it's older telephones via updates? They too claimed they did it because they were concerned about their user's battery life and that this way older models would last longer. No word on why they didnt tell people they were doing it or made it optional.  That time btw the post-hoc justification didnt fly

[Reelya]

The point I was making is that it doesn't matter why, everyone just assumes that this light bulb consipracy actually caused the consumer to spend more money. There's no real evidence for that, especially like i said when you factor in the vast difference in cost between the actual bulb and the power to run it. Nobody looks at the running costs, everyone cares about how long a 50 cent bulb lasts. As for the actual reduction in power, a lighter filament does that by itself. That's how you tune lifetime for an incandescent bulb, and it actually does mean that shorter lived bulbs don't draw as much power than the equivalent more durable bulb. For example we used to get 100 watt bulbs sometimes, but you'd usually go "holy crap, that's too bright!" so normally you'd get the 60 watt bulbs. If they'd had heavier filaments in them then they'd last longer but they'd need more current to get up to the same temperature / brightness, so people would have been getting the 100's just to match what the 60s were actually doing.

As for the economics, the light bulb companies are damn straight making far more profits off the new $5 fluorescent low-energy-use bulbs than they ever were off the 50 cent low-efficiency bulbs. The real beneficiaries of the old ones were the electric companies. Nobody ever has a conspiracy theory that the light bulb companies were behind getting the old ones banned, even though they vastly profited off that in the long run. Everyone has to switch out their old bulbs to new ones that costs 10 times as much? Who do you think benefited the most from that?

[Frumple]

As for the economics, the light bulb companies are damn straight making far more profits off the new $5 fluorescent low-energy-use bulbs than they ever were off the 50 cent low-efficiency bulbs.

Are they, though? Back when they didn't have those things I'd regularly see my household burn through a pack or two of the cheap bulbs per year on the low end. With the newer ones, it's been actual years, plural, instead of a few months or whatever between replacements. Haven't made the effort to actively track it, but doing most of the domestic shopping these days and having been along for the ride for most of it in yesteryear, I'm pretty sure the households I've been a part of have been spending less on lightbulbs even as they pay more per individual bulb, and that even discounting inflation.

Light bulb companies might be making profit these days, but if the margins have substantially increased I'm pretty doubtful it's because of increased costs for the consumer. Far as I've noticed we're actually paying less on lightbulb replacement, at the moment.

[Starver]

Personally, before low-energy (fluorescent 'incandescent-like' direct replacements) bulbs blew far more frequently than 1000hr/each. Though I'd had the supply checked, with nothing wrong found, I'd get circuit-tripping failures (whichever floor's circuit was involved at the time) whenever I turned on a light and had a blown bulb.  Replacing different wattages did not make much obvious difference. Computer equipment on the (seperate but equivalent) ring-main has never suffered from spikes/failures, except for occasional general (or, sometimes, single-phase and thus one house in three) neighbourhood outages that don't trip anything at home.

Then I started replacing with the 'low energy' replacements, the early generation that were slow to start. I still have mostly those. I've had maybe three fail for 'lifetime' reasons since then (none have needed the RCD resetting on the given fusebox circuit, when they did) and I had to replace some when I had an upstairs water leak that seeped down (there was water sloshing inside. the 'bulb' diffuser - while no power was there of course! - and I decided to still not use them, even once they'd been dried out), the latter happened once LED 'direct incandescent replacements' had arrived on the market, the former not quite (or not yet looking worth the bleeding-edge premium of the time?).

Shuffled around, to get LEDs where they'd be better than the early generation ones, I've not had any further failures. Years. Maybe >decade?  In this one room, that's ~15x1000h of accumulated use for every hour of average use per day. Let's say it's 3hr/evening, I'd expect at least one failure from a weak (and likely >10yo) 'new' bulb, from chance, looking at current (not contemporary) estimates of lifetimes, though the current sole LED in the room might drag it out much longer.


What thread is this again?

[McTraveller]

Definitely a change in demographics or quality of care or some combination of many factors in my state.  We've had consistent new case counts higher than our nadir right before restrictions relaxed, but the new daily deaths are still averaging their lowest.  Our 7-day moving average in daily deaths has been below 14 (down from a high of >150 in April) since June 15 when the restrictions relaxed.  The new case count hit a 7-day moving average low of 181/day on June 16, and it's been between 600 and 700 since July 15, with no proportional increases in mortality:



I feel like there is some other statistic that's missing here; that really sharp change in slope around 60k total cases seems unusual; the only obvious thing is that 60k cases was right when the most severe restrictions were lifted, but I would have expected the curve to not have that slope change.