Back in August 2023, I changed a light bulb (Post #1840).
I changed another light bulb today. Thus validating my prior guess that I’m on track to change roughly one light bulb a year, going forward.
Source: Pictures in this post are via Gencraft AI.
Last year’s bulb was a rugged survivor of the compact-fluorescent-light (CFL) era. I spent that prior post marveling about how vastly better the technology is now than when I was a kid.
The CFL era is now more-or-less history. Last I checked, Home Depot offered a few oddball sizes on their website. In the physical store, there were a few cartons of standard CFLs gathering dust on the lowest shelf of the light bulb rack.
Anyway, this year’s dead light bulb was an LED bulb. That’s the first LED bulb that I’ve had go bad. It was in my kitchen ceiling, installed base-up, which is hard on the electronics, owing to the heat. Plus, it burns a lot of hours per day, in that location.
A simple desultory philippic.
Source: Copyright Gary Larson, The Far Side, used without permission.
This proves — PROVES — that all you MISGUIDED ECO-WIMPS who said that LED bulbs would last 10 YEARS were LIARS!
/s
(I would have said eco-Nazis, rather than eco-wimps, but apparently Nazis are in fashion again. The whole six-million-Jews-off-to-the-ovens thing now being considered just a regrettable hiccup in an otherwise perfectly valid alternative to traditional American democracy. At least, by the lunatic right. Who are, praise be, not (yet) a majority of Republicans. I think.)
(I’m not even going to get into the testing procedure and definitions used to determine the average rated life of LEDs light bulbs. I did that in my prior post, cited above. Suffice it to say that, by definition, half of light bulbs will burn out prior to the rated half-life of the light bulb. A tautology that somehow always seems to get lost when people feel the need to screed.)
Sadly, nobody rails against the EVILS of CFLs any more. But you still see people railing against LED light bulbs in the home. Same language, mostly the same arguments, just fill in a different type of bulb.
You know what I mean. Comments to newspaper articles that make LIBERAL USE OF CAPITALS and better yet CAPITALS IN BOLDFACE.
At some point, if you’ve seen enough, you can do them like MAD LIBS. Just REPLACE the parts in ALL-CAPS BOLDFACE with the WORD SALAD of your choice. It will make JUST AS MUCH SENSE!!!
And for GOD’S SAKE, don’t forget the LOLLIPOPS!!!!!
That’s the term I heard used by staff of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for presentations that made use of strings of exclamation points. It was not a term of approbation. Rather, it quietly mocked the presenter for being unable to get an important point across without resorting to this!!! It was almost as if they were judging the writer for being unable to make the important points of a presentation clear with the writing itself, so that they did not require further cartoonish emphasis!!!
This, to make sure everybody understands their RIGHTEOUS ANGER at blah-blah-blah.
Anger really scores well with certain segments of the population. In fact, among Christian fundamentalists (and perhaps Christians in general), there is a concept of RIGHTEOUS ANGER being a necessary part of WITNESSING your FAITH IN GOD. Unconstrained expressions of anger are seen as a sign of strength, surety of purpose, and, well, RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Which boils down to the ANGRIER PERSON is literally HOLIER THAN THOU.
Which is great as a vehicle for propaganda, but is hardly conducive to rational give-and-take.
In my experience, UNCONSTRAINED EXPRESSIONS OF ANGER seem to be so strongly negatively correlated with being factually correct about something. Not merely uncorrelated, but negatively correlated.
It’s a bottom-of-the-barrel effect. You generally don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel until the barrel is empty. Similarly, it’s disproportionately those who have no logical argument for their position who resort to appeals to anger to support it.
Which is why all that ANGER-DRIVEN ARGUMENT ends up being so COMPLETELY FORGETTABLE in the long run. The fact that CFLs didn’t generate an environmental catastrophe beyond imagining is just conveniently forgotten. So that the same arguments can be mad-libbed against the next bit of progress.
And so, nobody rails against all the EVILS of HYBRID CARS any more. But I can distinctly recall that the ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION around Sudbury, ONT — from about 40 years ago, prior to the installation of S02 scrubbers on the nickel smelter there — was CLEARLY DUE TO THE PRIUS, and its nickel-metal-hydride battery. And all the SO-CALLED ENVIRONMENTALISTS who insisted on driving a reliable sedan with exceptional gas mileage, instead of a gas-guzzling SUV.
Reputation was Ebay’s stroke of genius.
Which I guess brings me to my actual point here. There seems to be no penalty in the modern world for being flagrantly, emphatically, and repeatedly dead wrong.
Near as I can tell, LED light bulbs are delivering on their longevity promises, and then some. Just like the manufacturers said they would, based on formal testing. And all the numbskulls who said otherwise have now flitted off to the next thing they need to be righteously angry about.
I can recall when Ebay was just starting to go national as more than just a purveyor of collectible PEZ dispensers. Roughly the same era when Amazon was getting cranked up. And one of the biggest questions was how they could possibly police bad actors, in those big E-commerce marketplaces.
Both platforms eventually settled on user-reported reputation as being adequate. Not perfect. But close enough to allow the marketplace to function reasonably efficiently, and not degenerate into a haven for rip-off artists.
And that, to me, is the big problem with social media. Consumers of it have no money at stake. (With the rare exception of people who take stock tips from strangers.) And most consumers will accept advice or “facts” from strangers, with absolutely no way to track how accurate those strangers have been in the past.
And so, unlike Ebay, much of social media degenerates into a game where the biggest liars win. And even more than that, a game where those who can play the righteous anger card win even bigger.
And, while there has always been an eager market for propaganda, the algorithm-driven internet has accelerated the pace and concentrated the dose. Many people now mainline their favorite flavor of propaganda 24/7. And, to be crystal clear, the big problem is with the Right, not the Left. (Pizzagate. Q-Anon. Jewish space lasers. Need I say more?) Like the alcoholic or the heroin addict, chances are good that the people who eagerly lapped up that stuff will continue to do so to the day they die.
I have no pat solution for this, short of having a populace smart enough not to swallow information from strangers with an unknown reputation. Until that happens, I think we’re stuck with democracy being at risk, and having our public electronic forums filled with liars and scam artists. And what passes for public discourse, for many, will simply careen from one overblown and hyped EVIL to the next. In an environment where individuals who are perpetually wrong — but sufficiently ANGRY about it — thrive.
And the folks who try to stay fact based, and just go about their business, changing their one light bulb a year? Way too boring. And, because there’s really no way to be RIGHTEOUSLY ANGRY about (not) having to change a light bulb, there’s really no way to fix that.
This is how the system now works. The internet has made propaganda vastly more effective, and made the consumption of propaganda vastly more prevalent. It is what it is. All we can do is live with it.
