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Trump Administration Dims Rule On Energy Efficient Lightbulbs (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report: If it's been a few years since you shopped for a lightbulb, you might find yourself confused. Those controversial curly-cue ones that were cutting edge not that long ago? Gone. (Or harder to find.) Thanks to a 2007 law signed by President George W. Bush, shelves these days are largely stocked with LED bulbs that look more like the traditional pear-shaped incandescent version but use just one-fifth the energy. A second wave of lightbulb changes was set to happen. But now the Trump administration wants to undo an Obama-era regulation designed to make a wide array of specialty lightbulbs more energy efficient.
At issue here are bulbs such as decorative globes used in bathrooms, reflectors in recessed lighting, candle-shaped lights and three-way lightbulbs. The Natural Resources Defense Council says that, collectively, these account for about 2.7 billion light sockets, nearly half the conventional sockets in use in the U.S. At the very end of the Obama administration, the Department of Energy decided these specialty bulbs should also be subject to efficiency requirements under the 2007 law. The lighting industry objected and sued to overturn the decision. [...] NEMA argued that Congress never intended for the law to apply to all these other lightbulbs. After President Trump took office the Energy Department agreed and proposed to reverse the agency's previous decision. Critics say if the reversal is finalized it will mean higher energy bills for consumers and more pollution.
At issue here are bulbs such as decorative globes used in bathrooms, reflectors in recessed lighting, candle-shaped lights and three-way lightbulbs. The Natural Resources Defense Council says that, collectively, these account for about 2.7 billion light sockets, nearly half the conventional sockets in use in the U.S. At the very end of the Obama administration, the Department of Energy decided these specialty bulbs should also be subject to efficiency requirements under the 2007 law. The lighting industry objected and sued to overturn the decision. [...] NEMA argued that Congress never intended for the law to apply to all these other lightbulbs. After President Trump took office the Energy Department agreed and proposed to reverse the agency's previous decision. Critics say if the reversal is finalized it will mean higher energy bills for consumers and more pollution.
Am I wrong to consider energy efficiency problem with light bulbs largely solved? LED bulb are affordable and efficient. Is there anything else left to do?
However, modern LED bulbs are not as reliable as an early models. I have very first Phillips LED bulb that was sold, it cost almost 80$ when it was new and it still works. About a year ago I purchased 20$ LED bulb and noticed it already intermittently fails to light. Such lack of reliability is a significant e-waste issue.
Voting
I am totally okay with a bulb costing me 30 cents more a year when it costs me $20!less to buy it (and specialty LED bulbs absolutely do not have a longevity benefit to make up for that cost).
...it has nothing to do with the benefit to either the consumer or the industry and is totally about trying to erase anything Obama did as a way of getting his petty revenge.
Now we're going to have to generate about 25 large coal-burning power plants' worth of extra electricity if this rollback goes through
They assume everybody is going to remove the LED lights, and replace them with incandescents ?
I've converted nearly all my house to LED, including most of the decorative lights. They look a bit tacky when they're not turned on, but you can't really tell the difference when they're turned on. I bought a whole boatload of LED lights from Walmart when they were like something like $2 for a 4 pack of 60 watt equivalents, and replaced every normal light in my home. The net result so far is to lower my energy bill from $121 to $104 a month.
CFL light bulbs sucked in every way imaginable. Not only were they bad for outdoor use (slow to light up), I never had one that lived up to its supposed 7 year lifespan. Then you had to package them up and bring them to a store to dispose of them. I wonder how many of those are lying busted in landfills across the country, leaking mercury into the water table?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Many specialty bulbs are very odd shapes. CFL and LED lights are difficult to fit into these shapes, and end up being highly unreliable. For what the special nature of these bulbs, the conventional style works more reliably.
Why is legislation defined as automatically meaning higher energy bills and more pollution? Aren't people free to buy the bulbs they want to buy? I have a whole bunch of candle-type LED bulbs; they're already on the market. I chose to buy them because of the energy savings of using them. Presumably, many more people will do the same. Regulation had nothing to do with my purchasing them.
Why should anybody care about what the government says about this when you can already make the choice yourself? Regulations don't "make a wide array of specialty light bulbs more efficient," the people who invented the specialty light bulbs do. Regulations just force people to do stuff (or not to do stuff).
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Looks like the Trump admin is doing a lot of that. I guess it looks good to his base....
Hate him if you must, but Trump has been mostly consistent about undoing things that Obama did by fiat.
If the law was written only for normal, everyday use A19-base residential light bulbs, then CONGRESS
needs to write a new law to cover the rest.
And while Congress is at it, they should hold LED manufacturers accountable for their lies regarding
MTBF. Like a poster above, I have an early LED bulb that is still going strong, but I've seen newer
ones die an early death.
My whole house has been LED for years. I've had zero issues and only had to replace 1 bulb. That issue wasn't that the LED failed, but the smart components failed and I coudn't use the app to control it. My house is fairly large for this area and the power company sends us averages every month. I'm always well under the power usage of houses in my area. I don't see any issues with quality of light as they now sell LED bulbs in different spectrums or even with adjustable spectrum. The cost is nominal you can get 24 60W equivalent bulbs now for $22.
This legislation was a good thing. It pushed manufactures to find a way to lower costs on LED bulbs and brought lower consumption of electrical use. Why change it?
The legislative branch is the only one that can write and implement laws. If an Agency is empowered with the responsibility to enforce that law, then that same agency can operate differently under different administrations. Basically, a given Agency can't announce a regulation that binds that same Agency in the future. The same holds true with Executive actions: One President can't sign an executive action that forces future Presidents to follow it.
If there is debate over whether a given regulation by an agency falls within the scope of legislation, then the correct way to solve it is via further (and clearer) legislation.
This isn't a question over whether changes to light bulb policy is good or bad: It's about the split of powers between Congress the Executive branch.
...to stop these people?
I honestly have no idea who you mean by "these people".
Do you mean:
1. Obamatards who imposed silly rules?
2. Trumptards who don't care about pollution?
3. Stupid consumers incapable of understand long vs short term costs?
4. Greedy light bulb companies wanting short-lifetime bulbs?
5. Slashdot editors who post silly articles?
6. Frist-posters?
Please clarify.
I prefer it when people actually post what's happening in the headline instead of trying to use stupid puns.
Ya, but they used the words "Trump" and "Dim" in the same sentence, so ... :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Look, give your money to the power company if you want, but you have to be crazy to be spending 4-5 times as much for electricity using old bulbs.
My electric bills are a shadow of their former self since replacing all my bulbs with modern LEDs, including dimmable ones.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They pushed CFLs just in time for mass production of the mercury-containing, dangerous voltage-using disasters to get into everyone's homes and now we have around twice as efficient of safe LEDs. Great job, guys. I don't think we need a law to accelerate demand since 80W incandescent vs like 12W LED for the same light in a three bulb kitchen fixture for example saves noticeable money. Plus, the wavelength looks more modern and makes your house look decades less old.
Suffer the children, for these shall become tomorrow's consumers of news for nerds. (Oh, really?)
———
I have one beef with energy-efficient lighting. The recessed sockets for the central lighting in my kitchen do a great job of preventing the glare of the bulb from meeting me at eye level.
But only the old-fashioned incandescent floods.
All the replacement LED floods I've examined place the bright, light-emitting substrate further up (down) the neck of the bulb, so I actually do catch the dazzle-inducing "filament" in my peripheral vision during normal kitchen activities.
Brightness is not the sole figure of merit. Contrast is also a figure of merit. Brightness is maximized when you look straight into the bulb. Contrast ratio, however, tends to suffer when the bulb is (mostly) in between you and subject matter of interest.
I've never seen specialty bulb packaging in my life that gives the viewing angle to the dazzle-point ever in my life. There's no way to find out without buying one, screwing it a socket, and turning it on. I did this quite a bit back when I had many other sockets to fill, so all my failures had somewhere good to go after the experiment failed. But now my entire house is LED, except for the recessed bulbs in the kitchen (three times 60 watts) which now contain the very last of my old-fashioned incandescents.
[*] Actually, I lied: we still have a halogen pea-bulb circuit under the kitchen cabinets along two walls which produce an excellent light for actual cooking (it's the last circuit we turn on when just passing through).
For many people, these LED floods are "the same" as the old incandescents, minus the heat, the expense, and prehistoric "warm" colouration. For these to be "the same" in my kitchen, I'd have to sink three pots at least another inch deeper (while perhaps raising the floor in the room above by a compensatory distance).
Hmm. It might be more environmentally sound for me to simply continue using incandescent floods on this one kitchen circuit for the time being.
(We're on electric heating, in a marine climate, where we manage to keep the kitchen around 63 degrees F for most of the winter without ever turning up the kitchen thermostat. On especially cold days I bake bread or reduce onions. A little bit of incandescent heat in the kitchen is no skin off my energy-budget nose for at least half the year.)
(And just in case you miss it, I'm being sarcastic.. )
But for those who really wonder about this:
I thought we should all be driving electric cars because they where emission free... So how does using more electricity for light bulbs create pollution when charging my car doesn't?
Electric cars are emission free where they operate, but fuel-driven power plants that make the electricity to charge them, of course, are not.
However: Fuel-driven power plants can run hotter and scavenge better, resulting in a lot less pollution than the engine that must be carried by an internal-combustion car. (Also, you have to burn more fuel to carry it around. It, with its powertrain, is a lot heavier than the batteries and electric motors of an electric vehicle.)
For those concerned about carbon output, stationary power plants CAN also use less polluting fuels (such as natural gas) than the liquids suitable for mobile use (without a heavy pressure tank). Modern fast-charge battery packs have little charge/discharge loss (or they'd melt, so they wouldn't be fast-charge B-) ). Even with the grid losses you end up with less total pollution from operation with electric cars.
Another factor is that the pollution is emitted at the power plant, rather than in crowded traffic. (This is yet another source of enmity between the urban and rural populations, as the latter may view the city people as exporting their pollution to the country people's back yards.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
and you wonder why Europeans think Americans are... stupid! ;-)
I use LED bulbs wherever possible. They're great for whenever a bulb needs to stay on for a long period of time. But they aren't perfect in every situation. For instance, lightbulbs in closets rarely stay on more than a few minutes.
However, switching to LED bulbs won't necessarily save people money. Power companies will just raise rates to compensate (there is a minimum amount of revenue required to run them, after all).
(And just in case you miss it, I'm being sarcastic.. )
And an idiot, just in case you missed it.
That's it? A personal insult is all you got to argue with here?
There is one thing that being an electrical engineer has helped me with is seeing the absolute hogwash that gets said about electricity production in terms of "green" energy or "zero emissions" for your electric cars. The truth of industrial scale electrical energy production is that it's a dirty business no matter how you do it. If you think you are saving the planet by driving one, you are at best misinformed or at worst actively lying about how things really work.
IMHO, if you want to do the least amount of emitting when you drive, you need to remember that nearly 70% of domestic electrical energy production in the USA comes from fossil fuels, including the energy you used to charge that battery. Somehow I wonder if we'd be better off burning Natural Gas in internal combustion engines over burning it to charge my EV's battery given transmission losses, conversion losses and charge/discharge efficiency and losses you have to over come... But hey, your mileage may vary (literally) but I'm pretty sure there is no such thing as a "zero" emission vehicle especially if you look at the whole life cycle of the car... Those are the facts I'm armed with, and why I'm being sarcastic...
But all you are armed with is personal insults.. I guess you don't have anything else then...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
IMHO, you use LED bulbs where they make sense, let the market drive this.
I actually have been slowly moving my whole house over to LED bulbs *because* they generate less heat. My primary consumer of electrical power is the Air Conditioning, so I benefit from the lower heat dissipation two ways. If one lives in a colder climate, the older light bulbs might be a good option.
So as LED's come down in price (and they have recently) more of them will be used, limiting electrical power consumption growth, making my wallet a bit fatter and decreasing emissions caused by my house.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Most of what he said was blatantly false.
I converted my house to LED last year. And that included a three-way for the living room, dimmables for the bathrooms and specialty ones for my daughter's ceiling fan fixture.
Voting
Which after this week and the fall out of the Mueller report and the spectacular flameout of AOC's "Green" new deal in the Senate soon to come is looking to be a pretty tall hill to climb.
Don't be too sure. Trump just put health care in play. I doubt he'll get votes by withdrawing protection for pre-existing conditions.
And although Trump may have been left unscathed by Mueller's probe, he is still facing lots of other legal issues.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Sounds like you're trying to hard to pwn the libs that you're fucking yourself.
I'm sure all those crypto-miners have something to say about that!
Call your congress critters, write the letters & email too. Let's drive this to the illogical extreme! Every illumination device can be registered and annually inspected for compliance per efficiency regulations. Just think of all the hidden bulbs in old cars, radios, motorcycles, bicycles, self propelled mowers. We can have a new national federal police to catch people that still have unregistered tungsten bulbs in great grand paw's radios in the barn, attic or cellar. We can have at least 500K new federal police and a new classification of federal felons. Think of all the milliwatts saved!
Yes but not everyone just puts lights in the ceiling you know. Some of us - me for example - live in 150 year old farm houses which were not originally electrified. We don't have wiring or light fixtures in ceilings or walls for that matter because they are in many cased not stud walls like in a modern home. So we have outlets usually located in floors; and use lamps.
Guess what resistance heat at waist level isn't as bad a away to heat a room. When its your reading lamp near your face its actually a pretty damn good way because it means YOU feel warm without heating the entire room. I actually have halogens, florescent, traditional incandescent and some led bulbs in various places around here. I uses each where it makes the most sense. LEDs are used in rough operation locations (door opener) and in places like the kitchen where lights are on for long hours for electrical efficiency. florescent are used where I need a lot of lumens cheap - shop lights. Incandescent are used for comforts lights - reading lamps, bedside tables, etc. The halogens (which I realize are also a type of incandescent) are legacy fixtures in the bathroom that I just haven't scrapped yet. I have a stock of bulbs I'll probably replace them once I use them up.
See I am not stupid and I understand how things work; how much power they draw and what service conditions they are suited for. I can choose a type of bulb that is both econ-concious and is fit for purpose without the help of the federal government!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It isn't clear Trump is left unscathed by Mueller. We don't see the full report.
Put yourself in Mueller's shoes. If he issued an indictment of Trump, the right-wing nuts would froth at the mouth...well, more so than they already do. And his boss has already declared Presidents are above the law. So by failing to issue an indictment in the way he did, i.e., evidence on both sides, he makes Barr decide not to indict and now Barr has to defend being a toadie...my apologies to toads.
And Mueller seemed to do a fair job of spawning off other investigations that were not in his direct purview. So now Barr has to contend with the rank and file knowing what a sleeze Trump is and attempt to bottle up those investigations.
In my opinion, Barr got the job because the Republicans needed a patsy and he was pleasured to oblige.
the light from LED bulbs seems more harsh
I personally find "daylight" bulbs very harsh, and I'm wondering if you got one of those. They are slightly brighter than "warm" bulbs but I don't like the color.
Ironically we say "warm" bulbs for bulbs with a lower color temperature. Color temperature is measured using the number of degrees that an ideal black-body radiator would be to glow at that color. "warm" bulbs are 2700K, and "daylight" bulbs are 5000K. The hotter color temperature means the light is shifted toward blue, so it's brighter. The "warm" temperature is less bluish. (We are used to fire being considered warm, and it's only red-hot; blue-hot is hotter. But ice looks bluish so I guess we think bluish colors are cooler.)
I have Cree brand tube bulbs that replace fluorescent tubes and they are 3000K color temperature. I like 3000K; the "warm" temperature of 2700K seems kind of yellowish to me. I found that Cree has some 3000K bulbs on the Home Depot web site (I've never seen them in a store) and I plan to try buying some.
Also, bulbs have a metric called "CRI", which I believe is "Color Rendering Index". A CRI rating of 100 is theoretically exactly as nice as sunlight. Higher is better. The most expensive Cree bulbs have CRI of over 90. Your "harsh" bulb may have a low CRI.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Is "curly-cue" [sic] the American way of saying compact fluorescent or CFL?
Yes; "curly fry" bulb is another one I've heard. Yuk Yuk!
We have a lot of recessed overhead lighting in our house, that uses rose larger flood bulbs.
I have switched to LED bulbs for other purposes, but for the overhead fill lighting I've never been able to find a good LED replacement. The main problem is that they are pretty much all way, way too directional - they shine very brightly down instead of filling an area.
Eventually they may get there with good fill lighting but until then they need to keep the standard bulbs, it's not like the go out rapidly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Could this benefit Trump via his ownership of a collection of energy-wasting shitbox buildings? Perhaps through reduced retrofit costs, or simply greater aesthetic flexibility (energy efficiency be damned?)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
IMHO, if you want to do the least amount of emitting when you drive, you need to remember that nearly 70% of domestic electrical energy production in the USA comes from fossil fuels, including the energy you used to charge that battery.
Actually it's 63.5% (for 2018.) Natural gas provided 35.1% and coal provided 27.4%. Coal has been trending downward since 2008 -- largely due to market forces, not regulations. Nuclear has stayed pretty constant, but renewables have been trending upward.
Somehow I wonder if we'd be better off burning Natural Gas in internal combustion engines over burning it to charge my EV's battery given transmission losses, conversion losses and charge/discharge efficiency and losses you have to over come...
You may have a point, but let's review. Natural gas is relatively cheap and abundant, and while hardly carbon-neutral, it is better on the environment than coal or oil. It will be hard to talk people out of using it, and it may make more sense to burn it in the car rather than in an electrical plan that charges an electric car. However, unburnt natural gas is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Leakage during transport is inevitable. (On the flip side, it does break down in the atmosphere more quickly than CO2.)
TL/DR: it's not just about the tailpipe.
But hey, your mileage may vary (literally) but I'm pretty sure there is no such thing as a "zero" emission vehicle especially if you look at the whole life cycle of the car...
You overlook that electrical energy can be created from many sources, whereas fossil fuels come from only one: fossils, and their availability is far more finite than other sources of energy. No matter how we make it, we're never going to run out of electricity.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Fair points. I should have said Trump was left unscathed by William Barr. And yes, we most definitely do need to see the report to get the full picture. I predict it will contain stuff that both sides will try to weaponize.
As for how/why Barr got the AG job, I'm not the only one who thinks he basically auditioned for it.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The reason why the "Lighting Industry" wants these rolled back is that the US manufacturers didn't re-tool their factories to produce LED lights, and now Chinese manufacturers have the bulk of the sales. They've had a couple years to know this is coming for this second class of lamps/bulbs, and *still* didn't re-tool.
This does not benefit the consumer in any way, it's strictly a bailout for the dinosaur bulb manufacturers.
Design for Use, not Construction!
And although Trump may have been left unscathed by Mueller's probe
All we've seen so far is a summary written by the guy who literally covered up Iran-Contra. And even that summary explicitly states the report did not exonerate Trump:
While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him
Btw, one of Barr's "interesting" legal positions is that you can not be charged with obstructing justice unless you can be charged with the crime you obstructed justice to hide. Which would seem to fit extremely well with that quote. It's also an insane opinion that isn't backed by anything other than convenience to the powerful.
Consumers still have the option to upgrade to the more energy efficient ones. Market forces of supply and demand will prevail.
Clever remark. More of the same critical thinking. Incandescents emit light and heat, and many homes are increasingly heated by electricity, emission free. Why ban incadescents, using a fraction of power compared to heating, with the rest heating your home and thus reducing your heating bills? Letâ(TM)s follow the money to understand obamas buying cartels of Philips and Co types. Profit for incandescents few cents per bulb. But scared with global warming guilt, you are happily paying $20 per short-lived LED bulb instead to 50 cents per incandescent bulb, satisfied that the planet Earth would not overheat tomorrow. Meanwhile Philips and Co are going laughing all the way to their bank.
Stick it to the man and get $0.99 led bulbs at ikea https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat...
Mines the same. But it's a rental and I can't replace fixtures. And cost effective LEDs can't be put in enclosed fixtures because they generate too much heat and shorten the life of the bulb. I don't know why tits thought they don't generate heat. They make tons
Eh. Haha on the autocorrect making it "tits"
"It's also an insane opinion that isn't backed by anything other than convenience to the powerful."
How is that an insane position for something like the alleged obstruction didn't impact the outcome of the investigation? I could see your point in a case where the charge can't be proven because of some ongoing obstruction or the destruction of evidence but for something like this it is bit like charging someone for breaking out of prison when they are subsequently proven not guilty. The crime was locking them up, not them getting out. Similarly if the investigation ultimately concludes no crime was committed the crime was having put them through an investigation in the first place.
Trump is... well he is about the worst case scenario for making these arguments about the President. The conclusions people reach tend to be heavily biased based on what they want to see happen with THIS President. But stepping outside that intent of the Constitution is actually pretty straightforward with regard to the President, he or she isn't supposed to be vulnerable to legal attack short of impeachment proceedings and congress shouldn't be using the justice department to investigate him because he has every right to hold loyalty as a condition of employment among his own staff. The executive branch is his staff. If they do use someone from an executive agency their role working from congress should be distinct from their day job which they should reasonably expect to lose when they investigate their boss.
I can't speak for that guy but... yes?
The price of "60 watt" LED lights is negligible now, so I batch ordered a pack of 32 LED lights for $60. I look forward to seeing my next energy bill.
-Bob-
"Have LEDs at home, not saving me any money based on my hours of usage per day. Now, if they last 10 years, then they start paying off.."
Sure it does for the same reason it saves those corporations tons of money. The power that they don't bother metering in residences still has to be generated and still costs money to generate... the power company isn't exactly known for charity, they certainly aren't going to take that cost out of THEIR pockets. Of course they aren't going to stop making you pay for it either, they'll pocket it unless given some reason to do otherwise like competition. That is why prices in deregulated markets are so much lower... unless you are sucker who doesn't check periodically for lower prices.
Yes, I agree with all of that, and have made similar points in other stories. Please see my reply to gtall above.
Barr's claim that there was no obstruction because there was no crime of conspiracy is ridiculous. Tell that to Martha Stewart, who was not convicted for insider trading, but was convicted for obstructing the investigation of her alleged insider trading.
And it gets better with Barr. He maintains that the President cannot obstruct justice. Not hard to see how he got the nod from the WH to be the new AG.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
or the Dollar store effect. It makes economic sense to buy LEDs. They save a large amount of money over a year or two. But if you're poor you can't necessarily afford a $10 or even $5 dollar light bulb when a .99 cent one will do. If you've only got $1 dollar in your pocket it doesn't matter how much the $5 bulb saves you. And for the really poor (especially the elderly) we often subsidize their electricity; and regardless you can make payment arrangements when you come up short.
The solution to this used to be subsidizing CFLs. You'd see them for $1 a piece at Goodwill when they sold for $3-$5 in other stores. We never really did that with LEDs, and we probably should. The savings are worthwhile, since it eases the load on the grid and reduces the number of new plants that need building, but folks don't like subsidies even if they save money.
Hell, we just did a massive number of cuts to WIC and food stamps that will eventually result in kids with brain damage from the malnutrition their mothers experience and, in turn, those kids will clog up the legal system with expensive crimes when they can't make sense of the world.
But hey, socialisms, amiright?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
60-70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck(depending on what you consider paycheck to paycheck, e.g. $1000 in the bank gets you 60%, $100 gets you 70%). Doesn't matter how much that $20 bulb saves you if you've only got $1 in your pocket. Move into an Apartment and you'll still find incandescent bulbs everywhere, especially if it's a cheap apartment.
Note that we're usually not subsidizing energy efficient bulbs out of the goodness of our hearts. It's usually pushed by power companies to reduce load on their plants so they don't have to spend to build another.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
hope you break your neck in an accident the next time you're between jobs.
How about the portmatards who like sticking "tard" on the end of words?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
7. CowboyNeal
In Germany at least, high-quality retro-fit LED "bulbs" emitting 806 lumens at a color temperature of 2700K with a CRI of 95 consuming 6.5 Watt are sold for about 3 Euro in single-piece quantities to end users. They are specified for 15,000 hours of operation (before the lumens emitted drop to 70%) and 50,000 switch cycles.
if you cover 'pre existing conditions'.
it is no longer "insurance". it no longer covers "what if".
they KNOW it will cost them. it's no longer a gamble. they WILL lose money.
why would any company want to do that?
If you force them to do that. Someone will get fucked and it won't be the company.
Congratulations. You just described why Obamacare has an individual mandate, with an IRS-administered penalty for those who don't sign up. A penalty that Trump's tax bill removed. (The ACA still has an individual mandate, but the penalty is $0.)
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It obstruction was only a crime if the obstruction worked, there would be no reason not to attempt to obstruct every investigation. If your obstruction succeeds, the crime never implicates you, and you can't be charged with obstruction. If your obstruction doesn't succeed, you can't be charged with obstruction.
Under your rules, you can only be charged if the obstruction is successful and you get caught.
Regardless, Barr is in charge of thousands of on-going prosecutions, probably dozens of which are obstruction where the effect was unsuccessful. I guarantee you he will not be dropping a SINGLE ONE of those, which essentially proves that he knows his assertion is bullshit.
dom
RTFA, this is rolling back an Obama rule that was pushed out as he left office. The law Bush signed is still in effect.
you just end up identifying "need" to almost nothing. It ends up boiling down to a way to pretend you're helping without having to pay for it.
The right wing (including Joe Biden) is trying to do the same with Social Security. They want to means test it so they can avoid paying to maintain it and, long term, shut it down.
If we had a real media (instead of the bought and paid for corporatist crap we get) this crap would be called out. But we don't, so crap like giving folks "what they need" makes it into the public discourse without anyone pointing out that the end game is to eliminate help for low income and disadvantaged folk in order to shift the money up stream. It's a trap, don't fall for it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
But now the Trump administration wants to undo an Obama-era regulation designed to make a wide array of specialty lightbulbs more energy efficient.
No.... 'Regulations' do not 'make' lightbulbs more energy efficient. The only thing regulations can do is to "require that specialty lightbulbs be manufactured to be more energy efficient in order to be legally sold."
Critics say if the reversal is finalized it will mean higher energy bills for consumers and more pollution.
Possibly. But let not ignore the probability that the newer light bulbs will also be considerably more expensive for consumers and, at least in my experience, they do not last nearly as long as advertised. Will the net result be more, less, or equally expensive to the consumer? That would be a question worth answering.
I listen to NPR on a regular basis because I once heard a smart man recommend that people should get news from all across the political spectrum. NPR's reporting has a definite bias to the left which they try to conceal by what they report and they report it.
It's pretty horrifying how many people are so deep into TDS, that they are willing to say "we should go back several centuries on progress on judicial system and adopt presumption of guilt", just to avoid having to face being wrong for two years.
But stepping outside that intent of the Constitution is actually pretty straightforward with regard to the President, he or she isn't supposed to be vulnerable to legal attack short of impeachment proceedings
[Citation Required]
There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the President from being charged with a criminal offense while in office. The existence of an additional mechanism for accountability (impeachment) does not mean it is the only method for accountability.
There is a DoJ policy that the President can't be charged, mostly because of a belief that this is a conflict of interest. Since the President is the boss of the DoJ, prosecutors might botch the job, thus protecting the President via double jeopardy. But that policy isn't in the Constitution.
I have a 'Cold Quartz Ultraviolet and Ozone Apparatus.' It's from the 1950s and was a quack medical device. It emits a lot of UV light and reeks of ozone after it's been powered for a little while. Don't use it to read books at night.
Here it is. It has a 117L7GT tube in the base, that runs the oscillator to produce the high voltage needed.
Wow, you've read the report? Not the summary, but the actual report?
Put yourself in Mueller's shoes. If he issued an indictment of Trump, the right-wing nuts would froth at the mouth...well, more so than they already do.
You mean like the Democrats have been for the last 22 months?
And his boss has already declared Presidents are above the law.
No, the DOJ has, for decades BEFORE Trump took office was of the opinion that a sitting President could not be indicted - if a crime is committed by the President, the first step is the Congress impeaches the President and unseats them, THEN the DOJ can charge the former President.
So now Barr has to contend with the rank and file knowing what a sleeze Trump is and attempt to bottle up those investigations.
Trump supporters knew exactly what they were getting in Trump, you just seem to have a problem accepting they preferred Trump over your preferred candidate in 2016.
Ken
That's why Reagan signed COBRA benefits into law back in 1985.
Ken
...de Vos just cut 18 million for Special Olympics.
The AG has no constitutional authority to indict a president, that authority is given to congress. His decision is unconstitutional as it usurps congressional responsibility.
I am a EE graduate turned computer programmer in the 25+ years of my professional career. I've worked in many industries like the arts (theater lights and sound), aviation, telecommunications, defense and held all sorts of positions and title from trainee to Principle Engineer, from junior developer to Development Manager. I've done a lot of related stuff because I have a "I'll try" attitude and the ability to work independently or in groups. I get stuff done, on time, within budget and I don't require a lot of management, just give me the task and it gets done. I don't recall ever claiming I had professional experience with stuff when I don't, but after almost 40 years of working for a living I've done a large number of things and have a wide range of experience as a result so I can see if you somehow don't think it's possible. Maybe for you it won't be, but I've been at this earning a living thing for a long time and I don't really mind what job I'm given, so I've done a lot of things over the years.
I suppose to some young skull full of mush who's just starting out the old man with grey hair seems kind of useless. I sit over here, flying my desk and I'm sure it seems to you that I don't know any of the new things, the important things to you. You've just graduated from college and finished your 16 years of schooling with all the pomp and circumstance ringing in your ears. But truth be told, you know enough to be dangerous and still haven't learned enough to know what you don't know. I've been doing this job (or ones like it) for twice as long as you've been alive. I see you for who you are, because I was once just like you, except that I understood that I had a lot to learn and the old guys with grey hair had a lot to teach me if I'd listen to them. Maybe it was how I was raised, in a poor farm family, struggling to stay fed and warm, seeing college and hard work as a way to a better life? Maybe it's my willingness to try all sorts of jobs, to do the dirty work that nobody else wants that gave me the wide breadth of experience I have... Maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones...
However, for you, I'd suggest you grow up some. Put some time in your profession. Listen more than you speak. You have a lot to learn.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I see people who demand a high aesthetic in their cell phones rather than pure efficiency ugly have come to demand industrial ugly for decorative lighting. It seems odd to me. Besides, the perceived problem is solving itself with only settings really demanding decorative lighting being equipped with tungsten technology. Let them have the option, let the rest of us have the option. Best will win.
{^_^}
you say that as if it makes things better. its robbery simple as that
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
its fairly normal (to a degree)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It is just a tax. Just like you pay taxes to pay for Medicaid and Medicare.
Statute of limitations exist.
If you want to require all prosecution to happen after the President is out of office, you need to pause all statute of limitations for the time they are in office.
That AC probably would never pay those sky-high COBRA premiums because he thinks he's healthy and doesn't want to subsidize all of the fatties back at his old office.
also robbery
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So taxes are robbery?
Try laying charges against the IRS then. See how far you get. I'll wait.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Reversing or eliminating a regulation has nothing to do with the actual creation of stuff. Therefore, claiming that eliminating a regulation *results* in something (such as higher costs or more pollution) is just pushing an agenda with a lie. The summary suggests this particular regulation was never more widely applied anyway, so how is killing it going to have *any* effect on *anything*? But, if such effects were estimated, did the calculations account for the increased energy independence of the US since Trump took office?
"Critics say"? Are these critics members of "The Natural Resources Defense Council"? The activist organization that profits from exaggerating or otherwise inventing environmental issues to complain about (an organization that nobody ever heard of and is exploiting the "orange man bad" zeitgeist to get their name out there)? *Those* critics?
No he should not. He has immunity, so does a congressman, a diplomat from another nation, or even a prosecutor for that matter.
The President can simply pardon himself for such a thing but he won't escape impeachment. He has been trusted by voters with the power to pardon anyone else for any offense so it would be nonsensical to say he doesn't have the right to execute that same judgement when deciding whether or not to shoot someone or otherwise engage in what otherwise would be a criminal act. We have a concept of breaking the law to prevent a greater miscarriage of justice. Punishing a man for his personal actions is just so relatively insignificant compared to the importance of the Office of the President that we make this tradeoff. The President makes decisions that can destroy or save thousands or even millions of lives in the course of his duties or even save or destroy the entire nation. The President can simply order the military to shoot someone what sense would it make to have a policy that is about making sure he can't pardon himself if he pulls the trigger himself instead of having someone else do it?
You use the most extreme example and there is always the difficult to assign a value to a human life. But the fact is that we do exactly that in court judgement, war, capital punishment, etc every day. Those values often and regularly come in dramatically lower than the impact of even minor decisions made by the President.
So there you go, if you want to shoot someone and not go to jail all you have to do to pull it off is get 300 million people to democratically elect you to be the most powerful person in the world, the President of the United States. Or... there are actually dramatically lower ranking positions that reach this bar, seriously there are billions of people and millions die every day.
The last thing you want is someone being able assail the office with things, including accusations, about things like this and interfere with the ability of the President to execute his or her duties. The President, already knowing he isn't guilty, fires his employee who is conducting an investigation that hampers his ability to execute his oath of office and finds a replacement he hopes will focus on helping him do so rather than hamper him. This is the sort of thing is actually a President doing his job. Now if he'd been guilty he might be trying to escape justice but trying to kill an investigation he knows is a waste of time and hurts him politically? That is just intelligently managing resources.
So do pardon. But just about everything the President does outweighs any sort of criminal punishment of one man. As such the President is empowered with the ability to prevent the criminal punishment of anyone for virtually any reason, including himself, explicitly by the Constitution of the United States of America.
Don't like it amend the Constitution or become President and enjoy it. It might appeal to our sense of justice but it really makes very little sense to avoid the President pardoning himself when he can simply order someone else to do whatever it is and then pardon them.
"Regardless, Barr is in charge of thousands of on-going prosecutions, probably dozens of which are obstruction where the effect was unsuccessful. I guarantee you he will not be dropping a SINGLE ONE of those, which essentially proves that he knows his assertion is bullshit."
I would not make such a broad assumption. Moreover, I'd venture there are probably thousands of cases where he or his staff have opt'd not to prosecute in the first place. That is in fact the job and discretion of a prosecutor.
"Under your rules, you can only be charged if the obstruction is successful and you get caught."
This suggests there needs to be a single black and white set of rules that always works. Life is too grey for there to ever be justice under that scheme. That is why prosecutors have discretion and why juries have nullification because even the most just law will result in injustice in some cases.
Article II, Section 2 states that the President "shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment."
The limitation of impeachment is explicit which makes a claim of any other limit weak. The fact that limitation is the recourse including in the Constitution for checking the President if he does something wrong makes it very clear this lack of limit applies to himself as well. Further just like congress, prosecutors, and even foreign dignitaries he is immune while in office. The fact that nothing prevents you from charging him in the first place when you couldn't convict him regardless is a mere technicality being used politically to preemptively have him judged in a court of public opinion and undermine him. Doing so isn't just a political victory it prevents him from executing his oath of office and obstruction of the Presidency is a very serious thing.
The founders repeatedly and explicitly set up a justice system wherein preventing unjust punishment is heavily prioritized over making sure to punish everyone who is guilty. They did that for very good reason and left jury nullification in place in order to prevent the state from passing unjust laws and imprisoning the people in a power grab. The same is true with the President, his ability to pardon himself protects him to a certain extent from being made to betray his office in response to blackmail.
I agree with the "Interesting" mod of this post, not because of any type of new information or insight, but because this is an excellent expression of the new cognitive dissonance blueprint for the anti-Trump crowd. Watch how many versions of this propagandist word thinking you see twisting in the digital wind, filled with spillover from dashed hopes and dreams of the demise of Bad Orange Man. These sentiments are the new (energy efficient) laser pointer you will see others follow passionately.
So do pardon.
Can't be pardoned without being convicted. Can't be convicted if you can't be prosecuted.
As such the President is empowered with the ability to prevent the criminal punishment of anyone for virtually any reason, including himself, explicitly by the Constitution of the United States of America.
Again, that requires a conviction first, so that everyone knows what the person did before a pardon can be issued.
They are the only thread of sanity left in the world. Stop them and we have nothing of the old world left.
The limitation of impeachment is explicit which makes a claim of any other limit weak
You realize we're talking about prosecution, not pardons, right?
Also, to be pardoned you have to be convicted.
Further just like congress, prosecutors, and even foreign dignitaries he is immune while in office
Um....you do realize there are congressmen currently in prison, right? They left office after they were indicted. According to you, this is impossible, yet it has happened many times.
At this point it's obvious you're vomiting forth impressive-sounding words in an attempt to create your own reality.