Now, see what sort of mileage you get when you try hypermiling that van through the Alps. This is the Monte Carlo route we're talking about here.
The Roadster's 241 mile range (Powertrain 1.5) is based on their official MPGe rating from the EPA, which means the same drivecycle that all other cars go through. Now, in practice, you're not going to want to run your car down to empty; in fact, when you hop in to drive it, the Roadster won't even show you all of the charge (part of it is kept in an "emergency reserve").
Note that they're only using 160Wh/kg li-ion cells. You can get notably higher nowadays. Which would explain the longer range of the big-pack Model S.
I'm not sure what you think is in li-ion batteries that you're picturing is so toxic. These aren't lead-acid or nickel-cadmium here. Want to know what goes into a lithium phosphate battery? Lithium salts (like you find in mineral water -- in fact, they're actually produced from salt flats where mineral waters evaporated), iron powder, phosphoric acid, sugar (for a carbon binding), porous polyethylene (separator), graphite or amorphous carbon (anode), any one of a variety corrosive but generally nontoxic electrolytes, casing, wiring, and so forth. You'll find worse stuff in a lot of bulk steels than you will in LFP cells.
You are aware that this is a car that could easily blow away almost all other cars on the road in terms of performance, right? It took this long because it was going *through narrow mountain roads in the Alps*. Are you going to drive 80mph on roads like this?
The cells are independently isolated. They've done a lot of tests forcing catastrophic failure of individual cells to make sure that the failure of one wouldn't cascade to others.
Note that this is really only applicable to Tesla; they're one of the only (if not the only) EV makers who use traditional laptop cells. Pretty much all of their competitors are using "automotive" li-ion chemistry variants that sacrifice energy density for faster charge capability, greater longevity, and fire resistance.
I once (and only once) added an easter egg to a program I was working on. It was called "Bullfrog", and was a government system for scanning the radio spectrum for signals and tuning in to whatever you found. On a dialog I was working on, one of the requirements was to have a "bouncing ball" that shows you what frequency you're at as you scan. There was also a little history snapshot dialog that you could turn on or off. If you clicked the button to turn the snapshot dialog on/off precisely 42 times, the bouncing ball would turn into a hopping frog. Only took a few minutes to code, so why not?:)
I can't help but wonder if anyone ever ran into that...;)
Hey, if you have no sense of hypocrisy, that's your fault. Iraqi army invades steals art owned by the Kuwaiti Royal family? Appalling! Horror! Looting! Those horrible people! A dozen years later, the US army steals art owned by the Iraqi royal family -- and turns some of it into art praising themselves. And our view on the subject is? Heroes! Justice! Righteousness! Why? Because we like the Kuwaiti royal family and hate the Iraqi royal family.
Sorry, but international law isn't based on who is popular, and applying a different standard of morality to one group over another is known as hypocrisy.
Throw a brick at a painting in a museum and try that excuse out, will you?
"Stealing" is not artistic expression, nor are there artistic expression exemptions laid out in the Geneva Conventions. Occupying armies are not there to practice art. They're there to do a job and get the heck out of the country of the people you're occupying without looting them or destroying/killing any more than you have to in order to keep the peace.
It became a symbol, like the Berlin Wall. Have we "stolen" sections of wall from the Germans?
The US military, acting in its official capacity, did not haul off almost the entire Berlin Wall back to the US and rebuild it into an anti-communist museum. And yes, anything soldiers stole of the wall on their own, if any, would be illegal.
The statue was the personal property of Saddam, who was arrested and executed. Both of his sons were killed by US forces. So they confiscated his property.
That's not how the Geneva Conventions works. You're not allowed to confiscate property from private citizens, either. To take something, there must be a compelling security justification. What's the security justification for tearing down a statue, paying someone to recast it into something that praises you, and then shipping that back to your home country?
But my main point is that when *others* invade and take home assets from other country or its leaders, we howl to the moon. But look at how strongly we stretch to justify it when we do the exact same freaking thing. And this isn't just individual soldiers stealing; this is an official action sanctioned by, at the very least, the commander of a US military base.
For those who care, there's an interesting contrarian view here, from a former government lawyer.
-------
DOJ and the FISA Lawsuit: The Lawyers are Doing Their Job by wmtriallawyer
After reading throughout the Netroots some of the concern vis a vis the latest Motion to Dismiss filed by the Department of Justice in the FISA lawsuit, I thought I would give my perspective, as a local government attorney, on what is going on.
Regardless of the context, if you work in government as an attorney, and you litigate (i.e. go to court), the first thing you do if you are sued is to look for a way out of the lawsuit. It's that simple. And there are plenty of immunities available to governments, whether federal, state, or local, to accomplish that goal.
I put the disclaimer up front: I'm no expert on FISA, the current lawsuit, or even all the immunities available to federal government at this point. But I have read the Motion to Dismiss in the case (available here), and I give some of my very basic thoughts below...
[b]Fact #1: This is a civil lawsuit for money damages and/or equitable relief.[/b] Plain and simple, the Plaintiff seeks monetary damages against the Defendants. I.e., you committed a wrong, and the only way to make up for that wrong is pay money. Or in the alternative, it seeks equitable relief -- i.e., an injunction -- to prevent a future wrong.
[b]Fact #2: The Motion to Dismiss was filed by the government Defendants in their official capacity.[/b] Two important points here. First, this is a Motion to Dismiss claims, or in the alternative, for summary judgment. I can tell you as a matter of legal practice, any time a government is sued, there is a Motion to Dismiss filed, primarily to see if you can "knock out" at least some of the claims, or if you get lucky, the whole lawsuit. Second, the "official capacity" part is key. Simply stated, DOJ is moving to dismiss Defendants "The United States of America," "President Barack Obama," "Attorney General Eric Holder," etc. in their official capacity. Official capacity is just like it sounds...you've been sued by virtue of the fact that a. you are a government agency or b. you work for that government agency in some official way.
[b]Fact #3: As a general rule, governments and government official have immunity for acts in their official capacity.[/b] This is nothing new. It is the concept of "sovereign immunity" which has been around for hundreds of years. The general rule is established so that Joe Blow cannot simply "sue the government" for every perceived wrong that government does, because it would not be in the public interest for ALL for the government, as an entity, to have to defend said lawsuits or pay out damages in its official capacity. However, and this is critical, this does NOT mean a Plaintiff can't sue a government employee for wrongful acts committed in the scope of their employment in their personal capacity. Indeed, in the lawsuit at hand, DOJ makes clear that they are filing this Motion for the government Defendants sued in their official capacity, despite the fact that many, many more are sued in their official capacity. Keep in mind, there are immunities available to those in their personal capacity as well, which DOJ also raises. But those immunities are generally not as strong as the immunity provided for those acting in an official capacity.
[b]Fact #4: Asserting a defense in a lawsuit does not in any way equate official government policy.[/b] Trust me on this one. I've had to assert defenses to lawsuits early on in the stages of litigation, as is the case in the FISA lawsuit. And it does NOT mean in any way that it is some sort of policy declaration. It is doing what is necessary to defend my client from the relief sought by the Plaintiff. Plain and simple. And that is especially true at the Motion to Dismiss stage. Indeed, these issues are going to be litigated not only at the t
It's not the shame card; it's the facts of the case. You might have thought to ask for them before you passed judgment. And whether the injury "drowns out any ill effects", it's a case of her insisting that she couldn't use them because they flickered and caused migraines, but while in reality, she couldn't even tell that ours were CFLs. I find that a lot of people, brain injury or no, are in exactly the same boat.
I find it incredibly annoying how the US uses violations of international law as a reason to demonize, sanction, or even outright invade other nations, but when the US does them, they're mentioned in passing and even cheered.
Random example: shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein, after the whole statue-toppling incident, the US took the scraps of the statue to an Iraqi artist and paid him to make them a monument out of them, which they shipped to Fort Hood. They also took an intact head, arm, and sword.
Okay, first off, it's completely illegal to deface artwork in the first place, whether you agree with it or not. But just completely ignoring that, this is outright looting. How many freaking times have we condemned as little more than thuggish brigands armed groups who invade one place and leave carrying out things like that? I couldn't begin to count it. And yet the US press, and the website of the museum at Fort Hood, is outright *celebrating* the looting of Iraqi bronze. WTF?
It's not really a master bedroom by design. When we bought the house, we decided all of the "bedrooms" were smaller than we'd like, so we converted the downstairs "family room" area into a combination bedroom/sewing room. So it's a really big room (comparatively). There are six bulbs in dimmable track lighting, three in the bedside lamp (which Elaine reads by every night), and a three-way CFL in the lamp on the dresser that we use to get ready every morning and which Elaine sews by.
We were taking care of her house and doing a lot of cleaning for her. She's on disability due to a brain injury from a car accident, and is probably going to lose her house once it runs out, so every penny we can help save her means longer she can keep her house. So lay off the holier-than-thou attitude.
Most of the bulbs in my house are 60W, not 75W, and I'm paying $0.09/kWh, which puts it at $4.04/year
Assuming you use them only for a mere three hours a day and don't count the dollar-or-two-per-incandescent-bulb contribution to your AC costs.
each bulb costs $2.50, remember
And incandescents are free?
Let me say that again: a single CFL burn-out changes my total yearly savings from $1.54 ($4.04 - $2.50) to -$0.96!
So, you live in a world where incandescents are free and you only use your bulbs for an average of a mere three hours a day, and incandescents don't increase your cooling costs, and despite only three hours of use per day, your bulbs burn out in six months. Right.
I live in the real world, which is a very different place. I've used CFLs for about three years now. The whole house has been on CFLs for at least two years. I've taken burned-out bulbs to the dump once before -- six or so of them, tacked on to another dump trip. I just checked my bag of bulbs that have accumulated since then. There are three bulbs in it. I'm going to go ahead and do a bulb count in the house for you: 4 in the downstairs bath, one in the mud room, 11 in the master bedroom, 1 in the stairwell, 3 in the living room, 3 in the dining room, 2 in the kitchen, 3 in the upstairs bath, 2 in the guest room, 3 in the library, and 3 in the computer room, for a grand total of 35 bulbs. 2-3 years. 9-ish dead bulbs. You do the math. Oh, and a good portion of my bulbs are on dimmer switches.
Oh, and the headaches? There's a reason I brought them up. You see, effective cost is a function of more than just monetary cost...
Mmhmm. And I have a friend who insists that as soon as she sees a CFL, she gets migraines. After getting evidence to the contrary (by virtue of how she didn't get migraines at my house, which she didn't know had CFLs), I secretly switched most of the bulbs in her house to modern CFLs while she was in the hospital (i.e., not the old flickery magnetic ballast ones) without her knowing about it to see if she'd notice. Guess what? It's over a month later, and she hasn't noticed. They're still there. Nor has she gotten a migraine (I'd know, because she calls us to take her to the hospital to get a shot when it happens).
She's hardly the only one I've had that experience with. I've had half a dozen people tell me that they can't stand CFLs who were shocked, when visiting my place, to learn (after being in my house for several hours) that all my bulbs are CFLs.
Of course, if he shares his catch with another male chimpanzee instead of a female, he'll have to pay the gift tax and won't have legal recognition of their adopted young.
As we all know, the gays are going to zap us with lightning. (Yes, that's a real commercial that's been airing on TV in several states)
The vast majority of my electricity usage is not from light bulbs, despite what most pro-CFL people would have you believe.
What an amazing discovery! So, you're telling me that I can change how much money my lightbulbs are costing me to run simply by wasting power or not wasting power elsewhere?
(Translation: Please, be serious here; the cost to run your bulbs is independent of where you waste power elsewhere.)
Let's say I save $4/month after I spend $40 on the bulbs.
Let's say I live 100 years by eating more sunflower seeds. Now let's decide what to do with those 100 years.
(Translation: No, pulling numbers of a hat doesn't count as doing the math).
You're really going to make me do this again, aren't you?
Multiply by however many bulbs you'd like. Note that we're not counting the contribution to AC/heating (which nets notably worse for incandescents).
Oh, and if your answer is, "Well, perhaps that'd justify my living room, but not Room X, because I don't use the lights in there that often" -- well, then they won't burn out that often either, now will they?
If it's too inconvenient, throw them in your trash. You'll still release less mercury than if you had used incandescents, let alone all of the other stuff coal power plants release.
You're picking straws. If you look at the box, 9 times out of 10, it'll say "Color Temperature". So deal with it. It's like trying to pick a fight with someone for saying that you should check how many calories are in a food before you buy it because they didn't say "kilocalories".
Wow, way to miss the point. I specifically said "in the winter".
Way to miss my point. Apparently where you live, there's only one season.
A modern CFL, the low-mercury kind that's starting to dominate, has only about 3mg of mercury in it. That's about the mass of ten grains of salt. Compare that to how kids used to play with whole balls of the stuff from thermometers -- and you're worried about ten grains of salt worth, a fraction of which might have left the bulb? On top of that, it's elemental mercury, which is far less toxic than mercury bound up in organic compounds (like you find in food, or power plant emissions). And it's not a dust.
Every so often you'll get some scare story about how somebody broke a bulb, and they had their mercury levels in the room checked and it was X times over the OSHA standards. But those standards are for chronic exposure, and we're talking about levels that fall off exponentially over time. For crying out loud, if you're concerned about tiny amounts of mercury in your body, there are a lot better ways to prevent it than worrying about CFLs. Like cutting down on seafood, or having any amalgam fillings removed from your teeth. And if you care about mercury in the environment, you should absolutely *not* be using incandescents, as coal power plants are our primary mercury emitters.
I have a hard time justifying spending $10 for four 60-watt-equivalent CFLs when I can get four 60W "regular" light bulbs for $1
Apparently electricity is free where you live. Where the rest of us in the US live, it averages $0.11/kWh, which means that a 60W bulb running for 3 hours a day costs $7 a year... *not* counting its contribution to your AC bill.
Sure, maybe my power bill is a little higher, but my TV uses more power than my light bulbs, and I leave that on practically all the time...
Neat line of logic. Since my mortgage payment costs more than my water bill, I should feel free to turn on a garden hose and leave it running 24/7, right?
Money is money, and savings are savings. Period. It doesn't matter if you're wasting money elsewhere *also*.
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Now, see what sort of mileage you get when you try hypermiling that van through the Alps. This is the Monte Carlo route we're talking about here.
The Roadster's 241 mile range (Powertrain 1.5) is based on their official MPGe rating from the EPA, which means the same drivecycle that all other cars go through. Now, in practice, you're not going to want to run your car down to empty; in fact, when you hop in to drive it, the Roadster won't even show you all of the charge (part of it is kept in an "emergency reserve").
Note that they're only using 160Wh/kg li-ion cells. You can get notably higher nowadays. Which would explain the longer range of the big-pack Model S.
They're essentially not, essentially, yes, no. The phosphates and spinels most other auto makers are using, even moreso.
I'm not sure what you think is in li-ion batteries that you're picturing is so toxic. These aren't lead-acid or nickel-cadmium here. Want to know what goes into a lithium phosphate battery? Lithium salts (like you find in mineral water -- in fact, they're actually produced from salt flats where mineral waters evaporated), iron powder, phosphoric acid, sugar (for a carbon binding), porous polyethylene (separator), graphite or amorphous carbon (anode), any one of a variety corrosive but generally nontoxic electrolytes, casing, wiring, and so forth. You'll find worse stuff in a lot of bulk steels than you will in LFP cells.
You are aware that this is a car that could easily blow away almost all other cars on the road in terms of performance, right? It took this long because it was going *through narrow mountain roads in the Alps*. Are you going to drive 80mph on roads like this?
The cells are independently isolated. They've done a lot of tests forcing catastrophic failure of individual cells to make sure that the failure of one wouldn't cascade to others.
Note that this is really only applicable to Tesla; they're one of the only (if not the only) EV makers who use traditional laptop cells. Pretty much all of their competitors are using "automotive" li-ion chemistry variants that sacrifice energy density for faster charge capability, greater longevity, and fire resistance.
I once (and only once) added an easter egg to a program I was working on. It was called "Bullfrog", and was a government system for scanning the radio spectrum for signals and tuning in to whatever you found. On a dialog I was working on, one of the requirements was to have a "bouncing ball" that shows you what frequency you're at as you scan. There was also a little history snapshot dialog that you could turn on or off. If you clicked the button to turn the snapshot dialog on/off precisely 42 times, the bouncing ball would turn into a hopping frog. Only took a few minutes to code, so why not? :)
I can't help but wonder if anyone ever ran into that... ;)
Hey, if you have no sense of hypocrisy, that's your fault. Iraqi army invades steals art owned by the Kuwaiti Royal family? Appalling! Horror! Looting! Those horrible people! A dozen years later, the US army steals art owned by the Iraqi royal family -- and turns some of it into art praising themselves. And our view on the subject is? Heroes! Justice! Righteousness! Why? Because we like the Kuwaiti royal family and hate the Iraqi royal family.
Sorry, but international law isn't based on who is popular, and applying a different standard of morality to one group over another is known as hypocrisy.
They signed in 1956. Nice try.
Throw a brick at a painting in a museum and try that excuse out, will you?
"Stealing" is not artistic expression, nor are there artistic expression exemptions laid out in the Geneva Conventions. Occupying armies are not there to practice art. They're there to do a job and get the heck out of the country of the people you're occupying without looting them or destroying/killing any more than you have to in order to keep the peace.
It became a symbol, like the Berlin Wall. Have we "stolen" sections of wall from the Germans?
The US military, acting in its official capacity, did not haul off almost the entire Berlin Wall back to the US and rebuild it into an anti-communist museum. And yes, anything soldiers stole of the wall on their own, if any, would be illegal.
The statue was the personal property of Saddam, who was arrested and executed. Both of his sons were killed by US forces. So they confiscated his property.
That's not how the Geneva Conventions works. You're not allowed to confiscate property from private citizens, either. To take something, there must be a compelling security justification. What's the security justification for tearing down a statue, paying someone to recast it into something that praises you, and then shipping that back to your home country?
But my main point is that when *others* invade and take home assets from other country or its leaders, we howl to the moon. But look at how strongly we stretch to justify it when we do the exact same freaking thing. And this isn't just individual soldiers stealing; this is an official action sanctioned by, at the very least, the commander of a US military base.
For those who care, there's an interesting contrarian view here, from a former government lawyer.
-------
DOJ and the FISA Lawsuit: The Lawyers are Doing Their Job
by wmtriallawyer
After reading throughout the Netroots some of the concern vis a vis the latest Motion to Dismiss filed by the Department of Justice in the FISA lawsuit, I thought I would give my perspective, as a local government attorney, on what is going on.
Regardless of the context, if you work in government as an attorney, and you litigate (i.e. go to court), the first thing you do if you are sued is to look for a way out of the lawsuit. It's that simple. And there are plenty of immunities available to governments, whether federal, state, or local, to accomplish that goal.
I put the disclaimer up front: I'm no expert on FISA, the current lawsuit, or even all the immunities available to federal government at this point. But I have read the Motion to Dismiss in the case (available here), and I give some of my very basic thoughts below...
[b]Fact #1: This is a civil lawsuit for money damages and/or equitable relief.[/b] Plain and simple, the Plaintiff seeks monetary damages against the Defendants. I.e., you committed a wrong, and the only way to make up for that wrong is pay money. Or in the alternative, it seeks equitable relief -- i.e., an injunction -- to prevent a future wrong.
[b]Fact #2: The Motion to Dismiss was filed by the government Defendants in their official capacity.[/b] Two important points here. First, this is a Motion to Dismiss claims, or in the alternative, for summary judgment. I can tell you as a matter of legal practice, any time a government is sued, there is a Motion to Dismiss filed, primarily to see if you can "knock out" at least some of the claims, or if you get lucky, the whole lawsuit. Second, the "official capacity" part is key. Simply stated, DOJ is moving to dismiss Defendants "The United States of America," "President Barack Obama," "Attorney General Eric Holder," etc. in their official capacity. Official capacity is just like it sounds...you've been sued by virtue of the fact that a. you are a government agency or b. you work for that government agency in some official way.
[b]Fact #3: As a general rule, governments and government official have immunity for acts in their official capacity.[/b] This is nothing new. It is the concept of "sovereign immunity" which has been around for hundreds of years. The general rule is established so that Joe Blow cannot simply "sue the government" for every perceived wrong that government does, because it would not be in the public interest for ALL for the government, as an entity, to have to defend said lawsuits or pay out damages in its official capacity. However, and this is critical, this does NOT mean a Plaintiff can't sue a government employee for wrongful acts committed in the scope of their employment in their personal capacity. Indeed, in the lawsuit at hand, DOJ makes clear that they are filing this Motion for the government Defendants sued in their official capacity, despite the fact that many, many more are sued in their official capacity. Keep in mind, there are immunities available to those in their personal capacity as well, which DOJ also raises. But those immunities are generally not as strong as the immunity provided for those acting in an official capacity.
[b]Fact #4: Asserting a defense in a lawsuit does not in any way equate official government policy.[/b] Trust me on this one. I've had to assert defenses to lawsuits early on in the stages of litigation, as is the case in the FISA lawsuit. And it does NOT mean in any way that it is some sort of policy declaration. It is doing what is necessary to defend my client from the relief sought by the Plaintiff. Plain and simple. And that is especially true at the Motion to Dismiss stage. Indeed, these issues are going to be litigated not only at the t
My dimmers were designed in the 60s, and my dimmable CFLs work just fine with them.
It's not the shame card; it's the facts of the case. You might have thought to ask for them before you passed judgment. And whether the injury "drowns out any ill effects", it's a case of her insisting that she couldn't use them because they flickered and caused migraines, but while in reality, she couldn't even tell that ours were CFLs. I find that a lot of people, brain injury or no, are in exactly the same boat.
I find it incredibly annoying how the US uses violations of international law as a reason to demonize, sanction, or even outright invade other nations, but when the US does them, they're mentioned in passing and even cheered.
Random example: shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein, after the whole statue-toppling incident, the US took the scraps of the statue to an Iraqi artist and paid him to make them a monument out of them, which they shipped to Fort Hood. They also took an intact head, arm, and sword.
Okay, first off, it's completely illegal to deface artwork in the first place, whether you agree with it or not. But just completely ignoring that, this is outright looting. How many freaking times have we condemned as little more than thuggish brigands armed groups who invade one place and leave carrying out things like that? I couldn't begin to count it. And yet the US press, and the website of the museum at Fort Hood, is outright *celebrating* the looting of Iraqi bronze. WTF?
It's not really a master bedroom by design. When we bought the house, we decided all of the "bedrooms" were smaller than we'd like, so we converted the downstairs "family room" area into a combination bedroom/sewing room. So it's a really big room (comparatively). There are six bulbs in dimmable track lighting, three in the bedside lamp (which Elaine reads by every night), and a three-way CFL in the lamp on the dresser that we use to get ready every morning and which Elaine sews by.
We were taking care of her house and doing a lot of cleaning for her. She's on disability due to a brain injury from a car accident, and is probably going to lose her house once it runs out, so every penny we can help save her means longer she can keep her house. So lay off the holier-than-thou attitude.
Most of the bulbs in my house are 60W, not 75W, and I'm paying $0.09/kWh, which puts it at $4.04/year
Assuming you use them only for a mere three hours a day and don't count the dollar-or-two-per-incandescent-bulb contribution to your AC costs.
each bulb costs $2.50, remember
And incandescents are free?
Let me say that again: a single CFL burn-out changes my total yearly savings from $1.54 ($4.04 - $2.50) to -$0.96!
So, you live in a world where incandescents are free and you only use your bulbs for an average of a mere three hours a day, and incandescents don't increase your cooling costs, and despite only three hours of use per day, your bulbs burn out in six months. Right.
I live in the real world, which is a very different place. I've used CFLs for about three years now. The whole house has been on CFLs for at least two years. I've taken burned-out bulbs to the dump once before -- six or so of them, tacked on to another dump trip. I just checked my bag of bulbs that have accumulated since then. There are three bulbs in it. I'm going to go ahead and do a bulb count in the house for you: 4 in the downstairs bath, one in the mud room, 11 in the master bedroom, 1 in the stairwell, 3 in the living room, 3 in the dining room, 2 in the kitchen, 3 in the upstairs bath, 2 in the guest room, 3 in the library, and 3 in the computer room, for a grand total of 35 bulbs. 2-3 years. 9-ish dead bulbs. You do the math. Oh, and a good portion of my bulbs are on dimmer switches.
Oh, and the headaches? There's a reason I brought them up. You see, effective cost is a function of more than just monetary cost...
Mmhmm. And I have a friend who insists that as soon as she sees a CFL, she gets migraines. After getting evidence to the contrary (by virtue of how she didn't get migraines at my house, which she didn't know had CFLs), I secretly switched most of the bulbs in her house to modern CFLs while she was in the hospital (i.e., not the old flickery magnetic ballast ones) without her knowing about it to see if she'd notice. Guess what? It's over a month later, and she hasn't noticed. They're still there. Nor has she gotten a migraine (I'd know, because she calls us to take her to the hospital to get a shot when it happens).
She's hardly the only one I've had that experience with. I've had half a dozen people tell me that they can't stand CFLs who were shocked, when visiting my place, to learn (after being in my house for several hours) that all my bulbs are CFLs.
We formulized it and called it marriage though.
Of course, if he shares his catch with another male chimpanzee instead of a female, he'll have to pay the gift tax and won't have legal recognition of their adopted young.
As we all know, the gays are going to zap us with lightning. (Yes, that's a real commercial that's been airing on TV in several states)
The vast majority of my electricity usage is not from light bulbs, despite what most pro-CFL people would have you believe.
What an amazing discovery! So, you're telling me that I can change how much money my lightbulbs are costing me to run simply by wasting power or not wasting power elsewhere?
(Translation: Please, be serious here; the cost to run your bulbs is independent of where you waste power elsewhere.)
Let's say I save $4/month after I spend $40 on the bulbs.
Let's say I live 100 years by eating more sunflower seeds. Now let's decide what to do with those 100 years.
(Translation: No, pulling numbers of a hat doesn't count as doing the math).
You're really going to make me do this again, aren't you?
75W bulb -> 19W CFL = 56W difference
56W * 3h/day * 0.001kWh/Wh * 365.24 days/year * 0.11 dollars/kWh = $6.75/year
Multiply by however many bulbs you'd like. Note that we're not counting the contribution to AC/heating (which nets notably worse for incandescents).
Oh, and if your answer is, "Well, perhaps that'd justify my living room, but not Room X, because I don't use the lights in there that often" -- well, then they won't burn out that often either, now will they?
If it's too inconvenient, throw them in your trash. You'll still release less mercury than if you had used incandescents, let alone all of the other stuff coal power plants release.
Huh? I certainly hope not. I've been using dimmables that I bought on Ebay for years, and they've done just fine.
You're picking straws. If you look at the box, 9 times out of 10, it'll say "Color Temperature". So deal with it. It's like trying to pick a fight with someone for saying that you should check how many calories are in a food before you buy it because they didn't say "kilocalories".
Wow, way to miss the point. I specifically said "in the winter".
Way to miss my point. Apparently where you live, there's only one season.
A modern CFL, the low-mercury kind that's starting to dominate, has only about 3mg of mercury in it. That's about the mass of ten grains of salt. Compare that to how kids used to play with whole balls of the stuff from thermometers -- and you're worried about ten grains of salt worth, a fraction of which might have left the bulb? On top of that, it's elemental mercury, which is far less toxic than mercury bound up in organic compounds (like you find in food, or power plant emissions). And it's not a dust.
Every so often you'll get some scare story about how somebody broke a bulb, and they had their mercury levels in the room checked and it was X times over the OSHA standards. But those standards are for chronic exposure, and we're talking about levels that fall off exponentially over time. For crying out loud, if you're concerned about tiny amounts of mercury in your body, there are a lot better ways to prevent it than worrying about CFLs. Like cutting down on seafood, or having any amalgam fillings removed from your teeth. And if you care about mercury in the environment, you should absolutely *not* be using incandescents, as coal power plants are our primary mercury emitters.
Ever notice how the incandescent defenders love to do the math on the cost of the bulbs, but they always leave out the cost of the electricity?
Hmm, gee, I wonder why that might be....
Fluorescent bulbs don't have color temperatures defined.
Yes, they do. Look at the box.
Fluorescent bulbs are very much band-limited, unlike broad band black body radiators.
And the color temperature rating for fluorescents is based on the weighted average of where its power output lies.
Heck, they do an okay job of offsetting your heating bill, in the winter.
Electric heat is inefficient. And electric heat in the summer means more AC. Adding extra heat to your house is overall definitely not a good thing.
I have a hard time justifying spending $10 for four 60-watt-equivalent CFLs when I can get four 60W "regular" light bulbs for $1
Apparently electricity is free where you live. Where the rest of us in the US live, it averages $0.11/kWh, which means that a 60W bulb running for 3 hours a day costs $7 a year... *not* counting its contribution to your AC bill.
Sure, maybe my power bill is a little higher, but my TV uses more power than my light bulbs, and I leave that on practically all the time...
Neat line of logic. Since my mortgage payment costs more than my water bill, I should feel free to turn on a garden hose and leave it running 24/7, right?
Money is money, and savings are savings. Period. It doesn't matter if you're wasting money elsewhere *also*.