Your daily Letter to the Columnist — Feb. 20, 2012
Israel, sometime between 1930-35 | Wikimedia Commons
She wants to keep her incandescent light bulbs
Handwritten, in beautiful penmanship, via snail-mail.
Yes Dan,
We would like to keep our incandescent bulbs. They have served us well for many years and at a reasonable cost. Perhaps you can rethink your ideas about changing to CFL bulbs.
- Think about all the mercury in the landfills.
- Think of the children breaking a bulb when parents aren’t there to do HazMat clean up and put in another bulb.
- Think of situations when you need light immediately (illness, burglers, etc.) and you flip the switch and have to wait for the light to come on.
Yes, we all know about the money GE gave Obama to change to these “low-light, expensive, ugly bulbs.”
Wake up, Dan.
Virginia Johnson
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Note from Dan: The bulbs are being phased out by a bipartisan act of Congress in 2007, signed into law by then-President George W. Bush.
February 20, 2012 - 1:30 PM
These are the kind of people who will be voting — and voting for the Republican. No wonder suzie wants to have an intelligence test.
There you go again Dan, letting facts get in the way of a perfectly beautiful right wing talking point.
Ms. Johnson must be kin to pammalapdog.
can’t fault her on “ugly” but she’s definitely wrong about low-light and expensive. Her arguments about mercury and waiting are factually true, but the mercury offset is actually lower with CFL and I dont know anyone who has trouble waiting less than a quarter second when the light needs to be turned on in emergency.
Wake up, Virginia. (the person and the state.)
Hey Dan, did you get the email I sent you on the CEED center in Rocky Mount?
A Beasley,
Yes, I did. Still evaluating. Thanks!
Approximately 52 metric tons of mercury are released into our atmosphere every year by coal fired power plants. That is the equivalent of the mercury in 9 billion cfl’s and that number is only significant if those bulbs were broken. In fact only 11% of the mercury in a broken cfl is discharged in the atmosphere as the rest adheres to the glass. Good reads on this if anyone is interested in facts:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/reviews/news/4217864
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.energystar.gov%2Fia%2Fpartners%2Fpromotions%2Fchange_light%2Fdownloads%2FFact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf&ei=hZtDT-_yEufm2AXJw_CECA&usg=AFQjCNHZp77l35a0Bk604tfrNbmFo242Gg&sig2=ZleTeyS1tYFCPxOAWi6-ww
I have mostly CFL bulbs in my home. Most are the old ugly kind that I purchased and installed almost 5 years ago. They are still going strong.
There may be a half second delay in the time it takes them to turn on but nothing that a blink of an eye wouldn’t miss. The newer bulbs look more like the incandescent style and I think there is less of a time lapse.
If you have folks constantly trying to sneak a peek at your “ugly” light bulbs… you have bigger problems than wanting to save a few dollars on energy consumption.
Oh, and by the way… the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) – passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush – created new energy efficiency standards for light bulbs.
“Ms. Johnson must be kin to pammalapdog.
Comment by Contrasuzie — February 20, 2012 @ 2:18 pm”
would rather be her kin than yours….she’s intelligent, you’re not
Many of the newest CFL’s have almost no wait time at all. Some of the old ones had a good half-second delay, and others would take a minute or 2 to hit full brightness…we still have a few of those in use.
And a HAZMAT clean-up? Talk about over-hyping a busted bulb. Hell, kids used to play with mercury because it was cool…and the amount of mercury they played with was umntold thousands of times larger than what’s in those bulbs. Yeesh.
#7 You mean the whole right-wing rant about mercury is just a red herring or a scare tactic? Imagine that.
#9 And the ever-intelligent pammalalapdog says, “Nanny nanny boo boo.”
“would rather be her kin than yours….she’s intelligent, you’re not”
Ms. Johnson probably doesn’t know about transvaginal ultrasounds, either.
Dan, wikimedia, like wikipedia, can be inaccurate. If the date in the caption is correct, then the location was Palestine, not Israel. And I wish as much as you probably do that no one cared which one it’s called, but, alas, they do.
Warren, good point. I thought about that when I saw the pic. But since I had no way of confirming the accuracy or inaccuracy of the date, I left it alone.
“If the date in the caption is correct, then the location was Palestine, not Israel.”
Reminds me of the song, ‘Istanbul’ by They Might Be Giants.
“Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks”
And they used to put lead in gasoline as an anti-knock compound, too!
Hell!
“Istanbul (Not Constantinople) was first recorded by The Four Lads in the early 50s. I’d like to hear the version by TMBG.