LED lighting, and a small ranty rant,

[Hammerskjold]

Ignore the technology. Ignore the manufacturers. Reward the adopters. Taxes, or the lack of them are what they can use to motivate people to change. But, as our current corrupt government does, they reward the consumer, and not the non-consumer.

What they need to do is give people tax rebates for the number of KWh reduction between this year and the prior year. If you reduced at least 5% you get a rebate, every 5% thereafter is an increasing rebate.

I'll jump a little more forward, and I'll offer you this thought experiment. As a Randtard you may or may not be familiar with it.

Why have your oh so hated gov't be in the business of rewarding conservation at all? (Especially if you believe how corrupt they are.) Now hear me out for a minute here. Let's not get into a knee jerk over reaction of 'WHAT?! You want the government to reward waste instead? I hope you drown in a BP oil spill!11'

What I am talking about is a shift into energy efficiency that the reward is evident in themselves, and are either instantly, visibly felt. Literally or in your wallet, and no need for yet another (grrr) government program.

Sounds far fetched, and there are big technical challenges to it, but IMO another real obstacle is changing people's mind and attitude from a large top down energy distribution to a more diverse and decentralized system.
(If nothing else, it gives the Terrrrrist too many targets, instead of one big juicy power plant to attack.)

Some things are still in need of major improvement, solar and wind are actually seeing exciting developments, but the key thing that's holding them back are not power generation, it's energy storage. We still need better batteries or storage technology.

Some also requires infrastructure changes, DC wiring vs AC wiring. Though I think in reality it will more likely be AC&DC (Thunderstruck!!!11)

http://chrisgammell.com/can-dc-power-an-entire-home/

But the main point here is, you no longer need to run to Galt's Gulch\Kommietopia to escape from 'the Man'. If say somebody wants the heater turned on full blast, while cooking a turkey in their electric oven, while only wearing a speedo, and have a couple of windows opened in the middle of winter.

Well as long as you are generating your own power, who cares? No one's business but your own. Energy independence for realsies. Now you may blow out your energy generator, or overdrain your battery, and may do some damage to your system with that kind of hypothetical stunt.

But you do have the all important FREEDOM of choice. But what you and I don't and never had, and never will have, is FREEDOM from consequences. But anyone who believes the two are the same is probably a full 'tard anyway.

When you get on the bad side of 'gubment they toss your butt into jail.

See: Steve Tucker served a 10-year prison sentence for selling light bulbs.

Misleading title much? Seriously did you read your own link? The takeaway from that article was the guy got busted for a drug charge. The gub't just slapped on the 'illegal bulb' charge in the same way Capone was charged for tax evasion.

Now the 'war on drugs' is frankly a topic for another thread and outside the scope of this current conversation for me.

But if the guy was selling LED bulbs instead (which there are for plant growth), but in otherwise identical circumstances, he probably would've got charged under selling drug paraphanelia. (Whether or not it would actually stick is probably a different matter.)

That does not make it accurate to then say:

'LED Light Bulbs Fuels Illicit Drugs Manufacturing'.

Because Mexico has more freedom? They have the freedom to make and sell incandescent light bulbs.

...Wow. Even if I read that with a straight face...Ok let me try to address this somewhat seriously. Or at least in the same level of seriousity of the above statement.

The 'freedom' to make and sell a rapidly becoming obsolete and rapidly becoming niche technology, is not a great 'freedom'.

There's also 'freedom' to re-manufacture x386 motherboards. I'm not talking about Rasberry Pi boards, I'm talking about re-manufacturing full size, old x386 boards that no one makes anymore. (I blame the gubment and their meddling).

There are games that I still want to re-play that IMO works best in a real 386, non emulated, on a version of MS windows just before the anti trust suit, that you soo loved.

I need a country\company with lots and lots of freedom that will manufacture me an x386 board, vintage RAM chips to go with it, and old ports for peripherals and monitors to go with it, since only a 4:3 CRT will really look best\natural with it.

I wonder why no company has returned my calls yet?


Ok seriously, unless one is going for sheer contrarian, hipster points, it's not one of the better 'Freedom'. Again, unless you equate freedom to choose to be freedom from consequences, or freedom from reality.

Now I've seen you do better than this, and you are certainly passionate about the topics you care about, and that's great. I say that sincerely, I wish more people would just pay more attention in general.

With that in mind. Here is a great podcast interview with one of the co-founder of Cree. Well the guest is great, the hosts can do with letting the guest speak more, though that might be due to Skype delay. Some interesting, and very inspiring stuff. Many of the technical stuff is over my non techie head, but inspiring nonetheless. Well for me at least.

http://www.theamphour.com/the-amp-hour-7...lucubrator