The Light bulb Cartel

MB is sort of like the BMW of amps, over-complicated, overpriced, pain to work on, coasting on name and "Made in America" lot at this point. I've read Randall Smith is kind of a sleaze.

Well BMW coasts on "Made in Germany" engineering but y'know. The Germans have made their fair share of junk

Don't forget kerosene, which saved a lot of whales :)

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I believe you meant (R.A.H.'s) TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch - from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

John :-#)#

TMIAHM isn't even good as a work of pulp fiction, it's just unreadable dreck for anyone over the age of 12. like the majority of Heinlein's oeuvre. what a SNOOZE FEST

sci fi literature in the 60s and 70s was run by a cabal of hacks

To be fair to them shorter lifetime bulbs give a higher luminous efficacy. You can't blame them for optimising their profits - that is after all exactly what companies are in business to do.

The ultimate being photoflood bulbs which were good for 3 or 100 hours use if you were lucky. They could sometimes fail on first switch on too.

It is what you get in a "free market" when the manufacturers are allowed to secretly conspire against consumers.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

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** To be fair, those selling long life bulbs were pulling a scam and the so called "cartel" was formed to stop them and give honest makers fair go.

Funny thing is, 2500hr bulbs sell poorly cos the public know they give weak looking light. The sale price of bulbs fell in real terms over time and settled so that typical bulbs use 5 times more in energy bill that the purchase price.

** Max profit would occur when bulb cost and the life time power bill were equal. Which has never been the case.

The "bitrex" troll is so deluded he thinks he outsmarts others.

Total narcissist and a compete asshole.

Peeeeeukeee...

.... Phil

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Robert Heinlein's politics did get a bit obtrusive. Quite a few of his cont emporaries were even worse, though few were as bad as Jerry Pournelle.

He was "known for his paleoconservative political views which were sometime s expressed in his fiction".

makes a welcome change. He went to Glasgow University and does understand l eft-wing politics, though this isn't all that salient in his books.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Poor people couldn't afford whale oil, much less beeswax candles. They could burn a bit of tallow in a dish with a wick, for a few minutes, if they weren't so starving that they had to eat the tallow, and could afford a wick.

The light bulb 1000 hour limit was close to economically optimum, and when the patents ran out anyone could offer anything that people wanted.

Even now, in a free market, most incandescent lifetimes are around

1000 hours.

Sometimes I put one incandescent in a string of LEDs when the LEDs don't dim well. A little real ohms helps.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Indeed. Until recently a farm animal's quality was (to a large extent) determined by the amount of fat on it.

Too simplistic. The cartel didn't want a longer lifetime. Traditionally cartels employ various underhand tactics to ensure the cartel's continued existence.

My dining room bulb hasn't been replaced in at least a decade, and only once that I can remember in 30 years. I still have a supply of the bulbs that I bought in the mid 80s :)

There are all sorts of tricks, and poorly misunderstood folklore, associated with that kind of usage of incandescent bulbs.

the display was nixie tubes. Naturally it didn't work when turned on.

Once the body was extracted from its waterproof and squaddie-proof case, the interior was brightly illuminated by an incandescent bulb. After removing the shorted NiCd battery pack, everything sprang back to life.

I probably didn't understand all the politics when I first read his stuff at approximately age 12-13. I was reading authors like Tolkien, H.G. Wells, Ursula K. Le Guin, and (not same genre) F Scott Fitzgerald at the time too and a 12 y/o does understand that these are books written by geniuses at literature. And even Piers Anthony was pretty clever.

And then I think the first Heinlein book I read was Stranger in a Strange Land and at that time I remember I'd heard it had a bunch of sex-stuff in it but I don't recall getting turned on by that book at all. Mostly I recall being confused and bored by it but I had to slog through because it was on a a summer reading list for English class or something. I thought there was going to be something sexy in it. What a rip-off.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle were huge hacks too, I read "Lucifer's Hammer" a few years later it was a book 1/3rd about a comic impact and

2/3rds about a race war as I recall. it was dumb. The most important things I learned from it were some of the units of the cgs system of measurement which I feel was already outdated for most astrophysicists to be using regularly at the time the book was written.

I didn't know what an "International Harvester Travelall" was either I had to look up in a history book (Internet still not really available at the time) that it was some kind of antique SUV.

Comet. Comet impact. The main character-dude (always a dude, almost always a Gary Stu author-insertion) bangs a hot redhead at some point before everyone starts dying which I thought was kinda cool, but also reading any of those guys write about sex is also fairly cringe-inducing for the majority of people who have sexual relations with the opposite sex regularly I think.

try selling bacon that looks like this today,

What the heck! I'm not even in this bulb-efficiency conversation. That was random...

Easy :)

and also

The red ones? seems unlikely they're not THAT bright.

Xenon strobes in daytime, then at night like Phil said a maybe 1000 watt incandescent run at 250 watts:

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** Rarely is the truth so simple.

** How simplistic - and false.

** So the word itself has this fool flummoxed.

Maybe he stops in the middle of the street when the WALK sign changes too.

** Nice, uncheckable non-fact piece of bullshit.

Liars love to use non-facts only they know about as proof examples.

And those incapable of rational thought.

..... Phil

Myth: a widely held but false belief or idea.

Their seems to be evidence that the cartel did exist, with even more recently found documents in just the past 5 years.

Did you get ahead of yourself on this?

The OP was meant to be sent to a friend I breakfast with. I had mentioned a story I heard on NPR about the Pheobus Cartel. I wanted to add some more info, so I sent him the wiki, I didn't read it, I expected it to just confirm what I had said. I still haven't read it.

Mikek