Thursday, June 30, 2011

Thomas Alva Edison is so yesterday

Congress has effectively banned the sale and use of the incandescent light bulb come January 2012. This was passed as part of an energy bill and signed into law by George W. Bush. The question arises with so much to worry about why did the Congress focus on that? This strongly points to a collusion between Government and Big Business. The government is in effect taking a product off the market that is not unsafe, that does not pose a risk to the public nor has been alleged to. The government is simply taking a long-standing and historical and popular product off the free market, deleting an option for YOU the consumer to buy something. Philips and GE make out the most and GE is known to be one of the biggest supporters of the Democrats. After January 2012 unless you are currently hoarding loads of Thomas Edison's invention you will be forced to go with the CFL or compact fluorescent lamp. I've issues with fluorescent lighting in general, I HATE it. It is infernal to work under for 8 hours a day and even while on vacation or during other leisure time some people I've known have said they felt perfectly normal driving in normal and natural daylight hours and then when they enter a mall let's say as I've done there is a definite and weird disorienting effect and it's as immediate as when you walk in the doors. There are many websites devoted to the negative health aspects of fluorescent lighting (http://www.emfblues.com/Fluorescent-Dangers-Fluorescent-Radiation-Fluorescent-Light-Dangerous-Health.html) and if I were the big government type I'd probably say it's the fluorescent lights that should be banned and not the incandescents. Maybe that's the whole point, to make us nuts:)

22 comments:

  1. Silence Slave! You will submit yourself to the boot of tyranny and like it. Your masters know what's best for you.

    This is why I've little if any respect for any self proclaimed "conservative" that supported smoking bans.

    It's real simple. You cannot sacrifice the rights of others without sacrificing your own.

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  2. "You cannot sacrifice the rights of others without sacrificing your own."

    This is why I'm so firm on Free Speech, it's the Boomerang Effect. We make such a big deal about the Tracy Morgans and Don Imuses of the world and whatever somebody else said in the News today that may have been offensive but if we had any sense we'd let it go because then they come for us. Let them say whatever so we can say whatever.

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  3. I may have a presidential
    candidate for you....

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  4. Uh, it's not like fluorescent lights haven't been around for like my entire life. They have.

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  5. Of course, Saty, because YOU don't mind fluorescent light bulbs, well then we ALL must not disagree with them being FORCED upon us!

    How about if the government banned nose rings? Would you then give a shit that the government is overeaching their powers, huh?

    Seriously!

    As Z-man pointed out, President Bush signed this stupid law, so it goes to show you that Republicans can be just as liberal as a Democrat and think they know better than the rest of us. And we keep letting them take away our freedoms, bit by bit.

    I have been stocking up on incandescent light bulbs for a while now...

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  6. All I said was that fluorescent lights are nothing new or exciting, Beth. They've been around since I was a baby and probably longer than that.

    That's the sum of what I said.

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  7. And now that I think about it, did yall pitch a fit when leaded gas was banned?

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  8. I just might fall for her BB.

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  9. Sat it's bad enough we have to put up with this diffuse flickering pulsating nightmare at work every day but now in our homes? If you like it then hunky-dory-cubed but seems to me if a pregnant woman can have options......not too long ago I blogged about cancer, how in my view high cancer rates and modernity seem to go hand in hand. Some of you pointed out that cancer has existed throughout antiquity, maybe BB linked to a mummy with a tumor, I don't remember but the point I was making is cancer seems a modern disease so why is that? Is it because of cell phones, the omnipresent fluorescent lighting and God knows what else? I only pose the question.

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  10. My opinion is that cancer's been around forever.. it just wasn't identified as such. Not long ago there was this slideshow I saw online of medical stuff from the 1800's where people had different kinds of cancers, I mean amazing stuff like a 23 pound ovarian tumor (they had photographs of these things), a man with a huge tumor on his leg, a man whose whole face was basically a tumor, it was amazing. Lots of diseases have been known for centuries, they just sometimes had different names, like consumption or catarrh or the grippe or melancholia. I was doing some reading the other day on mental illness and they were quoting like Hippocrates and other ancient Greeks who actually described bipolar disorder. I mean, I was amazed that these things were recognized and actually considered enough by these men that it got documented. Also that it was actually occurring among people, enough for it to be noticed. So I don't necessarily think that cancer is a new thing. I think it certainly gets more attention than previously and I do think that there are more environmental stressors that previously were minimal...I would put more blame on pesticides, radiation, poisons leaching into the water and air (Erin Brockovich anyone?), and also things like all the hormones that get put into livestock and milk, that cause these kids to have precocious puberty... but what springs to mind is that miners have been working underground for centuries and have had the full gamut of lung cancers through all that time.

    Just thinkin out loud.

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  11. To be fair there are lots of trades that have had their share of occupational cancers but being geologically oriented miners came to mind. At one time England banned coal fires because the sulphuric acid was in the air and was causing so many lung ailments and also that yellow 'fog' that gets so romanticized in Dickens novels. That same sulphuric acid eats away at stone, too, so a lot of the old buildings and statuary are pretty mutilated as a result. Anyway how about chimney sweeps? Silicosis too comes to mind. Lots of diseases, some of them they didn't understand. It's no accident that 'hysterectomy' and 'hysteria' both start with 'hyst'. I think these diseases have been around all along, and it's just that now we have made such advancements in things that we recognize them and are even finding more things. Not that they're necessarily new; just that a hundred years ago or more we didn't have the means to find them. After all before the microscope was invented no one knew what cells were.

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  12. But is fluorescent lighting an environmental stressor as some contend?

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  13. If you want my honest opinion I would put it on a par with, like, red lake #40. Some people swear it's the reason their kids are hellacious nightmares in need of a serious asswhuppin, some people swear it's given them cancer and hemmhroids and a twitch in their left baby toe, some people say it caused them to see visions of Elvis and Hitler and other people say they couldn't live without it. I think it's all about marketing. Personally I have no issue with fluorescent lights. We have some old blinky ones in the garage and they annoy me, and it is a little weird getting used to the way they warm up. But I don't see them as any kind of a major health hazard in the line of hexavalent chromium. Perhaps if you set up 500 of them three inches away from your naked body and turned them all on at once and sat there for days on end. But that's just like saccharin and nutrasweet right? It's cancer causing because they fed pounds and pounds of it to four ounce mice, and then the mice got sick. I think a lot of it is about marketing. But to sum up, our electric bills are way down, the cfls do just fine and they have the different filters just like they do for incandescents and I am looking forward to the day when we move forth into LCD, light our whole house for something like 30W total and never have to replace a bulb again for the duration of our lives.

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  14. And I'm sorry, Beth, did I miss you talking about how you pitched this selfsame fit when the government banned leaded gasoline and FORCED you to switch to unleaded?

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  15. But isn't it all about OPTIONS Saty? you know all those flavors at Baskin-Robbins.

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  16. Re your point about unleaded gasoline Saty somehow someone coming into our living rooms and taking away our light bulbs seems more immediate and intrusive than what we pump into our cars. Call it an aesthetic difference but it's way past crossing a line.

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  17. I don't know... I think banning leaded gas and banning incandescents is about the same thing. Actually, the ban on leaded gas affected me personally since I was driving a 1955 Chevy at the time and it really needed the lead for the valves. But you have to look at the bigger picture.

    For us we switched to CFL ages ago for a couple of reasons; one of the major reasons was the economic factor and another was the long life of the bulbs.

    To my mind if you didn't pitch a fit over unleaded gasoline then to pitch a fit over CFLs is a hypocritical statement that I would go ahead and assign motives to. I mean, pick a position and stay with it. I've been with mine since 1985.

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  18. So a woman can kill her unborn child but I can't have my Sylvania?

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  19. Why does it always go to the same place?

    We have a situation where a doctor wants to give Cardizem IV to one of our residents with hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy. (There's a reason for all these big words.) Now, the last time I gave Cardizem IV was in ICU stepdown with tele and monitors and the works. It's really too risky in the environment we are in, and the pharmacy folk are doing everything they can to stop it.

    Because this is a diagnosis I really didn't quite understand, I went online and did research, printed out stuff on the disease and the drug, read it all and went to one of our doctors to my confusion straight. Then I was reading that it's contraindicated in 2nd and 3d degree block. I used to work in cardiac med but it's been years and I wasn't understanding the relationship, so I got more information, and studied that. I mean, really doing my homework, because I have already been appropriated (by MD request) to work on this should it happen. And really enjoying learning it all, because generally there's not much of a clinical challenge in this place.

    So today our new nurse (4 months, her first job and I oriented her) says, oh I hear this person's getting a shot tomorrow. Now this information is all wrong; it's not a shot, it's a drip, not happening til next week earliest.

    So I correct all that and then she's like, well, what is it? And I pulled out all this stuff I had printed and annotated and highlighted and everything else. And she says, oh you're going to make me look it up. I wasn't heading in that direction to start with, but she pushed it there and so I said, well look I've been at this 16 years and I look stuff up when it's something I don't know. Then she's like.. oh, you're such an overachiever. And walks away.

    Now, I'm in the middle of a very irritable time (this too shall pass) and I cannot even explain how angry I was over it. For a couple reasons. Firstly, I'm not being an overachiever, I'm being careful because this whole situation involves a lot of things I don't understand or don't remember and I want to have all my ducks doing the high kicks if we're going to really do this. But more it pisses me off that this brand new nurse who has never worked in any real place doing any real clinical stuff has no ambition, no initiative, no desire to learn anything. This is accepting your own mediocrity. This is saying you're here for a paycheck and don't give a shit about being a nurse or a good nurse or a better nurse than you are today. And I can tell you where she learned this shitass attitude from, and it wasn't from me. It just pisses me off.. here is an opportunity to learn and you don't want it. I was so angry over this that I was on the phone with the hub for like 35 minutes just screaming about it, and then we talked about how the best football players.. Payton, Ray Ray.. all are students of the game; even though they're already great and already headed to the hall of fame, they are humble enough and have enough desire to improve themselves to sit and watch film, to study the game, to find what they can learn from players of the 50's and 60's and even before.. though they are the best of the NFL. And this is the difference.

    It hurts me that I worked so hard to get this girl oriented and to try to help her be a really good nurse.. and slackass nurses who just want to skate to their paycheck doing as little as they can have already taken her and basically ruined her. I'm just upset about the whole thing and really REALLY upset that wanting to learn and taking some action to relearn things I've forgotten and understand the condition, the intervention and what my role is.. is 'overachieving'.

    Anyway, that's my pissy story for today and I apologize for being off topic, but I know you understand about work things.

    I'll probably be angry about this a while.. this irritability thing can be toxic.

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  20. WOW,

    anyway you know what happens when one of these CFLs breaks in your home? You have to clear the room of pets and people cause there's mercury now to deal with and you can't just vacuum the crap up, have to get damp cloths or something. Then in NYC you have to dispose of your no longer good CFL at only a handful of designated places for this and they have limited hours and you have to give all kinds of personal information. Actually sounds alot like liberalism.

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  21. That comment I can relate to and it sounds like my place 'cept with food. Wonder if I can do anything blogwise with this/

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