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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I can’t find such a study, and it seems extremely unlikely to me that any such study was performed recently. The original law was passed in 2007, and then the regulations were in political limbo for more than a decade.

    My base hypotheses here, subject to easy refutation by any real evidence, are that:

    • The DOE has looked at no study from after 2007 to justify their current policies.
    • This regulation is going into effect now simply because it was on the list of stuff Trump did that the Biden admin reversed.
    • The effect on consumer electricity costs and carbon emissions are negligible, since LED bulbs are a decade cheaper and better and almost everyone voluntarily buys them.



  • Does anybody use incandescent light bulbs as radiators?

    Yes. I’ve done it personally a couple times.

    Because it’s the only alternative use I can think of.

    The thing about alternative uses is that they’re still real even if you can’t think of them.

    Broad bans are a bad policy tool in general. Even if you believe in the progressive ideal of expert regulators making broad societal policies, a simple thought experiment shows the problem: What would it take to do the study to accurately determine all the negative effects of a ban? Not guessing, not wishful thinking, but really collecting and analyzing the information.

    I wish people were as mad when books get banned, but sadly it’s not the case

    When was the last time the US federal government banned a book?


  • And heat is not ready a concern. You can touch most LED bulbs with your bare hands with no risk of severe burn.

    This very clearly indicates that you haven’t seriously considered this issue at all, and are just supporting your political faction with no reflection on what the unintended consequences might be.

    A common application of incandescent bulbs is to produce heat, for a variety of use cases. The typical example is an improvised chicken incubator.

    Consider very carefully why there’s an exception for traffic signals.








  • It’s really bad to support specific policies just because they sound like a kind of policy that you broadly support. I personally broadly support pro-density policies. But many specific policies that are proposed either have fatal flaws or are useless as long as a century worth of accumulated NIMBY policies exist that super-redundantly ban the sort of density increase that would actually be useful.

    And to be clear, only allowing density increases without cars would be exactly the sort of nonsense restriction that would be a fatal flaw, at least in the US.


  • Many people have already done the math many, many times, and it always works out to be a lot cheaper to have dense urban areas.

    I just moved from a dense urban area to a rural area. Taking everything into account - yes, really - things are unambiguously cheaper here. That’s a common result in the US. If you want to blame a single thing, I’d go with lack of housing supply in cities due to exclusionary zoning, but I hit some other weird figures like municipal water+sewer being more expensive than a well and septic system (again, yes, taking everything into account including construction costs).


  • It’s worth actually doing the comparisons to see whether car-centric living is a net positive or negative in practice in particular situations. Urban density should be a pure benefit, with economies of scale making everything cheaper. Unfortunately, cities in practice have some downsides that reduce that benefit. One major one is that centralizing services means that it’s more useful to try to get a cut of the cash flowing through the institution, and so some of the gains get siphoned off. As a trivial example, exactly zero percent of car commute expenses go to a bus driver’s union.