| I was with the article until this point: > If long lived light bulbs are worse products, why would they need a cartel to enforce a the thousand hour limit? Well, it's because people think long lasting bulbs are a good product: Lifespan is something everyone can understand, and has a direct effect on when you will have to go back to the store: if you saw two 60 W bulbs in a store, one claiming to last 400 hours and the other 2,000 hours, you'd probably get the longer lasting one without thinking about it. This makes no sense to me. The article's whole point was that longer-lived bulbs produce worse lighting: Less brightness, more "orange glow" instead of "daylight", etc. But light quality is the one thing that a buyer would immediately notice once they actually tried out the bulb. If they bought the amazing 100.000 hours bulb but found out it's a nightlight, they'll probably not buy that bulb again even despite the lifetime. If fact, they'd probably go back to the store really quickly to get a "real" light. So I don't see why we'd need some industry cartel here to decide what's good for the customers if the customers would perfectly well decide themselves. |
And with the stupid habit of talking about lights in input watts (skimmed over in the article), we’d get what’s described in the article, albeit less dramatic: people would buy the bulb that lasts 50% longer and not notice the lower lumen output.
Consumers are not educated at all in lighting, especially when the industry does not help (re: watts, but also temperature, color rendering, flicker, etc)