Goodbye 100w, 75w Incandescent Lamps

[JoeSpareBedroom]

Do you suppose light rail can do better than 30 mph on a good day?

[jJim McLaughlin]

Pathetic. Worse than a middle school bully.

Unable to actually have a real discussion, Joe resorts to ranking on families.

Looser.

[jJim McLaughlin]

No, it ca't. The one ride everyweekday (Portland Tri Met Yellow Line) averages a whopping 17 MPH. Per Tri Met.

[HeyBub]

"Pogram?"

"US Nay?"

[Dave Bugg]

Maybe it's shorthand for the persecution of American nuclear nay-sayers?

[krw]

Sure.

That's right. Guns don't kill people; bullets kill people. Guns just make 'em go faster. Same deal here. The car didn't kill Mary Jo; water did. The car just got her there faster.

Yeah, you're right...

[JoeSpareBedroom]

Looser than what?

You asked to be insulted, so I granted your wish. Have you forgotten what you wrote earlier today?

[Don Klipstein]

I (Don) EDIT FOR SPACE HERE>>>>

The Route 100 trolley line through Delaware County to Norristown (in Montgomery Co.), suburbs of Philadelphia, achieves 60 MPH in the fastest stretch and 35-50 in a lot of other portions of the route. I have seen some of these go a bit faster in the fastest stretch. One of the morning rush hour express ones leaves 69th St terminal at

8:15 AM and arrives at the Norristown end of the line at 8:38 according to the schedule. In that 23 minutes, it travels a distance that I estimate on a map to be about 11.5 miles. That works out to 30 MPH average speed from one end of the line to the other, which I consider very high for a trolley. This line has trolleys running mainly (possibly entirely) on dedicated right-of-way.

However, I have seen cost estimates of a proposed light rail line northwestward along the Schuylkill River, where the Reading Railroad used to run trains. Construction estimate was a gigabuck or two IIRC, despite running where track already exists for the line that the Reading Railroad used to run trains between Philadelphia and Reading. With projected ridership of only a few thousand passengers daily, that price easily makes this appear to be a bad deal, and it has yet to get off the ground. I have even not heard anything about this in the past couple or few years.

- Don Klipstein ( [e-mail])

[Jim Yanik]

[e-mail] (Don Klipstein) wrote in news: [e-mail]:

wouldn't a faster train make fewer stops,with more distance between them? And the slower light rail make more stops,closer together,meaning less walking to get to your destination.

[AZ Nomad]

Add up road costs, add up emergency service (police, fire, medical), subtract the little taxed onto gas, and you find that public transportation is a bargain.

Unless, of course, you're a hermit.

[AZ Nomad]

That compares very favorible with the 3mph traffic at rush hour.

[JoeSpareBedroom]

Give the man a free case of beer......

[Anonymous]

Several years ago, a Minneapolis suburb funded a public transport ( bus ) system.

After a few years of running DEEP in the red, some wise man calculated it would be cheaper to send a ( free ) taxi to each riders home.

In most citys, you'll see empty bus's plying back and forth, tying up traffic, burning up diesel, and creating another layer of overpriced govt. employees.

[krw]

Add up the productivity lost commuting.

Or work for a living.

[greatyetiofthenorth]

Not a related comment as much as just another reason why I HATE CFL. Anyone else notice that digital camera's auto white balance feature is usually thrown off kilter by those lights?

I have a ceiling fan with 4 CFL in it, and the camera still think it looks like incandescent, but the wavelength is still a bit off in the color spectrum range.

Just bitching.

[Don Klipstein]

I have had two Canon Powershot series ones (A70 and A640) handle compact fluorescents (usual ones 2700K with CRI of 82) pretty much as well as incandescents for indoor work without flash. The main difference I found was that skin tones come up more pinkish with the compact fluorescents.

The usual solution is to use the flash. If you have to take a still picture without flash, you can use a photo editor to adjust hue (adjust yellow a bit towards green) and saturation (a slight decrease) to mostly fix skin tones at least halfway without messing other stuff up much. (With non-triphosphor fluorescent, the adjustments would be largely opposite - mainly adjust hue to make yellow towards red, except that may screw up some greens, and red objects can come out dark).

If I have to shoot color-critical video or especially color-critical photos without flash, then I don't consider it a big deal to use incandescents.

- Don Klipstein ( [e-mail])

[AZ Nomad]

I bet his math was shit.

Did he make the fatal assumption that roads and emergency services cost nothing?

[celticsoc]

I think what he was saying was that people operate in their own best interest because they know what is in their own best interest. Unfortunately, government is no better a predictor of what is in my best interest than me, so while I may make a number of decisoins that work to my detriment, by and large I will make decisions that overall work best for me.

More unfortunate is the unreliability of information that comes from government, because once a person has achieved power, he/she will often do things to maintain that power. Because, by and large, he/she will do what is in his or her own best interest, and maintaining power falls in that category. That includes lying about a variety of things in order to have a compliant public. That lying includes lying about motive, perhaps even to oneself. You must separate the wheat from the chaffe in politics, electing people who are not yet in the power grab mode, or you have to remove the motive to maintain power, which was the reasoning behind the inclusion of term limits in our system.

It is very easy right now for people to believe that about George Bush, but these same people won't take a look at those on the other side of the aisle. The old saying, though, is "Follow the money". I look at people who have made a fortune on the global warming-as-man- made concept, who try to maintain control of that concept by saying that "debate is over" when it clearly is not, I see people threatening the careers of those who dispute the idea of human causality of global warming. Then I look at the careers and lifestyles of people in this camp and I wonder how the two can square with one another. For example, how much money has Al Gore made on the global warming issue? How does he live his own life with regard to things like energy consumption?

Given the unreliability of such prognosticators, I don't rely on their data. I do, however, rely on the data supplied to me in the form of an electric bill every month. I have also purchased spiral flourescent bulbs, and I have done so based upon my own interest. You may call it selfish, but I have a family which relies upon me for efficient control of income versus expenditures, so I try to maximize the value of my money for them as much as or moreso than for me. I am sure that (Frank, I think ?) probably has a similar thought process. This is the kind of control of which people are capable, as the closer information is to you, the more reliable it tends to be, which is also one of the reasons we have the economic system we do. Another reason, of course, is the understanding that people will tend to act in a manner which is best suited for them and those for whom they are responsible. In other words, the information and the actions are localized.

A ready example of information being localized here is your assumption that Frank believes in being selfish. You don't know fully his motivation for his decision to purchase things which save him money. Only he knows that, and therefore only he is generally in the best position to determine what is best for him, based upon is own values, his personal financial situation, his family situation, etc. As a wise man once said, walk a mile in his moccasins.

What is of greatest concern to me here is that idea that someone's reason is more important than his action. We have an economic system in the U.S.A. set up to tap into individuals' self interests. This is specifically because any system devised to have a centralized authority looking out for our interests is necessarily going to involve people with power and the self interest to hold onto that power. We further have as part of our political system intentionally decentralized authority in the form of multiple branches, and amendments to our Constitution preventing them from being the sole arbiters and disseminators of information, primarily because information from those attempting to maintain power can be unreliable based on their motivations.

Were global warming shown verifiably to be minimal and wholly unrelated to human activity, would this be good news? If so, do you think such news would be received happily by those who currently make a living decrying it? Do you think, for example, that Al Gore would readily accept that? As a parallel situation, consider the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton: Do you believe that they truly act on behalf of black people, or do you believe, based upoon their careers and lifestyles, that they are acting in their own interests at this point (regardless of the motivations you may believe they had at the start)? Do you believe that, if they got everything they demand, including an end to all racism, they would simply close up shop? Or are their careers too closely tied to the perception that racism exists everywhere, and that they might attempt to foment dissent when none is necessary? They have a product to sell, just as global warming decriers have a product to sell (and perhaps both have an agenda to advance). Just as the makers of spiral lightbulbs have a product to sell. None of them care why you buy the product, only that you do, and the greater your purchase, the better it is for them.

The difference is that, as more people enter the market for spiral lightbulbs, the market widens, and economies of scale dictate that the price will go down. The price has continued to rise with the other two, because they are nebulous products.

[Kurt Ullman]

Probably a much worse predictor of what is best for me than I am because of the self-interest stuff you discuss later on.

Nicely put, although everywhere you put politics, I would add "and the bureaucracy". The same power and self interest things get plugged in here. Probably more so, since most legislation really sketches things out in general terms and leaves it to the bureaucrats to write the rules and regs that actually implement the law.

A prof from Wisconsin who is not at all a supporter of man made global warming on CNBC a couple of weeks ago. One of the things that came up was that those pro-GW tend to write off most anti_GW results off because they are paid for by oil companies. His first comment was a general indication that this was BS and not all were. Then he said something telling: "Besides when was the last time you heard of anyone who is anti-GW getting any federal grants?" The implication being that governments has its own problems with bias. Because something comes from a governmental or other non-industry group is no guarantee of lack of bias."

[Don Klipstein]

So how much is being spent by governments on global warming studies,

how much of that is spent to pay those who only keep their jobs if they produce study results indicating need to remediate man-made global warming, (I expect a small number due to profit motive to either "defect to the other side" or "fame motive" [that can lead to profit] to produce studies and/or papers that show that "The Conventional Wisdom" is wrong. As an example - Einstein doing some significant boat-rocking of Newtonian physics!)?

And how much on similar studies (that indicate lack of existence of man-made global warming that requires remediation) and "counterstudies" is being spent by industries (and front organizations thereof) that stand to lose from need (or knowlege thereof) to counteract man-made global warming?

And why is some of the "counterdata" being misrepresentation of anthropogenic rate of carbon addition to the atmosphere into a low-by-73% claim of anthropogenic rate of CO2 to the atmosphere?

(Hint: 44 grams of CO2 has 12 grams of carbon. Next hint: when need to do web searching, consider gigatons, which are the same as pecagrams, and for accounting of "anthropogenic input to carbon cycle" (my words, which I expect low search engine hit usefulness from) gigatons and pecagrams are the same, and so far in my experience is that one web-searchable unit of anthropogenic rate of transfer of carbon from the lithosphere to the atmosphere is "PcG C per year", maybe also PcGC, give-or-take upper/lower case. Please keep in mind that a pecagram or gigaton of carbon entering the atmosphere does so mainly [or closer to entirely] as 3.67 of same units of CO2.)

- Don Klipstein ( [e-mail])