Incandescent light bulbs have been obsolete since the day they were first built.
They are nothing more than a heater that happens to emit a tiny amount of light while wasting a ton of energy.
The compact fluorescent bulbs have come a long way in color, performance and price, and are very hard to beat right now.
I know this has become like a Hatfield and McCoy issue, but just to show you how people are, I took a compact fluorescent to my "never fluorescent in MY house!" brother-in-law's house and secretly screwed it in his lamp in the den. He can into the den, and I turned on the lamp and asked him "what type light bulbs do you use in your house?". He started into his usual "no &#*$&%)# compact fluorescent bulbs in my house" rant, and I asked him "well what type bulb is in that lamp. He looked closely and said "incandescent, can't you tell?", and I said "fluorescent, can't you?".
The bottom line is he could not tell the compact from the incandescent either in starting the bulb or from the color or light output, but the bulb was not only more than saving its own cost in energy savings, it was also saving his struggling air conditioning system, since all that heat did not have to be removed from the house.
The incandescent vs compat fluorescent arguement is a moot point since everything is converting to LED, and most light bulbs will be LED in the near future, like it or not.
When I was a kid, we use to break open thermometers and play with the globs of mercury all day long. We also played with Dad's roll of asbestos paper.
The hysteria surrounding fluorescent bulb disposal is just that, hysteria.
Your car spews out a whole lot more toxic stuff every day right into the face of the guy behind you.
Until energy becomes free, we need to think about conserving it. There is only a finite amount of it, and we can't fight the entire world forever to get it.
I fall in the middle of the polictial spectrum, and don't believe in the far left or far right garbage that gets spewed out constantly, but anyone that is against energy conservation is in some sort of denial about the reality of our current situation on this planet. Its not about the government telling us what we can and cannot use in our lamp, it is about us having enough common sense to do the right thing and save a bit of energy for the next generation. Think about your kids and grandkids for a second and don't be so selfish.
Just my two cents worth, not that this has anything to do with machining.
Just get tired of the misguided hype.
