I installed a LED bulb just a week ago, which lasted about two days. I have had at least half a dozen other LED bulbs fail long before their advertised lifetime. I think I know the truth.
Neal, you probably know about representative samples and small n and all the rest.
You aren’t wrong that LED bulbs can fail drastically before their advertised lifetimes. This is because the LEDs do last what it says on the box, but there are voltage conversion parts in the base of the bulb that vary widely in how long they last.
And if you manage to install a brand that did that part of the electrical engineering correct, the “truth” is you won’t see them fail in your expected lifetime.
The n isn’t that small. And it makes no difference whether it is the LED itself that fails, or the voltage conversion part—it’s dead either way. And though it may be that some brands are better than others, the ability of a consumer to tell whether they’ve found a good one or not is part of a product reaching the level of maturity where it’s actually a good idea to adopt it.
Your n is not statistically representative because you didn’t purchase thousands of bulbs from the market from random manufacturers. Only an entity who did this can confidently make claims about actual average reliabilities. (which basically means government or a well funded non profit)
You cannot rationally have any confidence about your conclusions.
So you’re saying that because some cheap brands of LEDs die early, while good brands don’t, LEDs shouldn’t have been made basically mandatory, with lighting efficiency standards that have gotten progressively tougher.
(initially the Federal standards made it where incandescents could not be sold, but halogens were still meeting the minimum standards, and they have gotten tougher from there)
You have a naive level of trust in the ability of a superficially well-conducted study to arrive at a relevant conclusion. For starters, what exactly is meant by “bulbs from the market from random manufacturers”? And did governments actually conduct such studies before enacting regulations? How would that work, since the market was quite different after the regulations than before?
And while it may be that cheap LED bulbs die early, but some good (and expensive) ones don’t, that isn’t actionable information. I think you can imagine the result if consumers start preferring to buy whichever bulb is most expensive—formerly cheap and unreliable bulbs would soon become expensive and unreliable bulbs. Some sort of brand reputation is needed, but this process is probably inhibited by mandating that LED bulbs must be used.
I haven’t tried to quantitatively assess the impact of these regulations (which would be difficult), but I have my doubts that they have resulted in consumers saving money, or using less electricity, or producing less CO2, once one looks at all impacts. That would include the impact of an entire industry for producing compact fluorescent bulbs being created and now largely abandoned. And perhaps the LED bulb industry will be abandoned in the end too—depending on whether the bulbs that are reliable turn out to be sufficiently costly that either the regulations are abandoned, or some other technology replaces them.
It seems like a classic example of Hayek’s view that information needed to make good decisions is distributed amongst many parties, and can only be aggregated through the price mechanism in a free market, not by central planners.
I haven’t tried to quantitatively assess the impact of these regulations (which would be difficult), but I have my doubts that they have resulted in consumers saving money, or using less electricity, or producing less CO2, once one looks at all impacts. That would include the impact of an entire industry for producing compact fluorescent bulbs being created and now largely abandoned. And perhaps the LED bulb industry will be abandoned in the end too—depending on whether the bulbs that are reliable turn out to be sufficiently costly that either the regulations are abandoned, or some other technology replaces them.
This is a testable claim. And one that you can actually dismiss based on the data almost immediately*, and you have the data available at your fingertips.
Conveniently, you mentioned 3 interrelated terms:
consumers saving money
consumer electricity usage
CO2 emissions
What is interesting about this specifically is you might think you can only measure the first one. You have the cost consumers spend on LED bulbs (and replacements as needed for the ones that fail prematurely), cost they spend on power.
But the electricity usage happens to be closely related to power costs: that factory in China making the bulbs uses an unknown amount of electricity, but it can’t use more than the price of the bulb in electricity, and you can look up average electricity rates in China. It’s 8-9 cents a kWh, vs 12 cents in the USA.
CO2 emissions can also be calculated from that.
Really the only unknown here is the longevity of the LED bulbs. They can in fact last the 25,000 hours it says on the box, but only some models are made correctly.
I still think calculating these things is harder than you think. One point: I didn’t mean to talk only about consumer use of electricity, but rather any electrical use resulting from the regulations, similarly for CO2 emissions. So, for instance, electricity and CO2 emissions relating to a factory for making compact fluorescent bulbs that went bankrupt, and so never recovered its costs from consumers, would count, as would things paid for by government subsidies rather than consumers.
You’re right that you can put an upper bound on total electricity usage in making the bulb if you know the relevant cost of electricity, and the cost of the bulb. If we look at an “Amazon basics” 9 Watt, 800 lumen (60 Watt incandescent equivalent), 10000 hour lifetime bulb, currently $2.50US at amazon.com, the power savings of 510 Kilowatt-hours is indeed much greater than the maximum 31.5 Kilowatt-hours for manufacturing the bulb—provided all those numbers are actually correct (which is quite doubtful—lifetime might be one-tenth what is claimed), and there are no subsidies involved, and we don’t count some amortization of the electricity cost of previous failed attempts at improving on incandescent bulbs.
But maybe there now are good LED bulbs, that should usually be preferred to incandescent bulbs. But if so, why are regulations needed?
In that regard, it’s interesting that the Amazon basics listing says “Not eligible for shipments to California”. A comment at the link you give quotes one manufacturer as saying “(redacted) 10 watt A19 lamps were designed with flicker-free light output as the first and foremost concern, and unfortunately we were only able to achieve a power factor rating of 0.6. Consequently, these lamps are currently banned for sale in California and we are unable to ship them to our California customers.”
Could it be that California’s regulations are actually counterproductive? More fundamentally, why would one have any confidence that these regulations are not counterproductive? What’s your “gears level” theory of how regulations end up being designed as well as possible for the common good, rather as an attempt to get the votes of uninformed electors, or as an outright corrupt mechanism of enriching well-connected businesses?
Could it be that California’s regulations are actually counterproductive? More fundamentally, why would one have any confidence that these regulations are not counterproductive? What’s your “gears level” theory of how regulations end up being designed as well as possible for the common good, rather as an attempt to get the votes of uninformed electors, or as an outright corrupt mechanism of enriching well-connected businesses?
Here’s the gears level model:
(1) there is no guarantee, and regulations can be counterproductive
(2) there are many problems where the incentives are misaligned, and so capitalistic forces CANNOT solve the problem. The government is a critical piece of the system, like an organ in a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)
You can also observationally notice that places with lots of government intervention can be either extremely nice (parts of Europe) or highly productive with the strongest economic growth known to history (China).
The undertone I am sensing is you have accepted political propaganda that generally says “government is bad”. This is not correct. Bad government is bad, but more good government is almost always better than a capitalist Moloch equilibrium.
Along those lines, what, for example, do you think of Drax wood pellets
Well, the math says every ton of pellets has a certain amount of CO2 you avoided releasing, but you have to correct for the harvesting, shipping, processing, and just the general scalability issues. There is only so much land in the world that can support a forest, it probably isn’t a viable large scale strategy.
Care to explain why rather than making this claim without an argument.
“It’s not a gears level model because.”
If I read the above, I claim:
1. There are no guarantees of government goodness
2. There are large classes of things only government can do, thus anarchy or limited government fails
3. We do not have examples of successful countries that did anarchy/limited government in human history, and modern day successes had large and very expensive governments, including the united states.
Seems like I acknowledged the point, gave a reason why government is necessary, and gave empirical evidence that government is necessary and it must be large. How much detail do you demand.
It’s not about detail, it’s just that what you gave is not a gears-level model.
Sorry, I feel kinda rude just leaving it like that, but… if that link doesn’t help, I feel like it would take a lot of effort to explain in depth, and I don’t think I want to put that effort in.
I made the specific claim that government is a critical part of a modern economy and well chosen policies make a country highly successful.
I give a mechanical reason—those policies cause availability of “public goods”, which multiply the performance of the economy. For example, China building high speed rail and large power networks and large sea ports and mass training thousands of engineers, refusing to fund liberal arts training, and mass training thousands of doctors rather than allowing a medical cartel to restrict supply—these are all government actions with consequences, and they all fit in the class of public goods. None of these things would happen organically from private industry for a number of a reasons that won’t fit in this post.
For this to be untrue—for this claim to be falsified—there would need to exist a counter example. There is not. People advocating for anarchy or various levels of libertarianism are simply scammers, they want their personal taxes lowered and plan to die from aging before the severe negative consequences affect them.
You may have been socially taught to believe that—to trust your direct opinions or the median from your direct friends—but in terms of rationality—the philosophy of being the least wrong—your strategy is suboptimal. Only by collecting big n data can you ever really “know” anything.
So you may find it emotionally insulting but at the end of the day correctness matters.
I installed a LED bulb just a week ago, which lasted about two days. I have had at least half a dozen other LED bulbs fail long before their advertised lifetime. I think I know the truth.
Neal, you probably know about representative samples and small n and all the rest.
You aren’t wrong that LED bulbs can fail drastically before their advertised lifetimes. This is because the LEDs do last what it says on the box, but there are voltage conversion parts in the base of the bulb that vary widely in how long they last.
And if you manage to install a brand that did that part of the electrical engineering correct, the “truth” is you won’t see them fail in your expected lifetime.
I believe this is called a ‘gears level model’.
The n isn’t that small. And it makes no difference whether it is the LED itself that fails, or the voltage conversion part—it’s dead either way. And though it may be that some brands are better than others, the ability of a consumer to tell whether they’ve found a good one or not is part of a product reaching the level of maturity where it’s actually a good idea to adopt it.
Your n is not statistically representative because you didn’t purchase thousands of bulbs from the market from random manufacturers. Only an entity who did this can confidently make claims about actual average reliabilities. (which basically means government or a well funded non profit)
You cannot rationally have any confidence about your conclusions.
So you’re saying that because some cheap brands of LEDs die early, while good brands don’t, LEDs shouldn’t have been made basically mandatory, with lighting efficiency standards that have gotten progressively tougher.
(initially the Federal standards made it where incandescents could not be sold, but halogens were still meeting the minimum standards, and they have gotten tougher from there)
You have a naive level of trust in the ability of a superficially well-conducted study to arrive at a relevant conclusion. For starters, what exactly is meant by “bulbs from the market from random manufacturers”? And did governments actually conduct such studies before enacting regulations? How would that work, since the market was quite different after the regulations than before?
And while it may be that cheap LED bulbs die early, but some good (and expensive) ones don’t, that isn’t actionable information. I think you can imagine the result if consumers start preferring to buy whichever bulb is most expensive—formerly cheap and unreliable bulbs would soon become expensive and unreliable bulbs. Some sort of brand reputation is needed, but this process is probably inhibited by mandating that LED bulbs must be used.
I haven’t tried to quantitatively assess the impact of these regulations (which would be difficult), but I have my doubts that they have resulted in consumers saving money, or using less electricity, or producing less CO2, once one looks at all impacts. That would include the impact of an entire industry for producing compact fluorescent bulbs being created and now largely abandoned. And perhaps the LED bulb industry will be abandoned in the end too—depending on whether the bulbs that are reliable turn out to be sufficiently costly that either the regulations are abandoned, or some other technology replaces them.
It seems like a classic example of Hayek’s view that information needed to make good decisions is distributed amongst many parties, and can only be aggregated through the price mechanism in a free market, not by central planners.
I haven’t tried to quantitatively assess the impact of these regulations (which would be difficult), but I have my doubts that they have resulted in consumers saving money, or using less electricity, or producing less CO2, once one looks at all impacts. That would include the impact of an entire industry for producing compact fluorescent bulbs being created and now largely abandoned. And perhaps the LED bulb industry will be abandoned in the end too—depending on whether the bulbs that are reliable turn out to be sufficiently costly that either the regulations are abandoned, or some other technology replaces them.
This is a testable claim. And one that you can actually dismiss based on the data almost immediately*, and you have the data available at your fingertips.
Conveniently, you mentioned 3 interrelated terms:
consumers saving money
consumer electricity usage
CO2 emissions
What is interesting about this specifically is you might think you can only measure the first one. You have the cost consumers spend on LED bulbs (and replacements as needed for the ones that fail prematurely), cost they spend on power.
But the electricity usage happens to be closely related to power costs: that factory in China making the bulbs uses an unknown amount of electricity, but it can’t use more than the price of the bulb in electricity, and you can look up average electricity rates in China. It’s 8-9 cents a kWh, vs 12 cents in the USA.
CO2 emissions can also be calculated from that.
Really the only unknown here is the longevity of the LED bulbs. They can in fact last the 25,000 hours it says on the box, but only some models are made correctly.
Interestingly, the government of Dubai took it a step further and required improved LEDs for sale in their shops: https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-lights-you-cant-buy/
*try the math for a few minutes. See for yourself.
I still think calculating these things is harder than you think. One point: I didn’t mean to talk only about consumer use of electricity, but rather any electrical use resulting from the regulations, similarly for CO2 emissions. So, for instance, electricity and CO2 emissions relating to a factory for making compact fluorescent bulbs that went bankrupt, and so never recovered its costs from consumers, would count, as would things paid for by government subsidies rather than consumers.
You’re right that you can put an upper bound on total electricity usage in making the bulb if you know the relevant cost of electricity, and the cost of the bulb. If we look at an “Amazon basics” 9 Watt, 800 lumen (60 Watt incandescent equivalent), 10000 hour lifetime bulb, currently $2.50US at amazon.com, the power savings of 510 Kilowatt-hours is indeed much greater than the maximum 31.5 Kilowatt-hours for manufacturing the bulb—provided all those numbers are actually correct (which is quite doubtful—lifetime might be one-tenth what is claimed), and there are no subsidies involved, and we don’t count some amortization of the electricity cost of previous failed attempts at improving on incandescent bulbs.
But maybe there now are good LED bulbs, that should usually be preferred to incandescent bulbs. But if so, why are regulations needed?
In that regard, it’s interesting that the Amazon basics listing says “Not eligible for shipments to California”. A comment at the link you give quotes one manufacturer as saying “(redacted) 10 watt A19 lamps were designed with flicker-free light output as the first and foremost concern, and unfortunately we were only able to achieve a power factor rating of 0.6. Consequently, these lamps are currently banned for sale in California and we are unable to ship them to our California customers.”
Could it be that California’s regulations are actually counterproductive? More fundamentally, why would one have any confidence that these regulations are not counterproductive? What’s your “gears level” theory of how regulations end up being designed as well as possible for the common good, rather as an attempt to get the votes of uninformed electors, or as an outright corrupt mechanism of enriching well-connected businesses?
Along those lines, what, for example, do you think of Drax wood pellets? See https://www.clientearth.org/projects/the-greenwashing-files/drax/#:~:text=Drax%20says%20energy%20from%20biomass,when%20the%20pellets%20are%20burned.
Could it be that California’s regulations are actually counterproductive? More fundamentally, why would one have any confidence that these regulations are not counterproductive? What’s your “gears level” theory of how regulations end up being designed as well as possible for the common good, rather as an attempt to get the votes of uninformed electors, or as an outright corrupt mechanism of enriching well-connected businesses?
Here’s the gears level model:
(1) there is no guarantee, and regulations can be counterproductive
(2) there are many problems where the incentives are misaligned, and so capitalistic forces CANNOT solve the problem. The government is a critical piece of the system, like an organ in a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)
You can also observationally notice that places with lots of government intervention can be either extremely nice (parts of Europe) or highly productive with the strongest economic growth known to history (China).
The undertone I am sensing is you have accepted political propaganda that generally says “government is bad”. This is not correct. Bad government is bad, but more good government is almost always better than a capitalist Moloch equilibrium.
Along those lines, what, for example, do you think of Drax wood pellets
Well, the math says every ton of pellets has a certain amount of CO2 you avoided releasing, but you have to correct for the harvesting, shipping, processing, and just the general scalability issues. There is only so much land in the world that can support a forest, it probably isn’t a viable large scale strategy.
I note that what you’ve offered is not remotely a gears level model.
Care to explain why rather than making this claim without an argument.
“It’s not a gears level model because.”
If I read the above, I claim:
1. There are no guarantees of government goodness
2. There are large classes of things only government can do, thus anarchy or limited government fails
3. We do not have examples of successful countries that did anarchy/limited government in human history, and modern day successes had large and very expensive governments, including the united states.
Seems like I acknowledged the point, gave a reason why government is necessary, and gave empirical evidence that government is necessary and it must be large. How much detail do you demand.
It’s not about detail, it’s just that what you gave is not a gears-level model.
Sorry, I feel kinda rude just leaving it like that, but… if that link doesn’t help, I feel like it would take a lot of effort to explain in depth, and I don’t think I want to put that effort in.
It satisfies the criteria.
I made the specific claim that government is a critical part of a modern economy and well chosen policies make a country highly successful.
I give a mechanical reason—those policies cause availability of “public goods”, which multiply the performance of the economy. For example, China building high speed rail and large power networks and large sea ports and mass training thousands of engineers, refusing to fund liberal arts training, and mass training thousands of doctors rather than allowing a medical cartel to restrict supply—these are all government actions with consequences, and they all fit in the class of public goods. None of these things would happen organically from private industry for a number of a reasons that won’t fit in this post.
For this to be untrue—for this claim to be falsified—there would need to exist a counter example. There is not. People advocating for anarchy or various levels of libertarianism are simply scammers, they want their personal taxes lowered and plan to die from aging before the severe negative consequences affect them.
This kind of reply is ridiculous and insulting.
You may have been socially taught to believe that—to trust your direct opinions or the median from your direct friends—but in terms of rationality—the philosophy of being the least wrong—your strategy is suboptimal. Only by collecting big n data can you ever really “know” anything.
So you may find it emotionally insulting but at the end of the day correctness matters.