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Friday Fun Thread for June 14, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The obsession with turning the lights off to save on electricity bills has always infuriated me ever since I looked up the cost of it. LED light bulbs use about $2 of electricity per year, and they are supposed to last over ten years. You can get them as cheap as $1 per bulb if you buy in bulk.

Forget millionaires, someone living on minimum wage can afford to ignore optimizing electricity for light bulbs. Easy rule of thumb: if you can afford the space you can afford to light it.

Another easy rule of thumb: most actual electricity usage is related to temperature. Heating / AC / Fridges / Freezers / Stoves / Ovens / Dryers.

The obsession with turning the lights off to save on electricity bills has always infuriated me ever since I looked up the cost of it

This is a boomer thing. Yeah, electricity wasn't as expensive back then relative to wages, but lightbulbs pulled an order of magnitude more electricity and could also burn out (not that the cheap LED bulbs you can buy for under a dollar each can't, but they're relatively bulletproof by comparison).

They also have this weird obsession with refusing to use the dishwasher for its intended purpose. Like, just run two loads. Not rocket science.

could also burn out

Ironically, it's much safer for an incandescent lightbulb to just stay on 24/7 than it is for it to be switched on and off several times a day.

Maybe, but the reason certain boomers will never be fully on board with LEDs is that incandescent bulbs were absolutely dirty cheap even if you didn't buy cheap ones.

As opposed to certain Gen Y/Z/As, who notice that the dirt-cheap LED bulbs don't instantly turn on when you flick the switch (you have to buy the 10-dollar ones to get that) and have a hard time being dimmed past certain points (where they just turn off and you blow out your eyes trying to turn them on). Or those who remember what standard lightbulbs are like in terms of color reproduction, since LEDs still can't fake blackbody radiation properly (as that's inherent to incandescence).

Personally, I'm on board with LEDs insofar as you can get lots and lots of light out of them with existing fixtures and they also don't heat up the room; if my fixtures are going to say "100W max" on them, then my LED bulbs are going to be 100W no matter how blatantly absurd that is.