Planned Obsolescence is your fault

[Garth Wilson]

Quote:The ones who has *not* learned the business are the light bulb mafia. They banned (at least in Europe) incandecent bulbs and everyone is now forced to buy environmentally catastrophic CFL lamps or ugly coloured non-dimmable LED's at 10x the price. "The LED's lasts at least 40.000 hours" they claim. What a sack of donkey's droppings that statement! I've replaced as many "long lasting" LED bulbs as I've replaced halogen and incandecent bulbs. Sad

Our son worked in maintenance in a school. They got a box of CFLs that were supposed to last so many thousands of hours each. When he installed them, he put the date on them. Knowing how many hours per day they were used, he quickly found that half the box didn't even make it to 250 hours. I bought some LED bulbs for home that were supposed to last 15,000 hours. They had all become uselessly dim by 2,000, and all were totally dead before 3,000. At the normal temperatures inside our house, the CFLs take a couple of minutes to come up to full brightness. They are quite dim when first turned on.

Commenting on other things said, without quoting them:

Most of the electronics I have from the 1970's and even 1960's still work. The notable exceptions are tape recorders whose belts have rotted (but could be replaced), rubber wheels (harder to find), and dirty switches (which just need to be sprayed with contact cleaner, although in some cases they're not very accessible). Neither I nor my family have ever had a microprocessor go out, and I use computers for many years after I get them, used, cheap (or free).

The best car we ever had was a 1981 diesel Peugeot 504 station wagon. It had its first actual repair at 120,000 miles (brake master cylinder), and had had only $350 in repairs by the time my wife destroyed it in a head-on collision at 188,000 miles. She was not hurt, but the people in the other car, an Olds Cutlass Ciera, were removed with the jaws of life and taken by ambulance to the hospital. I do remember however how gas cars needed frequent tune-ups, whereas now they don't need that anymore but when they do need an actual repair, it's very expensive and you can't do it yourself anymore. (Yeah, we've had a few of those!) Modern oil makes engines last a lot longer than they used to also.