LED lighting is really bad for the environment - worse than CFL and here's why

See that? Those are four LED bulbs bought at the same time and made by the same manufacturer. They were bought in Lowes Black Friday sale sometime in the last 6 months. As an experiment to see how good they are, I put them in m'lady's bathroom. Two have failed within six months and we are not even talking heavy usage. Maybe a few minutes at a time - as long as it takes to use the bathroom. Then they are turned off.

This lousy longevity for LED lighting is not new. Many of my readers will remember that about 8 years ago I bought a very expensive LED bulb that was never really used until my stairwell light died. It just lay in a drawer until then. I put it in the stairwell and within a couple of months it was dead.

How many of us use LED flashlights? I know I have 3. I have one that works well and two that barely show a glimmer of light despite fresh batteries.

Now answer this - all these dead LED bulbs and flashlights - where do they end up? Sure, they end up as a white elephant in your closet or desk drawer but then you have a clear out and throw the trash out. These massive quantities of LED bulbs that are supposed to last 10,000 hours of fantasy time but which actually last maybe 12 hours in real time go to the dump as landfill. No part of an LED bulb is recyclable. That is environmentally horrible!

Now let's look at the CFL equivalent. Sure - they sound nice. They use 15% of the power of an incandescent bulb. At what cost though? The other name or the original name for a Compact Fluorescent Lamp is a Mercury Vapor lamp. Yes - that's correct - they contain vaporized mercury. That stuff is nasty! Mercury vapor is highly toxic and mercury remains in your body forever. Remember Minimata Bay in Japan where everybody died of mercury poisoning? By the time you have physical symptoms of mercury poisoning, your teeth will have long since fallen out. Those are the first casualty of mercury poisoning. Sufficient mercury vapor will kill instantly by paralysing your lungs. Each time a mercury vapor lamp breaks, you breathe in some mercury. Even if somebody else breaks a CFL some parts of the vapor could reach you from across the street. They are deadly!

In their infinite "wisdom" politicians have sentenced us to not using incandescent lamps on account of the CO2 that inefficient power stations produce. CO2 is much more environmentally friendly than mercury vapor or electronic waste. By the way, LEDs contain phosphorous - another dangerous chemical. CO2 is absorbed by vegetation and turned into oxygen.

The whole lighting thing is a huge scam. CFL was a sticking plaster the politicians saddled us with in order to protect power stations from cleaning up their acts. Rather than insisting on business cleaning up, they transferred the problem elsewhere and blamed the public for wastefullness. LED lighting is another sticking plaster that doesn't work.

The real solution is just to knock down every polluting power station and insist power companies build clean power stations. It is 100% doable. The problem is that politicians will lose all their backhanders if they govern their sponsors instead of victimizing the public.

This all leaves us with the question as to what on earth we do as people, as photographers etc. For myself, I shall waste no more money on LED lighting. It is just too expensive to buy things that don't last. Over 60% of these allegedly long-lived LED lighting things I have bought and which have hardly had any use have failed on me. CFL is clearly not the answer and I refuse to use such toxic substances. I refuse to have mercury in my home.

It is up to you what you do in your home, in your studio etc. I strongly advise that you carefully remove your CFL bulbs and take them back where you bought them. As far as I know, there is nowhere that you can legally dispose of substances containing mercury. As far as LED lighting, unless you were truly born yesterday, I'd advise avoiding it until the manufacturers put truthful lives on their bulbs. They won't do that though because 12 hours does not impress!

Why should you buy two POS tablets when one would do?

From initially being very skeptical about tablets, I've since come to like them. In fact, tablets are pretty much all I use now. I've been through a good few too - which is where the alarm bells should start ringing! Thus far I've used the following.
1. Nook Color - this was junk from the start. Originally retailing for $279, mine cost me $90. It had a huge fault in that the screen went bananas in humidity. I was using it to display photos at a function and it started flipping from photo to photo at random. Of course I got all the usual snarky comments such as "should't have wasted your money on that. Should have bought an iPad" but that wasn't that helpful. In the end I sold that thing on eBay for $15 and I was lucky to get that, too!
2. RCA 7 inch $50, 8 gigabyte thing. This kinda-sorta worked but not well. After 6 months suffering it, I simply gave it away and bought a reconditioned Nexus 7.
3. Nexus 7 2012 - reconditioned. This was bought for $100 and it was pretty good. The screen was excellent though it could slow inexplicably at times. After about 12 months it was freezing and locking up pretty well constantly. Thus I did what any normal person would and set it to do a factory reset. That was when I found the factory image was missing. I had a $100 brick on my hands. I kept it just in case I could reflash it to get it working again. The commercial outfits either wouldn't touch it or wanted an outrageous $50 to reflash it.
4. RCA 7 inch Voyager Pro. That was $50 for the model with a keyboard. This worked pretty well until the USB connector broke. I got in touch with RCA since it was only 3 months old when the USB socket broke. Their response was very confusing. At the top of the email it said to send them the tablet using their RMA number. At the bottom it said they had sent a replacement. Of course, two weeks later, no replacement has arrived. I suppose I'm going to have to pony up another $10 to send the bloody thing back to them in order for them to send me a "reconditioned" model that might or might not last a further 3 months.

To date I've spent $290 on tablets. My solution when faced with the same problem with phones was that I simply stopped buying the cheap phones and bought one that cost $250 (in an end of line sale). It wasn't the iPhone that I wanted but a Nexus 4. The thing about it is though it's now 2016 and I bought that phone in 2013. It's still working brilliantly. Previous phones just didn't last and just got dumped in a drawer when they gave out or went out in a more spectacular fashion!

It seems that when you buy a cheapass tablet, you need to buy two cheapass tablets. Don't be an idiot like I did and buy one that comes with a keyboard because as with my RCA, the keyboard will only work with the correct model of RCA tablet. Buy two keyboardless tablets and add a cheap keyboard cover. That way you won't get caught out by a tablet failing unexpectedly. You'll also be able to switch the tablets in and out at will.

At the moment I have two equally dead tablets. One that won't charge because the USB connection is just too flimsy but which has a very nice keyboard and one that doesn't have a keyboard but which had a nicer screen that's dead because somebody removed the factory image.

The problem with sending this tablet off is that I can't erase all my passwords and personal information from it before sending it off! I'm rather concerned about that in these days of identity theft. It's not so much the revealing and intimate photos on the tablet. There just aren't any. Sorry - I'm quite mundane and boring. I don't wear fishnets and miniskirts nor do I have photos of anybody else that does. Having said that, the slightest scrap of information in the wrong hands is a very powerful weapon.

I have a feeling that I might just have to write this tablet off as a bad buy and look online for something cheap from China. That is, unless I can open it, resolder the USB socket and then epoxy it into place more solidly so it can't break loose again.

Is camera gear now disposable?

Looking at the current rash of new cameras, computers, tablets, phones and other electronic gizmos, at first the sheer quantity available to the consumer is seemingly overwhelming. Hundreds of manufacturers all competing to relieve the consumer of the contents of their wallets.

Computers used to be one of the main grounds for competition until people discovered that as internet consumers rather than creators, they didn't need phenomenal processing power or incredible storage. They just want to play online games, read websites and possibly post opinions that have zero ultimate effect on news websites. For that, tablets will do. Of course, computers were made to be disposable. Every other year people had to upgrade to the next computer because their old computer would be no match for all the updates Microsoft came out with (commonly called bloat). So, computers were disposable. Now though since computers have largely caught up, Microsoft is making the operating system disposable by coming out with a new one every two years, knowing full well most people don't want to be bothered installing a new operating system and are well used to having to change computers.

Tablets and phones follow the same path as computers starting out with inefficient and underspecified devices with almost reasonable devices being highly priced. Look in any store and there will be a plethora of $40 - $50 tablets with 8GB of memory. With luck in the $50 - $75 range you'll find tablets with 16GB. They tend to be usable as opposed to the 8GB tablets. There is one caveat... How well built the device is. As an example, I used to use a Nexus 7 that I got secondhand for $100 from Walmart. That was fine until it died (which took a year). Basically the reason it died was planned obsalescence. It was designed to fail. My latest tablet (a $50 RCA Voyager Pro) has just died - after 4 months. That's 8 months short of the warranty. Needless to say, the company say they'll fix it if I post it to them (at my expense) and wait 3 - 4 weeks without a tablet (that I use daily). That's just being treated with contempt by RCA. It ensures only one thing - that I will never buy another RCA product as long as I live!
 
Cameras are very much disposable. Every 18 months, camera companies come out with new cameras. When that happens, the used price of cameras drops dramatically. Back in the days of film cameras, film cameras largely maintained their values. With the disposability of electronics, they don't. As an example, I paid $1,100 for a Canon 30D back in 2006. It was and still is a pretty good camera. In terms of value it has plummeted to next to nothing. That camera is listed in as new condition in secondhand camera stores at $115. Sold to a camera store or via eBay, it would raise only a fraction of that.

Going further, lenses are also disposable. Every couple of years insignificantly modified models of lenses are released. The resale value of the older edition plummets. The same goes for flashes. A hugely expensive flash plumments in resale value due to new variants.

Taking the whole lot as camera gear in its broadest sense, phones, computers, tablets, cameras and lenses, manufacturers seem to treat them with the same contempt as their customers. Devices are just made to be thrown away. It doesn't matter how much they cost - how many hundreds or thousands. The fact consumers cannot afford to buy items that plummet in value to zero (like my 30D) does not seem to have been recognised by manufacturers.

The above has led to a very interesting situation. Phones now have built-in cameras which are of high quality. People are ceasing to buy cameras because they don't see much point in spending hundreds or thousands on equipment they won't get anything for if they try to sell it a couple of years down the line. Currently this is really hurting camera manufacturers. They're experiencing a 35% a year contraction in the market. Long term this means bankruptcy. They have only themselves to blame by making camera gear disposable.

Has Twitter been taken over by radical Islam?

This blogger now has nothing to do with Twitter. This blogger does not endorse Twitter nor radical Islam. This blogger is very happy being a moderate, middle-of-the-road, peacable Christian.

This morning for some unknown reason I accessed my Twitter account and found I was locked out for a few hours. Logging in later, I was instructed that I could not access my account unless I deleted a tweet that referred to Islam as being a blood-dripping, murderous excuse for a religion. Clearly Twitter looks like it's now being run by ISIS sympathizers. This blogger does not endorse censorship of ideas and thoughts. What a world away from September 11, 2001 when people didn't bow and crawl before false Gods.

Consequently, my personal Twitter account is now no longer going to be used. The app has been deleted from my phone, my tablet and my life. That actually set me thinking about social media in general. It seems that on social media sites, accusations can be levied against other users by un-named, faceless accusers and judgements made without any defence being permitted. It's so unlike the current real world where the accused has the right to face the accuser and where both parties are entitled to representation. In many ways it has echoes of the 1940s.

Going further along that line, we have people using alleged social media without realising that nothing is ever free. Twitter, like Facebook are businesses and their business is to sell advertising to people that want to sell you things. Thus, as a consequence you have to ignore a barrage of advertising ranging from the ridiculous to the heinous. It is a rare individual that has not come across adverts for illegal and immoral activities on Facebook, Twitter or other social media. Doing business with Twitter or Facebook really seems to mean doing business with Satan himself.

Look at the kind of users that social media (not just Facebook and Twitter) attract... Pedophiles, terrorists, identity thieves, scammers, conmen, murderers, rapists. How many times have we hear of ISIS using social media as a fertile recruiting ground? How many have not heard of at least one rape, murder or pedophile activity carried out on naive social media users. The Craigslist Killer immediately springs to mind. 

Allowing social media into your home is like putting out the welcome mat, turning on the light and inviting inmates from the local prison into your home. I must say that without Facebook and without Twitter, life does not end. Indeed I gave thought to life without the internet.

As many of you know, I use an elderly smartphone. It's a Nexus 4 that I bought new in 2013. I believe this month might well be its 3rd anniversary. While I find it interesting and pleasurable to play with the internet on it, I don't really feel I'd miss much with just an ordinary flip phone. It's not as though people line up to phone me. Indeed if they did, believe me, I wouldn't have that phone for long! Ages ago I moved into a residence where I used DSL and that came with free incoming phone. I plugged a phone in and had non-stop junk calls. After three days, the phone was unplugged and thrown in a box.

Simply, since the Internet is clearly being so radicalised by terrorists etc, is there much point to it anymore? Twitter illustrates my biggest gripe with social media. I had had Twitter for several years and found that it's a medium on which (like Facebook) people like to broadcast their lives both intimate and not but who steadfastly refuse to interact. At its most basic, social media is a wooden soap box that is taken to a favorite corner of the local park upon which one stands and shouts inflated opinions at anybody within earshot. Blogs are just one example. This blog might even be pretty much an example of this.

Did I find Twitter fun? Not really. I used it hoping for some interaction but never got any interaction other than some faceless, nameless accusor. Did I find Facebook fun? Not really - there are people I like to keep up with but with all of them, I'd prefer to keep up with them via emal and instant messenger than via Facebook. Sadly, when I left Facbook in June, most dropped out of contact. Perhaps that says a lot of the worth of social media. It looks to be social but looks are deceiving.

Am I surprised Twitter seems to support radical Islam? Not really. Their workers are most likely outsourced to such basteons of democracy and freedom as Pakistan, Russia, China, India etc. Places where radical Islam is widespread! Given the reports of youngsters being recruited by radical Islam via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc, I'm surprised governments have not stepped in to shut down such operations. 

Sex change operation

Many of my regular readers will have noticed that this blog has been somewhat spartan on entries of late. This is due to a long and ongoing process of surgeries I have had that have culminated in the state of South Carolina awarding me a female driver's license. Yes, folks, I have been transitioning for years and have had all the gender reassignment surgery.

I wasn't initially going to write this article as it has so little to do with actual photography. I decided to in the end because it was about me and I write this photography blog and am the photographer.

This is not a sudden move. There has been a gradual realisation over the years that I'm not a man but a woman. From the time I arrived in the US over a decade ago, I've been free to experiment and develop as a person just as I have been free to experiment and develop as a photographer. Indeed you could say these two lines of development both parallel each other.

Well, back in 2009 I first saw the doctor about the issues and he suggested that I would be better as a woman. My immediate response was a particularly Southern "Bless your heart" for I have been in the South for most of the previous 5 years. He booked me in to sea a psychiatrist who ineed (bless his little heart) tell me that I really am female trapped in a male body.

Roll on a few years, hormone theraphy, breast implants, facial hair removal, body hair removal etc and I could walk down the street in heels, hose and a skirt and men in the streets opened doors for me, tipped their hats and picked up things that I'd dropped.

Last week I had my new driver's license back. The name on it (I changed my name) is now female. I suppose it means I'll have to change my online name now from Zephod to Trillian. I am now a bona-fide woman with bona-fide women's feelings, passions and interests.

Fake nails now have a meaning for me as I wear them daily. Life is good. Welcome to the world of womanhood this April 1st.