The Big Light Bulb Ripoff
I’ve posted before on The Truth About Energy-Saving Light Bulbs. It’s clear the battle lines between the manufactures and consumers are being drawn and the situation is changing a bit, so I thought it was time for another post.
Being Lied To
Do you notice how this has changed? Before we were told CFLs were 80% more efficient than ordinary incandescent bulbs. In my earlier post I explained how, even based solely on electricity consumption, this figure was an outright lie. By the time you took into account things like manufacturing and transportation costs, as unlike standard bulbs CFLs are pretty much only made in China, and disposal costs because these bulbs need special handling and transportation due to the toxic materials they contain, it’s unlikely there was any energy savings at all with these bulbs.
Not to mention being told by the manufacturers that it was safe to have mercury in our homes! Can you imagine that, someone else telling us this? Who wants toxic heavy metals in their home in any amount? And for what reason exactly?
Can you believe this, they almost got away with putting toxic materials in nearly every home worldwide? Are people gullible or what?! But this is okay, isn’t it — now we know CFLs are a piece of crap, we can throw them all away and buy the next round of consumer products.
Do you notice they’ve stopped with all the propaganda? At least in the shops here in Amsterdam, they’ve quietly moved the bulbs made from toxic materials to the side in favor of other technologies. They’ve also stopped telling us in such a deceitful way the newer bulbs are so extremely efficient like they used to.
Now it’s more like, here, buy this bulb because it’s the law.
They’ve also quietly stopped telling us the newer bulbs last longer. What they’re now doing is making standard light bulbs that burn out much faster than they did a few years ago. We just discarded a bulb purchased 15 years ago, and have been using daily in a floor lamp for about the last 5 years. How long has it been since we could buy a standard light bulb that lasted 5 years? There’s no reason standard incandescent bulbs can’t be made for a longer life, in fact if you search the Internet with Google you will see a number of places selling these bulbs in countries like China where they’re still legal.
To be very clear on this, there is absolutely no evidence beyond wild claims from from manufacturers that expensive bulbs pay themselves back in energy savings. Remember when cigarette companies used to claim their products were safe and not addicting? As long as no one can come up with absolute proof to the contrary, they can claim whatever they want.
The Demise of the 15w Bulb
Supposedly they started with the phasing out of 100w and 75w bulbs, as well as all frosted bulbs. They also assured us stores would continue to be able to stock older bulbs, and they would continue to be available for a while.
Boy, I haven’t seen any stores stocking older bulbs, have you? If you ran a store, would you want to keep low value stock like that laying around?
It’s this frosted bulb bit that’s the hidden detail. This seems to have a number of unexpected consequences. The first is 15w bulbs have totally disappeared from the stores, apparently because they can’t be made unfrosted.
Well we can all understand, at least from an emotional point of view, why they would ban 100w and 75w bulbs, right? Because they use so much electricity? Why do they need to ban the one incandescent bulb logical for someone who needs a small energy efficient light for a small space? After all, for someone who does want to lower their electric bill, and wants to replace a higher wattage bulb with a more efficient cheap one, a 15w bulb would be the logical way to do it. Is this too much competition for other supposedly energy saving light bulbs?
The Big Consumer Ripoff
Ten years ago light bulbs could be had for 10 or 20 cents, purchased in a package of 20 or so bulbs from a discount retailer.
Especially as the price of oil is going up, the true manufacturing and transportation costs of these new bulbs is really showing itself! These days it’s hard to find a light bulb for less than about €1 (around US$1.35), about a 500% mark-up from a few years ago. These prices are only going to go up if the manufacturers of the newer technologies are given a monopoly on the market.
It’s not acceptable to just lower the price a bit now, and take a loss, maybe put them on sale. Maybe a government subsidy here and there to distribute free or discounted bulbs. As consumers we have the right to access to cheaper technologies, as protection against future prices rises or market manipulations. If the new lighting technologies are so great, let them stand the test of time!
It’s not just incandescent bulbs that are becoming unavailable, it’s fixtures and devices like timers, switches and motion detectors. These are now becoming packaged with newer bulbs and fittings, forcing you to use a particular brand or type of bulb.
Missing Comments
If you leave a comment here, it should show up almost instantly. If you don’t see it within a few hours, or it disappears, please let me know. I don’t moderate comments. If for some reason I need to delete your comment and you’ve left a valid email address, I’ll send an email explaining why I did it. I got an email a few days ago from someone who’s comment didn’t appear, which is why I’m mentioning this now.
The problem is I use a program called Akismet to delete spam comments, and it sometimes makes a mistake. If you tell me your comment didn’t show up, I can hunt it down and bring it back. If I didn’t use Akismet, I would get around 1600 spam comments a month! So I have to use it, and I have to accept sometimes it makes mistakes. Every real comment here is important however, so I don’t want to lose any.
Akismet learns from mistakes, so if I find a comment it deleted by mistake, it’s less likely to happen again. In this way, if you tell me about a lost comment, you are doing me a favor as well as others who leave comments on Akismet blogs. Your future comments will also be less likely to get lost on other blogs in this way as well.
General Comment Policies
Since I’ve been around 5 years now, I have a pretty set policy on comments that probably isn’t very different from most other blogs. For the sake of clarity, I’ll just explain it a bit here.
Anonymous comments are welcome. The name, email address and URL fields are all optional. It’s always nice however if you choose some name, even if it’s not your real one.
In general everything goes except spam. You do however have to address the topic at hand.
While you can say anything you want, you can’t be intentionally disruptive, especially in a repetitive way. In particular, if you have a very strong disagreement with me, this isn’t the place to get into a long discussion about it. It’s better if you find some place else on the Internet to talk about it and leave a link from here. While your opinions are welcome, most people who read this blog are in general agreement with me on most things, and they would find a very long and rambling statement opposing me disruptive. This happened once for example when I posted about the relationship between eating meat and climate change, and someone wanted to spend a lot of time here talking about the virtues of an all-meat diet. I generally won’t delete comments like this, but will ask you to move on.
This isn’t the right place to talk about very divisive and emotional issues like guns, abortion or religion.
Both myself and others have the right to leave their opinion here. Requests to remove what I’ve written or comments from others will not be honored, and you won’t make any friends here this way either.
Within reason swearing is okay. I don’t much myself, but if you care to you’re welcome.
If you post something illegal, I might have to delete it.
While spam is not allowed, I offer a little more latitude to hand typed commercial comments that address the topic at hand. For example this Chinese company that produces a seeder that competes with one I posted about:
http://www.patnsteph.net/weblog/2006/09/earthway-seeder/
If you hand type something that’s creative and relevant, I’ll probably allow it. Entertainment value is extra credit. This is completely at my discretion.
What’s not allowed is a commercial comment that’s in stride with the topic at hand, or one that’s just a link or otherwise is not in any way creative or useful. Of all the comments I ever delete, they almost all fall into this category. Again, if you leave a valid email address I’ll get in touch and explain why I deleted your comment.
Comments anyone?
Peace Seeds, Peace Seedlings, Alan Kapuler and family
Alan Kapuler just sent me an email to tell me about the new 2011 seed listings for Peace Seeds (or here) and Peace Seedlings. Peace Seeds is run by Al and Linda Kapuler. Peace Seedlings is run by Dylana Kapuler and Mario Dibenedetto.
The websites are run by their close friend, Chinese agronomist Bi Jihuan.
It’s a pretty special and rare thing when a plant breeder offers part of their own seed collection for sale. Please consider supporting their work by buying and growing their seeds!
I Amsterdam
Expats coming to the Netherlands, beware!
The city of Amsterdam recently launched a new ‘brand’, called I Amsterdam.
This is a registered trademark of the city, and is supposedly used for companies or other organizations that present the city in a good light. In particular an important part of the marketing efforts are to attract so-called knowledge workers to the city, and help with their relocation by promoting businesses that can assist them with things like housing, banking and the like.
Beware of Racism!
An important part of the history of the Netherlands is after WWII a large number of migrants came here to help with the reconstruction of the country. These migrants kept coming, and in recent times turned into more educated knowledge workers. In fact, in light of the fact there were large numbers of knowledge workers the governments has significantly cut back on educational spending and let immigrants fill the gaps, causing other problems I won’t get into here.
The view has always been maintained that those coming to the country are doing so to serve the native Dutch and their descendants. In other words, knowledge workers come here to create jobs, and these jobs are for ethnic Dutch.
The demographics are now such that about half the city’s population is not ethnic Dutch, and if you move here you will also not be ethnic Dutch.
There’s a long running custom for ethnic Dutch to only hire or offer promotions to other ethnic Dutch. In fact, to hire or promote someone who is not ethnic Dutch is considered to be taking a risk. This might create discontent in the workplace, a clash of cultures or attract complaints from customers — much in the same way it used to be with black workers in America.
There is no such thing as affirmative action or reverse discrimination here, and certainly not in the city government! The vast majority of city workers are ethnic Dutch, and nearly all of those in positions of importance are. Most city contracts go to companies who only hire ethnic Dutch. Certainly for the purposes of this new marketing logo, if you do business with the companies involved, you will see they are almost all exclusively staffed with ethnic Dutch.
If you do business with them, you will be leaving out the half of the city that is not ethnic Dutch.
Housing
This is a good example, and since I am not ethnic Dutch and am offering an apartment for rent, let me explain a little bit how this works.
Largely speaking, there are three kinds of housing in Amsterdam. There’s social housing, where you have to meet certain income, employment and pre-existing residence requirements. There’s free sector housing, which is more expensive and easier to find. Now there’s this new category called Short-Stay housing, especially intended for expats.
There’s lots of grey areas in housing, for example people who have social housing illegally subletting it to expats for a huge profit, or landlords illegally renting out social housing as free sector. Lots of people will warn expats about ‘illegal’ housing, but actually there’s nothing to worry about. There are no penalties for you to rent and live in illegal housing. The risks are almost exclusively for property owners. If you find yourself in the wrong kind of accommodation, you may have to move out eventually or pay a higher than expected rent, you might find yourself swamped with a bit of red tape, but there are no other risks.
The one issue for some is if you are non-EU and living here on a residence permit renewed on an annual basis, you will need to register your residence with the city and be allowed to live wherever that is. This is easy. If you fall into this situation, ask your potential landlord if you’re allowed to register? If the answer is no, you have to look elsewhere. Your landlord will not want you to try to register if you’re not allowed to, and it will create a lot of problems for them if you do. If you aren’t required to register because of a residence permit, it’s no problem to come to an agreement that you won’t register, if this is what you want to do.
There is nothing illegal about renting an apartment from me or any other private party! Most places are okay to register with the city. If you rent from me, you can certainly register if you want, no problem.
Short Stay housing was created because there are a lot of empty apartments in the city now that don’t meet the requirements of free sector rental housing, and can’t be sold because the real estate market is too depressed. Licenses were granted to large housing corporations to use this excess housing as ‘Short Stay’ housing, in limited numbers so the market would not fill up with expat rentals, bringing prices down. These licenses were granted ‘per unit’, with entire apartment blocks considered as a single unit, meaning the cost for someone like me with a single apartment was unrealistic, and only pre-existing housing corporations would qualify.
If you move into an official ‘Short Stay’ rental, you will get housing licensed by a city government dominated by ethnic Dutch, with the intention of keeping it in short supply in an otherwise flooded real estate market with artificially high rents, as well as with the intention of benefiting ethnic Dutch owners running a company who only hires ethnic Dutch workers.
This isn’t the right kind of housing for expats!
Whatever you do, and however you find housing, the best thing to do is avoid official Short Stay housing and official housing companies. If you’re looking for housing, leave a comment on this post and I’ll try to offer the most current advice I have at the moment.
Work Ethic
One of the things that happens with the active promotion of ethnic Dutch is one of the most atrocious work ethics I have ever seen. Nothing is a better example than when the city was licensing taxis in a similar way as the new Short Stay housing! By searching on TCA or Taxi Centrale Amsterdam, there are probably lots of stories on the Internet, but basically the city turned all of their taxi drivers into thugs.
The taxi drivers all knew they had a right to drive their taxi, pretty much charge whatever they wanted and could do what they wanted because the city had given them a permanent license and weren’t issuing new licenses to others. This basically meant they were ripping off any tourist who entered their cabs, charging whatever they wanted, and many became involved in organized crime. For a time it was known if you wanted pirated software, you could buy a CD from most taxi drivers. Many would transport drugs on request. It was a real mess, and it took a long time to sort out. Nowadays, the taxis aren’t nearly as bad, certainly nothing to be afraid of, but there are still a few bad drivers floating around and taxis are still best avoided if possible.
Later I’m going to do a post on my recent house renovations, and the story is similar with this.
Any time you do business with a completely ethnic Dutch company, you risk the same sort of work ethic and desire to charge the highest price for the least amount of work. By the way, this is often the case with ethnic Dutch people trying to buy goods and services too. Since employment is harder to come by for non-ethnic Dutch, as a rule they are much more motivated and honest.
I’m not in anyway encouraging anyone to discriminate the other way, and refuse to do business with ethnic Dutch, but rather use common sense.
If you’re an expat coming to Amsterdam, beware half of the city is like you — from somewhere else. Look out for and pay attention to them! Look for colored skin, a funny accent or native English speaker. The day will come where you expect the same from others.
If you come here and work for a foreign company, it may take a long time before you notice it, because you’ll be working in a pretty sheltered environment. It’s also normal when you come here to look on everything with a positive light, and for example justify this kind of discrimination on the basis of a lack of appropriate language skills. The truth is with something like language skills, the expectations are generally just so high, that no non-native speaker is good enough. Almost no one learns to speak Dutch as a second language without an accent. It can take a long time living here before you see just how undeniable the discrimination is, but you’ll see it eventually.
A desire to purchase goods and services from non-ethnic Dutch is really the most important first step to ending the discrimination that goes on here.
Tomato Forum
Mike Curtis recently contacted me and asked me to mention his tomato growing forum.
His forum is a part of the Helpful Gardener forums, that won a Business Week ‘Best of the Web’ award in 2008. Mike mentioned his tomato forum is a friendly place that doesn’t allow the negative attitudes typically found on other forums. So be nice!
