Phillips make bulbs in Dubai that give approximately twice the lumens/watt, and last an order of magnitude longer, at marginal difference in production cost. The super high-tech clever secret? Just put twice as many LEDs in them. Strangely enough, Phillips don’t produce these bulbs anywhere else in the world, I wonder why?
They are designed to be the most efficient available, matching high lumen output with very long life
In return for the development Philips gained exclusive rights to manufacture the lamps for a fixed duration, extending from their announcement in 2016. Philips expect to have supplied 10 million of the lamps by the end of 2021
These lamps are currently only available in Dubai. The likelihood of them appearing elsewhere is limited by the fact that they are designed to last a long time, which isn’t profitable for the manufacturers.
I’unno I know this shit is happening in all areas all the time because capitalism but the blatant examples like this are really stupid and upsetting.
i mean we do functionally understand how to make the perfect lightbulb that would exist for 100+ years. we just choose not to for profits. this goes for a lot of things.
You should be legally allowed to copy and produce a product that a company refuses to produce or supply, even for profit. Patents or not.
100,000%. If you own a patent you should have to link to a place to purchase the product on the patent office website. If it’s unavailable, you lose the patent.
True, but then you’d also have to legally control their pricing, and all aspects of the sale, and so forth to make sure it’s all reasonable and accessible to consumers. By the time you have a remotely fair system, you’ll basically have nationalised the thing.
Not to say that would be bad :sicko-wholesome:
Yeah the great lightbulb conspiracy has been a thing almost as long as light bulbs have - They made a great doc on it I think its this one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_Bulb_Conspiracy
An aside, but I always felt the goal of the “degrowth” movement was to get rid of completely wasteful shit like this. Rather than the bad faith interpretation that it’s just “austerity by another name”. Like if Davos summit or Trudeau pitched something similar sounding, I’d assume it’s just more austerity, but it’s not like capitalism isn’t filled with a milliom little “inventions” which fuel growth and waste but don’t improve our lives necessarily.
Usually when most people outside of the small niche of leftists talk about degrowth, they mean green austerity and deindustrializing. Which will be the end of any communist movement.
You’re saying this as if liberal/centrist degrowthers aren’t themselves a tiny niche.
More effort needs to be done to go after companies that make and sell electronics that break or fail after a few months, or one-time use electronics. They contribute so much to the growing pile of E-waste.
This past Christmas I was at a party. A few people got these battery powered flashing Christmas light string necklaces as door prizes. The battery life on them wasn’t so good, and at the end of the party most were barely glowing and some people were throwing theirs in the garbage. I dug them out so I could repurpose the flasher circuit for something else, but it got me thinking about all the cheaply made electronic treats like this that are out there and how many people just trash them after a few hours of use.
This shit needs to be outlawed or regulated, but you just know the reactionaries will immediately start crying about the government taking their treats away.
