inner element

L: This my bitch. 

K: I am her bitch. 

L: Real talk. 

In 1924, representatives of the world’s leading lightbulb manufacturers formed Phoebus, a cartel that fixed the average life of an incandescent bulb at 1,000 hours, ensuring that people would have to regularly buy bulbs and keep the manufacturers in business.

But hardware store LED bulbs have a typical duty-cycle of 25,000 hours – meaning that the average American household will only have to buy new bulbs ever 42 years or so.

The lighting industry is panicked about “socket saturation,” when all household bulbs have been replaced with long-lasting LED bulbs. There’s signs that they’re moving to limit the longevity of LED bulbs, albeit without the grossly illegal cartels of the Phoebus era. Philipps is seling $5 LED bulbs that have a 10,000 hour duty-cycle. Many no-name Chinese LED bulbs are so shoddy that they’re sold by the kilo, and buyers are left to sort the totally defective (ranging from bulbs that don’t work at all to bulbs that give people electrical shocks) from the marginally usable ones.

JB MacKinnon’s excellent New Yorker piece tells the story of planned obsolescence and home lighting, but only skims the surface of the Internet of Things future of “smart” bulbs. It’s been less than a year since Philips pushed out a firmware update that gave its light fixtures the ability to detect and reject non-Philips lightbulbs – and thanks to laws like the DMCA, which have metastasized in the IoT era, it’s a potential felony to alter your light fixture to override this behavior and force it to work with non-Philips bulbs.

The IoT’s twin dark patterns are control (forcing you to use original consumables, only get service from the manufacturer, and limiting features to those that benefit the manufacturer, at the owner’s expense) and surveillance – and that’s the other side of this. As bulbs get smarter, they’re being positioned as IoT hubs that do everything from relaying your wifi to connecting to your thermostat to serving and coordinating with your home security system. This gives them the power to gather farcical quantities of potentially compromising, sensitive information about your life inside your own home, and since a federal court just ruled that the Terms of Service accompanying these products have the force of law, there’s little you can do (or sell) that will help people get out from under this kind of spying.

Glacier was so big, he got his own post, but I thought you’d like to see Mr. B, Polar, and Randy too. :-)  They all got dramatically whiter.  First is Mr. B, who was sort of gray and floppy when he came to the hospital.  His person had written:

I am attaching a few pictures of my daughter’s most beloved bear. She has had this bear since she was less than a year old (she’s almost 8) and there is nowhere that she has gone that the bear hasn’t made a trip to at least once! Sadly, all that love is making poor Mr. Bear pretty rough looking and she could use a good professional cleaning and restuffing. :D While the munchkin is not thrilled at the tought of her bear being gone, even for a little while, she understands that some TLC is definitely needed and is willing to let Teddy out of sight, “for her own good.”

Here’s Mr. Bear on arrival:

You can see he needed some stitches too.  The goal was to keep his wrinkly face shape.  He had his spa:

And he got a nice lavender heart:

All stitched up and ready to fly home:

Her family wrote:

Mr. Bear made it safely home and P is utterly thrilled!!!! She hasn’t put her down (except to eat and then she’s on the table watching P!! lol) since she got her. Thank you SO, SO, SO much for giving her bear a new lease on life and making my daughter so happy!!!

Next up is Randy (these three all arrived within a couple of days of each other, the week after Glacier came in).  Randy had the tail wound, and needed a spa.  Here’s his arrival photo:

A bit grayish brown, but so cute!  Here’s his spa:

You can see the brown better there.  He got a red heart:

Had all his wounds stitched and was ready to fly home:

Randy’s family in Baltimore wrote:

He looks great! Thank you for taking such good care of him. We really appreciate it.

Finally, we have Polar.  Polar needed his nose recovered in addition to the spa.  Here he is on arrival:

Here’s his spa picture:

And here’s his heart (red like Randy’s) being made with a bit of his original stuffing and going in:

Now Polar’s nose originally had a leather like feel (it was a faux leather fabric) and it was sewn on rather than being a separate nose held in place by a post.  His people opted to recover it with new fabric.  Here are his after photos with his nice white fur and shiny new black nose:

Polar’s people wrote:

Men Just Don’t Trust Women – And It’s A Huge Problem

I cannot think of a man with whom I have ever shared negative feelings who did not make it obvious, however hard he might’ve tried to hide it, that he is going through this mental process.

And yes, if you’re a man reading this and thinking, “Oh no, but she’s told me her negative feelings and I’ve responded by asking her questions about why she feels that way, does she mean me???” Yes, I mean you. I mean all of you. I am calling all of you out for this right now. No, I don’t want to have a private conversation about it, because I’m done with that emotional labor. If this describes you and you’re still in my life as a friend or partner, assume that I have accepted this sort of microinvalidation as the cost of doing business. But my acceptance of reality doesn’t make it any more *acceptable*.

Gene Parmesan: Uh, I’ve got some bad news. I’m… Gene Parmesan. 

Amigos - 2x03