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Comment by carlob | Hacker News Reader

No need to do that, you can still use CFL and they are not being phased out.

Why would anybody want to use CFL? Is it more for the migraines or for how they make everything look sickly?

CFLs don't flicker anymore, and if color accuracy is what you want stay away from LEDs since all the efficient ones are worse than CFLs.

You can make LEDs with good color accuracy but you lose efficiency making them worse than equivalent CFLs.

There are several types of fluorescent lighting, with different color temperatures. Granted, their spectra is not the same as sunlight, but you can mix more than one type for a more pleasant effect.

We enjoy smelling the flame retardant fumes offgassing from the electronics. Bonus when one burns out in a small cloud of acrid plastic smoke.

What if you don't want to deal with the toxic mercury gases?

Which are not released unless you break them. And even then, just open the windows for a couple of minutes.

It's a little more complicated than opening a window if you want to be as safe as possible. But you don't want to fuck around with mercury.

http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/cleaning-broken-cfl

People used to play with mercury as a toy, even drink it just to watch it pass through their digestive system. It's a very good thing people don't do that stuff anymore, but there are probably far worse things than mercury hiding in household items and chemicals.

> What if you don't want to deal with the toxic mercury gases?

Then buy CFLs? They help keep toxic mercury out of the air from burning coal.

Do you seriously believe CFLs emit any mercury, or are you trolling?

When broken, absolutely.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp

I've broken one bulb in a decade. But by being an early adopter and using them for more than a decade I've prevented hundreds of times as much mercury from entering the atmosphere.

One CFL bulb has less mercury in it than a can of tuna: http://www.lamprecycle.org/public/images/docs/LD+A%20August%...

Incorrect. That article is comparing the estimated exposure from a broken CFL with the exposure from eating Albacore[1] tuna. The actual mercury content in the CFL is obviously much greater.

[1] And not all canned tuna is Albacore. The stuff sold as "light" tuna is typically lower mercury content (don't have a source handy at the moment.)

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