Change

Last night a lamp bulb in the sitting room failed, the one that is used every single day and probably outside the kitchen, the most used in the house. The lamp and bulb were bought exactly 8 years ago, the bulb is one of those energy saving devices forced on us by the EU! In the eight years, it will have saved me around €250 in electricity costs - that's just one bulb.

It's another fine example of the anti-EU Johnson type bull****  and the ban was claimed to be a Doomsday scenario. The fact is that the European country which started with a ban was ..... THE UNITED KINGDOM. Here the Wiki entry:


The UK government announced in 2007 that incandescent bulbs would be phased out by 2011. In 2008, the Irish government announced a phase-out of the sale of any light bulbs with a luminous efficiency of less than 16 lumens per watt. Shortly afterwards, all member states of the EU agreed to a progressive phase-out of incandescent light bulbs by 2012.

And as it so happens in real life, one of the headlights on Angie's Renault Meghan Megane has failed. A real horror scenario based on previous personal experience and supported by numerous Youtube videos and forums. And why does it always happen in winter? I have to admit the French are not the only ones - VW "built-in" the same system so as to force customers to go to their garages to get the bulb changed, which is what the handbook tells one to do. I would love to see the EU bring in a law that required all car light bulbs to be simple to exchange even for someone without special tools or technical knowledge - at least as easy as changing a sitting room lamp bulb.

Despite having done the job once a few years ago, I tried to shortcut the process but gave up after a few minutes and went for the alternative method involving jacking up the car and removing the front wheel. Then through two small portholes which are just big enough to get my hand through, fumble around blindly for a while before giving up and using the mobile phone torch and camera facilities, review the situation. And then more fumbling before eventually with bloody scratches on the hand one eventually gets the bulb out and replaced. I had the misfortune to remove the securing spring clip the wrong way resulting in it pinging away somewhere and requiring a long search. Getting the spring back in its anchoring took the longest part of all.

Eventually, after a good hour, the job was done. Think about doing that at night on a rainy motorway carpark.

Well, I suppose such "commercially-driven-designed-obstacles" are needed to keep our economies alive. We are told we need 3.5% p.a. GDP growth to be a success. That means doubling our output every 20 years. And as the number of new car registrations in Germany (and the EU I suspect) has not increased at least since 2000, the money has to come from somewhere.

That figure of 3.5% p.a. GDP growth is frightening. Humans are the dumbest of all living organisms on the planet, driving ahead with a programme to destroy it's environment and ultimately life, despite knowing full well what they are doing.

Perhaps Brexit isn't such a bad idea and would allow us to get back to the days of candles and oxen driven carts. Just need to be sure one has an oxen cart design and manufacturing basis before one does it.