How much to change a diode?

This morning has been pretty productive, well, it could have been more so since I missed a meeting I was meant to attend, but the reschedule of a reschedule didn't reach me on time. Luckily, there has been a reschedule to the afternoon.

I am working from home today as there is an electrician coming to change the ceiling lights in our bathroom - the last holdouts. They are the final halogens in the apartment with all others being LED. We renovated the apartment when we moved in here about 5 years ago and while we had the choice to put LEDs in the bathroom then, they couldn't guarantee that they would be bright enough and we chose the halogen option. However, they have been blowing ever since and far too often. I have literally been replacing a bulb a month, and there are only 6 in total.

So, I have picked up some replacements and the electrician is coming to install them, something that I tried but failed at. I have no idea why as I am pretty sure that I did what was required and have installed lights before - luckily I have another task for him also. I am hoping that he can install an outlet in the little walk-in closet we have so that I can get my desktop up and running again. It has been sitting gathering dust for well over a year and this laptop can't handle even the most simple tasks.

While ther are still a few issues with LEDs, especially in the disposal phase, it shows how some technologies can innovate once introduced to increasingly improve and hopefully in time, have close to zero footprint. The problem with this process is that is on of incremental advancement and cost which requires support to get it through to the next round of innovation.

Too often people compare the early and essentially rough stages of a technology to the late and already close to optimized tech. This is an uncharitable comparison and misses the process of development involved. We see it in things like battery technology also where people compare it to the 120 years of development of combustion engines, even though when applied in the way it is being attempted now and at this scale, it is relatively new. If the electric car had got traction over the combustion engine, I wonder where battery tech would be today.

The thing with future prediction of what is possible is that it is always based on what has already been developed without considering that breakthroughs can be made that significantly move the direction of what is to be focused upon. The unexpected discovery in one industry can heavily influence the future development in another and when these are compounded against each other at a global level, it accounts for a large part of the reason the speed of innovation is increasing.

It is the speed of information flow that is really the driver of our development as a species and the more we are able to leverage the collective knowledge and apply it to our attempts to find solution, the faster solutions can be discovered and, the better the solutions will be. Often the problem these days is that we focus narrowly on pieces of that knowledge without seeing the bigger picture or factoring in potential. It wasn't so long ago that it would take me 5 days to download 100MB, now that is around 5 seconds on my current connection.

While I know that my limited individual efforts don't do much for the future of the earth as we know it, the more we move away from what we have been doing that has been proven harmful, the better in my opinion. I still find it quite incredible that it is still legal to produce cigarettes on a commercial level for profits - but then, tax makes the world go round.

What I am not looking forward to is the cost of paying the electrician, as they are not cheap here or probably anywhere for that matter. But then, that is the price of change - ing light bulbs.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]