Led lights have caused such a massive increase in light pollution, let alone the effects on humans due to the blue spike, that they should be banned outright.
Yeah I really don't like the proliferation of blue-pumped LEDs, they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.
In my view we should simply have improved on what already existed, instead of blue-pumped LEDs we should have used monochromatic amber ones like the SOX streetlights which were once ubiquitous in the UK. Night actually looked like night back then, rather than a cheap and nasty approximation of daytime.
It's so interesting that people assume the color of sodium lamps is the color of night just because that's the color technology made it at one brief moment in time. Just goes to show that illumination is culture, just like everything else
it might also have something to do with the orange glow of the sodium lamps resembling the orange glow of fire and torches, which were the primary medium of lighting in the dark for humanity for thousands of years
>they're environmentally friendly from the narrow perspective of energy use but they make the lived environment much worse in other ways, particularly the horrid clinical high-K ones people who want to make a 'modern' ambiance love so much.
They are friendly in the same way the feeding a baby petrol is. Sure it's more energy efficient, but humans aren't machines where input = output. It's going to take decades to get rid of all of them, and then even longer for all the cancers that blue light causes to work themselves out. It's amazing that we invented a new asbestos and put a green wash on it.
In people for what cancers have been investigates there is also evidence of a link, but not enough studies have been done to say that it's the case for all cancers. This is absense of evidence rather than evidence of absence.
Interesting, thanks for the links. To be honest I'm not scientifically or statistically literate enough to know what to make of that beyond that there might be possibly something there, maybe.
From what I've seen, most of this energy-per-lumen efficiency has just been funneled into outputting more and more lumens, not actually saving energy. It's only going to get worse with the new 2027 regulations coming in.
I've driven across Australia a couple of times. Night on the Nullarbor is an amazing experience. So. Many. Stars.
I was lucky enough to witness a thunderstorm over the desert, too. Too far for any noise to reach me, I just saw the clouds lighting up on the horizon. Incredibly beautiful, and not a little spooky. I totally understand why there are so many UFO sightings there.
there are tons of places in the US where it's dark enough you can see the milky way shining brilliantly, just not in the heavily populated areas. Washington, Oregon, Idaho Montana, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Maine, Vermont. even more places in Canada, Alaska, Norway...
I once wanted our then still young daughter to see a real night sky (as I experienced more often as a kid). We were on a darker part of an island (the map says 21.7 sqm). It was a bit tricky walking through the dunes in such pitch dark (no full moon), but also stunningly beautiful. It’s worth doing every now and then to experience our smallness in the vastness of the universe.
Being able to see it and being blown away by it are different.
I can see the milky way but I wouldn't describe it as "a new moon just smeared all across the sky" like one of the other commenters. It's more like just a vaguely higher-density strip of stars.
My location is 21 SQM according to the DarkSkySites map.
I see the milky way every clear night (other than full moons) and after a decade or more of this I'm still blown away by it. I'm never going to get tired of seeing our beautiful galaxy stretched across the sky.
This simply isn't true. I do astrophotography, including traveling to dark skies so I can do wideband and not just narrowband. Plenty on the narrowband captures at home in b9 skies, too.
The long exposures pick up far more of them than I can see why my eyes, but I still end up seeing plenty of starlink satellites just looking up, even at 2 or 3 in the morning.
Some googling indicates that they're high enough that light refracting across the atmosphere will still hit them, and yeah, the moon, and also just some reflections from earth and airglow.
I've not done any real research here - it didn't seem odd to me that I could see them, so I haven't done any investigation at all here until these comments.
I've build a similar project in university in two weeks with lisp, spending 30 minutes before bed on it. The difference being that it started with analogue voltages in the transistors.
I'm starting to think people impressed by LLMs are for the first time in their life not using a hammer on fastening screws and deeply impressed by tools that font fight them every step of the way.
Same thing that happened to blue collar work witch used to be the path to the middle class before the 1990s. The economy managed to create plenty of wealth without doing anything for 40% of the population.
Run up enormous credit card bills and take out tons of student loans. Moved in with their parents, or moved in with their children. Considered fentanyl.
Unfortunately no. The EU loves doing these kinds of sanctions itself and has spent decades withdrawing high value notes from circulation. There are thousands of people sanctioned by the EU:
An example of the EU doing similar sanctions would be Jacques Baud, a Swiss general sanctioned for "promoting conspiracy narratives and false claims about the war in Ukraine". The sanctions left him unable to buy anything including food. As he had a wife and family, the EU sanctioned them as well to prevent them helping him.
The same batch of sanctions also added an American citizen to the list, basically for running websites the EU doesn't like and considers fake news, and a French citizen, for "spreading conspiracy theories":
Cash doesn't help because there is no notice and most people don't keep enough cash on them to survive long enough, especially as there is no way to get unsanctioned - the entire process runs outside the judicial system and depends only on the whims of the Commission. The results are utterly brutal:
> Baud spoke in particular about how the sanction restricted his daily life. The measure caught him completely unprepared; from one day to the next, his credit cards, insurance policies, and bank accounts—including those in Switzerland, even though it did not adopt the sanction—were blocked. He could no longer make payments, and even shopping was impossible. "I survived, that's the only way to put it, thanks to my neighbors. They delivered food to me," Baud said.
Under the sanctions regime, the Geneva resident, who lives in Brussels, is entitled to support intended to cover his basic needs. According to him, the Belgian authorities granted his application at the beginning of February, but three months passed before the banks implemented it. Baud is also prohibited from leaving Belgium and therefore cannot travel to his home country.
The EU doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining about sanctions. The ICC judges only lost access to some emails and other nice-to-haves, the US didn't stop them buying food or water.
Even crazier, they sanctioned a German journalist of turkish decent due to support of the palestianian cause / support of terrorist groups. [0] Even if you think he supports Hamas as a terrorist group (which is questionable), these sanctions are decided by executive committee, without a judge involved, and they make it impossible for the person to have banking, work, rent, or buy within the EU. It is essentially a social death sentence, worth than going to jail, and no due process whatsoever is involved.
Yeah they've done a bunch of Israel/Gaza related sanctions actually, in both directions. And there are way more sanctions like Baud's, for saying anything the EU thinks might be somehow advantageous to Russia. Only a few cases reach public attention. You can just scroll through the list and see.
> Daniella Weiss is the Director of the Nachala Movement (“Nachala”). Nachala has the aim of promoting Jewish settlements and illegal outposts in the West Bank.
> Nathalie Yamb is a social media influencer. Since the Sochi summit she attended in 2019, Nathalie Yamb has been an outspoken supporter of Russia, adopting Moscow’s language and targeting France and the West in particular, with a view to ousting them from the African continent. She has specific ties with AFRIC, an organisation linked to Russian private military companies.
She has links with an organization that has links. She "adopts Moscow's language".
> Through appearances at symbolic conflict sites, interviews with Russian television, publications on his X account (which has 18 100 followers) and contributions to Kremlin-funded outlets such as International Reporters, he amplifies Kremlin narratives that distort the realities of Russia’s war
> [Thomas Röper, a German war correspondant] legitimises Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory by serving as an election “observer”
Observing elections in Russia controlled territory might mean you can no longer buy food.
The ICC judge got sanctioned because he's trying to arrest a head of a US allied state. The EU does sanctions vastly harsher - outright deadly - against random nobodies, triggered by things as minor as posting opinions to X, or merely being related to someone who did. It's on a different level.
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