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There is a Light that Never Goes Out
70 Plays1 year ago
Josh and M talk cartels, lightbulbs, and lightbulb cartels!
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Transcript
Humorous Struggles and Introductions
00:00:00
Speaker
Electric Light Orchestra. You what now? Electric Light Orchestra. It's literally all I've got for this intro. What, no Edison vs Tesla material? No Burning Crusade references for the World of Warcraft players? No Mr Brightside? No, it's just ELO and only ELO. That's a short intro. Actually it wasn't to record but yes, it's shorter than a cheap incandescent bulb from the warehouse.
00:00:33
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dent.
00:00:44
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison, and in Shuhai, China, they are Dr. M.R.X. Dinteth. How's China? Insomniatic. Is that China or just you in China?
00:00:59
Speaker
I had just me in China. I had five hours sleep last night. I had no idea
Errors and Emails
00:01:03
Speaker
why I decided to wake up at five o'clock this morning. I kind of wish I hadn't spent my time reading in bed until midnight because now I'm going, if I'd gone to bed at say 11, it would have been six hours sleep, but maybe I would have woken up at four. Maybe it's only ever destined to sleep five hours last night, but whatever the case, I'm very tired and I have to teach a class in three hours time. Yeah.
00:01:25
Speaker
Whereas I'm very tired, but I get to go to bed after this if I want. It's true. Are you going to go to bed after this or are you going to play the video games?
00:01:34
Speaker
Well, probably a small amount of the latter and then a larger amount of the former. Well, life in proportion and every proportion in life. So we have we have an episode today, strangely enough, but it's a regular one. It's just a topic which almost seems plain old bog standard topic. Are these topic episodes getting a bit obsolete?
00:01:57
Speaker
Are you trying to set a thing up there? Are you trying to do a segue? Bless you. Bless you. Yes, we're going to be talking about obsolescence and other interesting to pronounce words. And I don't think we have anything to say before you do anything before we get into it.
00:02:13
Speaker
No, I mean, the person who sent the trove of emails last week has only sent one email this week, and it just says, click the link X. And I can't quite tell
Introducing Obsolescence and Fatigue
00:02:24
Speaker
whether they're commanding someone called X to click the link, whether they're saying click the link and then a kiss, or they're signing off with the letter X. But once again, not clicking the link. I'm assuming it's the kiss one.
00:02:38
Speaker
Well, I mean, it does seem like that's the politest way to interpret what's going on. Oh, well, we'll have to see how it develops. So if that is all, then I guess we should play a challenge. I didn't realise until I listened to it back afterwards that last episode, which I edited, so I take full responsibility for, not only did I deliberately leave in
00:03:00
Speaker
numerous unprofessional mouth eating noises. I played the wrong chime at the start. It was a conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre episode and I just put the regular chime in and that annoys me because I like the conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre chime.
00:03:16
Speaker
And I'm annoyed at myself for not getting it right. But not annoyed enough to go back and complain about the mouth noises. At least one complained about the mouth noises. Good. Good. That's what they were there for. Now precisely, they're there to keep people on their feet and feeling just ever so slightly uncomfortable for about 38 minutes.
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah. So,
Planned Obsolescence in Light Bulbs
00:03:38
Speaker
on the assumption that it's your turn to edit this episode, play whatever sting you choose, and then we'll get into it. Should I eat some food as well? It's your mouth. That's true. It is. At least for the time being. Let's play that sting.
00:03:55
Speaker
Well, I'm going to assume that was a perfectly appropriate and well-placed sting. So as you alluded to just before, we're going to be talking about things being obsolete. What do you know? What sorts of things are obsolete? Well, Josh, I'll tell you one thing that's obsolete in my household. My HomePod mini, which I bought just after I arrived in China, so two and a bit years ago, died.
00:04:21
Speaker
two days ago and is completely dead and I spent good money on that HomePod Mini and it's already dead. So, frankly, this planned obsolescence business is getting very, very annoying.
00:04:34
Speaker
Is that a coffee thing or some sort of musical device? No, it's a HomePod Mini is a Apple speaker. Oh, right. Okay. Luckily, my coffee making apparatus is mostly manual and not electronic. So my espresso maker, for example, is a hand press espresso maker. So the only thing which requires electricity is boiling water in a kettle, which isn't actually part of the espresso machine.
00:05:00
Speaker
So if it breaks down, it's a physical fault. It's not a it's not a planned obsolescence fault. But I think, Josh, you're trying to get me to mention something like light bulbs. I certainly am. And you know it. You know full well that that is what we're going to be talking about today. So when was the last time that you bought you bought a light bulb? Oh, pretty recently, I guess.
00:05:22
Speaker
When you go to the supermarket, do you buy the cheapest light bulbs possible? Or do you spend a little bit extra cash on a fancy light bulb? To be honest, I usually buy ones that are pretty cheap.
00:05:35
Speaker
I'm not fussy. Is that a good idea, though? Well, I don't know. And maybe that's something we should we should look into as we proceed. Because, OK, so you've probably you, the listener and you, Ian, I assume, have probably all heard about that light bulb in the fire station in California that's been on continuously for 120 years and apparently outlived several webcams that are videoing the light bulb at all times.
00:06:02
Speaker
Yep, you can go to, I think it's centenarybulb.com, which is, the bulb has its own website and there is a webcam that people faithfully look at. Apparently it's gone out twice.
00:06:14
Speaker
once when they had to move it to a new firehouse. And I believe when they did that, it was almost like they were moving a bomb. It was, yes. Apparently, they cut the cord that it was hanging from, rather than risk extracting it from its fitting, which could have done more damage. And then, yes, carried it with a full entourage to the new place, and then got a specialist electrician to reattach the wire. It went out one other time.
00:06:44
Speaker
which where it turned out that the wire it was attached to failed and not the bulb itself and once they fixed it so people thought for a moment people thought this was it the bulbs finally died but nope bulb was still fine it was just the cord and the thing about this particular light bulb was people point towards it and go look
00:07:02
Speaker
If this light bulb can run for 120 years continuously, why is it that I keep buying light bulbs for my house? Why do my light bulbs keep crapping out on me on the regular when it's quite obvious they don't make them like they used to? They quite literally don't make them like they used to anymore. And so we're going to be looking at why that is today. Now,
00:07:27
Speaker
Yes, if you've heard anything about planned obsolescence, you've probably heard the idea that it was invented because of light bulbs, that light bulbs were the first product where people actually said, okay, we're going to deliberately make these not last as long as we could make them.
00:07:46
Speaker
so that people will have to wear out sooner, so that people will have to buy more often. Whether or not that's actually true, we're looking to right now. What are those things? It's partially true. It's a bit true. Yeah, it's true. And then it turns out that there was a cartel, the Phoebus cartel, that decided on what the lifespan of a light
Consumerism and Planned Obsolescence
00:08:08
Speaker
bulb should be. But they didn't necessarily
00:08:12
Speaker
do it for financial purposes, although I'm fairly sure at least some financial purposes did sneak in there at some point.
00:08:20
Speaker
Yes, yes. I mean, the cartel was all about making more money for the members of the cartel. They were entirely financially motivated, but the specific lifespan thing we're looking to. So yeah, the famous cartel itself was an international cartel. I've seen it referred to as possibly the first cartel with global reach, the first cartel sort of on an international scale. It was formed in the 1920s, specifically to control the market and light bulbs.
00:08:50
Speaker
It's members signed up to a document called the Convention for the Development and Progress of the International Incandescent Electric Lamp Industry. And it was largely British and European manufacturers signing up to it at the time. The company is called Osram Phillips, which apparently is
00:09:08
Speaker
Danish, I think, or Dutch. I can't remember. It's not British like I just assumed. Tungsram, Associated Electrical Industries, Elon, Compagnie de Lomp, International General Electric, and the GE Overseas Group. The actual US General Electric didn't sign up to this cartel, but they're sort of the overseas branches did.
00:09:34
Speaker
It lasted until 1939. This convention that they signed up to originally had an expiry date of 1955. They were signing up to stick to these rules until then. But something happened in 1939. Kind of my remember what I'm sure it'll come back to me. Some of the countries involved in the cartel were suddenly
00:09:58
Speaker
in conflict with other countries in the cartel. And whether or not you believe the Phoebus cartel was a conspiracy, it's much harder to run a price fixing conspiracy during a war when different member states are on different sides of the conflict.
00:10:15
Speaker
Yeah. But while it lasted, they decided, among other things, to standardize the lifespan of light bulbs that they all manufactured to 1,000 hours, which I haven't done the sums. Somebody said if you
00:10:32
Speaker
plugged one of these light bulbs in on the 1st of January. 1,000 hours lasts till sometime in February, I think, if it had been on continuously. It's not a hugely long amount of time. As we've seen, it's possible to make a light bulb that just seems to last indefinitely. And at the time, light bulbs tended to last 2,000, 2,500 hours.
00:10:55
Speaker
But they just said, no, we're going to go down to 1,000. And they were quite strict about it, apparently. Everybody who had signed up to this who was making light bulbs, they had to send batches of their light bulbs off for independent testing. And if they found that they were rated, if the testing showed that they actually would last significantly longer than 1,000 hours, they would be fined.
00:11:17
Speaker
for, I think there was a specific fine, like the longer your light bulb lasted, the higher the fine could be. They also had sales quotas that they weren't allowed to exceed, rather than being quotas that you meet. If any one company sold too many more light bulbs than the rest of the companies did, they could be fined for that. I think there was a
00:11:43
Speaker
I read a quote saying from some company basically saying, hey, we've done a really good period. We've sold like five times more light bulbs than we did. It's really going to suck if we get fined lots for doing that though. Yeah. And I believe
Capitalism and Economic Growth
00:11:57
Speaker
part of the rationale for the sales quota was also to make sure that people didn't produce light bulbs that was significantly shorter in lifespan than a thousand hours.
00:12:09
Speaker
So the idea being that your light bulbs can't last more than a thousand hours, but if you start pumping out light bulbs, it only lasts say 500 hours, we'll start to spot that by looking at the, hmm, you do sell a lot of light bulbs. You sell a lot of light bulbs. I wonder why that might be.
00:12:28
Speaker
Now, you'll be surprised to learn that all these companies that signed up to a price-fixing, market-monopolizing convention didn't always behave particularly honorably amongst themselves even. Who would have thought?
00:12:45
Speaker
But then we're apparently all sorts of thought that members of corporations would engage in skullduggery and rum behaviour. As we know, the corporate world has always been a bastion of morality and the lightbulb industry is a dark mark against it in sarcasm.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yes. You'd get companies, despite having signed up to this, which was supposedly for the benefit of all of them, you'd still get them trying to get around the rules. They'd fiddle with the voltages and the wattages of them so that you'd have a bulb that
00:13:21
Speaker
last the regulation 1000 hours, but at a higher voltage or something like that. And so when plugged in normally, it would actually be drawing less power than it was supposedly rated for and would therefore last longer and stuff like that. They were very
00:13:36
Speaker
ways around it, but they were supposedly relatively strict about it. But the reason why people talk about this most of the time is this whole deliberately making life light bulbs last for a shorter amount of time so that you can sell more of them is often credited as being the beginning of what we now call planned obsolescence. But it's that we should be sticking in a good old classic
00:14:03
Speaker
My name is Josh. No, actually, that's not it. So there's the we, we, we used to, we say the stick. Yeah. Why, why is that no longer? Oh, this one. There we go. Oh, it's been too long. It's been too long. Just like your mom. I mean, that doesn't work. Just like you're dead. So I think I've made a huge mistake. Let's start again.
00:14:32
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Are you done? Yes. Have you satisfied your sick urges for now? Alright. So, but anyway, would it be accurate to say that the Phoebus Cartel invented Plan Dots lessons? Probably not. Probably not.
00:14:49
Speaker
A little bit. Because we do have some reason to think that maybe the automotive industry, which of course, once again, bastion of morality, actually might have engaged a little bit of planned obsolescence themselves. Yeah.
Historical and Modern Obsolescence
00:15:04
Speaker
So General Motors, from what I can tell, was the first one to start doing this. Now, this wasn't a can't tell. This was just General Motors doing it themselves. And it wasn't. Sorry. This is General Motors.
00:15:17
Speaker
Is the who was the founder of that wonderful organization? I don't remember. Oh, no, sorry. I'm I'm I'm thinking for dear, but it's for Moses. This is the other crowd here. Once again, I think I've made a terrible mistake. Let's start again. So General Motors, again, this was also a different kind of obsolescence where it wasn't that they started making their cars so they'd break down more often. They decided
00:15:47
Speaker
This is getting to the point where basically, I think a lot of industries, the industrialization had been going on for quite a while and people were like, hey, so we've been making lots of these things and we've been selling lots of these things, but kind of running out of people to sell them to, like everyone who could buy a car has pretty much bought one by now. So how are we going to keep getting them to keep buying our cars? And General Motors apparently led the child to say, well, well,
00:16:15
Speaker
we could come up with new models of our car. So we don't have to make the car particularly different, but if we just sort of change the bodywork a bit, if we make it cosmetically a bit different and say, hey, this is the new fancy version, then at least people with the money to splurge on that sort of thing will want to upgrade. I don't know if the word upgrade existed back then, but
00:16:40
Speaker
They'll, you know, this was their way of encouraging people to go. They want to seem to be fashionable. They want to be seen to be driving... Exactly. Conspicuous consumption. Yeah. Exactly. So that was, again, if not the first, one of the first examples of planned obsessions. And this was about the same time, right? The Phoebus cartel formed at around the same time General Motors started doing this. Both of them were in the mid-20s.
00:17:05
Speaker
It's entirely possible that both industries came up with similar ideas just at the same time. And it's possible, like I say, lots of industries, I think, we're now we're grappling with the problem that we've been successfully making and selling stuff for so long that we're running that so much of our market already owns one of the things that we want to sell them that's becoming a problem. So it seems plain dogs lessons was possibly one of those ideas whose time had come.
00:17:32
Speaker
And also, I mean, it is kind of baked into the economic model that is capitalism, and that capitalism is successful when businesses and markets are continually growing. And of course, if you're producing goods which people only need to buy once, then you don't have the kind of growth that's expected for a successful capital company to be working with.
00:17:58
Speaker
So plan to obsolete since it's a very good way to make sure that there's always going to be growth in your market because you're getting rid of the initial tranche of goods and replacing them with the next generation, even if the next generation is really only a slight cosmetic change from the previous one.
00:18:17
Speaker
Yeah, so it wasn't long before just all sorts of industries were bringing in various forms of planned obsolescence. And there are various forms of planned obsolescence, which we'll talk about in a minute. But by the 1930s, this was quite rife. And it was generally thought of as a good idea. Economists of the time were like, yes, this is what we need to be doing. This is how we'll keep making and selling things. There was a paper, paper, sorry, an essay
00:18:46
Speaker
that was published in the publication Printers, Inc. in 1936, called Outmoded Durability. If merchandise
Legislation and Obsolescence
00:18:56
Speaker
does not wear out faster, factories will be idle, people unemployed.
00:19:05
Speaker
There's some sort of old-timey music behind it perhaps, but that'll do in a pinch. Yes, I mean, people were saying at the time that this is a good thing. This is what needs to happen. We need to start building obsolescence into our products. We need to make them less durable. And apparently there was, you know, it was not back to the light bulb example, actually making these bulbs last
00:19:31
Speaker
specifically 1000 hours was not a not a trivial problem. It did require a bit of a bit of sort of, you know, work and research to actually tune in them to make that happen. It wasn't like they just the light bulb manufacturers were employing people to sneak into houses at night and then smash the ball. Yep, you've had this ball for 919 1000 hours smash, smash, smash.
00:19:58
Speaker
But yes, so the term planned obsolescence, it's one of those ones where somebody comes up with a phrase and everybody thinks that's a great idea. And so then everybody starts using it and it ends up not quite meaning what it originally meant. Actually, can we circle back to the economic point again? Because I was thinking one of the things which kind of predicates the notion here that planned obsolescence is good because it keeps people employed. If we had had
00:20:27
Speaker
some kind of say universal basic income or universal benefit in the early 20th century. So we weren't subscribing to the work makes you good to be a good person, you need to be employed. We simply said, well, look, we've got enough.
00:20:44
Speaker
bounty that we can simply pay people a livable wage, and if people want to work they can, but they don't need to, maybe we wouldn't be in the climate crisis we're in now from the overconsumption and pollution of the world, from people continually buying replacement goods they don't need. Sounds almost like communism to me, so well done. That was ever so slightly, and 1936 would have been a good year for communism.
00:21:09
Speaker
I assume. But enough economics, back to linguistics, because that's what I like. So the term planned obsolescence, when it first showed up, apparently it was planned as in centrally planned, as in planned by the government obsolescence, the idea that governments can legislate that certain products need to be obsolete after a certain time.
00:21:30
Speaker
But then it started to mean the different kinds of things, making them less durable so they'll wear out sooner, just bringing in the idea of style and fashion and changing styles and changing fashion so that things go out of style more often in just any way they could come up with to incentivize people to buy new items more than they might otherwise.
00:21:53
Speaker
And the sort of stuff still happens today, especially the legislation that we're seeing it today when it comes to cars. New Zealand has legislation in place that is aimed at stopping the sales of petrol cars after a certain amount of time. It's I forget exactly how it works. But by some time in the 2030s, I think it's no longer going to be allowed to sell
00:22:21
Speaker
new petrol cars. I think any new cars sold after that date will have to be electric ones. And then the idea is that the secondhand petrol cars will just slowly filter out of the market over time. In some states in the US there's planned obsolescence around gas burners and kitchens. We of course had planned obsolescence when we moved from gas lamps and homes to electric lamps.
00:22:47
Speaker
we've seen centrally
Right to Repair Debate
00:22:49
Speaker
planned obsolescence time and time again. And ironically enough with light bulbs, like can you even buy incandescent bulbs in New Zealand anymore? I'm not sure that you can. There was a big flap some time ago when the government was wanting to get rid of them and you had all these people saying, ah, you'll take my incandescent light bulbs over my dead body and like deliberately
00:23:12
Speaker
leaving their lights on as long as possible. And somehow, because giving themselves the highest electricity bill they possibly could was somehow sticking it to the government. I don't remember. It's like the people who protested Nike shoes by burning the shoes whilst wearing them. Yes. Yes. I mean, it's kind of come full circle there in that we have actual centrally planned obsolescence.
00:23:36
Speaker
of incandescent bulbs. But then there's other things as well. There's the whole, not necessarily making things less durable, but making them difficult to repair when they break. There's been a lot of talk about sort of the right to repair, especially if you've heard John Deere, I think were the ones who started this by using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
00:23:59
Speaker
the act in america that was designed to stop um computer piracy to make it so that you're not allowed to repair the tractors on the grounds tractors have onboard computers the computers have software you need to fiddle with that if you're tuning up or repairing the the the um
00:24:16
Speaker
tractor. And so they've argued that under the DCMA, it's illegal for anyone but a John Deere representative to make repairs on a John Deere tractor. And there's been a lot of fuss around that. But then it can be as simple as if you've ever tried to take apart consumer electronics, it can often be quite difficult. I dug out my old Game Boy a while ago, my old Nintendo Game Boy, which wasn't working.
00:24:46
Speaker
And I thought, well, I can't hurt to open it up and see if there's anything obviously broken. Was it filled with spiders? It was actually a single wire. A single, obviously broken wire was broken. And I was able to sort of make it. But before I could do that, I had to open the thing up. And it's held together with these really screws with really weirdly shaped heads on them. They're called tri-wing screws. That was a tri-wing. Yeah, that was a tri-wing. By Nintendo. Mostly used by Nintendo.
00:25:15
Speaker
They have tri-bings, other ones have sort of star-shaped. I remember many years ago, when I was flatting, our flat vacuum cleaner broke down. And for some reason, we were trying to open it up and it had the triangle-shaped holes in the screws, which ended up with one of my flatmates actually getting a screwdriver and basically carving the side of the vacuum cleaner out.
00:25:41
Speaker
to get around the screw and just take it. I don't think anything good came of it, but she worked out some frustration, so that was okay. So yeah, there's lots of kinds, lots of kinds of planned obsolescence, but to return to the topic at hand was what the Phoebus cartel did, an example of planned obsolescence.
Conspiracy or Strategy?
00:25:59
Speaker
Well, let's return back to the sentry light bulb. Josh, if you were wandering around a fire station in the middle of the night,
00:26:08
Speaker
Would you want to rely on the light cast by the 120 year old light bulb? Well, I'd have to say no. If you look at a glowing... Hang on Josh, why not? Because it basically gives off the same amount of light as a toaster element.
00:26:26
Speaker
It's putting out some light, but it's just a sort of dull orange glow. It's not really achieving much for all of its longevity. And therein lies the rub, because light bulbs
00:26:39
Speaker
I use is basically a resistance circuit. So the first light bulbs were basically wires in a vacuum, modern light bulbs, you've got an atmosphere in there to make the tungsten or other piece of wire in there last as long as possible. If you want decent light,
00:26:58
Speaker
you need to pump more through it or use a different filament and that filament will not last as long. So you can make longer life light bulbs but they give off very little light. Or you make a shorter life light bulb
00:27:15
Speaker
then they glow brighter. And so the Phoebus cartel was basically trying to find a way of going, what is the perfect length of time for the kind of bulbs we produce that produces adequate light for a reasonable amount of time?
00:27:33
Speaker
Yeah, so a shorter lifespan bulb can end up sort of being more efficient in terms of power usage to light given out. And people have looked, in 1,000 hours, it's not an unreasonable lifespan for a decently performing incandescent bulb. Like we said, I mean, they did reduce it, right? At the time, before the cartel came in, 2,000 hours wasn't unheard of. They did consciously lower it.
00:28:02
Speaker
It wasn't entirely just about, let's just have its lifespan to sell twice as many. There was some amount of, let's see how efficient we can get it. And it's not going to do it.
00:28:21
Speaker
people didn't know what kind of light their bulb would give off when they bought it. So you might buy two or three bulbs and get varying light quality out of them. Once the cartel came into existence you could kind of guarantee that if you bought a light bulb it would give off the same amount of light as the previous light bulb you had bought. So you weren't having to then move your light fittings around to try and get adequate coverage in your room.
00:28:47
Speaker
Right, so I'm going to sound like a booster for Big Lightbulb. Well, why not? I mean, if the Phoebus cartel wasn't really bringing in planned obsolescence so much, surely it's all OK then? Because it sounds like
Legal Consequences
00:29:02
Speaker
I'm supporting capitalism and I don't want to be seen to be supporting capitalism at this time.
00:29:07
Speaker
Yes, and particularly not this capitalism, because it was still a cartel. Like even if what they did doesn't count as planned obsolescence, the entire object of the exercise was all about eliminating competition and price fixing. And while maximizing the efficiency of light bulbs and standardizing is not a bad thing on its own, they were doing it to make money. Everything was designed to make them the biggest profits that they could.
00:29:37
Speaker
And in the end, that's where also the sales quota thing came back in. So yes, in part, you might think the sales quota thing was to ensure that people weren't making cheap, substandard light bulbs. But the other thing was to make sure that people weren't undercutting the other light bulbs on the market by going, look, the price we're going to charge for light bulb is going to be relatively fixed, no matter how much it costs to make the light bulb.
00:30:06
Speaker
Indeed, in 1949, General Electric was found to have violated the Sherman Antitrust Act in the United States. In interest, apparently the decision about this does note at one point that yes, a bulb's lifespan depends in part on how much light it gives out.
00:30:25
Speaker
you know, you're reducing these things because you're making them brighter, which is what people want out of lightbulb. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. But you're still doing all the price fixing and the anti competitive stuff. And we we don't like that so much. So I guess the question then is, we're talking about this on a podcast that's devoted to conspiracy theories. Does what the Phoebus cartel did count as a conspiracy?
00:30:50
Speaker
I mean, that's a really interesting point because on one level they were not announcing to the public. By the way, we're engaging in price fixing, so when you buy a light bulb, it doesn't matter how much it costs for us to make it, you're going to pay a particular price. And also, by the way, your light bulbs will not last as long as they used to. We're not going to publicize that. We're simply going to do that behind the scenes.
00:31:11
Speaker
same time, it wasn't the kind of thing that they were actively keeping. Secret, you could find out about these things. And so you might think there's no real conspiracy here, but I'm always of the mind that we need to be very cautious about that because keeping secrets is sometimes a matter of just ensuring that certain people don't know what you're up to.
00:31:34
Speaker
And so people would like to point out that the Tuskegee syphilis experiment was not technically secret. They were publishing the medical data during the lifetime of the experiment themselves. They simply weren't telling the African-American men involved in the experiment, by the way, some of you have syphilis and we're allowing you to infect your wives and children. And the unfortunate experiment back home, they were also publishing data
00:32:02
Speaker
about the development of lesions of the cervix over the lifetime of the experiment. They just once again weren't telling the people involved in the experiment. By the way, some of you are probably going to develop cancer of the cervix and we're not going to tell you've got the precursors for it. So
00:32:25
Speaker
Yeah, on one level, you might go it doesn't seem particularly conspiratorial, just business as usual. But there was secrets being kept from some people during this process. Did you argue secrets being kept from the public at large? I mean, unless you're actually investigating business affairs.
00:32:44
Speaker
you probably never would have known. At the end of the day though, is this all just an interesting historical footnote?
Modern Light Bulbs and Future Impact
00:32:51
Speaker
Because like I say, in New Zealand, if you want a light bulb, if you go out and buy a light bulb, it's not an incandescent one anymore. It's all LED bulbs, or what are the other ones called?
00:33:04
Speaker
I can't even remember now. The other ones, the other ones that aren't incandescent light bulbs. That's what my house is full of. It was interesting that you talked about the never quite knowing what kind of light you're going to get out of it, because I find that with the more modern bulbs, some of them take a while to heat up. So you turn the light on and think, what the hell's wrong in here? This room is so dim, because it takes a minute for the thing to warm up. Other ones come on straight away. Some give off warmer,
00:33:30
Speaker
yellowy light, some give off a colder white light and what have you. But people have talked about the idea that, okay, incandescent bulbs are gone, but what are we going to see this all again with the new ones? There's an article... Because I remember when LED bulbs were first announced,
00:33:49
Speaker
A lot of people online would go, well this is great because there's no reason why these should ever burn out. You could technically be giving your LED light bulbs to your children or your grandchildren. And of course those of us who have dealt with new modern light bulbs would be aware of them. They don't last forever.
00:34:10
Speaker
Yeah, that was an interesting point. So there's an article on IEEE Spectrum called The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy, and it ends like this.
00:34:24
Speaker
are referring to the newer kinds of light bulbs. It says, whether or not these pricier bulbs will actually last that long is still an open question and not one that the average consumer is likely to investigate. There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes are reached. Such incidents may well have resulted from nothing more than keyless manufacturing. But there is no denying that these far more technologically sophisticated products offer tempting opportunities for the inclusion of purposefully engineered life shortening defects.
00:34:54
Speaker
After all, few people will complain or even notice if a bulb burns out nine years after it's installed rather than 14. True, today's lighting industry is much larger and more diverse than it was in the 1920s and 30s, and government monitoring of collusive behavior is more vigilant. Nevertheless, the allure for businesses to cooperate in such a market is strong, and the Phoebus cartel shows how it could succeed. So
Episode Wrap-up and Teasers
00:35:16
Speaker
who knows, if we'll end up seeing something similar in the future and the cycle will just repeat again and again and again.
00:35:21
Speaker
I think, given that civilisation is on the verge of collapsing, we don't need to be worried so much about that now. Well, I don't know. I still need something to see by. Way off that, Josh. Way off that. Fluorescent mosses or something. See, these are cases of planned obsolescence. People made way off that obsolescence when it came to lamps. Yes, yes they did.
00:35:47
Speaker
technology. It's just how it goes. Yeah, save the whales for a time being. I mean, once again, we're destroying the planet. So it was a brief respite, but it was nice. Well, nice. Well, what was it lasted? So that's, that's basically all we have to say about the Phoebus cartel and light bulbs and planned obsolescence. It's, it's an interesting subject with a whole lot of things that maybe are a certain way then maybe, maybe, maybe are not. And it's everything's always more complicated than it appears. So
00:36:17
Speaker
That's all we have to say about those particular subjects, but we now of course need to go and record a bonus episode for our patrons, the wisest and most venerable of all people. The LED light bulbs in an incandescent world.
00:36:34
Speaker
They are the LED-like bulbs of people, our patrons. We're going to talk about some stuff. We're going to talk about podcasts again. We're going to talk about UFOs again. And we're going to talk about Hovinal Mois again. No, Josh, remind me, who was Hovinal Mois? It sounds like a name I should remember, and yet somehow
00:36:53
Speaker
has receded into the past. Well, it's one of those. He was he was the president of Haiti who was murdered two years ago. The previously relatively stable democracy of Haiti, which has been in a state of anarchy for about two years, Haiti.
00:37:10
Speaker
Something like that, yes. But unfortunately, it hasn't been fun and interesting, so has sort of fallen out of the news cycle, but there have been developments there. That was one of those cases where we sort of, we mentioned it in a few episodes as things were developing at the time with the usual, I guess we'll just have to wait and see what develops. Seems something's developed a little bit.
00:37:34
Speaker
So if you want to know about that, you'll need to be one of our patrons. And if you're not one of our patrons, you can just go to patreon.com and look for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and sign yourself up. It's literally as simple as that. But for now, to all of our listeners, patron and non, I feel like I should work in some sort of a light bulb-y based pun thing at the end here, but one escapes me, I'm afraid. So I'm just gonna say goodbye.
00:38:02
Speaker
Let me say Siri, turn off lamp. That'll do. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon.
00:38:32
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it. Electric. Ah, I can't even say electric now. No, electric, electric, electric. What a weird word electric turns out to be. Electric. Electric. I don't think it'll catch on. I think it's one of those weird words that just
00:38:56
Speaker
It's never going to actually get into common usage. Give me a ferric energy anytime. Now that, that's a word I can wrap my mouth hold around. See, now I can't play it. I'll have your sex tape, yeah. Electric light. Ah, like? Yes, maybe I just need some water. Maybe my mouth is dry.
00:39:27
Speaker
lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalal
00:39:48
Speaker
You what now? Electric, like, no. No, I can't. I will say like, I will say electric, like, electric, like, electric, light, orchestra. Speechless fluency is terrible. Electric, light, orchestra. You what now? Electric, like, nope, nope, doing it again. Third time's the chart, actually four, fifth time's the chart.
00:40:17
Speaker
Electric Light Orchestra. You what now? Electric, like, nope. Nope, I'm just, I should rewrite the script to say like and then I might say light instead. Maybe. Well, we can just, we can take the sound clip of you saying it the first time and then just duplicate it for the second time. I mean, it would be good content to put after the episode so people can see how the sausage is made.
00:40:46
Speaker
Electric light, no. One, two, three. Electric light orchestra. You what now? Electric light, no. No, like orchestra. I'm going to petition ELO to change the name, but then the intro doesn't work. Electric light orchestra.
00:41:14
Speaker
You what now? Electric, like, no, like, why do I keep saying like? I don't know. I don't know what it's like. I mean, you read about this when actors talk about how they just get stuck in saying the wrong, the wrong word every time a scene is done, and then they end up cancelling the show because you just can't get past scene one. Yeah, that is all the time.