I'm not a phosphor chemist so I may not be right on this, but it's my understanding that despite the word 'phosphor' the coating that downconverts light in an LED is actually a fluorescent phenomenon, meaning the metastable states have lifetimes on the orders of tens of nanoseconds. Actual phosphorescent phenomena have lifetimes long enough to make a visual difference but because they stay in an excited state a lot longer they have a lot more time to engage in non-radiative relaxation, so their conversion efficiency is like 10x lower.

Strobing is a huge problem, and the easiest way to fix it is add big output caps to the switcher... which costs money.
It's sad to hear they did that. I will chat with someone who gets to make these decisions for them at the end of the month.
Strobing's even worse with car taillights because that's when people have the highest saccade rates and cars are moving quickly, so surprisingly high frequencies are clearly visible as strobe flashes.

The big open question for our time: how do we tell if stuff is quality?
Stuff that has the same manufacturer's SKU number, you open it up and it has all different guts than last year's because they've changed subcontractors.
They come out with a new version every four months, so by the time reviews are up on one you can't buy that model anymore.
Manufacturers have adopted influenza's tactic: change so fast that the system can't keep up with you and fight your badness.
Since us consumers need to buy stuff, we have no choice but to buy what's being offered, with only lemon metrics for judging.
Cree is an exception to this (in my experience), and I hope like mad that they stay that way.

Buy Crees. I work in LED driver design, and Cree, who I don't work for but I work with, seem to do a good job of making sure their LED's don't get associated with junk. Philips similarly, to a lesser extent.
So, from the inside, it's not that manufacturers generally scrimp on bulbs to make them fail faster so they can sell more. The economics of light bulbs don't support that business model. It's that people are crazy reluctant to pay $15 for a lightbulb when an incandescent costs under $1. So manufacturers engage in heavy-duty Muntzing until the bulb will just barely run, and they've cut the BOM by $1.45... and then it dies quickly. It's called value engineering, which as far as I'm concerned means removing all the value. They use cheap input filter caps, and scrimp on those, and they use cheap heatsinking which is poorly thermally coupled to the LED's, so the LED's operate at a high junction temperature and don't live very long.
Incandescents have visual inertia, for lack of a better term: if you pour a 30 hz square wave into one, it'll still look pretty good. LED's react in nanoseconds. Crappy dirty line power combined with dimming makes for a really demanding design, and designers and apps engineers have to work with a huge variation in dimmer designs. Consumers don't see any of that: all they see is "no way I'm paying $25 for a lightbulb" so they buy the crap ones and then get infuriated with them because they're visibly flickering and only last five times as long as an incandescent. I can't really blame them, either. There are really good lightbulbs out there. They're expensive. They should last 50,000 hours. But it's hard to tell what you're getting if you're not in on the design.

Fun fact, all MGM owned casinos in Las Vegas donate 100% of their food scraps to a local pig farmer, who in turn has very fat healthy pigs. Those pigs are then sold at a great discount to MGM owned casinos in Las Vegas. It's a fantastic system.

I already compost all of my food waste, most of which goes into my garden. What little there is, anyway. I spent too many years nearly starving, so usually when we cook (which is about 98% of what we eat) it goes through 3 cycles of leftover re-hashes until it's all gone. What can't be used immediately gets frozen and used later. My wife and I live on 60$ a week for groceries, which includes all toiletries, paper products, and cleaning goods. Learn to compost and make use of your food intelligently and responsibly - life is cheaper, and better for the environment. And a proposal like this one will do exactly nothing to your life.

Honestly, I think it's because those of us who submit actual scientific/geeky/nerdy articles gave up trying to make decent headlines/summaries after the 100+th one failed to get greenlit. Folks start doing more and more to get something to get folks attention with their articles.

Maybe this is what you should have done instead of the steaming steamer that is Destiny.

We largely agree that it sucks to be stuck drooling in a nursing home. But the reason people are keeping strict diets, exercising, and doing math puzzles is almost certainly not to live longer, but to live better during the time that they have. I want to die the moment living isn't fun anymore, but I want to delay that moment as long as possible. That's why I spend time and effort on keeping healthy: not because I simply want to live forever, but I want to feel like I'm able to have a really good time forever.

A makerspace is definitely the best bet as regards hardware. If you think you're going to pursue this, start playing with modeling software now. It's at least as complicated. (Moreso if you get a 3d printer that already works and you don't have to assemble and tune it.) Sketchup, Autocad's new free 123d or whatever it's called, freecad, are all very usable for graphics-oriented, and openscad is good if you're a programmer. I find freecad the easiest combination of precision, adaptability, and ease of use, but other people have totally different opinions.

What I tell people who are thinking about 3d printing is: if you have a specific project, that needs 3d printing, for which going through shapeways or something is either uneconomical (because you're going to need six tries to get your widget dimensioned correctly) or too slow (you're going to be making a ton of different prototype widgets) then a home 3d printer may be a good idea for you. Otherwise, you'll get it, print an octopus and a tardis, and then it'll gather dust and you'll kick yourself for having spent the money.
With that said, if you do have a specific project, and you use the printer for that, you will get enough time on it, and more specifically on using the software to make models, that you will have basically mastered the learning curve, and suddenly you'll be printing a lot of other things, that you didn't ever even think about making.
I'm co-owner of a plus-size mendelmax 2. We got it to print prototype circuit board adapters so we could stick x board on y piece of hardware. Once we'd gotten that hammered out, the other guy who owns it has printed a plug for his sewer drain, a rat trap for live-catch, buckets for a tiny pelton wheel generator, and I've printed lathe-holding tools, lcd bezels, automated printed circuit board test fixtures, and most of a fuel injection intake manifold for my car. We use it for everything.
But you need to have that first big complicated project that you have to get finished, to get to the point where it is a reliable tool, rather than a gadget.

With all THAT said, you'll always want a larger printer. But if the printer you have can cover 95% of your jobs, that's a whole lot better than none at all. Based on the stuff I've made, this printer could handle 95% of the demands I have, and there's always shapeways for the other 5%.

Yes. And spending two months debugging bed/head temperatures, print and extruder speed, and layer thickness, so your prints consistently stay solid and adhered to the bed rather than peeling, will be totally invisible to you because that $1K presumably means someone else already did that. There's a lot of value in getting something that's been debugged, and that's particularly the case for extrusion-based FDM 3d printers. It's okay to be hankering for a better machine, particularly if you're already printing. The best 3d printer is the one that's actually building parts for you.

Edit to above: I got a quick history lesson. I didn't realize that Scotland re-joined the UK willingly. My knowledge is mostly in medieval/renaissance and back then, they hadn't joined by choice.

Addendum to the above: I got a quick history lesson. I didn't realize that Scotland re-joined the UK willingly. My knowledge is mostly in medieval/renaissance and back then, they hadn't joined by choice.

There's actually no legal way that I know of for the british to say "YOU AREN'T ALLOWED TO USE POUNDS ANYMORE! TURN THEM OVER NOW!" So, if people want to use pounds, there's not really a reason they couldn't do it. Especially since it is fiat currency, and not backed by a hard asset.