Fluorescent bulbs also contain small quantities of mercury, which is no fun to clean up and makes disposing of used fluorescent bulbs a pain.

It is government regulation that makes the system work the way it does. Basically, utility rates have always been regulated, but California regulates them differently than most places. The amount utilities are allowed to charge depends heavily on consumption, not just production costs. When consumption goes down, the utilities are allowed to raise their rates enough that their profitability goes up rather than down. It produces the unusual situation where a company is encouraging its customers to buy less, and that's entirely by design.

An important point is that most of the specific conservation programs aren't dictated by the government, just the overall pricing rules. The utilities are free to come up with their own plans for encouraging conservation, and they naturally have a strong incentive to find the easiest, cheapest way of doing it. The utilities apparently think that CFLs are a big enough win over incandescent bulbs that they have subsidized them to get people to switch. Another big program is an attempt to get people to give up second refrigerators. Many people who got new refrigerators would move their old ones to their garages and keep using them. That was convenient because it meant people could have a whole second fridge full of cold soda and beer, but the old refrigerators tended to be inefficient, garages are bad places to put them (the higher ambient temperatures in the summer make the fridges power hogs), and a second fridge is more of a convenience than a necessity. Getting rid of them turned out to save a lot of power for a fairly minor inconvenience, so a modest cash reward was enough to get people to get rid of them.

I think that points to a big factor in all kinds of energy saving technology: people have only a vague idea of how much power different things use. We get a single electric bill rather than an itemized one, so it's very difficult to see where the money is going. If we don't know what in our house is using the most power, it's hard to make intelligent decisions about conservation. That's why policies that go beyond just raising prices are more likely to be successful at encouraging conservation. The average person may not have a very good idea about what in their house is wasting power, but the electrical utilities have the resources to figure out what things are especially wasteful on a larger scale. If you give the utilities the incentive to reduce consumption rather than increase it, they can do a more effective job of conservation than individuals can.

I am suprised a local/regional/state/country government doesn't just force the issue and issue a "Incandescent for LED trade scheme".

That's pretty much what's happening here in California. Our electrical utilities are regulated so that they are actually more profitable when electrical consumption goes down, so it makes sense for the utilities to subsidize energy saving technology. You can get rebates from the utility when you buy energy saving appliances, and they will either subsidize or give away energy saving lightbulbs. They seem to have concentrated on CFLs rather than LEDs, but the utilities have really been pushing them.

You must live somewhere with unreasonably cheap electricity, then. If you assume a lifespan of 1000 hours for an incandescent bulb, a 100W bulb will use 100 kWh over its lifetime. Unless you're getting your power for less than $0.02/kWh, you're spending more on power than you are on bulbs.

Meanwhile, CFLs have lifespans in the range of 5000-10,000 hours. That means that even if you are paying 5-10 times as much for a CFL as you do for an incandescent- and that will buy you good quality CFLs- you're still paying no more per hour of lifetime than you are for incandescents. Unless you have to keep a very tight rein on your spending, any power savings at all will pay for itself. Power savings on the order of 75%, which is typical for CFLs, is a huge win.

It depends a lot on the bulbs. You can get CFLs with 90+ CRI if you look, which is better than almost all LEDs. I have some very nice 42 watt, 2800 lumen, 5000 K CCT, 95 CRI CFLs that I use when I want more light than it's easy to get from a LED. They were moderately pricey, but worth every penny.

Except that ill-gotten gains are always subject to seizure. Look up US Federal drug forfeiture laws some time. The feds can take anything that's the proceed of or used to facilitate drug crimes. It doesn't matter what form the assets are in. If the feds can prove they were bought with drug money, they can seize them. If they were used as an active part of the trade, the feds can seize them. Since the bitcoins appear to be both, it's going to be pretty easy for the feds to get them.

Here's a radical idea: why don't they fix the stupid exponential algorithm rather than papering it over by trimming the lists?

My job involves working with people face to face. Tuning out the world doesn't help with your job when your job is to interact with the world.

Does it count as doing my job in multiple time zones if I have to travel for my job? How about if the travel only involves going to conferences, rather than my regular professional duties?

That sounds more like option #5: Has a cap I will never meet.

You're being unreasonable. An unqualified reference to Oakland made to a general audience is almost always to the one in California, just as an unqualified reference to Paris is the capital of France, and an unqualified reference to Manhattan is the one in New York.

Either that, or you used to live in the same neighborhood. How would you know, given who you're responding to?

American passenger rail is dreadful largely because rail can't compete with air over the distances Americans want to travel. There are some plausible high speed rail routes, like Boston to Washington and maybe LA to San Francisco, but rail can't compete on speed with the longer routes people routinely want to take. Air travel has a substantial advantage over rail for travel from the East Coast to the Midwest, and utterly crushes it for travel from coast to coast.

At the same time, American freight rail is substantially faster and more efficient than European freight rail. That isn't a coincidence, either. On both continents, there's a lot of shared rail that has to serve both passengers and freight. In Europe, passengers take first priority, and in the US freight takes first priority. Passenger service in the US supposedly got much better during the worst of the Great Recession because there was enough less freight that it made a big difference for passenger trains' speed and reliability.