HelixDab

Quick counter: lower kelvin lights are terrible for color reproduction. Pure sunlight is around 5000K, and has a CRI (color rendering index) of 100. Switching to warmer (lower kelvin) lights is going to also alter your CRI, and will change the way that you perceive colors. If you need high color discrimination, that’s going to be bad.

For outdoor lights, in most cases that’s not a problem.

Usually. In most cases, you aren’t going to notice just how much the colors have shifted, because your brain automatically adjusts. Youre perception of color is usually how colors appear relative to other things; you will see a red as red because your brain is comparing it to other objects with a known color. OTOH, if you’re taking photos under poor lighting conditions, you’ll see a significant shift in color. If you’ve ever taken film photos under fluorescent lights, you’d see that everything looked sharply green, when you don’t perceive them as being green at that moment. (Digital cameras often make color adjustments, and the sensors are often not as sensitive as film can be.)

Going to an extreme, if you use a red filter on a light source, all colors are going to end up looking brown and grey; switching to red lights does the best at minimizing light pollution and loss of night vision, but at the cost of most color information. That’s not bad, just a thing to consider.

‘Cities should be better designed so that we don’t have to use cars’

…Which I agree with. And it’s incredibly frustrating to me that, on the one hand, Republicans actively don’t give a shit about sprawl, and on the other hand, Democrats don’t want to ruin the charm and character of their lovely urban single-family neighborhoods with half acre plots of lawn in order to build dense housing that can make light rail economically viable. E.g., the people that should be on board with this shit talk a good game until it’s their own neighborhood.

I recognize my own hypocrisy here, because I moved to a rural area to get away from a city, and I am now finding that it isn’t rural enough because I can sometimes hear my closest neighbors. I just want to live in a shack like Ted… :(

It really depends on where you are though. Much like other public policy debates, a lot of this comes down to where someone lives. People that live in dense urban areas can very reasonably go without cars, and trains (specifically light rail) make a lot of sense. Once you get out of urban areas, suddenly trains don’t make any sense at all, and the ability to realistically take public transportation evaporates.

This is compounded by urban planning that doesn’t prioritize dense housing. Everyone says that we need more and better housing, but no one wants high rise apartments and condos in their neighborhood of single-family homes. That ends up leading to the kind of urban sprawl that makes public transportation impossible to work. Until zoning is taken out of local hands–so that wealthy communities can’t prevent high-density housing–you aren’t ever going to see this kind of thing change. (BTW - this is overwhelmingly happening in the US in communities that have a Democratic supermajority; that’s why housing is so expensive in California, because new housing isn’t being built.)