Pot, meet kettle :-)
We've repeatedly been down this road before... I pull out documentation, you dismiss it for X reason, you provide no documentation to back your own opinion of why those you disagree with are wrong, wash rinse repeat. I'm not a big fan of this cycle.
You're a smart guy, I don't want you (or anyone else) to take my word for it. But I am (like I have in the past) suggesting you dig more on your own and keep an eye on the bigger picture and look past the shiny happy CFL stats that are always waved around by environmentalists. Nothing I have said is difficult to confirm as factual and much of the evidence can be replicated with very little effort and money to crunch the numbers yourself. Look at annual bulb sale numbers. Examine the known and documented flaws to the technology. Look at the peer reviewed scientific studies. Look at CFL prices in countries that banned all incandescent sales and then discontinued price subsidies. Get a Kill-A-Watt and a light meter and experiment with some bulbs. Look at the documentation regarding the known issues with power cycling of fluorescent lighting. Examine the average percentage of household electrical bills that are actually dedicated to lighting versus climate control and appliances. Try some modern CFLs and power cycle 'em a few hundred times. Investigate the working conditions of these CFL factories and the mercury poisoning rates in the populous surrounding them, as well as research into the power source these factories use (it's coal,
by the way) to manufacture these bulbs in the first place. Look into the difference in natural resources and raw materials to manufacture and ship these bulbs in comparison to their simple tungsten counterparts, and conveniently get overlooked in the environmental impact calculations that only focus on energy used to produce light over its lifetime or if they are included get heavily padded by the unrealistic bulb life expectancy that doesn't happen in most household usage situations. Look into an industrial concept called "planned obsolescence".
These are all things I have actually done, by the way. My comments aren't based off of five minutes of time on Wikipedia and having a single CFL burn out on me. I dearly love and respect science, but I also know that statistics can be used to prove anything with sufficient data omissions... once you look at the complete picture instead of the picture painted by the bulb manufacturers, the CFL argument falls apart like a house of cards in a hurricane, and it even raises valid concerns about the potential long term costs and impact of LEDs. If you want to beat on the wolframite/tungsten as a blood mineral issue in defense of mercury, how about we talk about the impact of using yttrium, terbium, and europium for triband phosphors?
As for your question, it's a straw man. Anyone capable of thinking for themselves and truly understands the CFL debate wouldn't be in great favor of any form of mercury-based lighting. I'm not fond of traditional tubular ballast, CCFL, HID, or even induction, but there's still a significant divide in the technologies that you ignore. The biggest failing point in fluorescent bulbs is not the mercury and argon gas payload or the phosphors themselves, but the ballast and the electrodes. I may not like the other fluorescent lighting products either for a multitude of established and documented reasons, but the thing that separates most of them from CFLs? Two things: 1) at least you can replace the ballast with most of those alternative styles when it fails, with induction providing the longest lifespan and being the least evil of all types across the board as it's electrode-less; 2) industrial lighting has
very different requirements than home lighting, and home lighting goes through
considerably more power cycling, the Achilles heel to fluorescent electrode longevity.
If
the official solution to making CFLs meet their rated lifespan is to needlessly waste
more electricity running it than you might have otherwise used in the first place with a "less efficient" lightbulb only using it as you needed it? Wait a second (or 900 as the case may be). Clearly, there's a glaring problem there, and
even the Mythbusters have a problem with this. In situations with long, steady industrial lighting situations, some of these can and are more efficient than incandescent and I won't deny that, but not in the home under average home usage conditions. CFLs aren't induction lamps, they don't have replaceable ballasts, they're sealed units with cheap Chinese electrolyte capacitors stuffed into a tiny area that runs very hot, and they can't survive anywhere close to their rated lifespan (that all these safety and savings numbers are built off of that CFL defenders trot out to make their case) without using even more lighting/electricity than you might otherwise need in the first place.
You can keep picking and making snarky comments, or you can do some research yourself and learn something new.