Meral

One thing that makes modern grids more susceptible to the oscillation problem, and it is a genuine engineering discussion rather than a controversy: inertia.

Large rotating generators store kinetic energy in their spinning mass, which naturally resists sudden frequency changes. Inverter-connected sources do not have that mass, and a grid with less of it responds faster to disturbances — which cuts both ways, since fast response can also be used to damp oscillations deliberately.

Managing this is an active field, with synthetic inertia and fast frequency response as the main tools. It is one of the more interesting engineering problems of the moment and it is much more specific than anything the phrase in your question conveys.

A neat way to see the scale difference: the energy released by burning a fuel and the energy released by a nuclear process differ by roughly the same factor as the two you have been comparing.

That is not a coincidence — chemistry is electrons rearranging and nuclear processes are nuclei rearranging, and the energy scales of those two are set by the forces involved. It is why a small amount of nuclear fuel corresponds to an enormous amount of chemical fuel, and it comes straight out of the answer to your question.

Two practical points that usually decide it regardless of the physics.

Lifetime. Efficient bulbs last far longer than incandescent ones. Even in a scenario where the energy is free, you are replacing the old type many times more often, and in an awkward fitting that is the real cost.

The bulbs are already gone. In most markets the inefficient options have been withdrawn, so the choice you are analysing is largely hypothetical outside a few special-purpose fittings.

The thought experiment is still worth doing, because the reasoning transfers directly to appliances that genuinely do produce a lot of waste heat and that you do still choose between.

One familiar example that makes creep concrete: a bolt that was tightened correctly and is loose years later, with nothing having vibrated.

That is relaxation, which is creep's close relative — the same atomic mechanism, seen as a decaying force at constant stretch rather than increasing stretch at constant force. It is why critical joints get retorqued on a schedule, and why some fasteners are designed to hold their tension over time.

It is happening in ordinary structures around you, slowly, all the time.

The second factor is that the two orientations differ in which way the roll wants to rotate against friction, and this is measurable.

A roll on a spindle has some friction, and in one orientation the paper's departure geometry means your pull also presses the roll against the holder slightly differently. Combined with the paper's own curl — the sheet has a memory of being wound, and in one direction it wants to lie flat against the roll — you get different amounts of resistance to unspooling.

Higher resistance to unspooling is what you want when tearing. You are trying to hold the paper still while snapping it, so anything stopping the roll from simply spinning and paying out more paper helps.

Which is also why the whole question is really about one-handed tearing. With two hands, one holding the roll, the difference nearly vanishes.

Worth adding the flip side, since people often assume it: the probability per unit time genuinely is constant. A nucleus does not age.

A nucleus that has existed for a billion years is exactly as likely to decay in the next minute as one created a second ago. There is no internal clock winding down, no accumulated wear. That property is what makes the exponential the right functional form, and it is one of the more counter-intuitive facts in physics.

The central trick, and it is genuinely beautiful once you see it, is to check things against themselves using symmetry, because that requires no reference more accurate than the thing you are making.

The classic example is the three-plate method for making a flat surface. Rub two plates together and they wear towards matching — but matching could mean one convex and one concave. So use three. Lap A against B, then B against C, then A against C, rotating through the pairs. The only shape all three can share, in every pairing, is flat. No reference plane is needed and none existed before the first one was made this way.

The same idea produces a right angle: a square checked against its own mirror image reveals its error at double magnitude, because the error adds rather than cancelling. Reversal techniques of that kind are the backbone of metrology.

So the answer to "what do you check it against" is: against itself, in a configuration where an error cannot hide.