>>519534013
>>519533780
The "flicker" is because LEDs are diodes. And electricity doesn't flow like water. It propagates in standing pulses. Diodes only react to one half of the pulse (which is a wave) because they only allow electricity to transmit in one "direction" (but again it doesn't have direction like a flow of water or air would have, it's just an oversimplification so that shitskins can have a basic grasp of electrical systems).
It literally doesn't matter if it were AC or DC current. And even if you had a "single phase" rectifier, that's another oversimplification. Single phase power just adds more waves to smooth out the peaks and troughs and in the case of an LED would just cause it to flicker even faster and more erratically (due to the impossibility of perfectly consistent design/application).
Their efficiency comes from the fact that heat is mainly just lost when the pulse is on the 'rejected' half of the duplex, and the pulse thereby dissipates as a small amount of heat. The light that is being emitted is basically being emitted due to the direct emission of electromagnetic waves by the diode. The light emitting media is literally directly shedding photons of a set frequency with near 100% efficiency during the "up" phase.
Incandescent lighting basically heats up a tungsten filament until it is white-hot. Nearly all of the energy going into it is being dissipated as heat, just to get a few useful bands of visible light out of it.
Fluorescent and Neon lighting just involves heating up and/or electrically exciting a gas media which has a much lower thermal mass than a solid media like tungsten. So it's energy efficient but still relatively wasteful because it's not directly producing photons of the desired band.
There is some truth to the luddite bs though in that LED light is produced in much narrower bands than incandescent light. So it doesn't look natural no matter what you do. But there's no such thing as natural light at 1am.