> Why can’t people sell and buy vacuums that meet their needs? If I have a need for a 3000 watt vacuum, he EU won’t let me have it, even though I pay not only for the product, but any power it consumes.

But you probably always could - seeing as industrial vacuum cleaners are outside the scope of the regulation. Maybe you really want a 3KW ‘domestic’ vacuum but they probably never existed, in the same way that a Smart Car with a truck engine doesn’t. I found this document from the EU itself with a brief search that clarifies this https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/commission_guidel...

I admit it’s probably more dry than any sensationalist newspaper that wants to sell clicks and yes, the EU could’ve done a lot more to publicise the actual truth around this.

I think the crux on the vacuums was that people thought: more powerful is better, but they don’t actually vacuum better. (Physics: the max pressure difference from room to vacuum is about 1 bar. Given a certain gap between the vacuum and the floor, the marginal benefit of a 3kW vacuum over a 1kW one is small)

But buying psychology just promotes inefficient vacuums at that point, so it could make sense for the regulator to try and fix that. (From an environmental perspective I agree with this one)

Note: I’m not even sure if the EU even legislated this at all. Turns out, a lot of so called EU regulations bashed by the UK tabloids were represented overly simplified to fit a desired narrative.

E.g. here is Wikipedia on how both sides used the regulation on food to ridicule and defense the EU:

> This regulation requires that bananas as a minimum standard must not have "abnormal curvature",[5] although no definition or guidance was given about the degree of curvature that would be regarded as "abnormal". This led to various stories about an EU ban on curved bananas.[6] This has been frequently repeated by pro-Europeans and Euro-sceptics alike; the former tending to regard it as an apocryphal or misleading Euromyth[6] and the latter regarding it as an example of needless European bureaucracy.

Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_N...

> the shape of cucumbers..

I know that this is often used as an example of how ridiculous the EU is, but if you think about it, actually isn't. You need rules and standardization to be able to trade effectively.

If everyone is happy and close by, trade is simple. But as soon as there's conflict, it becomes messy, especially if the trade is international, and spread over time.

Let's say I order a few containers of cucumbers from you. A couple of months later they arrive, I open the containers and inspect the cucumbers, but find out that they're wrong. The colour is wrong, or the shape is wrong, or it's the wrong cucumber species. I complain and say that I can't sell these in my country, consumers wouldn't want to buy them, but you just say that in your country you call these things cucumbers, and customers would happily buy them.

I paid for cucumbers, you shipped cucumbers, but our respective definition of cucumbers are not the same, so now we have an international trade conflict.

And that's exactly what the "ridiculous" EU trade rules solve. They set up common shared definitions of stuff that gets traded so that everyone agrees what a cucumber is, and so that the above scenario doesn't happen. So you have to write down the accepted curvature and greenish hue a cucumbers has to have to be called a cucumber, even if you think it's ridiculous.

Why? It's an environmental regulation, as you're presumably aware? Seems odd to not acknowledge it, in that case.

It encourages advances in lower power vacuums, just like energy labeling does (and did) for other appliances. We don't want manufacturers to compete by having ever higher wattage numbers, which they are wont to do. This is not going to appeal to libertarians, obviously, and the UK is now free to finally become a Thatcherite libertarian experiment.

It would be nice to tax CO2, making electricity ten to twenty times more expensive. Then making rules like these might be superfluous.