Both “raises” and “lowers” are potentially confusing. Maybe “relaxes?”
The epitome of Hacker News and one of the reasons I find myself laughing enjoyably so much here.
I picture this marathon and the first one trips out of the gate with everyone piling up behind them.
When you read that the engineering practices in some company are of a high standard, do you also get confused as to if the company operates well or not well? I used to get confused from the meaning too but started thinking about it like this.
It does indeed. And the title does not comport with that derivation.
In terms of petro-chemical plants one operating to a "high standard" is clean, and one operating to a "low standard" is polluting. And the plant in the article is polluting. Instead of fixing the plant they decided to raise the emission limits. That is the legal equivalent of "eh, fine I guess" shrug.
Does that sound like operating to a "high standard"? So are these people raising the standard?
The confusion originates from the fact that in the case of pollution, smaller numbers are better. So "raising the standard" means "lowering the limits". And "raising the limits" are "lowering the standard".
Therefore they did not choose the right words. We might as well say that they phrased the title in a confusing way.
> I used to get confused from the meaning too but started thinking about it like this.
It really sounds like in a rush to educate us you just illustrated how confusing the title is.
But here is the thing. It can be worded in such a way to avoid this confusion altogether. They should just wrote "Texas raises emission limit ..." and it is avoided. Or even better, they could write "Polluting plant will avoid fines", or "Plant allowed to pollute".