Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

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Some regulations are written in blood, a huge chunk are not. Shower head flow rate regulations were not written in blood.

Your post started out talking about labor laws but then switched to the FDA, which is very different. This is one of the reasons that people like the DOGE employees are tearing things apart. There are so many false equivalences on the importance of literally everything the government does that they look at things that are clearly useless and start to pull apart things they think might be useless.

The good will has been burned on the “trust me, the government knows best”, so now we’re in an era of cuts that will absolutely go too far and cause damage.

Your post mentioning “imagined inefficiencies” is a shining example of the issue of why they are there. Thinking the government doesn’t have inefficiencies is as dumb as thinking it’s pointless. Politicians are about as corrupt of a group as you can get and budget bills are filled with so much excess waste it’s literally called “pork”.

Efficiency related regulation like the energy star is THE reason why companies started caring.

Same with low flush toilets. I vaguely remember the initial ones had issues, but tbh less than the older use a ton of water toilets my family had before that were also super clog prone. Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time a low flush toilet clogged. Massive water saving that took regulation.

Efficiency regulations may not be directly written in blood, instead they are built on costly mountains of unaddressed waste.

I literally had a new toilet put in a couple of years ago. It clogs pretty easily. So you just end up flushing it more, so you don't actually save any water.

BTW the same thing happened with vacuum cleaners, you need to hover more to get the same amount of dust out because they capped the power in the EU. My old Vacuum Cleaner I managed to find, literally sticks to the carpet when hoovering.

My Philips Silentio vacuum cleaner is both quiet and powerful and is also within the EU limits on input power. It will stick to the floor if I turn up the power too high.

And the Norwegian made and designed low flow toilets in my house flush perfectly every time. Have the flush volumes reduced further in the last fifteen years?

Nap, parent just bought a crappy toilet.

Which is the same as every other toilet.

> My Philips Silentio vacuum cleaner is both quiet and powerful and is also within the EU limits on input power. It will stick to the floor if I turn up the power too high.

I don't believe you and it besides the point because I suspect that it is an expensive vacuum cleaner. I don't want to put any thought into a vacuum cleaner. I just want to buy the most powerful (bonus points if it is really loud), I don't care about it being quiet or efficient. I want the choice to buy something that makes a dent in my electricity bill if I so choose to.

> And the Norwegian made and designed low flow toilets in my house flush perfectly every time. Have the flush volumes reduced further in the last fifteen years?

This reads as "I have some fancy bathroom that costs a lot, if you had this fancy bathroom you wouldn't have issues". I don't want to have to care whether my low flush toilet is some fancy Norwegian brand or not. I just want something to flush the shit down the hole. The old toilets never had the problems the newer ones have. I would rather buy the old design, but I can't. I am denied the choice because someone else I have never met thinks they know better than I.

> I want the choice to buy something that makes a dent in my electricity bill if I so choose to.

Have you considered that the market for such a thing is effectively zero? Why would anyone make this?

Dysons are fine, even if the founder is a total tool.

I was being hyperbolic throughout the entire post.

Every-time you have a conversation around older stuff being better than newer stuff (some of this is due to regulation), you will have someone say their boutique item that costs hundreds of pounds (or maybe 1000s) works perfectly well. Ignoring the fact that most people don't wish to buy these boutique items (the dude literally talked about some Norwegian toilet design). I buy whatever is typically on offer than is from a brand that I recognise. I don't care about the power consumption of my vacuum cleaner. I am not using it for the entire day. It is maybe 30 minutes to an hour twice a week. I just want to do this task (which I find tedious) as quickly as possible.

BTW Dysons count in this regard as boutique, they are expensive and kinda rubbish. They are rendered useless by cat fur (my mother had three cats and it constantly got clogged with it). Bagless vacuum cleaners are generally garbage anyway (this is a separate complaint) because when you try to empty them, you have to empty it into a bag typically.

> [Dysons] are rendered useless by cat fur

Patently untrue. Mine works fine.

Argh yes the "Works for me" argument. I suppose my mother was lying when she was complaining about it then? I will take her word for it rather than random internet user. So not it isn't patently untrue. I really dislike it when people try to gaslight me, on things that I have first hand experience with, so please don't do it.

BTW The old Henry Hoover (not bagless) never had any problems.

Indeed, your own anecdata are as good as mine, and taken just as seriously.

Not to me it isn't. I think you are trying to justify the fact that you paid far too much for a vacuum cleaner, like most people do when they buy overpriced item and point out the obvious problems with their products.

I own a Land Rover. It is old, expensive and unreliable. You know how I justify my spending on it? I like driving it.

So the person who says their Dyson works great is a liar but also their opinion is invalid because it is expensive.

Your Land Rover is good because it’s expensive but you like it.

Reading several of your comments on this thread are a real whirlwind. If you just flat out reject anyone’s experience that doesn’t reflect your own or that of your mother then I don’t know why you’re even responding to anyone.

I bought just about the cheapest toilet possible and it works identically to the one it replaced that was probably 15 years old. Maybe EU regulations are truly onerous and mad but the standards that have now been thrown in the garbage in the US have not been a problem for me literally ever. Anyone who needs to flush the toilet 10 times is doing something wrong.

I dunno what kind of cats your mom has but I’ve got 2 cats and 4 dogs and I haven’t had a problem with either a modest Shark or a (refurbished) Dyson.

> So the person who says their Dyson works great is a liar but also their opinion is invalid because it is expensive. Your Land Rover is good because it’s expensive but you like it.

I am not trying to justify my purchase by pretending it is not bourgeois choice, that was the point I was making.

Dyson's have historically been more expensive than other brands (at least in the UK) and they aren't actually worth the extra money. I just looked on amazon for prices "air purifier fans" and it is £500, I have something similar for my living room and I bought was £50.

> Reading several of your comments on this thread are a real whirlwind. If you just flat out reject anyone’s experience that doesn’t reflect your own or that of your mother then I don’t know why you’re even responding to anyone.

My experiences was flat out rejected to begin with. I told there isn't a problem, even though I know there is because I have some of the older products and I know they work better.

Other people have told me personally that they have made similar observations. So I know it isn't just I.

Both the Silentio and the toilets are very much mid range or lower. Definitely not a fancy bathroom, just one that complies with regulations and is properly designed. The toilets are Gustavsen.

And so we see the real outcome, on this axis, of these kinds of regulations, is to increase the quality gradient. A crappy old barebones water-hungry dishwasher with a phosphate-containing detergent worked just fine for me in an old apartment. Its comparably priced brand-new lower-water equivalent in a new house with phosphate-free detergent works awfully. Now you need a Bosch washer and premium detergent and so on. These exist and by all accounts are great. So we can say that the regulations didn't cause the quality problem, they just shifted the market.

Compliance with the regulations can be done both by the capable and the incapable, but caveat emptor rears its ugly head, and that assumes the end user is the buyer (right now, I'm renting). There's often quite a price gap between good enough and terrible too. A lot of people end up stuck with the crap and little recourse.

The government cares that your dishwasher uses less water and the detergent doesn't put phosphate into the water. It doesn't care that your dishwasher actually works well. We can layer more regulations to fix that problem too, but they will make things cost more, and they will require more expensive and competent civil servants to enforce, and so on. And I don't see any offer in that arrangement to replace my existing dishwasher, which is now just a sunk cost piece of future e-waste that neither the government nor the manufacturer have been made responsible for.

Sorry to hear you got a bum toilet, luckily for you, there’s the other huge benefit of low flush toilets that I didn’t mention.

Even with a total clog, there’s a 1-2 flush bowl capacity before it over flows.

Who remembers the abject terror of watching the water rise in a clogged high flush toilet and just praying it didn’t overflow.

Also unless every usage is a big poop requiring extra flushes, it’s far fetched that more flushes occasionally are adding up to the same water usage. If the toilet clogs for #1, something is very wrong - likely installed wrong, plumbing issues, or user error. Your toilet might not have been seated right so the wax seal ring is partially blocking the sewer line.

> Sorry to hear you got a bum toilet.

Firstly No my one works properly thank you. They just aren't as good as the old ones. Many of the plumbers have agreed with me on this.

> Who remembers the abject terror of watching the water rise in a clogged high flush toilet and just praying it didn’t overflow.

I don't remember the old ones clogging, because it rarely happened. So no I don't remember of this because it didn't happen that often.

> Your toilet might not have been seated right so the wax seal ring is partially blocking the sewer line.

It isn't fitted like that. I know because I took apart the old one (which was poorly installed). It quite frustrating on my end to read a post that when you make a bunch of assumptions about the fitting of my lavatory which are incorrect, while you are telling me I've got it all wrong.

Same with modern washing machines. You have to resort to hacks or tricks on many models to get it to use more water, or run extra rinse cycles.

Low flow shower heads, not toilets. The stupidity of it banished things like recycling showers if too much water flows through the head.

Not a regulation on water usage, but flow.

Additionally, the fact that it was federal and not per state made it farcical because significant portions of the eastern US are inundated with fresh water.

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