Comment by kortilla
3 days ago
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?
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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.
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.
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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.