Comment by ninalanyon
3 days ago
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?
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.
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.
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