Laundry boss*
Sometimes you wonder if the ideal future is one where people take their laundry down to the nearest creek and beat the items clean against the rocks, the old-fashioned way.
As the Washington Free Beacon reported last week, federal regulators plan to make washing machine manufacturers design appliances that use even less water and electricity. I’m not sure if the regulatory ideal here is to get appliances that use no water and no electricity, or appliances that create water and generate electricity—a modern-day perpetual-motion machine. It would be nice to know what vision the government regulators and their masters are pursuing as an end goal. Otherwise they may flail away aimlessly forever.
Biden's Energy Department last month proposed new efficiency standards for washing machines that would require new appliances to use considerably less water, all in an effort to "confront the global climate crisis." Those mandates would force manufacturers to reduce cleaning performance to ensure their machines comply, leading industry giants such as Whirlpool said in public comments on the rule. They'll also make the appliances more expensive and laundry day a headache—each cycle will take longer, the detergent will cost more, and in the end, the clothes will be less clean, the manufacturers say.
You can, of course, make laundry day more water and energy efficient. But the result is less actual cleaning. If you decrease the water use, and lower the amount of detergent, you have to do more of the cleaning by agitating the clothes against themselves for a long time and with a lot of noise, meaning you wear the fabrics and textiles out faster, while wearing out the homeowner’s tolerance for hours of loud laundry-room racket.
Meanwhile, the appliances will require heavier motors, weights, and flywheels in order to agitate the loads of heavy, damp fabrics for longer. Combined with fancier computer controller designs, this will result in more expensive equipment that will likely be less reliable, because it will be unproven. Consumers will howl at the manufacturers from whom they buy the machines at exorbitant prices, overlooking the government designers and their elected bosses entirely.
The do-more-with-less process is a natural byproduct of competition, as manufacturers try to find ways to cut costs and pass savings to consumers. Using regulations to mandate efficiency largely rules out innovation, since regulators take design options off the table. Bureaucrats’ tools are inflexible bans and restrictions.
Maybe we need to regulate ourselves back all the way to a new stone age—a Neo-Neolithic—to reach the point where a civilizational reset becomes unavoidable.
*Another in an interminable series about how government makes me cranky.
I can't recall who was involved in the "drawing room" discussion the other day, but in KDW's"Deplorable" article dated today, he admits to not having looked up the derivation of the phrase before wondering (or as some assumed, pretending to wonder) about it. On top of that, today Williamson responded about a grammatical issue raised by M. Jouffrey with "Yeah, I muffed that sentence."
I think Kevin may be catching on to the fact that while he's really good at that kind of stuff, so are many of us. In other words, the audience he finds here (or at least the commenting part of it) is a little more elite in some ways than he may be used to, and he'd be wise to see that as a plus.
Latest David French NYT column courtesy of NYT subscriber John N at TMD comments: 'What if Kids Are Sad and Stressed Because Their Parents Are?'
https://tinyurl.com/4aky5r53