[Mistletoe]

These press releases chill me to the bone with how 1984 speak they are. I’ve never seen whole agencies just completely gutted and replaced with nonsense like this before. The executive branch of the government was never meant to have this much power. We didn’t fight a war against a king so that we could just devolve to that again.

[Dylan16807]

How so?

There's a tradeoff here between price and quality, and the different political parties have different preferences for what should be allowed.

Obviously they're going to talk about the benefits and not the downsides of a particular choice, but that hardly strikes me as 1984.

[insane_dreamer]

It's not about quality, it's about reducing energy consumption, which is critical because ... climate change (among other things). Come on, I shouldn't need to explain this.

Trump wants to bring back incandescent lightbulbs. And burn more coal.

[mindslight]

The problem was that at least for some categories, the regulations weren't making appliances actually more efficient any longer, but rather just gaming the numbers by skimping on their primary functionality. For example clothes washers that don't use enough water to get clothes clean (hot water is directly counted as energy use), or dishwashers that skip having a heating element for the dry cycle, and then substitute some combo of dodgy "rinse aid", humidity-absorbing crystals that regenerate by using heat from the water, and drip drying.

Don't get me wrong, being an electrical engineer, doing a lot of DIY repair, and taking note of what goes into appliances I've got zero faith in manufacturers to come up with more efficient solutions on their own. But at a certain point the ever-advancing regulations stopped being productive as well. You can only switch to ECM/brushless motors one time.

(Also a meta issue - if the actions of the Trump administration were limited to only executive branch domestic policies like this, we could at least readjust in four years)

[insane_dreamer]

Fair point. But gaming the regulations is a different problem, one that lies not with the regulations but with enforcement of standards. Taking away these new regulations doesn’t mean that some companies won’t still try to game other remaining regulations in order to cut corners and eke out more profits or for planned obsolescence.

[mindslight]

I think the term "gaming" was overstating the point relative to my argument. What I see is that the previous regulations got a lot of the low hanging fruit, and now there aren't really big gains to be had like that.

I actually don't think companies will go backwards on improvements they've already adopted. The mechanism I see is a reluctance to spend design time on changing things (ie keep selling the same old shit), rather than pure cost optimization with newer technologies costing more.

I'd say a big cause of the problem here is the handwavey nature of regulations focusing on "high level" goals like efficiency and expecting that engineers can magically find it somewhere [0], rather than more direct things like "all appliance motors that consume more than 5% of the energy used by the appliance must be brushless ECM"

[0] similarly, see the repeated calls for magical encryption backdoors that don't weaken security

[Dylan16807]

Energy efficiency is a quality metric. Come on, I shouldn't need to explain this.

Even if you disagree with that for some reason, it doesn't really affect my point. It's a tradeoff and they want different rules about what options on the tradeoff curve are valid.

[insane_dreamer]

No, Trump wants to gut anything related to climate change initiatives because they were enacted by the previous administration.

It has nothing to do with quality tradeoff curves.

You don't even have to do a lot of critical thinking to get this; Trump has made it pretty clear.

[Dylan16807]

> It has nothing to do with quality tradeoff curves.

So do you think the claim that it's cheaper to build to looser standards is a lie, or do you think cheaper appliances did not play any role in motivating this order and only came up after the fact?

I'm pretty sure at least one of those has to be true for your claim to be true, and I'm quite skeptical of both.

(If you said it was mostly about climate change spite I'd be a lot more likely to believe you.)

[cycomanic]

> > It has nothing to do with quality tradeoff curves. > > So do you think the claim that it's cheaper to build to looser standards is a lie, or do you think cheaper appliances did not play any role in motivating this order and only came up after the fact?

That's not what the government title claimed though. They claim cheaper prices. You likely know, cheaper production prices don't necessarily lead to cheaper consumer prices. Moreover, often reduced quality/efficiency actually results in higher lifetime costs, something which is often difficult to ascertain for consumers (one reason for regulations).

[insane_dreamer]

It _may_ be cheaper to build to lower energy efficiency depending on the product and the supply chain. This _may_ result in lower prices.

I do think the promise of cheaper appliances in indeed a cover for the primary target: rolling back climate change related regulation. Remember Trump’s first term? He spent a lot of effort trying to undo whatever Obama had done , not because of the benefits but just because. You cannot underestimate how retaliatory Trump is.

But more specifically Trump has repeatedly made clear his disdain for climate change measures and climate science. What do you think “drill baby drill” is all about? Cheaper gas? Petroleum (coming out of the ground) is already about as cheap as it can get to profitable pump.

Check this out from today’s NYT:

> One discipline that has been targeted more specifically is climate science. President Trump has long downplayed the threats from human-caused global warming. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staff members have been ordered to comb their research awards for terms including “climate science,” “climate crisis,” “clean energy” and “pollution.”