[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