[diputsmonro]

Which is why government regulations that set the boundaries for what companies can and can't get away with (such as but not limited to labor laws) are so important. In absence of guardrails, companies will do anything to get ahead of the competition. And once one company breaks a norm or does something underhanded, all their competitors must do the same thing or they risk ceding a competitive advantage. It becomes a race to the bottom.

Of course we learned this all before a century ago, it's why we have things like the FDA in the first place. But this new generation of techno-libertarians and DOGE folks who grew up in a "move fast and break things" era, who grew up in the cleanest and safest times the world has ever seen, have no understanding or care of the dangers here and are willing to throw it all away because of imagined inefficiencies. Regulations are written in blood, and those that remove them will have new blood on their hands.

[kortilla]

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”.

[mint2]

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.

[kortilla]

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.

[CelestialMystic]

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.

[ninalanyon]

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?

[kbolino]

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.

[loloquwowndueo]

Nap, parent just bought a crappy toilet.

[CelestialMystic]

Which is the same as every other toilet.

[CelestialMystic]

> 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.

[ninalanyon]

Both the Silentio and the toilets are very much mid range or lower. Definitely not a fancy bathroom, just one that complies with regulations and is properly designed. The toilets are Gustavsen.

[jen20]

> 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.

[kbelder]

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.

[mint2]

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.

[CelestialMystic]

> Sorry to hear you got a bum toilet.

Firstly No my one works properly thank you. They just aren't as good as the old ones. Many of the plumbers have agreed with me on this.

> Who remembers the abject terror of watching the water rise in a clogged high flush toilet and just praying it didn’t overflow.

I don't remember the old ones clogging, because it rarely happened. So no I don't remember of this because it didn't happen that often.

> Your toilet might not have been seated right so the wax seal ring is partially blocking the sewer line.

It isn't fitted like that. I know because I took apart the old one (which was poorly installed). It quite frustrating on my end to read a post that when you make a bunch of assumptions about the fitting of my lavatory which are incorrect, while you are telling me I've got it all wrong.

[TFYS]

I don't think regulations are enough. They're just a band-aid on the gaping wound that is a capitalist, market based economy. No matter what regulations you make, some companies and individuals become winners and over time will grow rich enough to influence the government and the regulations. We need a better economic system, one that does not have these problems built in.

[rapsey]

Gaping wound that lifted billions out of powerty and produced the greatest standard of living in human history.

[TFYS]

Sure, but you can't ignore the negative sides like environmental destruction and wealth and power concentration. Just because we haven't yet invented a system that produces a good standard of living without these negative side effects doesn't mean it can't be done. But we aren't even trying, because the ones benefiting from this system the most, and have the most power, have no incentive to do so.

[rapsey]

Those are all results of political corruption, not capitalism. It is the government's job to set the ground rules for the economy.

[TFYS]

Political corruption is a consequence of capitalism. Taking over the political system provides a huge competitive advantage, so any entity rich enough to influence it has an incentive to do so in an competition based economy that incentivizes growth.

[tm-guimaraes]

When did Political corruption not exist? In what system in history did the people in power have so few rotten apples that corruption was an anomally? Blaming corruption on capitalism is silly. As long has worldhas resources, people want control of reasources, and bad actors will do bad actors thingies.

[dsign]

Capitalism is a good economic engine. Now put that engine in a car without steering wheel nor brakes and feed the engine with the thickest and ever-thickening pipe from the gas tank you can imagine, and you get something like USA.

But most of the world doesn't work like that. Countries like China and Russia have dictators that steer the car. Mexico have gangs and mafia. European countries have parliamentary democracies and "commie journalists" that do their job and reign political and corporate corruption--sometimes over-eagerly--and unions. In many of those places, wealth equals material well-being but not overt political power. In fact, wealth often employs stealth to avoid becoming a target.

USA is not trying to change things because people are numbed down[^1]. Legally speaking, there is nothing preventing that country from having a socialist party win control of the government with popular support and enact sweeping legislation to overcome economic inequality somewhat. Not socialist, but that degree of unthinkable was done by Roosevelt before and with the bare minimum of popular support.

[^1]: And, I'm not saying that's a small problem. It is not, and the capitalism of instant gratification entertainment is entirely responsible for this outcome. But the culprit is not capitalism at large. IMO, the peculiarities of American culture are, to a large extent, a historic accident.

[TFYS]

You can't really separate wealth and power, they're pretty much the same thing. The process that is going on in the US is also happening in Europe, just at a slower pace. Media is consolidating in the hands of the wealthy, unions are being attacked and are slowly losing their power, etc. You can temporarily reverse the process by having someone steer the car into some other direction for a while, but wealth/power concentration is an unavoidable part of free market capitalism, so the problem will never go away completely. Eventually capital accumulates again, and will corrupt the institutions meant to control it.

A smart dictator is probably harder to corrupt, but they die and then if you get unlucky with the next dictator the car will crash and burn.

[immibis]

Actually, the system that produced the greatest standard of living increase in human history is whatever Communist China's been doing for the last century.

[andyferris]

Not century.

Mao and communism brought famine and death to millions.

The move from that to "capitilism with Chinese characteristics" is what has brought about the greatest standard of living increase in human history.

What they're doing now is a mix of socialism, capitilism and CPP dominance. I'm not an American, but I understand FDR wielded socialism too, and that really catapulted the US towards its golden era.

[rapsey]

Chinese do capitalism better than anyone else. Chinese companies ruthlessly compete within China to destroy their competition. Their firms barely have profits because everyone is competing so hard against others. Whereas US/EU is full of rent seeking monopolies that used regulatory capture to destroy competition.

[ranger_danger]

How is consistently low profits across the board "better capitalism than anyone else"?

[immibis]

What you're describing is that China is doing the free market, while the US/EU is doing capitalism.

[rmnwski]

Almost like they made a great leap forward during that century.

[rapsey]

Capitalism.

[PlaneSploit]

...and they use money so it's capitalism.

[chii]

> We need a better economic system

none has been found. The command economy is inefficient, and prone to corruption.

informal/barter systems are too small in scale and does not produce sufficient amounts to make the type of abundant lifestyle we enjoy today possible.

As the saying goes - free market capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.

[TFYS]

We haven't really been trying to find such a system. The technological progress that we've had since the last attempts at a different kind of a system has been huge, so what was once impossible might now be possible if we put some effort into it.

[pixelfarmer]

There is no system that fulfills your requirements.

It is even easy to explain why: Humans are part of all the moving pieces in such a system and they will always subvert it to their own agenda, no matter what rules you put into place. The more complex your rule set, the easier it is to break.

Look at games, can be a card game, a board game, some computer game. There is a fixed set of rules, and still humans try to cheat. We are not even talking adults here, you see this with kids already. Now with games there is either other players calling that out or you have a computer not allowing to cheat (maybe). Now imagine everyone could call someone else a cheater and stop them from doing something. This in itself is going to be misused. Humans will subvert systems.

So the only working system will be one with a non-human incorruptible game master, so to speak. Not going to happen.

With that out of the way, we certainly can ask the question: What is the next best thing to that? I have no answer to that, though.

[TFYS]

Cheating happens in competition based systems. No one cheats in games where the point is to co-operate to achieve some common goal. We should aim to have a system based on recognizing those common goals and enabling large scale co-operation to achieve them.

[chii]

> co-operate to achieve some common goal.

all systems are competitive, if the system involves humans - after all, even in a constrained environment like academia, where research is cooperative, the competition for recognition is still strong. This includes the order of the authorship presented in the paper.

What you're asking for, regarding cooperation to achieve common goals, is altruism. This does not exist in human nature.

[ranger_danger]

> enabling large scale co-operation

This has been proven over and over not to work. Humans are inherently competitive, and so corruption ALWAYS takes over.

Even if you make everything and everyone equal, they eventually get bored and start trying to one-up each other and push the limits of what's allowed, which is just another way to say corruption.

Small government, big government, socialism, communism, capitalism, everything the world has tried has ended in mass corruption.

> It's possible to design systems that do not force people to compete

I have yet to see any real evidence of this working on a societal level.

[chii]

> What is the next best thing to that? I have no answer to that, though.

i argue that what we have today is the so called next best thing - free market capitalism, with a good dose of democracy and strong gov't regulations (but not overbearing).

[kbelder]

>The technological progress that we've had since the last attempts at a different kind of a system has been huge

And, dare I say, mostly due to capitalism.

[theshackleford]

> we’ve tried three whole things and are all out of ideas!

Guess it’ll just have to be this way forever and ever.

[rapsey]

Free market capitalism does not exist anywhere.

[immibis]

In fact, free market and capitalism are opposites.

[Turskarama]

Lol no they aren't, they're orthogonal, almost entirely unrelated.

[jdsleppy]

I assume they are saying that in practice, if wealth gives one influence (if one lives in capitalism), one will use that influence to make one's market less free to one's benefit.