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by deanputney 29 days ago
If you want an example of a sacrifice caused by regulation before technology had fully caught up, banning sperm whale oil in automatic car transmissions comes to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-pro...
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Or phosphates in dish detergents. Some will remember when our dishwashers stopped working well for a few years.

Various consumer review sites were regularly doing pieces on newer detergents that maybe-kinda work.

We didn’t have an answer when the bans swept the country. It took a while for things to catch up. Then it was fine again.