> And NPR told me that the possibility of gas stoves being banned was fake outrage: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/20/1150228734/the-facts-and-stra...

No they didn't.

> MARTÍNEZ: Look, Jeff and Lisa, I don't know what's going to happen with gas stoves.

Also NPR was talking about the Federal government. While the article above is talking about the New York _State_ government.

Literally the first sentence of their rebuttal admits it's all performative:

> Well, the risk for the environment, it's more about what gas stoves have come to represent. And that's the practice of burning natural gas in homes.

Stay on topic champ.

rayiner's comment is that NPR told him "the possibility of gas stoves being banned was fake outrage".

Whether or not gas stoves _should_ be banned is irrelevant. NPR clearly stated that they could become banned and that they don't know if they will.

Why are you ignoring the title and first paragraph?

> The facts and strategy behind the outrage over rumors of a ban on gas stoves

> The conservative media was in uproar last week over speculation that the federal government planned to ban gas cooking stoves and possibly seize them.

The aim is clearly to dismiss the concern as manufactured outrage—note the words “strategy,” “speculation,” and “outrage”—rather than a concern about something that may happen because it’s an aim liberals definitely have.

I seem to remember at one point that conservatives celebrated federalism - something about the states being the laboratories of democracy. Who knows, maybe New York will show how successful such a ban can be and the federal government can take that into consideration, but for now it seems like this is just New York.

Federalism means states have the power to make decisions independent of the federal government. It doesn’t mean supporting any particular exercise of that power.

And of course liberals don’t believe in federalism, so whatever happens to New York (including the 47% of the state that voted Republican in 2022) is coming to the federal level next.

If that's the case then I assume you should prepare for a ban.

Having lived in the metro area for quite a long time, I am qualified to tell you that few things NY does is exemplary of success. Most energy or public works projects turn into a total debacle. Shoreham Nuclear Power station is a good example. Billions spent, and they never even turned it on. Residents are still paying that down. Endless road project cycling. I'm not sure there has been a single transportation project that wasn't at last 3x over budget. Public corruption, kickbacks, bribery, influence peddling, patronage... The entire state apparatus is rotten to the core and rife with incompetence. I'd like to believe in the state's benevolence and concern for the well-being of its residence, but then I'd have to start or join a new religion (on blind faith alone) with its dogma being the bullshit that the state feeds to its residents.

And yet I believe it is considered the capital of the modern world in some sense, isn't it? (My perception as someone who's never visited the NE US). You choose to live there, or at least chose to live there for quite a long time as you said, so there must be some reason.

NY state is consistently ranked 2nd after California for the # of residents leaving. New York saw a net loss of over 75 thousand families last year.

Immigration helps offset those numbers a bit, because like you said people see NY(C) as the capital and plenty of people still want to live there.

Deterioration happens slowly and builds up over time. Humans are very resilient and adaptive to things getting worse (as every war has shown). When things happen slowly you don't notice how bad it is and forget what is lost. The older (usually conservative) people who notice the deterioration are often dismissed as cranks, boomers, out of touch, etc. So immigrants/young college kids still flock to NY and start building a life there before noticing that living there as an adult is way harder than it should be.

Moving states typically requires things to get really bad and people often don't understand the cause/effect of shitty gov and deteriorating cultures.

Not just NPR.

Republicans Mocked Over Outraged Claims Government 'Coming for' Gas Stoves https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-mocked-over-outraged-cl...

"... the rightwing immolation at the mere suggestion of a gas stove ban is just one more line on a long list of rightwing lies made for political gain." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/18/how-di...

As usual, "That's not going to happen!" gives way in short order to "It's a good thing that it is going to happen!"

It's called The Law of Merited Impossibility. It's a popular tactic for authoritarians in the last 30 years or so. Deny something is happening, and anyone who claims it is is paranoid. Then quickly do the thing, and smear anyone who says it's a bad thing. The point is to avoid ever actually debating the ideas they're pushing by denying it.

The ... ahem, administrators of Fox News and the Conservative media bubble told their flock that 87,000 IRS federal agents were being hired to come to everyone's houses (Conservatives first though) to remove all AR-15s and gas appliances as soon as possible, probably after Kamala Harris orchestrates Biden's removal from office via the 25th amendment so she, famous trans progressive, can implement the true LiberalTM agenda.

Fossil fuel use for energy (in the long term) should be centralized, then replaced. Building gas lines to new buildings should therefore be less preferred than running all-electric. Then of course, there is the reason gas stoves got brought up recently, which is concern with interior air quality and its long term impact on families.

The reality is that eventually, gas appliances will probably be restricted/phased out of use in new installations for several reasons. This shouldn't be surprising, sensational or controversial. The fiction is that they will be forcefully removed from existing installations. See electric vehicles, where my Fox-ian father thinks all gas cars will be banned in 2025 or some shit, when in reality new sales won't even be meaningfully restricted for another 12 years.

When the day comes that gas stoves actually get banned (either forcefully removed or by banning the distribution of gas), your comment will again be:

"This shouldn't be surprising, sensational or controversial."

>banning the distribution of gas

At some point that will happen, or else it will simply be so inconvenient to use gas it will be impractical for anything except remote places with propane tanks.

Why is that shocking? Are you also upset that you no longer have easy access to whale oil for your lighting, or a market for steam-powered sedans? Yes, someday in the relatively far future (decades) gas stoves will be a novelty, something small kids look at like they look at CRT televisions or ham radios today.

Who cares? My point is that the outrage on conservative media was built on lies and exaggerations about the now, as if in 2024 gas stoves would be banned. You You moved the goalpost in your comment.

I'm not writing this response to you, but to other people who might read the conversation.

Whale oil was replaced because of cheaper and superior synthetic alternatives. CRT Television were replaced because of more practical flat panels.

There are no advantages to electrical stoves compared to gas stoves. Gas stoves are far superior to electrical for cooking, and for operating both electrical and gas are equivalently practical. The energy cost of gas vs electrical is unimportant for home use, and in professional use you will use gas stoves.

Both electricity and gas (in general) are equally modern (or old) technologies, being a couple of hundred years old. Replacing gas with electricity is in no sense progression, it's just different tech.

Induction stoves are much better than conventional electric, but they are a far cry from gas stoves, which have all the benefits of induction and none of the drawbacks.

> Conservative media bubble told their flock that 87,000 IRS federal agents were being hired to come to everyone's houses

Did they actually say that, cause that sounds pretty hyperbolic to what their narrative actually was, which is that 87k agents were being hired which would effectively be targeting middle class and small businesses, instead of big corps.

I have friends who were were wrongfully audited, and it’s a huge costly, stressful burden.

I don’t think it’s wrong to question how the IRS is managing its budget.

Part of the narrative was how they would all have guns too.

It ignored the fact that most of those employees were actually customer service representatives, and you can see this year the huge increase in number of tax filers who were able to actually speak to someone from the IRS on the phone.

I was being hyperbolic. I didn't pay attention to the 87k news, since Fox News and Ted Cruz talked about it I assumed it was meaningless distraction.

> I was being hyperbolic

Yes. You and the people you are criticizing.

I'm not a "journalist" nor do I, fact-sharer or opinion-spewer, have hundreds of thousands of followers. The obligations I have to society in this regard are lower than cable news.

What gas stoves are being banned or seized?

All of them in NYs new construction. You’re trying to hide behind a hair.

You are nonethewiser.

Please edit out swipes. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Please edit out swipes. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment would be fine without that last bit.

There’s a difference between “no new construction with gas stoves” and “seizing all gas stoves” lol

It's basically the boiling-frog strategy if you can't figure it out

The boiling frog strategy only works on frogs when the frog's brain is removed.

https://archive.org/details/studiesfrombiol00martgoog/page/3...

That’s a fallacy. You can make anything into a slippery slope.

It seems to me that every time people reference the slippery slope fallacy, the people claiming slippery slope get proven right 10 years down the line. Even in this case, banning gas in new buildings implies that gas will be banned in the future!

It makes no sense to call the slippery slope a fallacy. Some things are a slippery slope, others are not. But it’s not fundamentally impossible to have a slippery slope.

No, you're just saying "you can't have a gas stove, gas heater, or gas water heater because we said so."

Read the article. They are t just “debunking” the seizing.

Damn, if only Tucker Carlson were still around to tell me how I should feel about it.

And where to send the check.

There are many ways that outrage can be fake, and a variety of them apply to this situation. For one thing the conservative talking points were all about a sense that the feds were coming for your freedom, and not in any way about the merits or otherwise of being able to burn gas in the place you live. For another, this was being talked about as something that would impose a heavy burden on normal people, which is simply not supported by the facts, both because none of the plans that have been put forward involve forcing you to buy a new stove, and because most normal people already have electric stoves.

By the way, I don't know if you actually read or listened to that segment, but it makes clear that there is a real possibility that this could be regulated. Calling it "fake outrage" is not to say "they're making up the possibility that it could be regulated", but "they're blowing this (real) possibility out of proportion, ignoring the reasons it might be a good idea, and instead making up vague and manipulative reasons to object to it".

You are wrong. Most normal people in nyc have gas stoves and they are massively superior in every way to a typical electric range.

Induction cooktops can be nice, but they are more expensive last I checked, and impose lots of limitations on what cookware you can use, including making it infeasible to use high end copper bottom French sauté pans, which also happen to be very hard to match the performance of.

It is absolutely a burden, and meddlesome, and a reduction in freedom of choice, and gas stoves use minuscule amounts of gas.

And I also used my gas stove to prepare meals during at least three nyc blackouts.

If you try to do exactly what you were doing on the gas stove in the same way, you will have a bad time, but my and many other people's experience is that a decent electric stove is perfectly capable of making good food once you figure out how to use it. Electric stoves in general can heat faster than gas, and in my experience heat more evenly (no hot spots), so you don't need the crutch of a copper bottom to conduct that heat across the surface. It's certainly true that there are a lot of crappy cheap electric stoves out there that are not nice to cook with, but there are also plenty of crappy gas stoves that don't work well too. There's a ton of propaganda out there about how cooking with gas is better (much of it funded by the gas producers and distributors), but it doesn't hold up well under inspection.

You are right that most people in new york have gas, but new york is an outlier in that -- one of only five states that are majority gas. Most of Tucker Carlson's audience have electric stoves.

And there’s no such thing as propaganda for electric stoves in your view? It’s always the “other side” that’s a victim of propaganda?

To be clear, I used to believe the gas stove propaganda myself. I too, like GP, had the feeling that gas was self-evidently better than electric, and that it wasn't possible to have an argument about it. Then I tried being open-minded about it and found the arguments for electric (and my experiences, once I gave it a chance) to be very convincing.

Good job falling for the electric stove propaganda campaign, with its arguments for their supposed benefits and accusations of gas stove propaganda. Fools and their quality stoves soon parted or whatever.

The person you are responding to managed to work Tucker Carlson into the convo so obviously knows precisely what is propaganda and what is objective fact.

All rational and educated modern chefs understand that copper bottom pans are just a crutch, because Mother Jones said so.

It’s not propaganda. I’ve cooked on all sorts of stoves.

Electric is way worse than gas. It’s not even up for reasonable debate.

Here's some reading about how much propaganda there has been for gas in the last century or so: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/06/how-the-foss...

Have you used an induction stove before? It's better than gas, and it's not even close (and yes, I have a gas range). Note that induction is not the same thing as resistive.

> but my and many other people's experience is that a decent electric stove is perfectly capable of making good food once you figure out how to use it

Not surprised your glib attitude, towards something a millions of people have a very strong preference towards and is dismissed out of hand, coincides with your authoritarian leaning takes. "I like induction, you can learn to like it to, move along citizen."

Please don't cross into personal attack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> For one thing the conservative talking points were all about a sense that the feds were coming for your freedom, and not in any way about the merits or otherwise of being able to burn gas in the place you live.

Well if the federal government’s opinion on gas is operative, and not your own, how is that not coming for your freedom?

You may think they have good cause, but that doesn’t change the nature of a law that bans you from doing or having something.

I want the government to always be balancing the good of society against my individual freedom. These people are saying "this limits my freedom" and ignoring the societal benefits. That's disingenuous. And you can tell it's disingenuous because the next thing they say is "we need government to ban books about gay people", or "we need government to ban abortion". I'm not saying your freedom shouldn't be a consideration, I'm saying it should be one consideration that is balanced against others.