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.

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”.

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.

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.

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?

Nap, parent just bought a crappy toilet.

Which is the same as every other toilet.

> 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.

> 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.

I was being hyperbolic throughout the entire post.

Every-time you have a conversation around older stuff being better than newer stuff (some of this is due to regulation), you will have someone say their boutique item that costs hundreds of pounds (or maybe 1000s) works perfectly well. Ignoring the fact that most people don't wish to buy these boutique items (the dude literally talked about some Norwegian toilet design). I buy whatever is typically on offer than is from a brand that I recognise. I don't care about the power consumption of my vacuum cleaner. I am not using it for the entire day. It is maybe 30 minutes to an hour twice a week. I just want to do this task (which I find tedious) as quickly as possible.

BTW Dysons count in this regard as boutique, they are expensive and kinda rubbish. They are rendered useless by cat fur (my mother had three cats and it constantly got clogged with it). Bagless vacuum cleaners are generally garbage anyway (this is a separate complaint) because when you try to empty them, you have to empty it into a bag typically.

> [Dysons] are rendered useless by cat fur

Patently untrue. Mine works fine.

Argh yes the "Works for me" argument. I suppose my mother was lying when she was complaining about it then? I will take her word for it rather than random internet user. So not it isn't patently untrue. I really dislike it when people try to gaslight me, on things that I have first hand experience with, so please don't do it.

BTW The old Henry Hoover (not bagless) never had any problems.

Indeed, your own anecdata are as good as mine, and taken just as seriously.

Not to me it isn't. I think you are trying to justify the fact that you paid far too much for a vacuum cleaner, like most people do when they buy overpriced item and point out the obvious problems with their products.

I own a Land Rover. It is old, expensive and unreliable. You know how I justify my spending on it? I like driving it.

So the person who says their Dyson works great is a liar but also their opinion is invalid because it is expensive.

Your Land Rover is good because it’s expensive but you like it.

Reading several of your comments on this thread are a real whirlwind. If you just flat out reject anyone’s experience that doesn’t reflect your own or that of your mother then I don’t know why you’re even responding to anyone.

I bought just about the cheapest toilet possible and it works identically to the one it replaced that was probably 15 years old. Maybe EU regulations are truly onerous and mad but the standards that have now been thrown in the garbage in the US have not been a problem for me literally ever. Anyone who needs to flush the toilet 10 times is doing something wrong.

I dunno what kind of cats your mom has but I’ve got 2 cats and 4 dogs and I haven’t had a problem with either a modest Shark or a (refurbished) Dyson.

> So the person who says their Dyson works great is a liar but also their opinion is invalid because it is expensive. Your Land Rover is good because it’s expensive but you like it.

I am not trying to justify my purchase by pretending it is not bourgeois choice, that was the point I was making.

Dyson's have historically been more expensive than other brands (at least in the UK) and they aren't actually worth the extra money. I just looked on amazon for prices "air purifier fans" and it is £500, I have something similar for my living room and I bought was £50.

> Reading several of your comments on this thread are a real whirlwind. If you just flat out reject anyone’s experience that doesn’t reflect your own or that of your mother then I don’t know why you’re even responding to anyone.

My experiences was flat out rejected to begin with. I told there isn't a problem, even though I know there is because I have some of the older products and I know they work better.

Other people have told me personally that they have made similar observations. So I know it isn't just I.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Academia is competitive because it's designed to be competitive. If things like funding, recognition and opportunities go to "winners", people will try to win. It's possible to design systems that do not force people to compete. For example you could take away the names from papers and assign funding randomly/semi-randomly and the competition would end. Then add some form of retroactive funding (or other kinds of rewards) that's awarded to research that has produced useful results, and you'll get your incentive to do good research without the need for competition.

It's harder to design systems that avoid competitive behavior, but I don't think it's impossible. And of course competition is not all bad, it's a good tool when used carefully. But it's way too much when most of our systems are based on it.

Any form of reward leads to competitiveness. In research, it's the funding, and the credit/accolades. In business, it's the money.

Any sort of scheme to try allocate the funding leads to competition for said funding!

In other words, in order to remove all competition in the system, you need unlimited funding. Even randomly allocating funding is insufficient, as it simply means you're competing on luck (for example, by trying to acquire more slots in the lottery).

> harder to avoid competitive behavior, but I don't think it's impossible.

Which i think is not true - it is in fact, impossible, unless you add in the condition that there's unlimited 'resources' (after all, there's competition for resources while it is limited).

> 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.

> 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).

>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.

Free market capitalism does not exist anywhere.

In fact, free market and capitalism are opposites.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You're right, political corruption is a problem in other systems as well, not just capitalism. I guess it would be more accurate to say that power concentration causes political corruption. We should try to figure out if it's possible to manage the economy in a way that limits the amount of power any individual can have to such an extent that corruption would be impossible.

I don't think there is exists a magical political system that we set up and it magically protects us from corruption. Forever. Just like any system (like surviving in an otherwise hostile nature) it needs maintenance. Maintenance in a political or any social structure is getting off your bottom and imposing some "reward" signal on the system.

Corruption mainly exists because people have low standards for enforcing eradication of it. This is observable in the smallest levels. In countries where corruption is deeply engraved, even university student groups will be corrupted. Elected officials of societies of any size will be prone to put their personal interests in front of the groups' and will appoint or employ friends instead of randomers based on some quality metrics. The question is what are the other people willing to do? Is anyone willing to call them out? Is anyone willing to instead put on the job themselves and do it right (which can be demanding)?

The real question is how far are the individuals willing to go and how much discomfort are they willing to embrace to impose their requirements, needs, moral expectations on the political leader? The outcomes of many situations you face in society (should that be a salary negotiation or someone trying to rip you off in a shop) depend on how much sacrifice (e.g. discomfort) you are willing to take on to get out as a "winner" (or at least non-loser) of the situation? Are you willing to quit your job if you cannot get what you want? Are you going to argue with the person trying to rip you off? Are you willing to go to a lawyer and sue them and take a long legal battle? If people keep choosing the easier way, there will always be people taking advantage of that. Sure, we have laws but laws also need maintenance and anyone wielding power needs active check! It doesn't just magically happen but the force that can keep it in check is every individual in the system. Technological advances and societal changes always lead to new ideas how to rip others off. What we would need is to truly punish the people trying to take advantage of such situations: no longer do business with them, ask others to boycott such behaviour (and don't vote for dickheads!, etc.) -- even in the smallest friends group such an issue could arise.

The question is: how much are people willing to sacrifice on a daily basis to put pressure on corrupt people? There is no magic here, just the same bare evolutionary forces in place for the past 100,000 years of humankind.

(Just think about it: even in rule of law, the ultimate way of enforcing someone to obey the rules is by pure physical force. If someone doesn't listen, ever, he will be picked up by other people and forced into a physical box and won't be allowed to leave. And I don't expect that to ever change, regardless of the political system. Similarly, we need to keep up an army at all times. If you simply go hard pacifist, someone will take advantage of that... Evolution. )

Democracy is an active game to be played and not just every 4 years. In society, people's everyday choices and standards are the "natural forces of evolution".

So far I have not seen that it is possible, because you cannot get the majority to agree on who gets to say what the limit is.

That's why we need new ways to make decisions using direct democracy. Any system that delegates decision making to an individual or small group is vulnerable to corruption. Everyone should participate in decision-making.

"Everyone" is for lack of a better word, stupid, and routinely votes against their own interests, and don't know what they actually want. Just ask Americans.

I agree, and that's why the decision-making process should be more complex than just a simple vote. It should be a process where everyone participating is forced to consider the issue from all sides.

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.

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.

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

Capitalism.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

> 20 hour workweek etc

We have that already. It's called part-time jobs. Usually they don't pay as much as full-time jobs, provide no health insurance or other benefits, etc.

> provide no health insurance

I am so glad to live in Germany...

… where your full time job pays less than the GP's part time job

Minimum wage in Germany (12.82€) is almost double the US federal one ($7.25). And contrary to popular belief, no, taxes and fees are not massively higher.

[Ed.: actually, thanks to 'recent developments' causing the USD to depreciate, it's pretty exactly double.]

(Only the highest of the local minimum wage setups in the US are slightly higher than the German one, e.g. CA's $16.50)

In the states, part time jobs like 20/hr a week don't pay half as much. They pay closer to an 8th as much.

That's why everyone in the US works full-time if they have the choice. I would HAPPILY work 20/hr a week at half my rate. Such a job just does not exist. I would have to take a huge, huge paycut for that.

It's a bad deal as a developer. I receive 50% of the money but still provide 70-80% value to the company.

As someone who straddles two fields (CS and Healthcare) and has careers/degrees in both -- the grass isn't always greener on the other side.

This could be said about most jobs in the 21st century these days in any career field given. That's a culture shift and business management/organization practice change that isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

Oh I'm not saying we have it worse. But there are jobs where time spent is more proportional to productive output, so working half the time for half the money is a fair deal.

Indeed, and I don't know why people keep saying that we ever thought the 20 hour workweek was feasible, because there is always more work to be done. Work expands to fill the constraints available, similar to Parkinson's Law.

Probably because the 40-hour workweek was feasible.

It became feasible because back when the workweek was "whenever you're not asleep", a lot of people set a lot of things on fire until it wasn't.

This misses a huge part of the story, increase in productive, means a large economy, means more efficient use of resources, means compensation goes up over time. If you want to live the live of somebody that did 40h a week 40 years ago and only work 20h, you can already have most of that, and still have many options somebody back then didn't have that is virtually free.

The actual realization is that most people simple rather work 40h a week (or more) and spend their money on whatever they want to spend their money on.

Specially many of us here, can do so easily. I personally work 80% and could reduce it further if my goal was maximum leisure.

By far the biggest reason it doesn't feel that way, is that housing polices in most of the Western world have been utterly and completely braindead. That and the ever increasing cost of health care as people get ever older and older.

Yes, this is an observation I've made about the illusion of choice in so-called free markets.

In actuality, everyone is doing the same thing and their decisions are already made for them. Companies don't just act evil because they are evil. They act evil because all they can ever be is evil. If they don't, then they lose. So what's left?

Facebook becoming an ad-ridden disaster was, in a way, predestined. Unavoidable.