I have heard that researching and posting cites is preferable to just having a guess about things you’ve “heard”.
And this response did not remotely approach an answer to the question: “Where were all these conservatives worried about when air our grid when air conditioning started becoming popular?”
Given that air conditioning has NEVER been popular in Germany, one wonders why this was brought up.
Since I can’t read German, I must retract my claim that they regulate air conditioning. The implied question, whether the conservative elements of Germany’s society were worried about the load of air-conditioning units on the electrical grid while air-conditioning became popular across the world (from the 30s on), shall remain unaddressed.
~Max
I have heard that many German publications are translated, and even Google Translate does a fairly decent job. I’ve heard that anyway.
Thanks, I tried but honestly I couldn’t even figure out how to find the website for Berlin’s municipal code. I think the way German words are sort of concatenated interferes with my Google-fu. Much less search through German law for a specific kind of regulation, or the debates that went into it.
~Max
I disagree with this. We don’t need people with a preference against change. We need people of all kinds to objectively assess policy matters, without any weight for or against change.
Being against change as a matter of principle is not a rational value; it’s a blind prejudice. The same with being in for of change as a matter of principle. Your evaluation of a particular decision should be objectively based on the circumstances of that particular issue, with no prejudice either for or against change in general.
Sure, it would be great if no one ever erred or had any biases. But the next best thing might be a diversity of mindsets that err or are biased in different directions, to try to balance things out.
The liberal model is to analyze a situation based on evidence and construct a rational policy. That doesn’t require any feeling either for or against change in general for any particular policy. Especially if the change is along the lines of “let’s stop treating X people badly.” There’s no need for input from someone whose motivating ideal is just not to change things.
This is a thread about gasoline vs. alternative fuel sources, not about how we treat people. But thanks for modeling a person with no bias for the rest of us.
Not sure all liberals got this memo! We had some Clean energy projects derailed in California because of NIMBYISM. I think early in the year, Obama criticized liberals for Nimbyism in the housing market too.
Well people are still people everywhere. Nobody wants shit in their backyard.
Same for Cape Wind and similar projects.
A better idea would be to ask why would anyone want to ship heavy freight over a mountain range in the first place. The goals of such shipping could be met more cheaply and efficiently by arranging production and distribution patterns so as to avoid crossing mountain ranges, especially with heavy freight.
In the case of bulk coal or other raw materials out West: Isn’t that what freight trains are for? Not trucks.
An example is Pittsburgh for its first 50 years had better connections with New Orleans (via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers) than with Philadelphia. It was difficult to haul anything over the Allegheny Ridge. The only usable pass over the Alleghenies was at Cumberland, Maryland; there were no good passes in Pennsylvania. This is why the Whiskey Rebellion broke out in western Pennsylvania: freight shipping over the Alleghenies was too difficult and expensive.
Key & Peele did this in reverse.
That’s one of the things that I think often frustrates people on the conservative side of things- often the changes made in the name of environmental reasons has a short-term performance degradation until manufacturers figure it out.
Dishwashers have had a double-whammy- first the phosphates were removed, and then the water use was tightened. Same with washing machines.
Light bulbs were kind of like that too- early CFLs kind of stunk in terms of immediate light- they took a while to warm up and emit the rated output. So if you wanted instant-on light like you were used to, they sucked. LEDs have mostly got rid of that particular issue, but it took a while for them to become cheap and common enough to make a difference.
Cars had the same problem in the early-mid 1980s. Think about the anemic US cars where they slapped emissions controls on existing cars and it wrecked the performance.
I’m not saying I agree with them that nothing should ever change, and old ways are always best, but I do see where their resistance does come from sometimes. I’ve had one too many shitty dishwashers, CFL lights, and the like to believe that the environmental friendliness doesn’t come with some costs.
There’s a King of the Hill episode about this issue re: low-flow toilets. The episode ends without them getting better, but it captures the temporary frustration well.
Low flow toilets were the example that I couldn’t quite remember.
What compounds a lot of these is they’re associated with major appliances/purchases. You buy a toilet, and it’s not like most people are going to pull it and buy a new one and install it in six months because it’s not as good as you’d like. Same with dishwashers, washing machines, cars, etc…
Instead, most people just make do and cuss the legislation that caused the manufacturers to drop half-baked products like this on the market. It’s short-sighted, but end users often don’t have the perspective to be able to see the environmental cost of having a proper flush, or using phosphates in the detergent, or whatever, so the legislation and environmentalism is blamed.
The question I have is whether or not it’s some sort of laziness on the part of manufacturers, or if it’s just one of those things where it takes time to work out the issues.
And then, when the problem or shortcoming IS fixed, they remember only that the early models sucked and won’t accept that the problem’s been fixed, because they haven’t been exposed to the improved models or didn’t recognize them as such (they didn’t notice that a toilet that flushed just fine was a low-flow). There are still lots of people who think that low-flow toilets made and sold now STILL suck.
Or, the mandated items fail, and eventually the market comes up with a better way that it would have come up with anyway, and politicians take credit.
It’s possible that CFL bulbs slowed the adoption of LED by forcing the market down another path for a long time. The early low-flow toilets would often take multiple flushes to work, negating water savings and making owners skeptical of the concept.
Governments should not be in the business of mandating particular technologies or engage in industrial policy.
Yeah it is not like when the government or government institutions ordered the COVID vaccines from Moderna and funded the biggest part of their development. (/s) (the percentage of private help -like from the one from Dolly Parton- was significant but very small compared to the massive government funding and development)
(BTW it is also a “coincidence” that it is mostly guys from the right wing the ones that began to push to get the votes and support of the anti-vaccine people, when until recently it was mostly a non-partizan ignorant effort)
No, they didn’t. 75% of flushes are for liquid waste and there is NO instance of low flow toilets not being sufficient for those. You’d need to flush 10X for solid waste to negate the savings.
It’s almost as if people lose the ability to do simple math when they are tilting at particular windmills.