361–370 of 410 posts
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During COVID I reported a bajillion eBay sellers for selling masks above MSRP, they did nothing.
Anti-price-gouging laws are an incredibly bad idea.
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Creating more supply is hard. Jacking up the price is easier. Sure, someone will see the opportunity and undercut your inflated price, but you will have made your money by then and there will be a lot of collateral damage in the interim.
In what way does a higher equilibrium price cause collateral damage? Can you explain what collateral damage you're envisioning?
But who am I to question the wisdom of the free market…
Now do fraudulent flash drives on Amazon!
Emissions tests are a poverty tax that play a strong role in punishing people trying to buy affordable old cars and either pushing the demand curve for new cars, or pushing poor people into illegality or carlessness.
The poverty tax is making it required to have a vehicle to participate in society. Make better public transit options so owning a car is optional.
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I think the reason is (any diesel mechanics around please correct me if I'm wrong) that modern engines stripped of their emissions equipment will pollute a lot more than old engines.
I understand the reasoning and am all for mitigating pollution. It may be frustrating for consumers when these systems have potential to decrease economy, performance, and reliability while increasing cost and maintenance.
But, at least in Europe, diesel options in passenger cars are mostly gone, most SUVs nowadays are either gas powered (with a particulate filter, of course, so another thing that can go wrong) or some kind of gas/electric hybrid.
Now do fraudulent flash drives on Amazon!
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I agree, but governments think otherwise (and inconsistently with their acceptable limits). https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_absorption_rate Can be a handy tool to selectively remove vendors from the market (which may be what occurred here). If there was a problem with interference, I really wished our regulator would require the telecoms to disa…
I know they do have limits, but I don't believe any government or private entity has linked absorption to any kind of health impact at levels anywhere close to the published SAR limits. These are likely just out of an abundance of caution just in case, not because they actually think harm will come. Frankly that's just fine, I wish they'd do that more - especially with new chemicals. > If there was a problem with int…
Then some regulatory body ossifies into some role, and then we end up with some regulations.
Some useful but not doing enough (lead, fly ash from powerplants, plus basically any emissions regulations via the EPA, huge political battleground, insane lobbying, etc), some that have benefits but are doing too much and in a very wrong way (environmental reviews and zoning regulations which make construction permitting process a non-deterministic nightmare with bonus added possibility for endless legal challenges, but no outright bans of course ... you can try to apply for whatever you want, and local democracy, council, judiciary will just happen to say no. how fair, right!? ... of course, makes no sense, since persistent/rich builders end up getting approved eventually. democracy, fairness, yey!) And again, of course, public good projects, from railways/subways to nuclear power plants, where there are no special interests pushing for (and plenty of against), that simply don't get built (or carry an enormous premium of wasted time and "reviews").
And then chemicals and RF. Since there's a clear and obvious good in having nice radios (in phones, laptops, headphones, doorbells, etc) and a very obvious problem of interfere, it very quickly got the FCC to manage it. (And sometimes it's too slow to allow or free up spectrum for non-exclusive usage, and there are sometimes conflicts, but in general it's clear, fine, easy to measure, great.) And then the health concerns are added on top of it, and it's very much not clear WTF should happen. How to prove safety? With 5G we have had a total crusade by motivated folks trying to prove it does at least something bad. Kills/warms insects, tracks each and every one of us, and of course causes cancer. And ... it seems the sheer momentum of functionality simply marched through this soup of uncertainty.
And it seems something very similar happens with "chemicals". Obviously working with them in factories almost always causes a lot of harm, but we allow it, because it's very useful (and weak labor laws, and no compensatory tariffs), and there's simply no clear way to prove safety.
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Which makes sense. It's not like pollution stays confined within the track area.
Dedicated race cars don't have emissions controls, though. For some reason, only race cars that drive on both roads and tracks are regulated.
Sorry to sound stupid but what is the point of an emissions defeat device?
Often times it's the removal of a complicated system that is failure prone - less filters to get clogged and stuff like that. Edit: people generally don't do things for the "sole purpose of polluting more" it's often functional. Many diesel drivers don't like others who roll coal as the image is bad in general - heavy equipment will often produce black smoke because the engine is being worked for a purpose and it's l…