"Efficiency"
FederalGovCo keeps using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
People like to (as The Queen Of The World likes to say) complicate a cornflake. Case in point: dimmer switches. I've been swapping dimmer switches for simple on/off ones for literally (mumble mumble) decades. It's dead simple.
Except now it's not. Most new light bulbs are LED type, because Congressional Lobbyists for General Electric wanted all of us to pay $5/bulb instead of 50 cents. Thanks ever so much, Congress. But the Twilight Lone experience doesn't end just at sticker shock. Consider the failure points:
Your LED bulbs must be "Dimable". They won't dim if they're not, and you'll pay a premium for this.
Your dimmer switch must be for LED bulbs. It won't work with normal incandescent ones (assuming you can even get these anymore). You will (wait for it) pay a premium for this.
The new dimmer switches are bigger than the old ones. This isn't a problem if you have only one switch in the electrical box; this is a big, big problem (see what I did there?) if you have multiple switches in the same box, covered with a multi switch face plate.
That last one means that there are lights that I simply cannot dim, because I can't swap out an existing on/off switch for one of the new, high-falutin' (and expensive) LED dimmer switches because it simply won't fit.
Gee, thanks for jacking everything up, Congress. Nobody's life, liberty, property, or sanity are safe when you're in session. Jerks.
Borepatch’s complaint won’t sound new or novel to anyone who has ever worked in the trucking industry, as both my brother and myself did for most of our adult lives (he still does, actually). Our friend Don spent years pulling those 53’ trailers all over hell and half of Georgia himself, and recently had been considering renewing his Class A CDL and hitting the road again.
That was kneecapped, though, when he was told at the DMV that in order to get the license renewed it was now legally mandatory for all hopeful truck drivers to attend a state-accredited truck driving school for remedial instruction as a beginner. This, despite Don’s 20-plus years of professional experience behind the big wheel as an OTR owner-operator.
Funny thing about it is, after the law had been instituted, the truck driving school Don initially spoke with suddenly raised its rates from a semi-reasonable 2,000 dollars for a three-month course of instruction to a completely outrageous 6 grand for six months—a tripling of the demanded tariff and doubling of the course length—for no apparent reason other than that now, having been relieved of the “unfair" burden of competing with other schools in a more or less free and open marketplace, the sky is now the limit thanks to the heavy, hidden hand of government interference.
Any bets on whether the trucking schools might have played some part in lobbying for this new requirement and getting it passed into black-letter law, perhaps? No? Thought not.
This kind of low skullduggery is hardly anything new, alas; quite the contrary, it’s one of the very oldest stories there is. I well remember, after deregulation of the airlines back in the late 70s/early 80s, taking frequent advantage of the long-since defunct People Express airline’s one-way fare from Charlotte to Newark of a paltry twenty-nine (!!!) smackeroos—a direct flight, no five-hour layover in Detroit, Phoenix, or Kalamazoo along the way, just a tad less than two hours in the air and BOOM! I’d be grabbing a cab into New York City for another weekend of fun and frolic.
Now that the incremental stealth re-regulation of the airlines has been pretty much accomplished, though, you just try to find yourself a direct, one-way CLT-to-NYC flight at a comparable rate. Or, for that matter, at any price whatsoever, since direct flights are pretty much a thing of the past in the sweaty nightmare that is air travel in Amerika v2.0 nowadays, via any method other than chartered private jet.
PRO TIP: you ain’t gonna.
T’was ever thus. Big Government pokes its prodigious proboscis into every nook, cranny, and corner of our lives based on its claims for ensuring fairness, efficiency, lower prices, and enhanced safety. Are any of those claims supported by reality? Have they ever been, even once?
To ask the question is to answer it. The real question now, the only question, is: how much longer are we going to put up with it?