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Comment Re:Fleeing abusive companies? (Score 1) 257

There is a very distinct difference. In Soviet Russia you could only vote for candidates that will provide laws that support the Communist Party and its economy system. In the US you have a choice which industries get their laws, dependent on the candidates you choose and the industries that back him.

Comment Re:Fleeing abusive companies? (Score 1) 257

That would mean that they wait for elections to happen and then buy the politician. It's the other way around. The politician needs money to get elected in the first place, so he whores himself out to various industries. The various corporations now pick and choose their preferred sock puppet and fund it with money so he can run (sensibly) for an election.

You, as the voter, then get to choose between the various corporations and whose puppet you'd prefer to see in power, i.e. you essentially get to choose what industries get their laws.

Comment Re:My two cents (Score 1) 338

Don't ban it. Don't tax it. Educate people and you won't have to do either.

Lightbulbs as well as high wattage vacuums are not really in the interest of the user. All you have to do is to tell people. People are not stupid. Especially when you tell them how to save money. And this goes directly to their wallets. Both of them. More efficient light sources and vacuum cleaners mean less power used, and less power used means less money spent. Even if the initial cost goes up you can easily break even long, long before the item expires.

If the EU wanted to put their money where their mouth is, they'd promote the efficient solutions and offer tax rebates or subsidies for people using them. It would be far more sensible than 99% of the subsidies they hand out already.

Comment Re:Do the math (Score 1) 338

Approaching the problem from the perspective that EU vacuums use more than the whole of Denmark; a 1000 watt bulb can produce 16 sq feet of marijuana, a cash crop, therefore banning carpet in favor of wood floors throughout the E.U. should solve the problem. Especially since the advent of L.E.D. growlights. Now we can either trade that 1000 watts for 100 or exceed our area to 160 sq.ft. of marijuana and trade the problem for water usage. However with todays technology, we should be able to reuse the unevaporated water from our grow system and measure the nutrients in order to re-add the necessary food to the plants.
Just put my Nobel in the Fed-Ex drop box...

Comment Re:Do the math (Score 1) 338

Anyone here not knowing that? How often have you seen ads for computers sold as "gaming rigs" with $insaneamountof GHz CPUs and a completely outdated graphics card (quite possibly "sharing" its memory with the main mem)? Or how about cameras being announced to have more pixels than there are people on the planet, but when you're looking for information like lenses all you find is a finely printed "interpolated".

People don't know jack about the appliances they buy. And I'd have to be honest, outside of the few areas I consider myself clued in, so do I. Just recently I had to buy a new TV. There were two in the shop that I'd deem, in my cluelessness, identical. Same size, same plugs (mostly), looked the same to me (they were both turned on), just one costing about twice what the other one did. So what do you look for? What does it mean that one of them has 400 Hz and the other one 200? Last time I cared 100Hz was all the craze, but back then TVs still were CRTs.

Not to bore you with my TV purchasing adventures, but it should serve to illustrate the problem people face when buying something. Sure, they could spend hours and hours to go through various tests (provided they can or find one that is not only unbiased but also younger than a year because one thing is certain: No matter what you're going to buy, the various tester companies will only test the crap AFTER you bought it and of course whatever you decided to get is the worst of the flock). But who wants to spend time studying tests where you probably need a crib sheet anyway to understand half the terms used in the vain hope to figure out what they mean? Only to be frustrated because even after you know what they mean you don't know whether they are in any way important to you.

So people go for the easy solution: They look for something they can easily compare. Screen size for TVs, CPU power for computers, Wattage for vacuums.

To change that, limiting wattage is no solution. What could offer one is if the EU started to educate its people about misconceptions like "High wattage vacuums == good". But I guess that would be bad for the industry, and we can't have that. Instead, let's rather patronize the consumers.

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