The Elephant in your Back Yard

Would you be surprised to discover an elephant in your back yard?  And what if, on discovering it, you learned it had been there for several years?

I imagine your reaction might be similar to what I felt after I finished reading a short publication I received a couple of days back entitled Hack Your Showerhead: Ten Ways to Get Big Government Out of Your Home.


What I found most amazing was the variety of ways in which government regulations affects us and our lives without our even being aware of it.  The unfortunate thing about this is that we often have a tendency to blame other the wrong people for the consequences of these regulations.

One of the ten ways that Jeffery Tucker, the author of this article, sees government regulations affecting us is in the shorter life that many --maybe most-- electric appliances have today, in comparison to the way they were a few years back.

I'm sure you've heard the complaint: "They just don't make [insert name of appliance] like they used to!" and then the complainant goes on to blame the greedy manufacturers for cutting down on the quality presumably in the interests of making more profit.

As Tucker sees it, these manufacturers are under the pressure of government pressures and regulations to implement a series of changes to their products, some of which actually make them perform worse than they did before without adding any material benefit to the end user.  So, in order to comply with the government presser so that they can stay in business, they are forced to substitute parts and materials that will meet the government requirements and yet will not increase the price beyond what their customers are prepared to pay.   All too often the consequence of this is to use cheaper parts which will wear out faster than the older ones.

Tucker explains what happened to air conditioners:

Manufacturers are permitted to make units that use only so much electrical power. They must choose among the features in which to allocate this energy ceiling. The lighter, “more efficient” parts tend to break more easily than they once did. This means that you have to replace the units more often than you did in the past. 

And that's just air conditioners.

Adding Tucker's article to my own observations over the years I have started to wonder how many of all the problems we face in the world today, ranging from wide spread diseases, to aberrant social psychopaths, to threats of depleted resources, to animals in danger of extinction, to hunger, to wars, etc. could be traced back to government interference, intervention or stimulation of some sort or the other, regardless of how well intentioned it may have been.

This suspicion is not because I believe that everybody in government has some evil intention to make the world into a living hell for us, but rather that people, both those who are in the government and those to look to the government to solve problems have too much faith in the ability of these people to find solutions.

The people in government are not superhuman before they go to work for the government, nor do they become endowed with any special abilities once they enter the government.  Why then, do we, and they believe that they can solve problems which supposedly couldn't be solved before the government became involved?

So if you discover you have an elephant which you don't want in your garden, do you then look around for another elephant to deal with it, or is it better to consider other alternatives such as finding a new place to plant your garden, start planting things which elephants don't like, or some more imaginative option?

Fighting Ecology

Michael Phillips has written a blog encouraging us to fight Ecology, in which he urges us to do things which are inconvenient for ecologists.

While I am a sort of rebel at heart, and have committed some utterly stupid things in my life because I resented being told what to do, I don't feel I can wholeheartedly endorse Phillip's position.

When he points out that some of the things which have been done in the name of ecology which have produced negative effects, such as the increase in the world's affilictions for malaria in underdeveloped countries because DDT has been banned worldwide, I agree.

But when it comes to increasing the use of Styrofoam simply because ecologists are trying to ban them, I feel that is senseless.

Banning airports, which restrict result in travel restrictions, and congestion in airports, may not be convenient to Phillips, but at the same time, I believe that if there are costs which affect others in expanded airports (such as noise, air pollution, greater car traffic congestion) these costs need to be met and paid for by the people who directly benefit from the expansion.

It is not always easy to get the benefit users to pay for all the costs of a particular service, and it is quite likely that some of the costs may not even be known until many years after something has been put into place, but that doesn't mean that we need to place roadblocks into the path of development simply because we cannot foresee the dangers which lie in the future.

In the end I object to and resist laws imposed by politicians based on vested interests, either for or against specific interests and I fear we have far too many laws which do exactly this.

Somewhere I remember reading about a proposition that ALL LAWS should automatically expire after a certain period of time unless they are specifically renewed by the legislators. This could go a long way in at least providing a way to escape from many of the senseless laws that do more harm than good, or benefit only specific vested interests which are not apparent when the laws were passed.

7 million miles of toothpaste wasted!

There's a web site that deals exclusively with toothpaste, if you're interested in picking up a lot of trivia about a very common household commodity: Toothpasteworld - World's Largest Toothpaste Collection. Also see Toothpaste in Wikipedia

Colgate, Proctor and Gamble, GlaxoSmithKline, and Unilever, which manufacture the major brands sold around the world, are among the largest companies on the globe today.

If you stop to think about it, there is an incredible about of toothpaste consumed every day.

I don't know if anyone has ever tried to calculate the actual consumption but let's make a rough attempt. In almost every ad and photo you see of toothpaste in use, a strip of about 1inch is spread on the brush. At this moment, the world population is somewhere over 6.8 billion people. If we suppose that only 25% of the people in the world use toothpaste, and that they only brush one time per day, the world consumption of toothpaste is a strip which measures some 26, 830 miles EVERY DAY!

That's more than one complete circumference of the globe.

What's the point of this?

From my own experience, I've discovered that you don't need 1" of toothpaste to effectively brush your teeth. In fact, I even have my doubts if you really need it at all, so long as you do brush your teeth regularly. But, in my own case I have found that just 1/4" of toothpaste does a very nice and refreshing job of cleaning in my mouth.

So, if the world's population were to reduce their use of this product to the level I have found effective, we could conserve all the resources and energy which is needed to make 20,123 miles of toothpaste each day. The annual savings would me more than 7 million miles of toothpaste.

Just one simple, small change which is within the capacity of everyone without any cost or inconvenience could add up to significant impact.