98 thoughts on “Wednesday Writs: Mowing Through Laws That Blow Edition”

  2. WW1, WW2: I live in CA. I like the stuff in WW1 a lot more than WW2, which kind of seems silly, honestly. I don’t know, though. If you drill into the details, maybe there’s something there.

    Meanwhile 2-stroke engines shove lots of pollutants into the air, and electric equipment works just fine.

    The 2035 goal is very ambitious, to be sure. But maybe we will look back and think “well, maybe not so ambitious as we thought”.Report

      1. Em, I think the key is “small off road engines”, which will remove certain gas powered generators from store shelves, but not all. Basically the cheapest generators will be removed.

        Hopefully Newsome also signed a law making it cheap and easy to install whole house batteries and solar power.Report

        1. “In order to remove the pollution from small gasoline engines we will ban them!”
          (lawn workers bring generators to charge batteries)
          “Ah, well. Nevertheless…”Report

      2. Most larger whole house generators can run off propane, natural gas, diesel or regular gasoline. And the have pollution controls that smaller models lack. There are also a lot of solar systems that can power a whole house and have battery walls for when the sun goes down. SO there are a great number of options.Report

        2. a surprising number of weirdly punitive regulations by governments turn out to be “some dude didn’t like it when people did the thing, and eventually he got into a place where he could stop people doing the thing”.Report

        3. Lots of municipalities near me put restrictions on gas powered machines due to noise issues. The demand for such laws has ticked up with more people working from home. They typically target commercial use only.Report

      2. I remember a time in the 1970s when noise pollution and “aesthetic” pollution (the fight over billboards) was a thing but we seem to have given up on both of those.

        My neighborhood is very loud, and a lot of those noises are the “f you I’m doing what I want” variety (e.g., someone driving a boom car on volume level “11” at 2 am, people with trucks modded to roll coal/be extra loud). During the stay-at-home time of the pandemic it really soured me on where I lived.

        I don’t know that we’d be able to do ANYTHING legislative about noise pollution given the current climate of division, and “think of your neighbors who might be light sleepers or who have babies at home” seems to cut no ice with anyone.Report

        1. Most places have laws on the books about noise and levels and times, but police don’t enforce them.

          Now if by some twist of judicial logic, SCOTUS upholds the TX abortion law, someday you may be able to sue your neighbors for it.Report

  4. WW1: from California’s Central Valley, which has some of the most unhealthy air in the country, where asthma is endemic, but where the efforts to clean up air pollution have had real, measurable results and benefits, despite massive population growth.

    Does this go too far? Maybe. I’d have to see the actual specifics of the law. But lithium ion batteries have really made doing yardwork electrically more practical. And if the end result is smaller lawns and less water usage, maybe that’s a win win. OTOH, I don’t know how you’ll mow all those golf-courses on electric, so maybe there’s a work around.Report

    1. The service my neighborhood uses has solar and battery lawn mowers. Not sure if the could do a golf course, but they handle the public parks and green spaces here just fine.Report

      2. Our battery-burner mower is able to handle maybe a quarter-acre, and it was the biggest battery available in the store, and it takes about a half-hour to charge back up (and that’s the fast charger running off full-voltage house power.)

        wElL jUsT bUy MoRe BaTtErIeS, gAs Is ExPeNsIvE

        Sure, at two-hundred-fifty dollars a shot, which is about sixty gallons of gas.

        Most yard tools have about a half-gallon tank, maybe more which means that one battery costs the same as a hundred fill-ups, and you can certainly do more than a quarter-acre on one tank of gas. And I can fill up all my yard tools at once, versus needing a separate two-hundred-fifty dollar battery for each one. (And buying smaller batteries doesn’t help because manufacturers charge by the unit with only a small increase for higher capacity; a half-capacity battery is about two-thirds the price.)

        (Oh, also that two-hundred-fifty dollar battery is denser than gasoline, so it’s heavier.)

        So if I have four tools that’s a thousand dollars I have to spend on batteries, which translates to four hundred fill-ups; assuming four tools and (conservatively) one fill-up per yard, those batteries end up costing the same as the gas for four hundred yards. Maybe I can do two yards a day if I push, but I also don’t do yards all year long, so let’s assume half-and-half to make it an estimate of a full season of business before I can say “I’m now paying less money for the batteries than it cost me to keep buying gas”.

        And that’s only enough batteries to do the job once; either I need to buy a portable generator to charge them, or I need to run my truck all day to use it as a generator, or I need to buy extra batteries.

        And that’s not including the cost of buying the tools to use the batteries, which is about as costly as the batteries themselves (oh, and, now that gas tools are banned, the tools I did have are valueless, which is a major business asset that has been taken away without compensation.)Report

        1. Oh, hell yeah, this is going to cost money, and a whole lot of it. I bet you people will be buying out the stock of gas powered stuff before it’s all outlawed for sale, and the existing tools will be carefully maintained and repaired for YEARS, rather than just tossed out.

          But electric tools can do the job. Your urban home owner with a 1/4 acre or smaller lot can manage just fine on electric tools (I had a plug in mower for years, did the job fine).

          It’s the rural folks and landscaping companies that are really going to feel the pinch. And I’m betting you will still see gas powered tools, just not with 2 stroke engines. I mean, companies in CA are nothing if not creative when it comes to getting around CA laws.Report

          1. I have a handful of electric/battery tools for around the house, but I can’t imagine the chainsaw tech is remotely useful for my ‘property’ needs… I could see it perhaps working for your suburban hedge cutter, but I can go through a full tank of gas bucking up one tree… and the power needed?

            A four stroke chainsaw? Are there any? Would it have been better if there were before passing the law?

            Are all the big ZT mowers exempted? I think my ZT is 4 stroke, but it’s on the edge of being a small engine with separate gas/oil, so I’m not sure… but no way I’d just stop using it without a viable alternative.

            The article is pretty sparse, but this law has to be loaded with exemptions, right? I mean, sure suburban homeowners could likely comply, but CA is a pretty Industrial Land-Use state.Report

            1. I had an electric chainsaw when I lived in rural Tennessee for a couple of years, it served me well enough — but it wouldn’t have been strong enough to fell an actual tree of any substantial size.

              As an aside: taking down bigger trees can be dangerous. There’s some techniques that aren’t necessarily obvious to the casual user. Get educated about how to cut down a tree that you need a chainsaw to cut through because if you need a chainsaw at all, it’s probably big enough to, maybe not necessarily kill you, cause you permanent damage (especially if it dislodges the chain on your saw while it’s moving).Report

              1. “but it wouldn’t have been strong enough to fell an actual tree of any substantial size”

                This is rather my point, no? That plus having to work in the woods for hours at a time. I get it, I have simple electric tools for ‘little’ jobs. Not all jobs are little and my experience with electric tools suggests that they don’t scale. I mean, the torque required for the common electric power drill is manageable and that seems to be the sweet-spot.

                That’s why I simply assume that we’re not hearing about all the exemptions… because if they aren’t there now, they will be.Report

            2. As far as I know, all ride-on mowers are four-stroke these days.

              Internal-combustion-engine technology is another one of those things that’s just been quietly, as it were, getting better every year, and the ones we have now are so much better than they used to be and it’s just “oh, well, of course that’s what things are like” because it didn’t happen all at once.

              “The article is pretty sparse, but this law has to be loaded with exemptions, right?”

              In the article it says that it’ll go into effect three years from now, with a possibility of indefinite extensions if “regulators” don’t feel there is a workable alternative in place for these small gas engines.Report

              1. Makes sense… likely it’s the nexus of needing to be human carried vs. machine mounted.

                So all the ire against leaf blowers in suburbia vs. not caring about chainsaws in the country.

                Fine by me, my leaf blower is battery electric any way (still noisey as heck) 🙂

                A noise ordinance dressed as Green action. Baptised NIMBYism.Report

              2. Other than Vogtle, the only active project is an effort by the DOE and some Utah utilities to build a small modular reactor plant at INL in Idaho. DOE put up the federal land, so the state can’t complain, and preempted a bunch of Snake River water rights for cooling.

                Still looks like it will come in at about a decade, and $8B per GW of capacity. Personally, I’m betting the utilities are forced out by their owners, who will decline to take on the eventual financial burden.Report

          2. From the looks of things, the law has plenty of wiggle room; it’s three years to implementation rather than immediately, and it even has “when regulators deem it feasible” as a cop-out for when it turns out that landscapers don’t have the capital to replace all their equipment and manufacturers can’t make a decent man-portable four-stroke.Report

            1. Ah, yes, so it’s mostly signaling.

              My prediction: This will wind up impacting consumer grade tools, and “professional” grade tools will continue to be gas powered (although perhaps only as 4-stroke engines, since there isn’t really a good way to clean up a 2-stroke that I’m aware of). So if you want the gas powered tool, you need to show a business license for a landscaping company, or be an employee of a grounds team for a large corporate (or other) campus.Report

        2. Get tools which all use the same battery. My chainsaw, lawnmower, blower, and weed whacker all use the same. Weight of the battery might be heavier than the gas it would use, but the engine is lighter so it nets to the same or lighter. Noise is a lot less. Pollution is zero. I never need to worry about winterizing anything or those stupid carbonators breaking because we’re putting ethanol is a small engine.

          Now the real counter argument is I can’t mow the entire lawn without a recharge break (I have 3 batteries). Chainsaw… IDK. It burns through batteries pretty quick but there’s a strong argument that if it’s out then I’m too tired to use it safely.Report

    2. Ever since the air pollution laws were first created, every single regulation has been lampooned in editorials as silly and not sufficient and even counterproductive.
      Outlawing backyard incinerators, scrubbers on power plants, catalytic converters, vapor recovery nozzles, wood burning fireplaces…they were all silly, all pointless, all going to crash the economy.

      But in the end, they all worked. The air is much cleaner now than it was then and the economy healthier.Report

          1. Diablo Canyon has been slowly becoming less dispatchable (because jellyfish), and requires a minimum $4B cooling system upgrade in order to conform to the new California regulations on heat discharge into the coastal ecology. No ocean-cooled thermal plant — nuclear, natural gas, or coal — is really feasible at that location any more.

            One of the too-little appreciated things about the Western Interconnect is that pretty much all thermal power generation is going to have to go eventually. Possibly Texas as well — during their last big drought, they came very close to having to shut down two of their four nukes because of lack of cooling water.Report

            1. “Possibly Texas as well — during their last big drought, they came very close to having to shut down two of their four nukes because of lack of cooling water.”

              During the freeze, they had to shut one down because the turbines couldn’t handle the cold. Absolutely no provisions for cold weather in our amazing unregulated hellhole.Report

            1. It’s not. Too expensive and too slow to build.

              Their price per kilowatt isn’t competitive, even with the massive subsidies they get, and it takes decades to build one. And even then, they cost three times as much as “already too expensive” by the time it’s added up.

              I keep hearing about mythical “new designs” but they’re vaporware. Nobody wants to risk that kind of money and time commitment on a nuke plan that will produce power that costs three or four times the prevailing rate by the time it’s built.Report

            2. As Michael notes, it’s not so much about the plant being nuclear, as making sure they have additional generating capacity online when the plant shuts down. That’s where I worry about coal or NG plants being used to make up the difference (either CA building them, or buying the power from other states that use them).Report

      2. Reducing several forms of air pollution causes more deaths by COVID19. As we must, at all costs, reduce deaths by COVID19, I’m certain you, as a liberal, will agree that we should force everyone to start smoking and inhaling nitrous oxide on the regular.

        After all, what’s a 1.1% absolute risk reduction? Something we should make mandatory as a condition for employment (read: getting fed), or ban like Scandinavia has?Report

    3. Gas outdoor equipment is the new plastic straws. They aren’t actually causing the problem, banning them won’t make things much better, it’ll be a massive inconvenience, the workarounds will make things worse than before, but it’s a highly visible Thing That Can Be Done and so that’s what’s happening, and what the hell it’s not like the lawn staff votes in US elections right?Report

    4. Maybe Tesla will manufacture an all-electric rider mower with lengthy enough battery life that it can be useful on a golf course. It could have a “ludicrous” mode that cuts greens really short.Report

  5. WW1: I own an electric. It works… but I’m good with doing stuff, running out of battery charge, then waiting a few hours for them to recharge.

    WW3: Donna was elected in 2000. She was re-elected in 2006 and 2014. Current term expires in 2022. She was unopposed for election in 2014. So she’s been making stuff up as she goes along for 21 years.

    On paper I guess she looks fine. https://ballotpedia.org/Donna_Scott_DavenportReport

  6. When WWI went into effect, did it negate a whole bunch of “your lawn must be X kept up” local regulations?

    Because if there still are “you must not let your lawn start looking shaggy” regulations on the books, WWI is going to be ignored.Report

    1. Honestly I’d happily trade “perfect lawn” for “lawn service causing lots of noise every day of the week between 10 am and 1 pm during the work-from-home-enforced time”

      I have a reel-type lawnmower. It works. My lawn isn’t perfect but it does what it needs to. I also have a battery (electric) yard trimmer which also is useful but not perfect.

      What I’d like to see banned are the leaf blowers, though someone argued with me that expecting people to rake leaves was ableist. I don’t even know. (I find holding a loud, heavy piece of equipment more difficult than operating a rake is.)Report

      1. expecting people to rake leaves was ableist

        This is a pretty good trick to use to argue against anything. Just wrap it in Social Justice Language.

        Kellogg’s is undergoing a strike and this got injected into the debate:

        The general theory at the time was that this person was trying to distract from the strike.

        Whenever you see the injection of Social Justice Language into a topic such as “lawn care”, do a double-check to ask “is this an op?”

        But, like, don’t end up in “everything is an op” crazytown. That would be bad. And ableist.Report

        1. you can go to far into the “not everything is an op” side, like the guy here who insisted that he’d seen “OK sign is actually a White Power signal” back in the Nineties…Report

      2. Rakes work better if you have flat lawn. For getting in/around bushes, or leaves on stone pebbles, a leave blower is a lot better. Now my brother uses his blower on his flat roof top, a rake would scratch it and not do as good a job.Report

  7. WW2: One person’s ridiculous micromanagement is another person’s social engineering to encourage what they see as right thought. A lot of what liberals like about how people behave in the Nordic countries is basically decades of subtle and not so subtle encouragement in a certain direction.Report

      1. Possibly.

        But the Republican jurists are every bit as capable as Republican legislators of pivoting on a dime from “Deregulation!” to “Well, hold on now…”

        Like I mentioned elsewhere, we are seeing the convergence of the organs of the state all bending to support the policy goal of the Party.Report

  9. WW7: Trying to legally define what constitutes consent is always going to be a third rail topic. That is why politicians want to avoid it.Report

  11. Ww6. If someone with a disease like ALS wants to die on their own terms I’m fine with it. There need to be protections and all that. Not coincidentally my SILs BIL just died of ALS in his 40s with two teen age kids. It sounded like he gave up at the end, so in a way he chose to go.Report

  12. My son’s fashion sense tended to find him browsing the “girls section.” He liked bright colored leggings to wear under shorts and they didn’t make these “for boys.” He didn’t even notice.

    Now they do make them “for boys.” They’re different… thicker, no pockets, cut slightly different in the crotch, reinforced knees. And they’re cheaper now, despite being arguably of heavy dutier fabric.

    Funny how that worked out.Report

      1. I see what you tried to do there. You used Haidt’s categories to make your point as if to defend yourself against the accusation of not understanding conservatives. But you did it exactly the way he said liberals do, by underestimating conservatives’ commitment to Care and Fairness. And you did it while analyzing what is, apparently, a fake story. So you don’t understand your opposition’s positions, or his thinking, or Haidt? Wow, that’s amazing.Report

        1. I was pointing out that his foundations seem to be in a lot of great tension, and the result is a bad statement that should be beneath pretty much anyone.

          You always seem to mistake this pointing out of dynamic tension and the bad policy that results as a lack of understanding. Which I’ll grant is consistent of you. But it also means you gravely misunderstand me.Report

      1. In that case, I stand corrected!

        Interesting question: If such a bill were proposed, what percentage of Texas Republicans would vote for it, do you suppose?

        I bet a clear majority.Report

        1. Legislators are able to propose bills, so if none of them have, that’s an indication of how popular the idea is. I mean, I’m sure some would support it rather than risk falling behind on the all-important pagan goddess issue.Report

      2. He’s the Legislative Director for Texas State Rep. Bryan Slanton. so he is a GOP political director, just not THE state political director. And as the LD for a state house member – yeah he has legislative priorities.

        Up your google skills man.Report

  14. I am going to issue a partial defense of WW2. It might be kind of silly but there is no reason for any toy to be gendered a toy for boys or a toy for girls and it is ultimately harmless because, toy stores can just comply by having all the toys together.

    More harmful for children and parents is the decision of U.S. News and World report to” rank all the elementary schools and middle schools in the nation. This does nothing to improve education and the only people I can see benefitting from it are real estate agents. It is purely protected speech, I am not stating it should be outlawed but it does provide more harm.Report

    2. For “What causes more harm”, judges would also have accepted “Active shooter drills”, or even “Being arrested and jailed for crimes that don’t exist by government officials acting on a mission from God”.Report

    3. Any specific law can be argued to be a good thing. The thing is after you get past a certain number, it takes a compliance officer to know what all of them are, or maybe even an entire department. At some point you’re hobbling small business in favor of large.

      It’s like any specific snow flake can’t harm someone but enough freezes stuff.Report

    4. Saying “no reason” mistakes the theoretical for the practical.

      Why do toy stores do it? Because soooooo many parents and kids and grandparents and aunts and uncles and family friends think in those terms when buying toys for kids. It’s how a LOT of customers prefer to shop.

      That’s a pretty powerful reason.

      Doesn’t make it right or harmless or anything else. But it is a very real reason.

      And I say this as someone who actively resists all this gendering as both a parent and a teacher. I think it’d be a beautiful thing if it all went away. And yet… I wouldn’t support a law to make it so.

      And I’m curious about the specifics… can you have separate sports and doll aisles? Do LEGOs and LEGO Friends have to be together? What happens if you put all the dolls and doll accessories together and the section suddenly has a pinkish hue?Report

        1. If I were the poor soul charged with compliance I’d go for alphabetical. Of course the ironic part is that the only way to tell a girls toy from a boys toy for enforcement purposes is to rely on stereotypes. Maybe you just leave everything exactly as it is and remove any signs that specify.Report

          1. You have to rebrand and repackage. Take Legos. in the “regular” line there are Lego City, Lego Ninjago, Lego Super Heros, and Lego Star Wars (as 4 exammples). All in red, blue or black boxes with pictures of their contents doing whatever they are supposed to do. Action oriented. Stereotypically “Boy.”

            Lego Friends? All pink boxes with the pictures of the “friends” figures – which are not standard Lego Mini figs – sitting together having tea or reading or making some food, no matter what the emphasis of the set actually is. Relationship oriented. Stereotypically “girl.”

            Moving them all together won’t solve this problem.Report

            1. Stereotypes are not a “source of truth”, but they do generally exist for a reason.

              I would guess gender areas exist because if you’re buying one [x] toy, then the store would like your eyes to rest on the one next to it and get it as well. Or alternatively, they’d like to reduce your shopping time.Report

              2. I would bet that any significantly sized retailer has reams of data showing just who buys what and when and where they do it. But this is modern social justice for you. Incapable of distinguishing cause and effect.Report

            2. Look at your own analysis though. It relies solely on stereotypes. If I’m the toy store’s lawyer I say you’re the one projecting your own stereotypes, not the store. There’s no objective standard you’re following, and this action versus social and color coding thing is something made up, post hoc. My guess is the rationale the stores follow is what is proven to make the most money.

              But that’s what you get with bad laws to solve problems that don’t actually exist. It’s unusual for a commercial speech reg to be held unconstitutional but I actually think there’s a decent chance this could be given lack of rational basis.Report

            3. What, exactly, is the problem the law is trying to solve? Do kids really, honestly believe that they are not allowed to shop in the other gender’s aisle? Is there a gate, or guard, checking for presented gender and limiting access? Is there marketing in the aisles or on the toys suggesting that boys should be shamed to play with girl toys, and girls can’t handle boy toys?

              Or is this a parenting issue? Do we really want the law to craft regulation for toy stores in order to try and subvert how parents nominally treat gender?Report

    5. In practice: they’ll delete the “Girls’ Toys” section, and declare the used-to-be-Boys’-Toys section the “Toys For Everybody” section. In the name of gender equality we shall erase the female gender!Report

  15. WW1: IIRC, other states have a choice of following either the federal standards, or the California standards. Several states in the PNW and NE have chosen to adopt the California standards. However, that may apply only in the case of vehicle emissions. Having tougher standards doesn’t matter if the states still don’t meet the EPA standards in practice.

    The next time any of the western states are evaluated for compliance, they will all fall woefully short on both ozone and fine particulates under EPA regulations. There are no exemptions for forest fires, and the smoke haze across all of them has been horrendous for two years. Front Range Colorado, where I live, has had 50-60 days of ozone violations so far this year. Almost as bad for fine particulates, and this was a good year compared to 2020. The deal still requires the states to take actions. If they don’t, the EPA will dictate. California is probably not the last western state that will ban small gas-powered engines. They’ll all also be clamping down on big diesel engines, and the oil and gas industry where there is one.Report

  16. Isn’t having a gender-neutral toy section already standard practice? Where else would they put all the gender-neutral toys? If they wanted to ban boys’ and girls’ toys sections and require retailers to mix them all together, that would at least do something. I don’t see what problem this is attempting to solve.

    I guess maybe the legislators had discovered, to their shock and horror, that they had a day with absolutely no moral grandstanding scheduled, and had to find something to fill it with.Report

    1. Have you been in a toy section of a major retailer lately? They don’t have labels on the aisles saying “Boy” or “Girl” but they very much sort and segregate toys into gender areas. Those Lego Friends I mentioned up thread are almost never with the rest of the Legos – they are with the dolls, which are carefully sorted so the G.I. Joe and He Man (yes thats STILL a thing) are on a different aisle. The only place with anything close to gender neutral toy selections by mixing is the baby toy aisle or section, and there packaging is still pink or blue.Report

      1. It’s less that they have “Boys’ Toys” and “Girls’ Toys”, it’s more that they have “Toys” and “Girls’ Toys”. And that fits with a lot of other American retail; people who say they want Gendered Stuff actually mean they want Stuff Specifically For Women And Girls.Report

      2. Stores typically put a lot of effort into the placement of goods to increase sales. The division could be based on stereotypes, but it could just as easily be because the consumers who buy He-Man are more likely to buy G.I. Joe products if they see them.Report

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