It may seem slightly above inconsequential, but parking. Parking is a great example of arbitrary rules having longstanding effects. (Really neat video on parking regulations - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8)
As for more inconsequential. Leafblowers Leafblowers immediately banned unless they are
Less than 20db
Zero emission
ONLY USED AFTER 9AM WHY IN GODS NAME ARE YOU LEAF-BLOWING AT 8AM ON A SATURDAY
Yeah no kidding, this guy uses decibel scale but doesn't understand decibel scale. I fucking hate leaf blowers but 55dB seems like a reasonable starting point to me. It won't even barely reach your yard from a neighbor's.
WHY IN GODS NAME ARE YOU LEAF-BLOWING AT 8AM ON A SATURDAY
These people are usually the sorts who rise at 5am regardless of day and have become bored after 3 hours awake. If they think about it at all, they believe that everyone who is not yet up by 8am is a fool who ought to be out of bed, thus that is the perfect time to make noise.
As to why they rise at 5am, take your pick from: i) Old and unable to sleep for long periods - Will be asleep again in an armchair by 11am once they've gone back inside; ii) Military bearing or wannabe - Probably has reveille.wav for an alarm; iii) Abject a-hole who gets a kick out of it. Honourable mention: iv) someone with no choice under direction from one of the above.
You forgot v) collaborates internationally for work, requiring them to be awake early to maximize overlapping hours in their workday.
But even I know not to do noisy shit outside until at least 10. Those few quiet hours in the morning where it seems I’m the only person alive are to drink coffee and cherish.
I'm guilty of 8am yardwork, but mostly mowing in the hottest part of summer at the coolest part of the day. I'm also guilty of 8pm yardwork when it's just the only time I can find to get it done. I only mow once every 2-4 weeks depending on how much my grass has grown, so I figure that balances it out somewhat
Never live in the japanese countryside. Work starts between 5 and 6am every day (sunrise is before 4:30am at it's earliest where I live). By 9am in August, it's already getting ridiculously hot for working outside.
Seriously, I feel like one of those Rubik's cube champions looking at my yoghurt from all possible dimensions trying to find out if it turned to cheese or not.
I would go with: Remove expiration dates entirely. Because it's not an expiration date, it's a "best before" date. Which when you think about it, it's true that food is "best before" literally any future date you put on the label.
Most of the factors that will cause food to spoil are things not under the control of the companies that package the food. How cold do you keep your fridge at? How long did it take for you to transport the food from the store to your fridge? What was the temperature that day? How long did you have it before you break the seal and start using it? How long was the food outside of your fridge? etc. etc.
Those things are just invented by a marketing department to encourage people to throw out food so they have to buy more. There are no regulations on it, they just put whatever date they think will maximize their profits.
You buy fresh fruit and vegetables (the things that will spoil faster than anything else you buy) there is no expiration date. How do you manage? Look at it, and maybe give it a smell test. The same applies for all food really.
"Best before" dates are a scam that results in food being thrown out prematurely. Grocery prices are too high, we shouldn't allow these kinds of shenanigans to drive prices higher.
First: Yes, best before dates are sometimes arbitrary depending on the product and where you live.
However, basically anything with a package sold commercially has been tested for taste/feel/look over time to determine when quality degrades.
If you make cookies you don't want people only buying up 1+ yr old boxes and thinking your cookies are just supposed to taste like solidified disks of keyboard powder. Having a best before date tells people when your product tastes as intended and when it's only worth buying from the discount bin.
It's fair to say sometimes marketing bullshit influences that date.
Second: Expiry dates are a real thing, at least where I'm from. Fridge/freezer temperatures are meant to be within specific ranges and there are food safety regulations around how long certains items can be outside of those ranges - like for transport or during prep.
Expiry dates are based on testing the development of bacteria colonies/degradation of the ingredients in an average of settings one would expect those products to go through.
Just because something says it's expired doesn't necessarily mean it's unsafe, though. Except: in a commercial kitchen it is illegal to sell expired ingredients because of the testing that goes into determining that date.
I've worked as a chef, have taken multiple food safety courses, had good relationships with food inspectors. And I've worked in a production kitchen where the products were sent to testing facilities for determining the dates we put on the labels.
Even if the best before dates are removed, you need to have A DATE to reference the age of the product. Maybe it wont spoil in one week, but if its been 2 or 3 I would really like to know.
In the UK they have two categories. One is Best Before and the other is Use By. A product will have one or the other but not both. One is a recommendation and the other is a command. And out of date cracker is different to out of date raw chicken. (eggs have a Display Until and a Use By date on the same pack).
Laptop keyboard layouts. There is no reason they should be so different.
Specifically, those laptops that have full-sized left and right arrows, but half-sized up and down arrows - those earn 1 week of jail time for the CEO per unit sold.
While we're at it, the power button must be in the same place on all laptops.
I just want every keyboard to have a home and end button (I'm a coder, and my current keyboard doesn't have them, and I have to set a binding in every. single. thing.)
The Sims 2 had wonderful keyboard shortcuts for toggling walls and jumping between floors via Home and End and Page up and Page Down respectively and this was carried through to The Sims 4
A pretty-much arbitrary system based on a standard letter size of 8.5 in x 11 in, with multiples and fractions thereof. It lacks the critical √2 aspect ratio, so pages designed for one size have the wrong proportions when scaled up or down.
There are basically no requirements for maintaining trademarks. If a company owns a name they can use that name and branding forever, no matter how false it becomes, no matter how much the business or product changes, they can keep the name. This shouldn't be the case.
If an ice cream company is named after their two founders, the company shouldn't be able to keep using their names after they're no longer involved. But under current laws they can.
A glass company can build its reputation on making heatproof glass, then change the glass so its no longer heatproof, while still selling it under the same name. This is unjust.
Companies should be forced to rebrand upon major changes. Current trade mark laws are fundamentally misleading.
The point of trademarks is to avoid market confusion.
MTV didn't instantly eliminate all of it's programming and created new programming overnight. They had reality TV shows playing alongside music videos in the 90s. There are some people that might like a reality show that was on MTV when they were playing music videos, then suddenly the name of the company changes because they don't play music and those people can't find the show they like? Even though it's still on, still being made by the same company, but under a different name because curmudgeons don't think it's appropriate that a company with the letter M in it's name isn't focused on music?
Trademarks are about people being able to know which company they're buying from. The name of the company is relatively arbitrary. You could start a company making computers and give it an arbitrary name like I don't know "Apple". then people will associate the quality of the computers with that arbitrary name "Apple". Well you could if someone didn't do exactly that already. It's not so much the name it's the consistency that matters most.
And many names we just kind of forget their origins because they're irrelevant to what the company now does. Does Motorolla have to change it's name because they no longer make record players for cars? Does DC have to rebrand because very few of their comics are about detectives? KFC can't call themselves that because a vast majority of their restaurants aren't in Kentucky?
I'd actually go the other way if anything. Make it illegal for a company to change it's name. Facebook promotes eating disorders to teenagers? Sorry you aren't changing your name to Meta, you can't do bad shit and erase that negative brand association by re-branding. You want your brand to be considered good? Then do better.
I like this. It's stupid that LA has the Lakers... because LA is known for it's lakes? They also have the Dodgers... yeah because people are always dodging streetcars in LA?
The MTV thing though... I think they've already made it so the M doesn't stand for anything now. They removed the "Music Television" part off of their logo anyway.
Basketball:
"Soon it was commonplace for entire teams to change cities in search of greater profits. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don't allow music.
The Raiders moved from Oakland to LA back to Oakland, no-one seemed to notice."
TV remotes, computer speakers, car radios, etc must have two sets of volume up / volume down controls. One for upper volume limit, and one for the lower.
Now I can hear what the characters are whispering to eachother, without waking up the entire apartment complex when there's a gunshot on screen.
Or hear the quiet parts of music when I'm driving without blowing my eardrums out when the contrasting high energy part kicks in.
Do I not amplify the background noise when I turn it up myself? I think they're looking more for a "variable volume" option rather than any actual audio engineering
It frustrates me to no end that you can customize audio levels for vocals, music, sound effects, etc in video games, but you can't individually customize anything volume-wise on a TV.
To branch off from this, can i be the regulator for anyone using speaker phone in public/shops for 1v1 conversations by holding the phone next to their face to talk and walking around.
(Although 8 and 12 aren’t coprime, and he tears open three bags of buns, meaning if he had just bought three packs of hot dogs and two bags of buns he’d be fine.)
“Coprime” is the operative qualifier of the original comment. You can’t do what Steve Martin did with coprime amounts of buns and dogs because they can never evenly go into one another. You’ll always have leftovers.
Packaging for supermarket products should have what the product is big and the branding small. Not the other way around.
Oh. Sound mixing on movies/tv shows should be such that voice lines are always perfectly audible even on shitty speakers. Make actors e n u n c i a t e like they did in the 30s. Christopher Nolan has a lot to answer for, turning all of media into mumblecore chief among those things.
Streaming sites should have options like some video games where you can choose what type of speakers you are listening through. Because I do have nice 5.1 speakers, but I don't always want to use them. Because they are loud as fuck lol.
Movies (and even most video games) make me so angry with that kind of stuff. You want an artificially tailored experience that only works with a zillion-dollar sound system? Fine, you can make it an optional soundtrack that only kicks in with those systems. But the default audio mix needs to be intelligible even on my phone's speakers.
Video games are annoying because often you can't hear anything over the explosions music during the opening cutscenes, but at least you CAN fix it in the settings. Movies, yeesh, you have to rely on your TV's crap postprocessing.
The technology for this has existed for 20+ years and is actually fairly common. It's often referred to as dynamic range compression. I think the chief complaint here is that it needs to be more accessible. Pre-applying it would mess up too many use cases.
LEDs on electronics need either a maximum brightness or an adjustable brightness. I have taken to covering the LEDs on charger bricks with Sharpie/tape (often multiple layers of tape) to dampen the brightness because I cannot function with these damn things at night.
They should flash when they are first turned on, so you can tell that they turned on. That helps diagnose connection issues versus power issues. After that, though, darkness please.
Lmao, I worded that wrong. Like, they should all have a way to seal them shut again. Most of them you just open, I want a little ziploc top or something
Address numbers are to be placed in a prominent position, with a font that is legible from the street and illuminated at night, on every building in cities and towns.
Out in the country address numbers are to be displayed on reflective signs at the end of the driveway and again if/when a shared driveway splits.
Oncoming car headlights should not blind you. Companies need to stop making these and if they are custom jobs, this should be easy tickets for the police.
This is legislated in the US. Just not enforced and cars became taller since the law was written (-3ft/75ft iirc, may vary by state).
In Scandinavia they actually care about this and high beam use is part of diver training. It's nice. Also semi trucks will happily blind you with a thousand Suns if you forget. So it's rare to get blinded in night driving.
The adaptive headlights that fix this are not legal in the US, but in other countries they can be used and will selectively dim parts of their light beams that point at other cars.
Those yellow bump things for blind people. They need to follow a spec that then in turn cart manufacturers, wheelchair manufacturers, and wagon cart manufacturers all build around so that when I travel over them they don’t jostle my whole cart around and tip over my drink.
Most sewn tags I don't have much of an issue with, since I can remove them if they're annoying.
But some, often the most annoying ones, are sewn with the same thread as the garment itself, meaning you will unravel the garment if you try to take it off. Argh.
A modern standard for indoor lighting receptacles.
It’s silly that we ship a driver and circuit board packed into the lightbulb just to make it compatible with screw bulb receptacles. We should have a new socket that accepts efficient lightbulbs and that can reuse or modularize driver electronics. Instead, the market has gone for full integration at the expense of the consumer.
If you build a new home these days, you get the lightbulb and fixture integrated together. This necessitates replacing the entire assembly when it fails, and when you have to do this eventually you’re going to have mismatched indoor lighting unless you had the foresight to buy extra units.
We need a new lightbulb socket standard, but for modern lighting.
Having some kind of control signal available over wire would be nice, though. So the only way to dim lights wasn't to turn them on and off again a hundred times a second. That would also enable timers and automatic lights for those who want them. Without clouds.
I love telling my phone to turn off my lights in bed, or changing the color of my lights with a simple command. It’s super handy and I’m never going back.
Those electronics are frequently for converting AC to DC and/or regulating the LEDs off current, or for built-in features like zwave, color changing, etc.
Assuming you are mostly interested in getting rid of the AC conversion stuffz are you suggesting adding DC light outlets in each room? Where would you cconvert from mains?
Personally, I'd like to convert pretty much all of my lighting to 12v or 24v DC, but want to make sure I understand what you had in mind.
I'd like ALL game advertising to be composed of at least 50% actual in game screenshots or or videos, but that would actually be consequential and good
For inconsequential, remove stupid-proofing from certain products, like "warning: contains eggs" in egg cartons
No thanks, this would stifle customization. I am all for making MB header connections less flimsy and unclear but I think having separate connections for individual connector ports is a good thing.
The motherboard header should be a standard pinout to make it possible to make a solid connector. That should be part of the ATX standard.
The cable from the case...the PC I just built has no reset switch, the power button light is controlled by the case's built-in RGB controller, there's no hard drive access light because it's the distant space year 2024...turns out the only thing plugged into that header on my machine is the power switch itself.
Having an electronics hobby, having played with Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and such, building things like 3D printers, I'm used to dealing with those little 0.1 inch DuPont connectors, everyone else has a fit about them but they're not that bad.
People just take any opportunity to rant about their favourite cause that gets them fired up. They don't care about a fun premise for a thread. Sidenote: that would be my inconsequential thing to regulate; that people would always have to respond to forum posts on topic and in the spirit of the post.
There’s generally higher throughout if people just stand on both sides.
Throughput isn't everything though, for instance in train stations some people hurry for a connection, I would say let the latency sensitive ones bypass the others, except in situation where there is a concrete throughput issue.
I think most of these ideas are great but actually too consequential.
Chargers should have an LED that displays red while charging and green when finished. An amber LED toward the end is acceptable. I'm not making this up. I have an item that only displays solid red, when it's finished charging.
I'm partial to blinking for charging and solid for charged. Allows single color LED which is cheaper. Then if you do use multi-color or RGB you can turn red for incompatible/error.
Ok, but if you are still tailgating me in the right lane because I'm doing the speed limit, I'm allowed to deploy James Bond style gadgets from my car at you.
Tell that to the civil engineers who designed spaghetti bowls full of splits and left-exits and ignored surface street routes and mass transit so even when the freeways are moving at the speed limit there is enough traffic that there is no guarantee there will be enough space to move over at the perfect time.
This is a lovely enough idea for actual intercity travel, and it only takes a couple of clueless asses to make that frustrating, but I see people who think it's actually realistic in populated areas and I shake my head.
Nah, "Regular" is reserved for when you've been eating in the same place for a long time and you walk in there like "Ey Tony, gimme the regulah" and the cook goes "Coming right up boss".
I absolutely agree with you. My former flatmate didn't like to use the dishwasher because according to her, it wouldn't clean the dishes properly. Yet she would load the dishwasher by stacking the plates horizontally... as you would store them in a cupboard
Further: all toasters should be able to steal the sunbeam radiant control patent since it's being squatted on and not used in any toaster on the market
This is what I always struggle with. Is this curry Indian spicy, or American spicy? There have been times where the "lesser spicy" food has brought me to my knees, and other times where the hottest item on the menu was a cakewalk.
Yes. I've never had anything in Europe labeled as "spicy" that wouldn't be outclassed by a mild hot sauce in the US. Closest I've come is an Indian restaurant in London. Also the hot sauce at Nando's was an honorable mention.
Meanwhile the minimum spice level at the hole in the wall Mexican restaurant down the street in Texas is at the same level and hot enough in the high end that I can't handle it. It's perfect.
If you do any industrial processing step which creates something harmful for the environment, your company is responsible for undoing that step after nobody wants the result any more.
This creates an incentive to recycle and build stuff to be able to deconstruct it's components. Less stuff in the landfills and more raw materials for recycling.
Let the consumer bear the cost by paying the real price of a product and not mother nature.
Packaging should be made to be reusable. Glass jars must have easily removable labels, plastic wrap would only be allowed for sterile equipment, otherwise you have to use paper and other biodegradable materials. Branding would have to be completely removable too. Basically, packaging would remain a product of the state, and would be completely controlled. Corporations would have to pay packaging tax to subsidize control of this.
Anyone who lets their dog bark outside for 10+ continuous minutes (except in case of emergency) loses dog privileges for a year. One year added for every five minutes over 10.
ShotSpotter installs can be repurposed to locate homes of negligent owners who are annoying the entire neighborhood by letting their dogs bark unmitigated.
My neighbor texted me the one time they had their dog barking in the backyard for 10 min + with an explanation of why he was out there, and the offer to bring him back in if it was too noisy in our house. 10/10 great neighbor, and honestly made me not mind the barking at all
Its so hard to get them penalized for barking too. Lucky for me my dumb bitch neighbor was letting her dog roam off leash so i nailed her for that and ive been able to get some sleep. Most of the time you have to get 2 other neighbors to report them as well, which is bullshit imo.
Expand allergy warning labels on products. Mammal product allergy exists, it's called alpha-gal syndrome - one of the issues that can arise from a tick bite. I would like to see allergy labels for beef, pork, gelatin, and carrageenan alongside the ones for milk, wheat, nuts, etc.
Stickers put on products by manufacturers or retailers must either be on the product packaging or be made with the material that leaves no residue behind when peeled off.
What about that pyramid with an eyeball on there? US money is weird as fuck and everyone is just all "yup these are completely normal things to have on our currency."
Brian Brushwood once referred to the reverse of the USD $1 bill as "a ticket to the illuminati show."
Fun fact: The Great Seal of the United States of America has a front and a back just like a coin. The eagle with the shield and the olive branch and the arrows is the front, the All Seeing Pyramid is the back. And while the Obverse of the Great Seal is used quite a lot, the only prominent use of the reverse is on the $1 bill.
New "No Ads" holiday. No ads on TV or the entire internet for one day, physical billboards can stay, digital billboards must be turned off, essentially all form of digital advertisement is disallowed. If a company breaks those rules, it is fined 50% of its average annual revenue.
E-bike legislation. Here in BC Canada, you're limited to 500W motor and 32KPH. while I have no problem with the speed limit, I think they should allow up to at least 1000w motors. Heavier individuals such as myself would crush a 500w motor.
For glassware, try buying tempered glass. It's more resistant, but most importantly, when it breaks, it tends to break into cubes rather than into a million little sharp knives.
Bwahaha, I had a tempered measuring cup, a big one I used for pancake batter, stuff like that. One day I gently tapped it with a wooden spoon and it exploded. Pancake batter and (yep, not sharp) tiny pieces of glass everywhere! That was the day I learned tempered glass can store energy. It wasn't that one tap, but every thwack it ever received built up, until it could not store any more and it exploded. Very interesting to learn but very messy.
Break up the monopoly that Match Group and Bumble Inc hold on the market, by working with the Federal Trade Commission and UK Competitions & Markets Authority.
Introduce caps on what apps can charge for Premium features. Charging the same price as several World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV subscriptions just to see likes is scummy as fuck.
Introduce mandatory ID verification to dissuade fake users, and have very strict regulations on how said data is processed and stored, with massive fines for data breaches that could easily have been avoided.
Have a correct appeals process towards account penalties/closure and outlaw the use of shadowbanning.
The THC content of edibles. It's unregulated in NYC so everything seemingly has between 30mg and 1250mg while I'm sitting here with a 10mg hard limit. A few states have a 5mg or 10mg per serving limit and it's wonderful
Are you in licensed dispensaries? Pretty much all the ones I've been to, the edible options are 2.5mg, 5mg and 10mg. My other thought, are you sure you aren't looking at the THC content of the whole container? I have some 10mg chocolates in the freezer, but dead center on the lid's label is "100mg THC", then underneath and in a much smaller font, "per bottle." I've noticed that on a lot of packaging, as well as dispensary websites, they choose to list stupid big numbers by just listing the overall content, and not what you would get per unit.
Early access and beta and alpha terms for games. Also, early access has a time limit.
Alpha - we're adding and removing features.
Beta - we're 90% polishing 10% adding/removing.
Early access - just fixing bugs. Maximum 3 to 6 months.
You can stay in alpha and beta as long as you want. I don't want to change game dev actuality. I just want the terms to reflect what's actually going on.
I don’t think that Early Access is meant to convey a specific stage of development. That’s probably why they opted to use that instead of alpha/beta. Maybe developers should be required to disclose their plans between now and release, but I don’t feel that an arbitrary time limit is fair.
Yeah rogue legacy 2 goes very against oc’s demands but did it right. There was a clear path of development of one area every 3ish months, and it would be fairly polished once it was released, but possibly unbalanced. I didn’t feel cheated, but I also don’t think any other early access releases will be that good. I’ve been a huge fan of supergiant games since bastion and am still waiting on Hades 2 to get full release before purchasing, it just seems like it’ll be worth waiting to experience
Emergency brakes should be a handle that pulls a mechanical cable that directly actuates the rear brakes. Simple and reliable, like you would want in an emergency.
I just did this on my 2011 Miata. It has about 50k miles on it. Driven in Wisconsin, and while I've mostly kept it off winter roads, it's inevitably going to have more corrosion than an equivalent car kept in a warmer/dryer climate.
$600 for the repair. Given how long it lasted, I don't consider that too crazy.
Drinking straws are too wide/girthy on average. Every fast food and coffee place uses giant straws, while a relatively skinny straw provides a vastly superior drinking experience, in my view.
Advertisements should always say what the thing is and what it does.
Disney + show ads on YouTube are like, two dialogue lines, and then "Stream now on Disney Plus". Only thing more annoying than an ad is an ad where you don't even understand what the hell they were trying to sell you.
Every keyboard must have a home and end key that doesn't require pressing additional keys like fn, and home must go to the start of the line, while end goes to the end of the line.
The top speed of cars is limited to the highest speed limit in the country they're certified for.
For emergencies, there's a covered switch on the dash which disables the limit, calls 911 and transmits your position to them.
In-game currency and microtransactions are fine, as long as the app can pay out for the same service/item. If I can buy a sword for $5, I can also sell that sword to the app developer and get $5 back. If I can pay $1 to skip a level, I can redeem $1 for beating said level.
It is not, you fuck up the entire traffic flow while trying to back your Ford festival float into the spot and everyone that parks like a normal person hates it and you.
My rule would be the exact opposite, lol. It's proven to be safer over and over. The main reason is because you have good vision of the road and traffic when you leave, as opposed to when you have to leave in reverse.
Agreed. It is far safer to back into a parking spot than into traffic, especially if there is pedestrian, bicycle, or motorcycle traffic sharing the lanes.
It's annoying as hell, it blocks the flow of traffic, and it causes the cars to lineup the wrong way with each other which makes people more frequently open their doors into the side of my car.
How about we just make tipping rounding and pay people a living wage? You know in Europe, eating out is not more expensive than it is in the US and they don't beg for tips. It's such bullshit here
I'm not from North America but I live in Canada now. I find tipping is ridiculous. But if I'm going to be forced to tip it should be made clear to me before the transaction starts. I'm not saying this is the best solution. Tipping should obviously be abolished but I'm just answering this question.
All vehicles have an auto-sensor that detects when the steering mechanism is turned past a certain point and activates the fucking turn signal. Deactivates it once the steering mechanism returns past that point.
Better rule, if the vehicle detects that the turn signal is not active and you're making a turn, it engages temporary self driving and delivers an electric shock to the crotch .
On multi-lane merge ramps is the guy in the right lane signalling his left blinker because his steering wheel is turned or is he planning to dive into your lane before the merge?