You don't have to buy a subscription to anything. You're welcome to make a purchasing decision in any way you want, including ways that are free like word of mouth.
What a weird world where only certain people are allowed the privilege of information via money rather than enforcement thru the government to level the access.
People trust word of mouth much more than other sources of information. That's probably because the person giving you a recommendation has social skin in the game (if they're talking smack you won't trust them again in future), and no conflicts of interest.
Versus asking the manufacturer ("very efficient sir") or the government ("efficient and we ignored every other aspect of the product so it might not actually work", see the dishwasher discussion).
The problem is that close to zero consumers are actually verifying this stuff.
We need actual regulations in place to display accurate information because otherwise you can just lie, and that's that. How many people do you think are actually testing the power usage of their appliances under different scenarios?
If Billy Joe says it's efficient and you trust him, you could be getting ripped off and never know it.
It's very similar to nutritional information as required by the FDA. Testing food is expensive, and even if you could, since you're not the manufacturer you'll never know what ingredients actually go into it. Only they know.
It's just significantly cheaper in aggregate to have the government tell manufacturers to list information they already have. Rather than have a potentially infinite number of random parties try to figure it out with their limited information.
There are already plenty of laws in place to prevent false claims about products during a sale, so even if EnergyStar doesn't exist you can't just lie about energy consumption and be legal.
But you guys are all making very bad assumptions about these kinds of government programmes. There is no "EnergyStar police". Read the GAO report linked further down: when they investigated it, they found the government doesn't actually test anything. They just assumed that anything the manufacturers said was true, and had been doing so for decades. They're very likely still doing that.
Professional product reviewers don't make this elementary mistake but the people who work on these programmes have protected jobs and no incentive to do it well. Hence the zany results. You don't see well known product review magazines signing off on gas-powered alarm clocks, right?
> If Billy Joe says it's efficient and you trust him, you could be getting ripped off and never know it.
Ditto if Billy Joe is a civil servant, except the real Billy Joe doesn't force you to pay him for his advice, and the real Billy Joe probably isn't just blindly repeating stuff he read in the manufacturer's instructions whilst claiming it's his own opinion.
> It's just significantly cheaper in aggregate to have the government tell manufacturers to list information they already have.
They don't already have it because such certifications require highly specific testing setups that don't necessarily match what real customers care about. It also tends to yield a lot of specification gaming.
But there's a bigger problem with all of this. The US government deficit is so huge that to even preserve a government that even barely resembles the one you have now, absolutely everything has to be cut if it's not core functionality. To put this in perspective, you could zero your military budget tomorrow - literally fire everyone in the DoD and scrap every piece of equipment - and the USG would still spend more than half a trillion dollars in excess of revenue.
Americans have no idea what austerity means. Not only will you have to scrap all the fiddly unnecessary stuff around the edges like EnergyStar, you will also have to make huge cuts to the military and pensions and other forms of welfare. People won't accept the latter without the former. Otherwise, you get endless stories in the press of the form "I've been pushed into poverty by cuts in X welfare programme whilst the government pays civil servants to review toasters all day". Ask Europeans whose countries have been through even quite mild austerity what it's like. Everyone in this thread is re-arranging the deckchairs whilst the Titanic is holed below the waterline.
> so even if EnergyStar doesn't exist you can't just lie about energy consumption and be legal.
Right, but you can just not include that information at all. Which is both cheaper for the manufacturer and advantageous for them.
Or, do you one better, you can include vague claims that you can argue don't mean anything. Sort of like "natural" on food. That word means absolutely nothing. Still plastered across food and consumers think it means something.
Also, on the topic of deficit: no, I reject this notion. It's just conservative populist propaganda that we have to burn it all down otherwise the US implodes.
Until you, and other's, start proposing wealth taxes, I don't give a shit what you think about the deficit. Sorry, I don't, so don't waste your breath.
People trust all kinds of nonsense they shouldn’t.
You want to talk about word of mouth? I’ve never heard anyone complain about dishwashers except from the people on here who have a libertarian axe to grind.
