Ep. 1834 - I Looked Into Why Household Appliance Quality Is Declining. It's Not What You Think.

There are a few things I love more than Good Ranchers, but there are not many. I'll tell you that. It might, I think it might make it on the top five of all things in the world. It's just the best quality meat at the very best price from the very best people. Meanwhile, you go to the grocery store, you ever ask yourself, hey, where was this meat raised? Because American beef on the package does not necessarily mean everything that that company sells is American. Good Ranchers makes it very simple. Every cut they sell is labeled, born, raised, and harvested in the USA. They partner with more than 100 local American farms and ranchers to deliver 100% American meat straight to your door. Beef, chicken, pork, even seafood, you know what you are feeding your family, you know where it came from, you're supporting American farmers and ranchers producing it. And I love supporting Americans, and I love a good price. For me, though, it all comes down to the quality. The Good Ranchers quality is just next level. On certainly all the beef, even, I'm not a huge chicken guy, the chicken is like the best chicken you're going to get, whether we're talking about the chicken breasts, whether we're talking about the C2L-free chicken nuggets, it's all just magnificent. The people are great, too. Start a plan at goodranchers.com slash wire, get 50 bucks off plus free meat with every order. You can build your own box starting as low as under 29 bucks. That's goodranchers.com slash wire, 50 bucks off plus free meat with every order. Goodranchers.com slash wire, goodranchers.com, American meat delivered. Well, it's almost Labor Day. Which means you're about to be carpet bombed, if you're not already, with advertisements for new appliances, almost all of which are essentially ticking time bombs, waiting to self-immolate in your home when you least expect it. And for that reason, the holiday presents, I think, a good opportunity to answer some questions that almost every American has asked in the past decade or so, which are, when exactly did household appliances become so much worse, so much more dysfunctional and unreliable and even dangerous? And what specifically changed? And what specifically changed in the appliances themselves? Is there any concrete answer to these questions? Are we all imagining the massive decline in quality? Well, as it turns out, no, it is not a figment of our imagination. Yes, the quality of our appliances, like so many other products in our lives, is declining. And there are very concrete reasons for that. And it's not as simple as, you know, corporations want to make more money, so they design their products around planned obsolescence. And that's part of it. But it's not as simple as, you know, corporations want to make more money, so they design their It's not the full story. There's also the fact that government regulations and the threat of litigation are forcing some of the largest appliance manufacturers to build major vulnerabilities into their products. And the manufacturers, rather than tell consumers what's happening and how to fix the issues, are happy to sit back and watch as the appliances break, leading to new sales. It's an intricate scam. And we're going to reveal it all so that you know what to look for. But first, let's just watch this video together to set the stage. This is from an account. It's an account called Tech Stuff, and it describes a Sunbeam-branded toaster from the 1940s. So if my math is right, which it often isn't, we're talking about a toaster from more than 80 years ago. Now, you would think, given all the advances in technology that have taken place since the 1940s, that today's toasters would be vastly superior to this product from Sunbeam. Again, it was created long before we landed on the moon. And yet, despite all the time that's passed, modern toasters have nothing on the Sunbeam. And there's a very, very interesting reason for that that we'll talk about. Watch. What makes this toaster cool is, well, besides the bread automatically rising and lowering when it's starting or finishing, it's actually the radiant control portion that makes it cool. And here, just let me read it for you. The toasting is always the same no matter what kind of bread you use. The heat radiated from the surface of the bread actuates the exclusive radiant control thermostat, that's why you always get the same uniform golden toast you want, whether the slices are moist or dry, cold or warm, thick or thin. Only the Sunbeam has it. And you can clearly see they're pointing to the radiant control, which is essentially a bi-metallic strip that, when it gets hot enough, it actuates the thermostat, it clicks it off, and then the bread rises up. And that's all done mechanically. There's no motors in there that makes it go up and down. It's just a counterbalance on a lever. So. Now, I'm going to be making a lot of toast right now, and I'm going to be using white bread, an English muffin, hamburger buns, some rye bread. Well, here you'll be able to see that all of the bread here is toasted at about the same doneness. And that's the really cool part about this toaster. And let me put all these times up against each other. And as you can see, the times vary rather wildly. It goes from a almost two minutes at English muffin at a minute fifty-five. And the hamburger bun at forty-two seconds. And I didn't change any settings. It has the radiant control sensor, and it keeps them all about the same level of doneness automatically. So, by comparison, my Cuisinart toaster, which is rated at eighteen hundred watts, you could see about how bright this gets with its heating elements. Now, side by side, you can clearly see the sunbeam is really hot, and that's only at thirteen hundred and seventy-five watts. Still, it is a hotter toast, in my opinion, when it comes out. And I just think it's better. So, in the 1940s, the toaster could sense how hot the bread was, and it would dynamically adjust the heating time to ensure the bread was toasted appropriately. So, if you cooked one batch of toast and then quickly toasted another while the toaster was still hot, you didn't have to worry about timer settings or anything like that. The sunbeam would automatically cook the second batch of toast for a shorter period of time. And as you saw, no matter what you stick in the sunbeam, it's gonna. heat it to a consistent level. Now, by contrast, today's toasters mostly use timers, which are obviously much more inexact because they're not measuring heat at all. And even some premium toasters that do measure temperature aren't as good as the sunbeam because they measure ambient temperature in the toaster as opposed to the temperature in the bread itself. This is the kind of thing that, if you're a conspiratorial person, must absolutely drive you crazy. I mean, how could it be that over the course of eighty years, we haven't figured out how to make a better toaster? How could it be that. If anything, most toasters have degraded in quality. Our grandparents and great-grandparents, all those years ago, they imagined a Jetsonian future where a robot would, like, instantly zap your bread to the exact level of toastiness that you desire, and instead, here we are, eight decades later, with toasters that have not advanced at all, or have gone the opposite direction. Is it possible there's somehow a conspiracy to make toasters worse? Actually, that would be the optimistic explanation, the more likely explanation is that we've all simply accepted a mediocre product, which is cheaper to produce, so that's what we get. You know, it's similar to how we abandoned the Concorde, the supersonic passenger jet. We had the ability to fly on faster planes and have better toasters and have a lot of other better stuff, but we decided, collectively, as a population, that it just wasn't worth it. So, while we can land on the moon, we're stuck with toasters that don't work very well. That's the weird dynamic. Now, you can get very radicalized if you. Don't spend any amount of time thinking about this topic, and indeed, many people are doing just that. So, consider this viral video that blew up recently, where a guy shows off his fully functioning 1956 washer in 2026. Now, today, the typical washing machine lasts for about seven to 10 years. This machine is going on 70 years of use and still going strong. Watch. This is a 1956 Frigidaire washer. I want to show you guys how quickly. It'll empty this tub and get up to 1,100 RPMs of spin speed. Watch this. And it's there. Now, in response to videos like this, you might point out that the Frigidaire washer, which is one of the most popular washing machines in the world, has a lot more power than the Frigidaire washer. The Frigidaire washer is a little more powerful than the Frigidaire washer, but the Frigidaire washer is more powerful than the Frigidaire washer. The Frigidaire washer is less powerful than the Frigidaire washer. In videos like this, you might point out that, well, while it's impressive, we can't actually draw too many conclusions from this clip alone. We have no idea how many times this washing machine has been repaired, for example, nor do we know on average the typical lifespan of a Frigidaire washing machine from the 1950s, nor does anyone have any data on that point. Maybe 90% of them died within a few years, and this one is a unicorn, so it's a kind of a survivorship bias going on. But the thing is, pretty much everyone has a story like this. Anecdotally, you probably remember, or your parents may remember. How much longer appliances used to last, and how they were often built with steel instead of plastic or aluminum. And even if you don't remember that, it's hard to miss the constant stream of videos where people make this claim. So here's another one that went viral. This is a Fridge from 1958. Watch. All right. On today's episode of They Don't Build Things Like They Used To, I present the Refrigerator from 1958. This is the General Electric variety. All right. Let's get to it. So this is the Refrigerator from 1998. This is a Refrigerator from 1998. All right. So this is the General Electric variety. All right. find some more okay okay so here we are we got i don't know quite a few pounds of steel on there now does that shelf look like it's uh even thinking about breaking or bending or doing whatever it is that someone says it's gonna do now in the interest of full disclosure since i'm always interested in presenting the other side of the debate you should know that you know this viral fridge video really infuriated the esteemed journalists at the wall street journal and they put out a tiktok video in the usual style that these kind of videos are made now and this is made by someone named emma camp debunking the fridge from 1958 watch i recently saw a viral video about a fridge from 1958 and the comments drove me crazy everyone seemed to agree that the reason why they didn't have a fridge as cool as that one is because of capitalism this could not be more wrong so while i couldn't find that exact model i did track down an ad for a similar fridge from 1958 it costs 400 so about 4 600 today most modern fridges are way less expensive than that in fact 4 600 these days will get you just about the nicest fridge that money can buy this smart fridge is 50 larger than the 1958 one it has built-in ice maker and water dispenser and some very fancy beverage storage not only are fridges cheaper today but modern american families are much richer than they were in the 1950s in fact in 1950 around 20 of american homes didn't even have fridges why did appliances become less expensive it comes down to technological innovation and competition from foreign models so no capitalism is not the reason why you don't have that vintage fridge it's why you normal person watching this video can afford a fridge in the first place now i counted about five different poses in that video and i'm not sure if you can see them in the video but i'm not sure if you can that one minute video which is actually restrained by gen z selfie video standards that could have fit in another 20 poses or so 20 more cuts and by the way this video is courtesy of the wall street journal opinion section which is the same paper and the same opinion section that just a few days ago defended a columnist who used ai to write an op-ed on the theory that ai is just another tool you know like a spell checker or a thesaurus emma camp had nothing to do with that to be clear but i can't miss the opportunity to mention it since we're talking about wall street journal and the writer in this case is a columnist who wrote an op-ed on the theory that ai is just another tool in the case uh in the case of the op-ed did not use ai just to help him he used it to draft entire paragraphs to generate the article in large sections anyway and the ai generated writing was so bad that everyone immediately called it out and nevertheless in the eyes of the wall street journal there was nothing wrong with the ai generated slop op-ed or slop ed that we can as we could now probably dub it and anyway as for the substance of what emma camp actually says first of all she never said anything about it she never said anything about it she never said anything about the butter warmer in the fridge for the 1950s she talks a lot about the new features in modern fridges but she fails to mention that none of these features is anywhere near as cool as a butter warmer in your fridge that's a big omission right off the bat but then you know there's the whole bit about capitalism as if everyone who's upset with their appliances must be a communist and in fairness some people do blame capitalism for this problem and i'm sure she saw plenty of comments to that effect which she's responding to but to make this entire discussion into a capitalism versus anti-capitalism thing i'm going to have to do a little bit more i'm going to have to do a little bit more and i'm going to have to do a little bit more and i'm going to i'm not anti-capitalism obviously i don't think we should return you know the bolsheviks to power simply because appliances are terrible now um and yes as she states in the video it's obviously true that appliances are much cheaper now than they were in the 1950s they have more features too with the exception of the butter warmer and many of these new features are totally pointless while also making the appliance much more likely to break down but none of this explains why appliances today as a general matter are not as good as they used to be in the 1950s and i'm not she doesn't address that question and that's strange because just a couple of years ago this same paper the wall street journal observed that according to all available data the problem is indeed very real quote appliance technicians and others in the industry say there has been an increase in items in need of repair yelp users for example requested 58 percent more quotes from thousands of appliance repair businesses last month than they did in january of 2022 american households spent 43 percent more on home appliances in 23 than they did in 2013 rising from an inflation adjusted average of 390 dollars to 558 dollars prices for the category declined 12 percent from the beginning of 2013 through the end of 2023 according to the labor department okay so i'll say that again we now spend 43 percent more on home appliances than we did in 2013 even though prices have decreased in that same period the only logical explanation is that people are replacing appliances much more frequently than they used to probably because those appliances are breaking and indeed the article goes through several examples of people who spend you know spend a lot of money for new appliances only to see them fail in spectacular fashion there's one case where a couple owned a dishwasher from the 90s it was working perfectly but they decided to purchase a much sleeker $800 stainless steel dishwasher from a ge only for the new dutch dishwasher to spring a hidden leak less than three years later they ended up with thirty five thousand dollars worth of damage to their kitchen plus they got dropped by their homeowner's insurance and the culprit was a sixty dollar pump that broke yes a sixty dollar pump ultimately caused thirty five thousand dollars in damages and again anecdotally i can say that my personal experience with dishwashers in particular has been similarly uh tragic we've had at least two top-of-the-line dishwashers in the last three years and we've had two top-of-the-line dishwashers in the last three years and we've had two top-of-the-line dishwashers in the last three years and we've had two top-of-the-line dishwashers in the last three years and we've had two top-of-the-line dishwashers in the last couple of years that have ended up leaking all over the floor both had to be replaced and one thing you notice about the really nice dishwashers is that even if they remain functional for longer than three and a half days they don't actually do a better job of the thing that they're supposed to do which is washing the dishes the expensive ones don't produce noticeably cleaner dishes sometimes it runs the opposite way this is not an uncommon situation anymore across a variety of appliances which we'll talk about in a second but maybe the best way to illustrate illustrate how much things have changed is simply to look at how appliances are advertised now compared to the 70s and earlier so here are a couple of maytag ads from all the way back then in case you don't remember them or weren't alive when they were airing watch mr maytag repairman i'm coming oh lonely hold on help i'd go anywhere to fix a maytag what a dream but i'm exhausted i better go down to the shop and get some rest not all maytag repairmen are this lonely but we're trying maytag we also make great dishwashers working on the main tag working on the main tag boy it's sure good to be actually working on a maytag it's been a while you know that's the trouble with you you maytag washers and dryers you're too dependable it's not often that anybody needs us maytag repairman that's why we're the loneliest guys in town i'm working on the main thing so the whole sales pitch is that maytag's appliances were reliable you know their washers and dryers and dishwashers weren't going to need a repairman uh so he could just relax and uh you know because they were built to last and and plenty of other brands used the same strategy as this it's seems like a pretty good selling point timex ran the ads where they promised that their watches would take a licking and keep on ticking uh and ford promised that ford trucks last longer again customers expected that products would last a very long time and most corporations had not yet mastered the art of planned obsolescence or maximizing shareholder value so they gave customers what they wanted now fast forward a few decades and ads look more like this a lot of people are not going to be able to buy the products that they're going to be able to buy because they're not going to be able to buy the products that they're going to be able to buy and they're not going to be able to buy the products that they're going to be able to buy is intelligent machine learning and diagnostics to enhance wash and dry performance sensors constantly monitor the dishwasher's progress and will send a notification through the smart hq app if attention is needed now i'll admit that in certain situations having a wi-fi connected appliance can be a good idea it could be useful to remotely control your thermostat with your phone i guess or hypothetically you could even use your iphone to access the camera on your iphone to access the camera on your iphone to access the camera on your iphone to access the camera on your iphone to access the camera on your iphone to access the camera on your iphone and spot a home invasion in and spot a home invasion in and spot a home invasion in progress and race home and shoot the progress and race home and shoot the progress and race home and shoot the burglars burglars burglars there's a completely plausible scenarios there's a completely plausible scenarios there's a completely plausible scenarios that are made possible by the wonders of that are made possible by the wonders of that are made possible by the wonders of online enabled smart appliances online enabled smart appliances online enabled smart appliances but when your dishwasher claims that but when your dishwasher claims that but when your dishwasher claims that it's using machine learning it's using machine learning it's time to draw the line i mean there's no universe in which machine learning and a dishwasher machine learning and a dishwasher machine learning and a dishwasher should appear within the same sentence should appear within the same sentence should appear within the same sentence it's totally absurd it's totally absurd it's totally absurd no sane person wants to get dishwasher no sane person wants to get dishwasher no sane person wants to get dishwasher notifications notifications notifications on their phone this is one of the most on their phone this is one of the most on their phone this is one of the most self-defeating things about all these self-defeating things about all these self-defeating things about all these smart appliances smart appliances smart appliances the whole point of a household appliance the whole point of a household appliance is that it's supposed to do a job for you is that it's supposed to do a job for you is that it's supposed to do a job for you and take it off of your plate and take it off of your plate and take it off of your plate but now with smart appliances all but now with smart appliances all but now with smart appliances all routed through your wi-fi connected to routed through your wi-fi connected to routed through your wi-fi connected to your phone your phone your phone not only do you have more features that can can easily break and all that kind of stuff. Your appliances are constantly nagging you. They take up more space in your mind and your life, not less. You know, the idea back in the day was, yeah, you're spending a lot of money on the appliance, you invest in it, and you're going to have it for a long time. And it just kind of does its job. You don't have to think about it. And it's not like that anymore. Now, admittedly, I've never connected any of my appliances to my phone because I don't really like receiving text messages from most humans I know, much less receiving them from my oven or my ice maker. But I know plenty of people who are fully connected and integrated with their appliances. They receive real-time updates and push notifications from their refrigerator and their washer and dryer and crock pot. It's like being in a never-ending group chat with every inanimate object in your house. I mean, why not bring your sofa and your coffee table into the conversation at this point? It's totally ridiculous. As you expect, all of this comes with a very big catch. Because everything does. Watch. This weekend, I had to buy a new dishwasher because our old GE died. I bought a Bosch 500 series because that's what Consumer Reports recommended. And more importantly, I could find one in stock. After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle only to find that that, along with features like delayed start and eco mode, require an app. Not only that, to use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to Wi-Fi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then you have to connect your dishwasher to Wi-Fi. And then you have to connect your dishwasher to Wi-Fi. And then and only then can you start using all the features on the dishwasher. We wanted to run just a rinse cycle to make sure the water would go in, the water would pump out through the sump, and everything would be working. But I could not find a way to do a rinse cycle on the control panel. So I looked in this book and found this page. This page shows that the rinse cycle has an asterisk. The asterisk, if you look down at the bottom, says available through Home Connect app only and depending on your model. If you have a cloud app, that means there's a cloud service that has to be running that costs money to maintain. And if there's no subscription fee right now, that means one of two things. One, they could be selling our data already. I didn't look at the full terms of service or anything, so I don't know if they already are. But that's one possibility. The other one is, at some point, they'll either close the service because it's a cost center that they don't want to pay for, and it costs maintenance once you have a million users using this thing. Or two, they're going to charge a subscription. And all of a sudden, if you want to use rinse mode, it's going to be five bucks a month forever. So in addition to being more inconvenient, the intelligent machine learning Wi-Fi enabled dishwasher also has access to your personal information once you install their app on your phone, which I don't know why anybody would ever do. You're giving them your name, your email address, your phone number. They're learning how often you wash the dishes. They're learning when you're at home, et cetera. And presumably, they're either selling the washing machine or washing the dishes. They're selling this information or they're planning to monetize it in some other way. Now, if you asked a random customer, which would you prefer, a dishwasher that lasts 50 years or a dishwasher that connects to your Wi-Fi and floods your kitchen in three years? Every single one of them would choose the 50-year option. But none of these companies are even trying to make a product like that. They're not even trying. 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You know what you are feeding your family. You know where it came from. You're supporting American farmers and ranchers producing it. The good rancher's quality is just next level on certainly all the beef. Even, I'm not a huge chicken guy. The chicken is like the best chicken you're going to get, whether we're talking about the chicken breasts, whether we're talking about the C2L-free chicken nuggets. It's all just magnificent. Start a plan. At goodranchers.com slash wire, get 50 bucks off plus free meat with every order. That's goodranchers.com slash wire. 50 bucks off plus free meat with every order. Goodranchers.com slash wire. Goodranchers.com. American meat delivered. Now, a big part of the problem is that all across the appliance industry, plastic housing is increasingly used for critical components. In a dishwasher, you know, that includes the pump or the spray arms. Very often, this is presented as, as a safety measure rather than an attempt to cut costs or to, you know, force the machines to fail so that they need to be replaced, even though that's very often what's actually happening. But the truth is usually a lot more complicated. So take mixers, for example. If you buy a KitchenAid mixer today, even an expensive one, the machine is almost certainly going to have a single nylon gear inside called a worm gear. And the primary role of the worm gear is to transfer rotational power from the motor to the gears, which then allow the mixing attachment to work. But the worm gear also functions as, as a mechanical fuse. You know, it's designed to strip and shed if the mixer ever encounters too much resistance, which in turn will immediately stop the mixer from working, protecting the motor and the gears from any further damage. But as many people have pointed out, this safety feature does not simply kick in during a rare emergency. Instead, after a few years, the worm gear seems to inevitably fall apart, regardless of how you're using the mixer. And according to many different reports you'll find online, this failure mode is very new because back in the day, the worm gear was made of metal, instead of plastic. Supposedly, these mixers were much more reliable when a company called Hobart was making the mixers before Whirlpool took over in 1986. Here's just one example of a video that makes this claim. Watch. Let me introduce you to the part they hope you never learn about. It is called the worm follower gear. In every modern KitchenAid tilt head mixer, hidden inside that beautiful metal body, there is a gear made of nylon, plastic, that is designed to protect the machine. In a machine that costs $300 to $500, there is a $3 plastic gear that is guaranteed to fail. Here is what they do not say. Your grandmother's Hobart-era mixer had thermal overload protection built into the motor itself. If she overloaded it, the motor would shut off automatically, cool down for a few minutes, and restart. No parts destroyed, no repair needed. The machine protected itself without sacrificing anything. The plastic gear does not protect you. The plastic gear guarantees a future transaction. Either you pay a repair technician to open the machine and replace it, or you decide the repair cost is not worth it and you buy a new mixer. Either way, the company wins. A viewer named Susan from Michigan sent me photographs of her mixer's gearbox after it failed. The plastic gear had been ground into white powder. She said it looked like someone had grated a candle inside her gear. It looked like there was a lot of dirt in it. people don't realize, is that KitchenAid does indeed include nylon worm gears in most of their models, and these gears are very prone to failure over time. And if you don't use your mixer in accordance with the manual, then you're going to accelerate this timeline drastically. If you read all the documentation that came with your mixer, which of course nobody does, you'll learn that you need to use low speeds when you're mixing yeast dough, for example. On the other hand, professional grade mixers, including some sold by KitchenAid, use all metal gears assemblies, and even ordinary mixers from the 80s had much better construction than what you'll find today. So take a look at this shot, which I pulled from the website Mixerology, along with all of my knowledge on the topic of mixers. I've become suddenly an expert on the topic, never meant to be. This is what the kids, you know, would call a gear mogging, I guess. I'm not going to pretend to be an actual expert on the topic, but I can say with a high degree of certainty that if I had the option, I'd rather have the mixer that doesn't look like a mixer. I'd rather have the mixer that doesn't look like a mixer. A child's toy. But today you don't get that option, at least unless you spring for a much more expensive professional mixer. Evidently, these professional mixers come with fully metal transmissions and the worm gear follower is made of bronze, not nylon. This is reportedly the case for the professional HD and professional 600 model types, among others. And while the bronze gear can theoretically still fail, of course, it's much more resilient. You can also find professional mixers mostly used in high-volume mixers. So if you're a professional mixer, you can also find professional mixers in high-volume cafeterias that don't have a mechanical fuse at all. They use an integrated motor and transmission assembly. And as you expect, they have a much, much lower failure rate than your mixer at home. Now, what's misleading about the KitchenAid content you'll find online, and yes, it's an entire genre somehow, is the suggestion that older household mixers didn't have the nylon gear. They did. This wasn't a modern change to suddenly force your mixer to fail. Wirecutter recently tore down an old KitchenAid mixer and they found very similar components in an old mixer as compared to one that you buy today. That said, as I just mentioned, the quality of the construction in those old mixers was still visibly superior to anything you can buy off a shelf right now for a reasonable price anyway. As it stands, if your KitchenAid mixer becomes disabled, you have a couple of options. You can buy a new mixer, which is obviously what KitchenAid wants you to do. It's also the most common option. Alternatively, you can pay a technician $100 to fix it, or you can replace the part yourself. And here's what that looks like. It's a fairly involved process that will take about 30 minutes out of your day. Watch. Welcome to Redneck Light. Today, I'm going to be showing you how to disassemble, rebuild, and re-grease a 4.5-quart KitchenAid mixer. This is the classic tilt head model with the sacrificial plastic worm gear. By design, it fails before the motor fails, and the repair is fairly inexpensive compared to buying a completely new one. It is a messy job, but totally doable by an at-home user. Like I said, you're, you're almost aiming to make a mess, uh, with this. We're just really trying to go nuts. Alright, so there you can see the very heavily greased, uh, bits and pieces of the KitchenAid mixer. And that's, now the very back of this, you're going to push the power cord, um, boot back into its slot here. Now, if you're the kind of person who's willing to deal with this hassle, repairing the gear is cheap, but if you're like the vast majority of KitchenAid customers and your machine dies on you after a few years, you become frustrated, you buy a new one. That's the whole point. But again, I don't want to imply that all of these problems are invented by executives just to wring more money out of you, um, although that is happening. The government also plays a very big role across a variety of industries. When Wirecutter spoke to some repairmen, they immediately pointed to federal regulations concerning water and energy efficiency as the root cause of many problems that people deal with when it comes to these kitchen appliances. Quote, the main culprit is the set of efficiency standards for water and energy use for all cooking, refrigeration, and cleaning appliances. Those standards have been managed by the company, and they are still in use. They are still in use. Most of the significant changes arrived in the early 2000s, and they have been updated several times since. Before those updates, appliances were road tested for decades. Brand representatives would even ride along with his technicians as they worked on appliances and monitor the failures and what goes on inside. Now the models change a lot more often. More importantly, to meet any new standard, the appliances often move from analog parts to digital components, such as computer circuit boards. So the constant changes prevent long-term, long-term testing from taking place while also introducing many more components that can fail. And by the way, just in case you think that this was a partisan issue, the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987, which we all remember, passed the Senate with 89 votes. The House approved it with a voice vote. So we're talking about an overwhelming support from both political parties for empowering the Department of Energy to ruin as many household appliances as possible. The law was signed into law by Reagan, who supported the law because appliance manufacturers who lobbied hard for the bill were frustrated by the patchwork of state laws that were regulating their products. They wanted a uniform federal standard, and they got one. Mechanical timers were replaced by circuit boards. Plastics replaced metals, as we discussed. Motors became smaller and used less water. This was a theme of Reagan's presidency. He created a framework that in the following decades would become a disaster. He did it with immigration and his amnesty. He did it again with this legislation. Under George W. Bush, the Department of Energy gained even more power. And then under Obama, the regulations intensified even further. This was a bipartisan effort to screw us over, as most bipartisan efforts are. We'll close with one more practical example of the effects of these regulations, specifically the regulations governing water use. Now, again, I'm not an expert on the topic, but it's fascinating to see exactly how the government can manage to cause problems with your washing machine. So I found a service center in San Diego that pointed out many of the issues caused by eco-related regulations that conserve water. And here's what they had to say. Quote, the logic is simple. Washing machines need sufficient water to create effective agitation and detergent distribution. When water levels are reduced, clothes do not move as freely, and detergent may not dissolve fully. The result is uneven cleaning. And an accumulation of grime inside the drum, hoses, and filters. This hidden buildup can cause malfunctions, unpleasant odors, and even accelerate wear on critical components, such as pumps and seals. High-efficiency machines are designed to use less water, but their sensors and cycles rely on careful balance. If a machine's sensors misread the load size or detergent amount, it may use even less water than intended. Over weeks and months, small compromises in water usage can lead to a steady decline in performance. Users often notice that clothes look cleaner but feel stiff, smell faintly musty, or require extra cycles for stubborn stains. Reduced water levels also strain the appliance, causing pumps to work harder, along with uneven wear on the drums. Detergent residue, since it's not fully rinsed, can corrode components, and on and on. So how do you benefit from any of this? Maybe your utility bills will be a little bit lower, but that's about it. In exchange, you get an expensive washing machine that's doomed to fail in a few years. Oh, and all of your other appliances got worse, too, courtesy of the federal government. Now, if there's any silver lining here, it's that in 2024, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron Doctrine. We talked about this case at the time. The ruling basically means that Congress can't delegate everything to federal agencies like the Department of Energy. In other words, every once in a while, Congress needs to pass a law using the constitutional process rather than allowing bureaucrats to delegate everything to federal agencies like the Department of Energy. At the Department of Energy, to effectively pass laws by themselves, which is what's been happening. Agencies are no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt in every case, and that's good news if someone decides to sue the Department of Energy to roll back some of these inane regulations that are making our everyday life much worse in many respects. There's a real opportunity to do something about these regulations for the first time in decades. And once that happens, who knows? Maybe we'll usher in a new era of human progress. Maybe we'll colonize Mars in a few years. Because you see, when we're not drowning ourselves in regulations, there's actually a lot we can achieve. All we have to do is admit once again that Reagan made a mistake. We have to make it clear that people are entitled to demand functional products, even if that means paying more up front, and even if that means we're using a little more water in the process. And if you doubt that it's possible, remember, we once landed on the moon. And we did land on the moon. We also, once upon a time, created a toaster that doesn't burn the bread. And we can easily return to that era of American excellence if we're willing to do so. This is a far more worthy cause than a lot of the stuff that people talk about. It's a more worthy cause than all the BLM riots combined. So the next time your Wi-Fi-enabled washing machine destroys your entire kitchen, or the next time your KitchenAid mixer spontaneously combusts, Remember the words of the old civil rights heroes of America? yesteryear. And get yourself into some good trouble. Take to the streets. Seek the justice that you and your dirty dishes so rightly deserve. Future generations and future customers of household appliances in particular will thank you for your sacrifice. And next time there's a Labor Day appliance sale, for the first time in recorded history, people will actually be excited about it. And with apologies to George Floyd and John Lewis, it's hard to imagine a more meaningful legacy than that. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week. Have a great weekend. Godspeed. But in all of my years of public life, I have never profited from public service. I welcome this kind of examination. Because people have got to know whether or not their president's a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. For more than five decades, from Iran-Contra to Monica Lewinsky to Russiagate, every political scandal has been measured against one, the Watergate affair. But what if Richard Nixon was telling the truth? What if Watergate isn't what it seems? What if hundreds of thousands of pages of sworn testimony, memoirs, and newly released government documents tell a different story than the one you learned in school? In 1972, Nixon won the biggest electoral landslide in modern American history with grand plans to remake the federal government. Two years later, he was out of office. You were taught that Nixon's men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to spy on his political opponents. You were taught that when he found out, Nixon covered it up, and that the cover-up was worse than the crime. You were taught that two heroic Washington Post reporters, guided by a righteous FBI whistleblower, brought the truth to the table. You were taught that Nixon's men broke into the White House, brought the most powerful man in the world to justice. But you were never taught what really happened. I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. The real history of the Watergate scandal is available now on Daily Wire+. I'll tell you that. I think it might make it in the top five of all things in the world. Beef, chicken, pork, even seafood, you know what you're talking about. You're not feeding your family. The good ranchers quality is just next level on certainly all the beef. The chicken is like the best chicken you're going to get, whether we're talking about the chicken breasts, whether we're talking about the seed oil-free chicken nuggets. Start a plan at goodranchers.com slash wire. Get 50 bucks off plus free meat with every order. Goodranchers.com. 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