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Gas mowers and garden tools are just bad in general. But they are the backbone of a lot of immigrant small businesses. Banning without providing a path or inc

Gas mowers and garden tools are just bad in general. But they are the backbone of a lot of immigrant small businesses. Banning without providing a path or incentive to electric seems very radical to me. Relevant facts on gas-powered tools: https://www.peoplepoweredmachines.com/faq-environment.htm https://www.peoplepoweredmachines.com/faq-environment.htm

maxcan 6y ago
Making life miserable for small business to win some virtue points is one of the bedrock principles for SFBA municipal governments. Its right up there with "rules for thee and not for me".
- eznzt 6y ago
  Making the lives of poor people miserable in the name of virtue points is one of the bedrock principles of left-wing governments around the world. For example, European cities banning diesel vehicles.
  - octonion 6y ago
    "virtue points" is a meaningless propaganda term.
  - ginja 6y ago
    It's funny how everything is a matter of perspective. I'd say that European governments are pretty "center" on average, given that they mostly range from social democracy to liberal conservatism. But anyway, in most medium to large European cities there is little reason to drive. The restrictions on vehicles are overwhelmingly positive for residents' quality of life and the environment.
  - snakeboy 6y ago
    > For example, European cities banning diesel vehicles. At least in Paris, poor people are not often the ones driving into Paris for work, they're mostly taking the metro in from the suburbs. Paris has some moderate air pollution problems, often among the worst European or American cities (of course, globally there's much worse), and that effects everyone's quality of life and long-term health in a myriad of ways that we don't fully understand yet, as well as in some obvious ways that we already understand. Of course there's always a bit of political show-boating with these things, and so the French left-wing do this with their pet issues, namely environmental issues. But that show-boating doesn't diminish the tangible positive effects of the policy...
  - michelpp 6y ago
    Guess who is physically harmed the most by using two stroke powered lawn equipment? Those same "poor" operators who run it all day every day. What is the upgrade cost vs asthma, cancer, neuropathy, and permanent hearing damage? Even from a completely selfish perspective electric is a no-brainer.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  Your comment is way off the mark. You completely ignore the very real environmental and quality-of-life issues with small two-stroke engines and call it virtue points.
  - Proziam 6y ago
    Is the threat of overnight destruction for many small businesses a reasonable way to approach this problem? I can easily imagine that not a single person passing this change ever thought about that. Whether it is virtue points or an important issue is irrelevant, the way it was handled was appalling and harmful. EDIT - If you're downvoting consider this: If you and your family were running a small landscaping business and need to replace thousands of dollars of equipment, you might feel differently. Be empathetic towards those people and consider other ways to accomplish the goal. We could just as easily have banned the sale of these after a future date. There are always options to mitigate the pressure on the affected persons.
    - acdha 6y ago
      Your point is undercut by lying about “overnight destruction”. If you read up on this issue, the effect in the real world is that businesses buy electric blowers. A bunch of them started calling it “organic landscaping” and charging more along with dropping chemical fertilizer / pesticide use.
      - Proziam 6y ago
        > If you read up on this issue, the effect in the real world is that businesses buy electric blowers. I wonder, between the two of us, who has spent more time actually making money by doing landscaping. A large portion of these 'businesses' are 1-2 people who scraped together whatever they could to get the equipment to make a living. Many are low income. Many sacrifice heavily in their personal lives to be able to make ends meet. The lie here is the notion that the bunch that go the route of 'organic landscaping' are representative of the entire group.
        6y ago
- triceratops 6y ago
  Why does it make things miserable for businesses? They'll just increase their rates to pay for the new equipment.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  This is pure flamebait, attributing malice for its own sake to administrators and dismissing the externalities as 'virtue points' - equivalent to saying you don't care about people who are bothered by noise or heavy gasoline fumes. I'm happy to see changes like this as it's something I've complained about for years; multiple properties in my area used these sort of services, and I'd frequently have to deal with the dust and dirt from their property being blown onto mine, along with noise and bad smells. I also felt bad for the operators who were exposed to that every day. So I am one of those people who has spent years nudging for a regulatory change. Why, exactly, should anyone support a business model that can only be profitable by dumping its weaknesses on to other people? I mean, if you want to use a potentially dangerous product and the risks fall only on you, you have an absolute right to do that. But you have no right to accrue benefits while dumping the risk onto someone else.
Zak 6y ago
More generally, lawns seem to me to be a net negative environmentally relative to any of many other landscaping options. I'm not quite for banning them, but maybe we could stop mandating them.
- namibj 6y ago
  Well, I'd go further, and propose to void all rules that mandate landscaping choices, which have non-trivial maintenance cost (rule of thumb: if you need to do gardening more than once a year, it's not negligible). Or just have the rules convert to "must not look abandoned", as long as that doesn't conflict with other existing rules. In case of conflict, the "must be lawn" rule would just disappear with no replacement.
MisterBastahrd 6y ago
Electric garden tools are great as long as you work quickly. I have a walk-behind mower and it has a TON of torque even in super-tall grass. I cannot imagine someone running a landscaping business with them, though. You'd have to double or triple your hauling load just to carry all the batteries you'd need to power them in a workday.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  If they charge quickly, maybe just have two sets of batteries, and require customers to let you charge the unused ones while you work?
  - ganoushoreilly 6y ago
    They don't charge all that quickly and I don't think customers want people plugging in battery chargers at their homes, at least I wouldn't. All it takes is one bootleg charger from amazon, or one bootleg battery from amazon (of which there are plenty of examples) and boom nasty battery fire. I would place money on that being a magnitude more likely than a spontaneous fire from combustables in the back of a truck. EDIT: Let's downvote instead of actually having a proper response. I can't wait until the bubble some of you live in pops and all of this nonsense goes away.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - imoverclocked 6y ago
    I have a Stihl electric polesaw/weed eater/brush/… combo with a backpack battery. That battery outlasts my ability to use it in a day. Multiple small batteries is an extremely doable solution for a professional. Also, what you add in battery charging, you easily make up with reduced maintenance of the tool.
- r00fus 6y ago
  Electrics don't have a plugin while working option do they?
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
The businesses will just pass the cost on and be fine. The guy who uses the $100 Home Depot weed whacker to do his own lawn is the one who gets screwed because he now either has to wrangle a cord everywhere or spend much more for equivalent performance from an electric. (on second thought string trimmers are low enough power that a cheap battery one should work for a homeowner but for blowers, chainsaws and most other landscaping power equipment my point still stands, you gotta spend big bucks on the 36-48v stuff that performs about the same as the ICE powered $99.99 special)
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  My electric trimmer was not much more expensive than the gas one, and it's much quieter and the battery can be used in any of my other Ryobi products (chosen deliberately for this purpose). The battery easily lasts for my entire yard, but if I had a bigger lot (like my parents, around 1 acre), I might need a second battery.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    For everything under ~4hp electric is definitely "nicer" in every way but only if you pony up for "nice". The 18v trimmers and chainsaws that are comparable in cost to the low end 2-stroke stuff aren't nearly as good (yet).
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    I’m a huge fan of Stihl and their range of battery tools. One weird little idiosyncrasy is that while their battery range are interchangeable, they don’t work as you’d imagine. The bigger batteries have more charge, but the biggest one also gives more power/torque (when used on a chainsaw). It’s something to do with the cells being wired in parallel or something like that. The difference is very noticeable.
    - Zak 6y ago
      Batteries experience a drop in voltage when a load is applied. The magnitude of this drop varies based on the design and chemistry of the battery, and the load per cell is obviously lower if there are more cells.
hangonhn 6y ago
It would be great if larger cities setup some kind of trade-in program where one can give up their gas powered tools for vouchers, etc. that they can use to buy replacement electric ones.
stefan_ 6y ago
Right, which is exactly why we should have banned them 20 years ago already. Just look at what happened with combustion engine scooters: we have been grandfathering these shitty, loud things for 30 years straight now. Now there are hundreds of electric scooter manufacturers in China and basically none serious in the western world. It's just a bandaid that needs to be ripped off. Like RoHS getting rid of lead solder; that was never gonna happen without regulatory intervention.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
If we only catered to the little guy to protect their jobs, we'd still have horse drawn carriages as the main form of transport...
minikites 6y ago
We could just give them money, but that idea is too taboo for the vast majority of Americans who believe the only purpose of government is to make the individual suffer.
crazygringo 6y ago
Electric equipment already exists, no "path" is needed. And this isn't going to harm immigrant small businesses, because everyone's in the same boat. It's not like non-immigrant businesses get to continue using gas blowers. Price will go up a little bit for consumers as everybody switches over to electric. But we're not even talking a massive capital investment here. Weed whackers don't cost $50,000.
mnouquet 6y ago
Electric mowers and garden tools are limited to small jobs. Being unable to get more that 1.5HP of mechanical work reserve electric tools to small casual jobs. At 5HP to 10HP, now we're talking, but power cords for 240V, as it's translates to 20A to 40A...
sib 6y ago
Well, assuming that those businesses are paying taxes (hmm?) then purchases of this amount would typically be fully deductible in the same purchase year as opposed to required some sort of complex depreciation schedule, so that would reduce the burden significantly. And since pretty much every vendor would have the same cost increase, it wouldn't be a competitive disadvantage from a pricing point of view. Likely the cost increase would mostly be passed on to the customer.

maxcan 6y ago

Making life miserable for small business to win some virtue points is one of the bedrock principles for SFBA municipal governments. Its right up there with "rules for thee and not for me".

eznzt 6y ago
Making the lives of poor people miserable in the name of virtue points is one of the bedrock principles of left-wing governments around the world. For example, European cities banning diesel vehicles.
- octonion 6y ago
  "virtue points" is a meaningless propaganda term.
- ginja 6y ago
  It's funny how everything is a matter of perspective. I'd say that European governments are pretty "center" on average, given that they mostly range from social democracy to liberal conservatism. But anyway, in most medium to large European cities there is little reason to drive. The restrictions on vehicles are overwhelmingly positive for residents' quality of life and the environment.
- snakeboy 6y ago
  > For example, European cities banning diesel vehicles. At least in Paris, poor people are not often the ones driving into Paris for work, they're mostly taking the metro in from the suburbs. Paris has some moderate air pollution problems, often among the worst European or American cities (of course, globally there's much worse), and that effects everyone's quality of life and long-term health in a myriad of ways that we don't fully understand yet, as well as in some obvious ways that we already understand. Of course there's always a bit of political show-boating with these things, and so the French left-wing do this with their pet issues, namely environmental issues. But that show-boating doesn't diminish the tangible positive effects of the policy...
- michelpp 6y ago
  Guess who is physically harmed the most by using two stroke powered lawn equipment? Those same "poor" operators who run it all day every day. What is the upgrade cost vs asthma, cancer, neuropathy, and permanent hearing damage? Even from a completely selfish perspective electric is a no-brainer.
unethical_ban 6y ago
Your comment is way off the mark. You completely ignore the very real environmental and quality-of-life issues with small two-stroke engines and call it virtue points.
- Proziam 6y ago
  Is the threat of overnight destruction for many small businesses a reasonable way to approach this problem? I can easily imagine that not a single person passing this change ever thought about that. Whether it is virtue points or an important issue is irrelevant, the way it was handled was appalling and harmful. EDIT - If you're downvoting consider this: If you and your family were running a small landscaping business and need to replace thousands of dollars of equipment, you might feel differently. Be empathetic towards those people and consider other ways to accomplish the goal. We could just as easily have banned the sale of these after a future date. There are always options to mitigate the pressure on the affected persons.
  - acdha 6y ago
    Your point is undercut by lying about “overnight destruction”. If you read up on this issue, the effect in the real world is that businesses buy electric blowers. A bunch of them started calling it “organic landscaping” and charging more along with dropping chemical fertilizer / pesticide use.
    - Proziam 6y ago
      > If you read up on this issue, the effect in the real world is that businesses buy electric blowers. I wonder, between the two of us, who has spent more time actually making money by doing landscaping. A large portion of these 'businesses' are 1-2 people who scraped together whatever they could to get the equipment to make a living. Many are low income. Many sacrifice heavily in their personal lives to be able to make ends meet. The lie here is the notion that the bunch that go the route of 'organic landscaping' are representative of the entire group.
      - 6y ago
triceratops 6y ago
Why does it make things miserable for businesses? They'll just increase their rates to pay for the new equipment.
anigbrowl 6y ago
This is pure flamebait, attributing malice for its own sake to administrators and dismissing the externalities as 'virtue points' - equivalent to saying you don't care about people who are bothered by noise or heavy gasoline fumes. I'm happy to see changes like this as it's something I've complained about for years; multiple properties in my area used these sort of services, and I'd frequently have to deal with the dust and dirt from their property being blown onto mine, along with noise and bad smells. I also felt bad for the operators who were exposed to that every day. So I am one of those people who has spent years nudging for a regulatory change. Why, exactly, should anyone support a business model that can only be profitable by dumping its weaknesses on to other people? I mean, if you want to use a potentially dangerous product and the risks fall only on you, you have an absolute right to do that. But you have no right to accrue benefits while dumping the risk onto someone else.

Zak 6y ago

More generally, lawns seem to me to be a net negative environmentally relative to any of many other landscaping options. I'm not quite for banning them, but maybe we could stop mandating them.

namibj 6y ago
Well, I'd go further, and propose to void all rules that mandate landscaping choices, which have non-trivial maintenance cost (rule of thumb: if you need to do gardening more than once a year, it's not negligible). Or just have the rules convert to "must not look abandoned", as long as that doesn't conflict with other existing rules. In case of conflict, the "must be lawn" rule would just disappear with no replacement.

MisterBastahrd 6y ago

Electric garden tools are great as long as you work quickly. I have a walk-behind mower and it has a TON of torque even in super-tall grass. I cannot imagine someone running a landscaping business with them, though. You'd have to double or triple your hauling load just to carry all the batteries you'd need to power them in a workday.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
If they charge quickly, maybe just have two sets of batteries, and require customers to let you charge the unused ones while you work?
- ganoushoreilly 6y ago
  They don't charge all that quickly and I don't think customers want people plugging in battery chargers at their homes, at least I wouldn't. All it takes is one bootleg charger from amazon, or one bootleg battery from amazon (of which there are plenty of examples) and boom nasty battery fire. I would place money on that being a magnitude more likely than a spontaneous fire from combustables in the back of a truck. EDIT: Let's downvote instead of actually having a proper response. I can't wait until the bubble some of you live in pops and all of this nonsense goes away.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- imoverclocked 6y ago
  I have a Stihl electric polesaw/weed eater/brush/… combo with a backpack battery. That battery outlasts my ability to use it in a day. Multiple small batteries is an extremely doable solution for a professional. Also, what you add in battery charging, you easily make up with reduced maintenance of the tool.
r00fus 6y ago
Electrics don't have a plugin while working option do they?

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

The businesses will just pass the cost on and be fine. The guy who uses the $100 Home Depot weed whacker to do his own lawn is the one who gets screwed because he now either has to wrangle a cord everywhere or spend much more for equivalent performance from an electric. (on second thought string trimmers are low enough power that a cheap battery one should work for a homeowner but for blowers, chainsaws and most other landscaping power equipment my point still stands, you gotta spend big bucks on the 36-48v stuff that performs about the same as the ICE powered $99.99 special)

Jtsummers 6y ago
My electric trimmer was not much more expensive than the gas one, and it's much quieter and the battery can be used in any of my other Ryobi products (chosen deliberately for this purpose). The battery easily lasts for my entire yard, but if I had a bigger lot (like my parents, around 1 acre), I might need a second battery.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  For everything under ~4hp electric is definitely "nicer" in every way but only if you pony up for "nice". The 18v trimmers and chainsaws that are comparable in cost to the low end 2-stroke stuff aren't nearly as good (yet).
- lostlogin 6y ago
  I’m a huge fan of Stihl and their range of battery tools. One weird little idiosyncrasy is that while their battery range are interchangeable, they don’t work as you’d imagine. The bigger batteries have more charge, but the biggest one also gives more power/torque (when used on a chainsaw). It’s something to do with the cells being wired in parallel or something like that. The difference is very noticeable.
  - Zak 6y ago
    Batteries experience a drop in voltage when a load is applied. The magnitude of this drop varies based on the design and chemistry of the battery, and the load per cell is obviously lower if there are more cells.

hangonhn 6y ago

It would be great if larger cities setup some kind of trade-in program where one can give up their gas powered tools for vouchers, etc. that they can use to buy replacement electric ones.

stefan_ 6y ago

Right, which is exactly why we should have banned them 20 years ago already. Just look at what happened with combustion engine scooters: we have been grandfathering these shitty, loud things for 30 years straight now. Now there are hundreds of electric scooter manufacturers in China and basically none serious in the western world. It's just a bandaid that needs to be ripped off. Like RoHS getting rid of lead solder; that was never gonna happen without regulatory intervention.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago

If we only catered to the little guy to protect their jobs, we'd still have horse drawn carriages as the main form of transport...

minikites 6y ago

We could just give them money, but that idea is too taboo for the vast majority of Americans who believe the only purpose of government is to make the individual suffer.

crazygringo 6y ago

Electric equipment already exists, no "path" is needed. And this isn't going to harm immigrant small businesses, because everyone's in the same boat. It's not like non-immigrant businesses get to continue using gas blowers. Price will go up a little bit for consumers as everybody switches over to electric. But we're not even talking a massive capital investment here. Weed whackers don't cost $50,000.

mnouquet 6y ago

Electric mowers and garden tools are limited to small jobs. Being unable to get more that 1.5HP of mechanical work reserve electric tools to small casual jobs. At 5HP to 10HP, now we're talking, but power cords for 240V, as it's translates to 20A to 40A...

sib 6y ago

Well, assuming that those businesses are paying taxes (hmm?) then purchases of this amount would typically be fully deductible in the same purchase year as opposed to required some sort of complex depreciation schedule, so that would reduce the burden significantly. And since pretty much every vendor would have the same cost increase, it wouldn't be a competitive disadvantage from a pricing point of view. Likely the cost increase would mostly be passed on to the customer.