US GOVERNMENT SAY BAH HUMBUG! to Christmas lights
The Comment period ends December 30th on the new regulations that will outlaw affordable Christmas lights including indoor and outdoor lighted decorations of any type. See link below.
From the Washington Times via Gail Combs:
Christmas lights have become so affordable that even the humblest of homes often are lit like the Star of Bethlehem. Federal bureaucrats are working to end this. They claim it will make us safer, but the facts don’t back them up.
It’s not uncommon to find strings of mini-lights priced at $1 for a hundred lights, sometimes even less. To cure this excessive affordability, the feds are rushing to save Americans from mass holiday displays. They seem to believe we all are like Clark Griswold, the bumbling father figure in National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation” (played by Chevy Chase), who nearly electrocutes himself, starts fires, falls off the roof and short-circuits power in his whole neighborhood as he tries to create a home display that would outdo Rockefeller Center.
The Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) has created an example of regulate first and explain why later. In October they proposed new regulations to outlaw strings of bulbs, lighted lawn figures and similar items that would be declared as hazardous. The red tape deals with certifying wire sizes, fuses, and tensile strength of all “seasonal decorative lighting products.”
This includes Christmas tree lights, lighted wreaths, menorahs, outdoor strands, lawn figures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, or Santa or Rudolph or Frosty the Snowman. Yes, Kwanzaa, too. CPSC is an equal opportunity Scrooge. The agency estimates that their proposed regulations will impact 100 million items per year with a market value of $500 million.
Of course, those items already are covered by safety regulations and also by industry standards and oversight. CPSC admits that 3.6-million unsafe lights were recalled under existing safeguards in place since 1974.
So what is CPSC’s justification for adding red tape to the red, green, blue, yellow, white and other colored displays? They report 250 deaths from fires or electrocutions by Christmas lights. That’s not 250 deaths per year; it’s 250 deaths since 1980. They had to add together 33 years of statistics to misportray danger.
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Is there anything left to regulate?
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christmas lights ban? really? where do these people come from mars? for me I do not celebrate christmas put up lights or anything like that, even I think this is a big trespass on peoples rights to buy whatever they want and spend their money on high electric bills if they want. it is your house your money and your life you can spend it use however you please as long as your not trespassing on anothers rights. but this simple concept seems to elude alot of people who get into power. in fact I think they get into power and it goes to their head and they feel like they are gods entitled to make whatever laws they want (of course they put a noble cause cover story to get people to accept it) lets pretend it is for the good of the children and we can violate whatever natural or god given laws we want and people will be glad to hand their money and life over to us. general populations just dont get it or they do and just give up because trying to change it is to exhausting. maybe they do like that guy alone in the wilderness go buy some land somewhere build a log cabin chop trees down for heat and hunt and grow food and keep minimal contact with the rest of the world.
I read the pending CPSC proposal. It doesn’t outlaw these lights. It only aims to require “minimum wire size, sufficient strain relief, or overcurrent protection”.
This is a good deal if you think about it – without any of those, a cheaply made string, with no fuse (they mostly seem to have this already), no strain relief, and undersize wires could overheat long before a 15A breaker would interrupt the current, and become a fire hazard.
To your point here, there are already some industry standards & oversight non-binding though, and won’t impact ultra low cost Far East imports. As for safety agency approvals, these same low cost Far East ports rarely gain CSA/TUV/UL recognition! Too costly.
It clearly is urgent that the government regulate farts. Those do contain those awful greenhouse gases!
Anyone ever see a photo from space of the Korean Peninsula at night?
Did they omit injury or death from falling off the ladder while hanging the lights?
Leaving em burning all year would avoid that?
Forgot that g,d,r in chevron brackets would not show up.
One person in the Victoria BC area is doubly sinful, has lights on both his house and his big pickemup.
Emulating perhaps the big trucks that festoon themselves with lights and parade through the area each December, albeit for only several hours. (A charity thing, and educational – trucks can be examined up close at the end of the tour, at the local race track.)
I agree with those who say the regulations are not intended for the homeowner. The regulations are intended to hit the manufacturers and stores. Legal threats and green activism behind the scenes have been used to intimidate a lot of small businesses and chains. The result is that regulatory control of what stores can carry, and therefore what you can purchase in stores, is tightening like a boa constrictor.
In this way, the environmentalist NGOs, the government, and the UN are the customer. Not you.
Once regulators tell industries what they can produce, and dictate to stores what they can sell, then they will say, “Look a market solution! Look, environmental capitalism!” “A green economy!”
An important test of this observation is that the upcoming presidential candidates, and president, will be an ELECTRIC CAR SALESMAN in Chief.
Time Machine Trip
This is what happened last time simple, working, harmless lighting technology was outlawed by environmentalists. See the comments – this is not unusual, and that is volitilized mercury gas that is being released.