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Comment by Proziam | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I can easily imagine that not a single person passing this change ever thought about that

I can easily imagine they did. Who's right? People have been raising this issue for years, the idea did not just fall out of the sky. I'm unclear why the people who have been putting up with the problem for a long time need to coddle the people creating the problem any longer.

I doubt it's overnight destruction of the business. It likely means selling some of their amortized equipment to buy different equipment. They've likely had notice for a long time. Especially if they participate in their government.

That equipment only lasts so long anyway. If you drove your care as much as the pros drive their lawn mowers you would be putting around 75,000 miles a year on the car! If the law doesn't take effect for 3 years then all equipment will have been replaced by the normal cycle.

Of course if you are a homeowner that equipment will last a lot longer. (home owners buy a cheaper grade of quality in general, so you can't compare lifetimes with pro grade equipment)

> If the law doesn't take effect for 3 years then all equipment will have been replaced by the normal cycle.

I have personally seen such equipment remain in use for 15-20 years. When I was young the lawnmower we used was a monstrous Craftsman that was originally built 20 years prior. It was used year-round for that period for everything from snow removal, lawn mowing, and hauling landscaping supplies (retaining wall blocks and the like).

You would likely be surprised at the level of care and maintenance some small business owners put in.

Bigger equipment lasts longer. When weight is an advantage you don't feel bad about putting in bracing to make things last longer.

We are talking about hand held stuff here though. While pros need equipment to last longer than home owners, there is a limit to how much mass they can deal with for something that is hand held.

> It likely means selling some of their amortized equipment to buy different equipment.

Many run their business with the tools they can afford. Upon inspection, you would find that many such businesses have little to no resale value to lean on to make such an upgrade.

> They've likely had notice for a long time. Especially if they participate in their government.

What percentage of people laborers have the time to actively participate in government? I don't know the answer to this but I suspect it's shockingly small.

> Many run their business with the tools they can afford.

Are electric equivalents of the banned gas tools really that much more expensive?

The higher end electric stuff isn't priced exorbitantly compared to the higher end ICE stuff that businesses tend to use.

The problem preventing commercial adoption is that if you want commercial user amounts of uninterrupted run time you wind up spending a fortune on batteries.

You've changed your argument. Now you're saying "forget half of what I said".

I agree that second-order effects need to be considered, certainly. That is the point of phase-in periods, which this measure had.

Is it long enough, or substantial enough? Should small businesses be able to apply for exemptions, or interest free loans for new equipment, for example? Perhaps.

It should be uncontroversial given the facts and experiences with these engines that they are awful pollutants, terribly aggravating to communities, and that the world would be better without them.

> You've changed your argument. Now you're saying "forget half of what I said"

My only point is that the way you implement change matters and that this implementation will adversely affect the worst-off population.

> It should be uncontroversial given the facts and experiences with these engines that they are awful pollutants, terribly aggravating to communities, and that the world would be better without them.

No controversy there at all.

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.

> 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.

A business doesn’t fail overnight when they say “to comply with local ordnance, we’re charging 5% more to replace our equipment”.

This complaint is brought up for every single environmental improvement, and it misses the concept that the risk is an imbalance, not a change which affects everyone. For example, you used to not be able to see across the street in LA on bad smog days – and I remember plenty of people insisting that doing anything about that would devastate the economy, and yet California seems to be not exactly an impoverished wasteland.

The market finds a way.

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