MPCGA doesn’t easily roll off the tongue as MAGA does it?

The photo above is of two petrol cans I own.

The one on the left purchased twenty or more years ago, is easy to use; just unscrew the cap, which has a plastic collar so just flops to one side; take the nozzle, which has its own cap; screw that on the opening, and then pour the petrol. Easy peasy, Japanesy, with no spillage anywhere, especially not on your hands.

The one on the right was purchased in the last few years; to use it involves unscrewing the black cap and punching out the yellow seal in the middle of it, which has to be placed somewhere; extracting the pourer from the opening, turning it around and inserting it through the hole in the black screw top; screwing that top back on the can to then pour petrol. It’s fiddly, slower than the other can, and there is no way in Gods Green Earth it can be done without getting petrol all over your hands or gloves.

As far as I can tell, the reason for this new design is that it provides a better seal than the old models, thereby protecting the environment?? But it sucks on that account as well, given all the petrol spilled into waterways as a result of all the hand-washing, not to mention the drips on the ground while setting it up to pour.

The latter is the only models you can buy. I suppose I should be grateful that at least New Zealand’s regulators didn’t get rid of the vent on the nozzle – which is what the Yanks did a few years ago, as explained by one Buck Throckmorton back in 2019:

In 2009 the EPA banned the sale of gas cans that functionally pour gas. To be specific, the scientifically illiterate bureaucrats at the EPA outlawed gas cans with vents, mandating that all new gas cans must have crazy contraptions that require three hands to operate. Unlike the old gas cans, the new ones spill gas all over the user and onto the ground. The result of the EPA’s incompetence is a new gas can that is much worse for the environment than the one it replaced.

Sounds familiar!

The incompetent regulators at the EPA are so scientifically illiterate that they honestly believed that the vents on gas cans were there to allow gas fumes to escape, rather than the actual purpose of allowing air to flow in to the can so that gas can be poured out. Having received their “science” education in Oppression Studies classes at Grievance State University, these morons making rules for how we gas up our power tools have likely never handled a tool more powerful than their own personal groomers.

The government-mandated, non-functioning gas can may be the most unpopular government-imposed regulatory rule since the 55 mile per hour speed limit. If you don’t know someone who mocks and despises these stupid red canisters, then you are living a very sheltered urban or upscale lifestyle. Most all working-class and middle-class Americans deal with these awful containers, and they mock the government for imposing them on us.

Congress never passed a law which outlawed the old gas cans. Instead, these abhorrent new gas cans were simply foisted on us by zealous government imbeciles who have never mowed a blade of grass or poured a drop of gas out of a gas can.

That has now been reversed.

And while you could sit there and shrug your shoulders at such a small regulatory change, it carries far deeper meaning, as Throckmorton explains today:

The national gas can nightmare is over. Thank you, Donald Trump! Thank you, Lee Zeldin!
….
Elections matter, and the election of Donald Trump as president, and his appointment of Lee Zeldin as EPA Administrator, are resulting in a profound rollback of the eco-communist agenda that Democrats were imposing through EPA regulations.
…
And once again I’ll point out that the “True Conservatives” at National Review, Wall Street Journal, Dispatch, etc worked feverishly to keep Donald Trump out of the White House over the past three elections, and to elect Hillary, Biden, and Kamala instead. Had they been successful in “saving conservatism,” this triumphant day would not have arrived.

All of, but especially that last, being food for thought as I continue to wade through a sea of regulations here in God’s Own. Any chance I’ll ever get the old cans back again here in NZ, or am I doomed by petty bureaucrats sitting in Wellington to deal with the modern shit for the rest of my days?