As Americans, you're a bunch of selfish monsters. Liberals are fed up with you. You take, and take, and take. Just because you live in a wealthy, successful, nation - the most powerful country on Earth - you think you're allowed to shower for as long as you want. Well, your government is here to tell you how wrong you are.
The agency is spending $15,000 to create a wireless system that will track how much water a hotel guest uses to get them to “modify their behavior.”
“Hotels consume a significant amount of water in the U.S. and around the world,” an EPA grant to the University of Tulsa reads. “Most hotels do not monitor individual guest water usage and as a result, millions of gallons of potable water are wasted every year by hotel guests.”
“The proposed work aims to develop a novel low cost wireless device for monitoring water use from hotel guest room showers,” it said. “This device will be designed to fit most new and existing hotel shower fixtures and will wirelessly transmit hotel guest water usage data to a central hotel accounting system.”
The funding is going toward creating a prototype and market analysis for the device. The goal of the project is to change the behavior of Americans when they stay at hotels.
The feds will undoubtedly say they need this system to deal with situations like the California water shortage for which they, themselves, are at least partially responsible. There might even be a grain of truth to the assertion. However, in the end, we all know how this will play out.
Hotels will love and abuse it because if the "slippery slope principle” applies (and it almost always does) the monitors will give them a new way to upcharge guests. Use too much H2O and you'll find the overage tacked onto your bill.
The EPA will love and abuse it because they're a bunch of crazed control freaks, hell-bent on monitoring - and eventually manipulating - virtually every aspect of human behavior. If they can spy on your habits, liberals can (again, eventually) come up with some onerous legislation to forcibly alter them. That could mean governors on the showers, new taxes, or new usage regulations all based on the inarguable fact that "they know what's best for you."
Again, at the moment this is for hotels only. ...But how much would you like to bet that there's some pencil-necked prog deep in the bowels of EPA headquarters - a guy who was likely educated by a certain sociology professor - who’d just love to have one of these "wireless systems" sending data from every American home straight back to DC?
Baby steps, Uncle Sam. You'll get there one day.
