Yellow Peril

If it never occurred to you that building codes were creatures of interest group lobbying, Joshua Davis’ tale of the waterless urinal in Wired.com will be an eye-opener. Seems that the new-fangled urinals take a lot less skilled labor to install. And by no coincidence, back in 2003 the plumbers unions managed to get the two organizations that produce model local building codes to bar them on the strength of a consultant’s report that they could cause “unconsciousness, respiratory paralysis and death.” So how has Falcon Waterfree Technologies managed to sell 200,000 of these murderous water-saving machines since then? By fighting for code revisions city-by-city – something few other start-up companies have pockets deep enough to contemplate (Falcon is backed by a couple of billionaires).