[HN Gopher] Over-regulation is doubling the cost
___________________________________________________________________
Over-regulation is doubling the cost
Author : bilsbie
Score : 320 points
Date : 2025-11-20 22:58 UTC (1 days ago)
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| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| > As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do
| certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn't increase
| emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this
| certification across every single truck engine family. It costs
| $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine
| families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That's
| $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that
| this is to certify that a device--whose sole reason for existence
| is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so
| across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations--is not
| increasing the emissions of the truck. It's a complete waste of
| money for everyone.
|
| Wild - whoever did this should lose their job.
| dangus wrote:
| Seems somewhat reasonable. I don't know why the company is
| supporting all 270 engine families.
|
| This company wants to put a bunch of stuff on the road going
| 70mph that could crash into you and kill you and is complaining
| about a measly $27 million of regulatory cost.
|
| They are making up a bunch of scary numbers about the cost of
| the status quo and the tone of the article is basically holding
| us all hostage. Speed out special snowflake startup company
| through the regulatory process (written in blood) or else
| you'll lose bajillions of dollars in suffering and pain from
| the "status quo."
|
| $27 million is basically a rounding error for automotive
| companies. Maybe do better at raising funds next time, bro.
| some_random wrote:
| Why wouldn't they try to support a large number of engines,
| the testing was about emissions not safety, and they're not a
| huge automotive company.
| dangus wrote:
| Emissions = safety.
|
| I assume that out of 270 entire families that some are more
| popular than others? Why not pick the 20-30 most popular
| ones?
|
| The tone of this article is that OP's company has a savior
| complex. If they aren't given expedient special treatment
| regulatory approval, the status quo is causing a bunch of
| fake make up dollar values of damage. It's kind of a gross
| tone.
| some_random wrote:
| >As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do
| certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn't
| increase emissions of semi trucks.
|
| Where in this sentence is asbestos mentioned? As for the
| families, if they know their product works in 270 engine
| families why would they chose to only sell to 20-30?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Because they can't afford the required testing for all of
| them?
| cm2012 wrote:
| The testing that is clearly theater and a waste of money
| for all involved?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| It's not wasting the money of the testing people who's
| job it is to get paid to do work.
|
| Like a civil engineer preparing an existing conditions
| plan of a flat field...
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I don't know enough about it to know whether it's a waste
| or not. It's certainly not surprising that the company
| that has to pay for it thinks it's a waste.
| dangus wrote:
| It looks like theater when everything goes right.
|
| But when it catches a problem suddenly it's not theater.
| ehnto wrote:
| Presumably they have so many families to serve their
| customers well. If they were to consolidate their engine
| families in such a way to avoid paying as much money to
| regulatory processes, that seems like a bit of a perverse
| incentive and outcome.
|
| In my view though the goal of the regulation isn't bad,
| but the cost of the process is prohibitive. Why is it so
| expensive to measure engine emissions?
| cm2012 wrote:
| Spoken like someone who has no idea how hard it is to
| actually get anything done in real life vs your armchair.
| dangus wrote:
| Nope. I own a business.
|
| Complying with regulations is a sometimes-difficult but
| necessary part of my existence.
|
| Small business owners like myself are the ones who comply
| while the biggest corporations use their armies of lawyers
| and bean counters to see how many pennies they can save by
| skirting those regulations. Just like OP.
| terminalshort wrote:
| If you want to argue that adding an electric engine to
| existing trucks is going to make them go out of control and
| kill people in some completely common sense defying manner,
| then the burden of proof is on you and not on the company to
| prove a negative.
| wredcoll wrote:
| I don't think this is even what they're testing, but come
| on, it takes very little going wrong for a multiton truck
| going 80+ to kill someone.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >Wild - whoever did this should lose their job.
|
| Why's that? Because a guy who's apparently friends with the
| owner of the company that produces these things told you that
| it saves emissions? Doesn't it seem reasonable to verify these
| claims?
| some_random wrote:
| No that doesn't seem reasonable at all if it's been proven to
| work _really well_ in several configurations and there's no
| particular reason to expect that the results would be
| drastically different in other very similar configurations.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Who proved it works really well in several configurations?
| squigz wrote:
| And how do you codify the threshold for what "very similar"
| configurations don't need to be tested and those that do?
| XorNot wrote:
| That's what regulatory exemption procedures exist for,
| and it would be the logical next step if you had
| convincing hard data.
|
| Every single regulatory process has them, so the fact
| that this very ranty article omits any mention of an
| attempt to use them is highly suspect.
|
| I've worked with plenty of systems where for all sorts of
| reasons exemptions are granted for the express purpose of
| promoting innovation or recognizing a special
| circumstance.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Some kind of testing should be required but 27mil seems
| egregious
| ehnto wrote:
| Yeah why does the certification process cost so much is one
| question I have. Would this be a conversation if the cost
| of the test were more reasonable?
| etothepii wrote:
| Most likely it costs a lot because there isn't enough
| frequency of demand for it for more than one company to
| offer the service thus there is no supply. However, as it
| is a regulatory requirement the severity of demand when
| it appears is near infinite.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Having done UL certification before, this is exactly how
| it is.
|
| During the process we forgot/missed that the product
| serial needed a single letter appended to the end to
| denote that it was the UL compliant version. We caught
| this after paying $15k for just recertification with new
| parts, no testing, only paperwork.
|
| We went back to UL and told them about the mistake. They
| charged us $5k to open a new case _just_ to append a
| "-5" to the name of the product on a handful of
| documents.
|
| It's a total fucking racket.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| Of course we should verify such claims.
|
| Just as we should also verify claims that every regulation
| that has ever been written into law is by definition Good
| (tm) and can never be questioned.
|
| It's possible for the friend of the company owner to
| astroturf an online form to get a good regulation eliminated,
| just because it didn't benefit him.
|
| It's also possible for the such wealthy individuals to
| astrotruf in favour of bad regulations, just because it would
| benefit him.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| The null hypothesis is that interventions are just as if
| not more likely to cause harm than do good.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Aren't regulations a form of intervention?
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Yeah thats my point.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Verifying is great!
|
| How many types of truck engine do you reasonably need to test
| with? The number should fit on one hand. And really you
| should only need to do the full test with one model and
| limited verifications with others. That'll get it down from
| $27M to $200k, which would be a far more reasonable
| requirement.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| The problem isn't that regulations exist. The problem is that
| they are defined in a way that reasonable work arounds or
| alternative pathways do not exist for situations like this. 270
| engine families for 9 engine suggests that the designs may be
| small variations that would not significantly change the
| emissions between them. The bureaucrats should waive off some
| requirements here.
|
| The other alternative that I can think of is that experimental
| engines get an exception to be not certified for X miles of
| operation. Once the candidates are chosen for mass production,
| mandatory certifications can be introduced. Even if your new
| design doubles the emissions for some reason, over 100000
| miles, that's barely a drop in the bucket. For reference,
| double the emissions for 100000 miles is roughly equivalent to
| having an extra semi on the road for a year, which is nothing.
| nerdponx wrote:
| We need more information. How does this work for internal
| combustion truck engines?
|
| Is the regulation well intentioned poorly designed? Is it
| anti-competitive gatekeeping drafted by lobbyists? Is the
| author misrepresenting something? All of the above? Hard to
| say.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I imagine that the variation is in the internal combustion
| engines the system is being paired with. In that scenario,
| it can be that the regulator is treating the combined units
| as a new drivetrain and requiring certification of each
| combination as if it were a new engine.
|
| It would be interesting to see a breakdown of what larger
| operators have in their fleets. It could be that a few
| certifications go a long ways. They are going to be at
| least somewhat inclined to avoid variation.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| You cannot separate the idea of regulation from their harm
| because they are inherent to the concept. A system so complex
| and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to
| correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially
| those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely
| to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because
| we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why
| they often have paradoxical effects. Rent control is a
| fantastic if trivial example of such.
|
| We know central planning doesn't work, yet we are inclined to
| do it anyway under the false notion that it's better to do
| something rather than nothing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Rent control is a fantastic if trivial example of such.
|
| No it isn't. Rent control is made to provide short term
| relief. Regulations tend to be long term requriements. Of
| course making a short term temporary solution long term
| does not work.
|
| >we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing
| interventions because we cannot accurately predict their
| outcomes
|
| For policy, I think it is important to be risk averse.
| Regulations are extremely risk averse. Slowing down
| reckless actions so that people don't die should be
| considered a good thing. Of course, that can be anathema to
| businesses who rush to be first to market.
|
| I don't see regulations being a problem here, but the cost
| of the regulations. Instead of focusing on de-regulations
| we look into what that 100k certification is going to?
| Hopefully not yet another for-profit middleman with
| incentives to bog the process down.
| terminalshort wrote:
| > Rent control is made to provide short term relief.
|
| Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the
| longer you are in the same apartment without moving as
| the difference between what the tenant pays and the
| market value diverge further with each lease renewal.
| There are people in NY who have been in their apartments
| 50 years and pay 10% of the market rate.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm talking about the policy, not the tenants. Enacting
| 50 years of rent control is no different from Japan's
| economy the last 30 years.
|
| Of course after multiple generations you scare off
| housing investment. But not after 5. And that should be
| the goal of rent control. Short term relief while doing
| the long term plan of building more housing.
|
| Politicians not doing it this way is like blaming your
| duct tape for falling apart after a few weeks of adhesive
| duty.That doesn't mean duct tape is bad. It means no one
| bothered to fix the underlying issue.
| parineum wrote:
| > And that should be the goal of rent control. Short term
| relief while doing the long term plan of building more
| housing.
|
| Even when there's a plan in place, it's unpopular to
| remove handouts like that. Any politician up for re-
| election isn't going to let that expire.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| And that person can never ever move.
|
| They're right. Rent control is useful as a short term
| measure to keep rents from spiking, but it does long term
| damage to supplies and you need completely different
| methods to fix the supplies.
| davidgay wrote:
| > Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow
| the longer you are in the same apartment without moving
| as the difference between what the tenant pays and the
|
| You're assuming a form of rent control where new tenants
| pay market rate. That's not the only form, e.g.,
| Berkeley's rent control used to continue "forever", until
| California forbade that (Costa Hawkins act in 1995).
| heddycrow wrote:
| The "we" that knows central planning doesn't work and the
| "we" inclined toward central planning are the same?
|
| If so, I've not met this group of people, but I'd like to
| share your first point with them because I tend to agree.
| vkou wrote:
| If central planning didn't work, why does every
| corporation under the sun use it internally? Why don't
| they just let everyone do what they want, and then sue
| eachother when it doesn't result in great outcomes?
| Tostino wrote:
| What is the average age of a corporation?
|
| I say that as someone who actually thinks a little
| central planning is good.
| card_zero wrote:
| Clarify that, please? Maybe you mean "most corporations
| are short-lived due to excess central planning", or then
| again "most corporations are full of crusty old dudes who
| love the tradition of central planning", or ..?
| Tostino wrote:
| I may believe both of those things, but no that's not
| actually what I meant. I simply meant look at the stats
| for how long corporations actually live. Are we sure
| that's how we want to structure our government?
| wredcoll wrote:
| Some corps live 1 year and others have been around for
| 150+ and they all use central planning. This seems
| unrelated.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Without comparing the management styles of different
| corporations it's difficult to say if it's related or
| not. For example, it's possible that long-lived
| corporations are run in a more laissez-faire style
| compared to ones that fail.
| komali2 wrote:
| Interestingly, one marker for longevity is distributed
| ownership, aka profit share or co-op structures, or
| family run businesses. Co-ops specifically have much
| longer longevity than traditional corporations.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Is that a useful metric in a vacuum like that?
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Central planning _does_ work at small scales. Everyone
| "centrally plans" their own life. Can you imagine doing
| it any other way?
|
| The issue is that as the context expands, we lose the
| ability to make accurate predictions. To some extent we
| can't even predict our own lives although we try our
| best. When you expand that to the size of a corporation
| it's mostly just guessing. Corporations fail all of the
| time. When we expand that to a society, we are just
| guessing for everything but the most simple of
| predictions.
| vkou wrote:
| And you cannot separate the idea of lack of regulation from
| the harm inherent to the concept.
|
| This kind of lazy ideological posturing is thought-
| terminating and _incredibly tiring_.
|
| Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a
| blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage
| slip into your food, medicine, construction materials,
| safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes.
| It would be truly baffling if of all conceivable points on
| the axis it _was_ a global optimum.
| card_zero wrote:
| I sympathise with your fatigue, I get tired of repeated
| arguments too, but I suppose the tiredness itself isn't a
| sign of being right. I wonder whether _oh no not this
| again_ contains useful information. Perhaps not.
| Misconceptions are popular, but good ideas are also
| popular.
|
| The earliest regulations were about the purity of bread
| and beer, and I tend to think of them as a good thing.
| But concepts like _gypsum doesn 't go in bread_ are
| simple enough for a king to understand, so perhaps those
| early regulations were more suitable for central
| administration. This was before there were brand names or
| consumer organizations. I suppose a _non-_ central form
| of regulation would have to be along those lines,
| adversarial but symbiotic with the specific industry.
| Restaurant rating stars. IDK. Some stuff isn't consumer-
| facing though.
|
| When unmonitored, people aren't motivated to behave, and
| they make a mess. When monitored, the people comply, but
| the monitors aren't motivated to be wise or
| understanding, only to enforce. _Sometimes_ you get
| situations where an entire culture of people are
| spontaneously careful and good, or where they are
| regulated by regulators who are wise and perceptive and
| flexible. This state of affairs comes about, so far as I
| can tell, at random, or by voodoo.
| wredcoll wrote:
| I think this specific thing is more an effect of human
| brains trying to stereotype complicated things.
|
| "all regulations are bad" is a much simpler premise than
| "rule #3.70.66.345 should be adjusted to consider
| multiple drive trains with the same engine to pass the
| same tests".
|
| Like, if you found a specific regulation that was badly
| designed and advocated for it to change, no one would
| argue against it, but you wouldn't get any internet
| engagement either.
| card_zero wrote:
| "All blanket statements are wrong" (is a blanket
| statement).
|
| There's wide agreement that reality is complicated _and_
| that simple elegant theories are valuable.
| vkou wrote:
| Here's a simple and elegant theory - an ounce of
| prevention is worth a pound of the cure. If you'd like it
| to be even simpler, "Measure twice, cut once."
|
| Trying to squeeze blood out of a rock from people who cut
| corners and hurt others after-the-fact is a fuckin'
| nightmare and leads to globally bad outcomes.
| card_zero wrote:
| Yes, contradictory ones abound. Look before you leap,
| seize the day.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| > Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how
| a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting
| garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction
| materials, safety systems actually leads to globally
| better outcomes.
|
| You're gonna complain about "lazy ideological posturing"
| and then in the same breath construct a tired, boring
| straw man? Was this on purpose to prove a point or
| something?
|
| Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims
| can be counted on. Regulating lead in petrol is simple,
| uncontroversial, and very reasonably likely to do more
| good than harm. It's an example of an intervention on
| society that is relatively safe and easy to predict the
| outcome. And it's also an outlier, because most political
| action is neither uncontroversial, simple, or likely to
| do more good than harm.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Regulating lead in petrol was very much not
| uncontroversial when it was regulated. Same with asbestos
| - the industries involved fought really hard against it.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by
| imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict
| their outcomes.
|
| This doesn't follow from your premise.
|
| > We know central planning doesn't work
|
| Europe conquered the world using central planning. Every
| society on earth with any measure of security, order, and
| cleanliness to speak of is dominated by a central
| bureaucracy. It works.
|
| > under the false notion that it's better to do something
| rather than nothing.
|
| Doing nothing is precisely why anarcho-capitalists failed
| to change anything. Everyone smart associated with that
| movement studied power dynamics and moved onto other
| projects.
| parineum wrote:
| > Europe conquered the world using central planning.
|
| Ah yes, I remember when the country of Europe conquered
| the world.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| You mean the British Empire, that committed all sorts of
| atrocities? Thats what you call "works"?
| wat10000 wrote:
| Central planning is why our cities are no longer choked by
| smog. It is extremely difficult to predict outcomes in
| complex human system, but that cuts both ways: it's hard to
| know if some intervention is good or bad, and it's hard to
| know if leaving things alone is good or bad.
|
| If you leave things alone, you get the light bulb and the
| airplane, but also leaded gasoline and radioactive tonics.
| The notion that it's always better to do nothing rather
| than something is as fallacious as the opposite.
| fragmede wrote:
| > We know central planning doesn't work
|
| Most corporations and dictatorships seem to be centrally
| planned. Communism didn't work out for the Soviets, but
| they also didn't have smartphones and ChatGPT.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization
| is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of
| interventions, especially those imposed from the top down.
| In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by
| imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict
| their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical
| effects.
|
| This isn't quite right. There are some regulations that
| have such obviously enormous benefits that even if our
| estimates are imperfect, they'd have to be off by a
| thousand miles to not be the right thing. Examples like
| banning leaded gasoline or asbestos, or having antitrust
| laws that kick in if a market gets too consolidated for any
| reason.
|
| The problem is then people start making a bunch of other
| rules that on paper would improve things by a couple of
| percent, but in practice because they're not accounting for
| overhead or their numbers aren't perfect they're actually
| making things slightly worse, and then multiply that by
| thousands of such individual rules and you've got a huge
| mess.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| I agree with this. When Michael Huemer talks about
| political knowledge he lists several requirements:
|
| 1. Simple. For example, "Demand curves slope downward."
| The more complicated a theory is, the more ways there are
| for it to go wrong.
|
| 2. Accepted by experts. For example, there is a broad
| consensus in economics that protectionism is undesirable.
| If a theory is well-justified, then the great majority of
| reasonable and intelligent people will usually come to
| accept the theory, once they understand the arguments for
| it.
|
| 3. Non-ideological. Theories that have an ideological
| flavor and that call forth strong emotions tend to be
| pseudo-knowledge-for example, the theory that behavioral
| differences between men and women are entirely due to
| socialization. Reality is unlikely to conform to
| ideology.
|
| 4. Weak. For instance, we do not know that free markets
| are always perfectly efficient. We can say only that free
| markets are usually approximately efficient.
|
| 5. Specific and concrete. We can be much more confident
| in a concrete claim such as "Ted Bundy's murders were
| wrong" than in an abstract theory such as "It is always
| wrong to initiate violence against another person."
|
| 6. Supported by appropriate evidence. For example, the
| claim "violent entertainment increases violent crime"
| cannot be known without empirical evidence. In this case,
| a study based on a large, random sample would be
| appropriate, rather than, say, a few anecdotes.
|
| 7. Undefeated by counter-evidence. If there is a large
| quantity of evidence against P, or if one does not know
| whether there is such counter-evidence, then one does not
| know that P. For example, if one has read several studies
| supporting gun control while having read none of the
| literature on the other side, then one cannot claim to
| know whether gun control is desirable.
|
| The claim "Leaded gasoline should be banned" reasonably
| fits most of these requirements, thus it's probably a
| relatively safe intervention with upside.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > The problem isn't that regulations exist. The problem is
| that they are defined in a way that reasonable work arounds
| or alternative pathways do not exist for situations like
| this. 270 engine families for 9 engine suggests that the
| designs may be small variations that would not significantly
| change the emissions between them. The bureaucrats should
| waive off some requirements here.
|
| Any form of regulation is attacked by those who seek to
| profit by freely causing the harm that regulation prevents.
| These attacks aim at completely eliminating any and all
| regulation, but also aim at eroding it so that complying with
| the letter of the law is ineffective at actually complying
| with the spirit of the law.
|
| Trying to make mountains out of molehills is one way to
| attack regulation.
|
| Look at OP's example. In no way did OP offer any support for
| the $100k price tag for certification, or even mentioned what
| this hypothetical amount represents in the total investment
| in a product such as an engine. We're talking about
| investments that range well in the tens of million of
| dollars. It's an insignificant drop in the bucket. The design
| team's salaries alone eclipse that value. On top of that, a
| single engine alone sells for thousands. Is this hypothetical
| regulatory cost that high if it can be covered by selling a
| few dozen units?
|
| The combinatorial explosion is also a far-fetched example of
| this desire to make mountains out of molehills. You do not
| need to recertify a whole engine if you do a minor change out
| of a whim such as changing the color of a knob.
|
| Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that whoever wants to sell
| an engine isn't putting out subpar products that underperform
| and outpollute at clearly unacceptable levels. If proving
| that your product is not poorly designed and irredeemably
| broken is too much to ask, is regulation really the problem?
| shkkmo wrote:
| > We're talking about investments that range well in the
| tens of million of dollars. It's an insignificant drop in
| the bucket. The design team's salaries alone eclipse that
| value. On top of that, a single engine alone sells for
| thousands. Is this hypothetical regulatory cost that high
| if it can be covered by selling a few dozen units?
|
| I think you missed the context here. Revey, the company
| being asked to do these certifications, doesn't make diesel
| engines for semi-trucks. The company makes an electric
| "powered converter dolly" which puts a mini trailer between
| the semi truck and trailer that uses batteries and electric
| motors to reduce the amount of diesel burnt per mile.
|
| It's clever solution, there are externalities to consider
| (increased truck weight and length, changes to turning
| behavior, etc) but expensive certification per motor to
| prove that giving a truck an extra electric push doesn't
| increase the emissions doesn't strike me as making sense.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Having dealt with regulatory bodies before - they probably did
| lose their job, maybe multiple times, before becoming an
| engineer that doesn't have to engineer anything, just come up
| with rules.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| This is China's secret weapon.
|
| Luckily, the internet, software, and the digital world in
| general; were a bit too out of left field for regulators.
|
| That's why we kept supremacy over them.
|
| If we are lucky, AI may not be regulated to death
| wredcoll wrote:
| This is such a bizarre myth but I guess it matches your
| priors.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Its not usually one person, but many well meaning committees.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The magic of the system is that we all did it, comrade. There's
| multiple people, laws define what those people can do,
| processes, comment periods. It's all spiderman pointing at
| spiderman. You can't find any one party so clearly culpable
| that they can in good conscience suffer real consequence.
|
| And it's not just this, every f-ing regulated industry is like
| this. I work with someone who specs out where the wires and
| fixtures for the lights are gonna go in commercial buildings.
| Ceiling lighting is full of crap like this for christ sake. The
| whole system is rotten.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine
| testing to prove that the Revoy doesn't increase emissions of
| semi trucks and that Revoy must do this certification across
| every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per
| certification and there are more than 270 engine families for
| the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That's $27,000,000
| for this one regulatory item.
|
| Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you
| haven't bribed us enough". And then "if we come to an
| understanding, we might be able to look the other way".
|
| Wonder what state that is? Anyone want to guess?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you
| haven't bribed us enough".
|
| This is often fully formalized, i.e. you're not bribing a
| specific government official, instead you're paying a huge
| certification fee hundreds of times because it's a source of
| revenue generation for the government and whoever passed the
| bill gave zero fucks that it's a heavily regressive tax on
| new and small businesses.
| ecocentrik wrote:
| Mississippi? I bet it's a flyover state with a tiny sliver of
| road that sees massive trucking volume.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It's gonna be California (but I'm guessing, not sure).
| Other states just defer to federal regulation.
|
| That they don't put the state on blast sort of points to
| the big cost not being entirely real (where they either
| think they can induce regulatory change or the number of
| tests that is needed to sell the systems is quite a lot
| less than the number of tests that would be needed to allow
| 100% of the market to use their system).
| greenie_beans wrote:
| mississippi doesn't make people do certifications lol.
| unless you drive a hybrid, then you pay the hybrid tax.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| lol
|
| state and federal bureaucrats do not lose jobs
| jimnotgym wrote:
| It's not like anyone ever added a device to an engine to
| deliberately defeat these tests.
| _ink_ wrote:
| > whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%,
| and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles
| of testing and operations
|
| Then it should be easy to answer that request? Where does the
| $27M price tag come from?
| dangus wrote:
| I was just reading an NYT article about lead battery recyclers in
| Africa and how their operations are basically unregulated and are
| poisoning entire towns.
|
| Things going a little slow or costing a little more is very often
| preferable to the alternative where you begin operations
| recklessly and negatively impact neighbors, sometimes
| irreparably.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I think part of the story here is that as we regulate things at
| home we also out source activity that wouldn't fly here to
| those African regions?
|
| That may keep it out of sight but if it's still happening it
| might have been better to do it in a managed way at home.
| dangus wrote:
| "All outsourced, vendor, and subcontractor companies down the
| entire production/waste chain to the raw material must meet
| US environmental regulations."
|
| Done, fixed the loophole.
| some_random wrote:
| Oh of course, just identify your entire supply chain in
| both directions and make sure they're compliant. What an
| obviously easy thing to do.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| The world is so simple when you can just assert that your
| intervention will have positive effects eh.
| pabs3 wrote:
| If the chain is all onshore then it must all be compliant
| ... right?
| dangus wrote:
| If they don't want to do that they can save a lot of
| effort by onshoring rather than outsourcing to lowest
| bidder shady overseas companies.
|
| But I think that overall the process is not anywhere near
| as hard as you say it is. Corporations use purposeful,
| tactical ignorance to avoid regulations.
| some_random wrote:
| Oh of course, just onshore your entire supply chain. What
| an obviously easy thing to do.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Congratulations! Now just wait until next election when you
| get the boot in a landslide because of how much you raised
| prices for consumers.
| shswkna wrote:
| Its exactly this. And the majority of persons in powerful
| regulatory roles completely don't get or comprehend this
| effect.
|
| When regulatory efforts depart from reality,and fail to find
| the correct middle ground, this happens:
|
| The reality still exists, and _will always_ find its
| expression in one of the following:
|
| - people circumvent rules and go criminal
|
| - undesired behaviours move elsewhere where the regulation
| doesn't exist
|
| - sections of an economy die
|
| - issues remain unaddressed with the over regulated issues
| becoming too taboo to even discuss in a sane way.
| dangus wrote:
| But of course, in the case of this article the OP is
| presenting just their side of the story. It doesn't present
| the other side of the story where companies rushed
| dangerous products to market with no oversight which made
| the regulations necessary.
|
| They find that $27 million in regulatory cost is a huge
| burden.
|
| But I think if their product is successful it seems like it
| could be the kind of thing that a large percentage of semi
| trucks install.
|
| If even 10% of semi trucks purchase the product, $27
| million is a drop in the bucket.
|
| Instead of bitching at the world over regulatory costs, OP
| should bitch as his investors for not being generous
| enough. Or maybe his investors should be firing him for
| failing to account for regulatory cost and time.
|
| And all this bitching is happening despite the fact that he
| was successful in having the regulatory agent expedite the
| process. 14 months to get a brand new instrument of this
| sort approved doesn't seem crazy to me. It seems quite in
| line with the estimated time needed for a company like
| Toyota to crash test and certify a new vehicle model with
| the various emissions and safety agencies.
|
| If OP would like to move faster they need to get out of the
| sort of industry that makes products that can very easily
| kill people.
| z0r wrote:
| The parent comment is talking about outsourced lead battery
| recycling. What is the middle ground there? I think your
| very abstract argument about over regulation probably
| belongs in another thread.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The US can't do much about other countries. We can definitely
| control how and who we outsource to, but the past 30 years of
| US government doesn't make me confident that we'll do that
| anytime soon.
|
| But that's a tiny bit tangential from regulations.
| z0r wrote:
| Is the suggestion here to remove environmental regulations
| that make outsourcing to countries without regulations
| appealing? I'm not sure what problem that solves. Of course
| without discussing specific regulations it is hard to argue
| about anything - maybe there are useless environmental
| regulations that make lead battery recycling impossible in
| first world countries? Or maybe your line of reasoning just
| doesn't make sense, at least in this case. I don't think I'd
| want to live near a polluting lead battery recycling
| operation.
| nemomarx wrote:
| A lead battery plant that we can oversee and regulate is
| better than a polluting one in another country, where we
| basically export the suffering and damage to them. So
| policy goals should try to keep it possible and
| economically viable (with subsidies, bureaucrats who are
| responsive to community needs, whatever you like) to do
| recycling in the first world in some way.
|
| Whether any particular regulation is necessary or onerous
| needs more detailed examinations, and it's easy to say
| "just have the regulations be as simple as necessary to
| protect us", but I'm arguing we've gone a little far with
| zoning regs and studies so that we can't build things as
| well as we used to. You could also argue that bodies are
| using these environmental regulations for their own
| purposes, like keeping property values high or protecting
| their other investments instead of actual environmental
| impacts?
|
| (We can also try and spread regulations down the
| outsourcing chain, but I think that's difficult for other
| reasons.)
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| When someone says being overweight is bad, do you think they
| are saying they shouldn't exist at all?
|
| Of course not, they want to be a normal weight. That's the
| discussion reasonable people hope to have about regulation.
| Your strawman isn't welcome here -- I've never seen anyone
| seriously argue that ALL regulations should be removed.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > I've never seen anyone seriously argue that ALL regulations
| should be removed.
|
| I've been seeing it in real time this entire year in my
| country.
|
| And yes, on certain topics I see it here quite a bit. Maybe
| not "ALL" regulation, but some members of the community have
| an extremely libertarian take on conducting business.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| Even the anti-government types don't want big companies
| pouring cyanide in the river they fish in.
|
| I think you're continuing to mischaracterize the other
| position in order to feel like there's some daylight
| between you and the "anarcho-capitalists". If you stop
| erecting strawmen, you might find you agree on more than
| you think.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sure people want regulation until it affects their
| business. Then suddenly there's studies to talk about how
| trace amounts of cyanide won't affect the ecosystem
| anyway.
|
| > If you stop erecting strawmen, you might find you agree
| on more than you think.
|
| Try to give an argument and we can talk about it. All
| I've gotten so far is "no they aren't". Not very
| convincing.
|
| Meanwhile, the actions have shown companies will do all
| they can to tear down regulations but provide nothing in
| return. It's just greed and hypocrisy.
| k1musab1 wrote:
| Edison Motors, a manufacturer of hybrid and electric semi and
| other trucks in Canada, is currently battling regulation. They
| have a series of videos on their Youtube channel going over
| what's been taking place.
| ehnto wrote:
| That was pretty surprising when I saw it unfold. Especially
| because they utilised state grants specifically to achieve the
| goal they are now being blocked by regulation on.
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| Wasn't there a scandal about the consultants that write the
| grant applications also were contracted by the government to
| administer it?
|
| Shady as all hell.
| faidit wrote:
| Meanwhile the established players with connections can break all
| the laws they want, and pay zero taxes to boot.
|
| I think the problem isn't regulation (which the current admin is
| aggressively destroying, e.g. with the EPA) so much as corruption
| - which manifests partly as critical government functions being
| deliberately starved of resources. Regulatory bodies should get
| more funding to study and approve new technologies, and there
| should be more subsidies available for smaller innovators to
| offset the R&D investments and application waiting periods. That
| wouldn't be in the interest of big polluters and their captive
| politicians though.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| No they can't. Dieselgate cost VW over $33 billion.
| faidit wrote:
| That was 10 years ago, when we still had a mostly functioning
| government. The EPA has since had its teeth removed by the
| Trump administration.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sounds like regulations work, then. We just need to get a
| functioning government back to enforce it.
| nocoiner wrote:
| He described "the missed acceleration in sales" of pumping Liquid
| Smoke down old oil wells as "a direct hard cost" of the
| regulatory regime. That tells me all I need to know about our
| narrator's intellectual honesty.
|
| I'm open to being convinced that there are better ways of doing
| things, but despite what half a century of propaganda has been
| saying, regulations generally aren't enacted for funsies. They're
| there for a reason, specially the reason that in the absence of
| those regulations, commercial actors were privatizing profit at
| the expense of society as a whole, and democratic society made a
| decision to make rules to stop that from happening.
| orzig wrote:
| He literally writes:
|
| "Regulation obviously has a critical role in protecting people
| and the environment"
|
| and then quantifies "a mindblowing $40m/year in healthcare
| costs" and a total of "about $400M" in societal cost from one
| delay, mostly borne by the public.
|
| In that context, the line you are reacting to is just one item
| in a long list:
|
| "We've also spent untold millions on regulatory affairs at all
| levels of government, not to mention the missed acceleration in
| sales"
|
| He even says,
|
| "What pains me most is the 5 years of lost carbon removal and
| pollutant reduction"
|
| So the piece is not "regulations bad, profits good." It is:
| regulations are essential, but the current process is
| generating huge public harms by slowing down tech whose whole
| purpose is to reduce pollution.
|
| Maybe he's wrong on any given point, but he's clearly trying to
| describe the utilitarian trade-offs in good faith
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > regulations are essential, but the current process is
| generating huge public harms by slowing down tech whose whole
| purpose is to reduce pollution.
|
| I hear this with a call to action of "we need to deregulate
| to help reduce pollution". And not the real call to action in
| that "these regulations need an overhaul". The title of
| "over-regulations" and the general tone seems to place the
| issue as an obstacle to be eliminated, not a system to be
| corrected.
|
| That's my big problem with the article.
| blitzar wrote:
| The meeting of softwares 'move fast and break things' with
| hardwares 'move fast and break things'.
|
| You cant just restore the river from a backup after you realise
| it was pretty dumb to dump toxic waste into it.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Everyone should read or at least be familiar with Joseph Tainter
| and his research on societal collapse.
|
| > "It is suggested that the increased costs of sociopolitical
| evolution frequently reach a point of diminishing marginal
| returns. This is to say that the benefit/investment ratio of
| sociopolitical complexity follows the marginal product curve...
| After a certain point, increased investments in complexity fail
| to yield proportionately increasing returns. Marginal returns
| decline and marginal costs rise. Complexity as a strategy becomes
| increasingly costly, and yields decreasing marginal benefits."
|
| Government regulation and intervention are one such contributor
| to complexity, and as Michael Huemer demonstrates in his paper
| _In Praise of Passivity_ we are akin to medieval doctors
| administering medical procedures on society that are more likely
| to cause harm than create benefits.
|
| It's fairly clear to me that our civilization is in decline, and
| it pains me to no end to see people push for _more_ regulation
| and government intervention. "The patient is getting sicker, we
| need to let more blood! Fetch me more leaches!"
|
| The good news is that collapse, as Tainter puts it, isn't
| necessarily a bad thing. It's a return to less complexity, and it
| often brings great benefits to large swathes of people. For
| example, the collapse of the Roman Empire was beneficial to serfs
| who would actually welcome raiding parties into their villages.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| No. Such laissez-faire economic gaslighting and accelerationist
| mob terrorism-condoning sophistry. Read Chalmers Johnson and
| Edward Gibbon instead.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >It's fairly clear to me that our civilization is in decline
|
| Because of deregulation, if anything.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| What data do you have to suggest that our societies are
| becoming less regulated? Because what I can tell, regulation
| is increasing throughout the western world and has been for
| at least the past five decades. In the US for example:
|
| > From 1970 to 1981, restrictions were added at an average
| rate of about 24,000 per year. From 1981 to 1985, that pace
| slowed to an average of 620 restrictions per year, before
| accelerating back to 18,000 restrictions per year from 1985
| to 1995. A decrease of 27,000 restrictions occurred from 1995
| to 1996--3.2 percent of the 1995 total--and in the 20 years
| since then, regulation has grown steadily by about 13,000
| restrictions per year. These periods do not match up neatly
| with any president or party; rather, regulatory accumulation
| seems to be a bipartisan trend--or perhaps a bureaucratic
| trend independent of elected officials' ideologies.
|
| https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-
| visualizations/regula...
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| I like how the study you linked had to so loosely define
| "restrictions" as to make their point.
|
| Do you really think that's an intelligent way to reason
| about this? Surely you understand the concept of quality vs
| quantity, which isn't even necessarily _the_ issue with the
| study but certainly stops the evaluation right in its
| tracks.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written
| in blood.
|
| Now sure, you may be the one "good corporation" out there, who
| will do things the right way and (edit: not) sell a cheap product
| or mislead anyone. But if the regulations aren't super stringent,
| others will undercut you by skimping on safety/emissions and
| selling a similar product for way less.
|
| It becomes too tempting to cheat otherwise - see Dieselgate / VW,
| for example. Make it possible to easily profit by cheating (via
| relaxed regulations) and people will. Again, not you specifically
| (maybe), but people in general.
|
| Since we can't tell what kind of person you are, REALLY - SBF
| also told people to trust him, for example - onerous regulations
| are required.
|
| Plus, I love how on the main page advertising to companies, Revoy
| advertises 3x-to-5x better fuel efficiency - I'm guessing this
| one is the one they'll need to back up and officially achieve or
| companies will dump them / sue.
|
| In the blog post, he claims 94% less fuel and 7 mpg to 120 mpg. I
| don't see how 7 mpg to 120 mpg is "only" 3x-5x better fuel
| efficiency - it seems like it's more 17x. Sounds to me like he's
| exaggerating the effect in the blog to try to get sympathy.
| bsder wrote:
| > But if the regulations aren't super stringent, others will
| undercut you by skimping on safety/emissions and selling a
| similar product for way less.
|
| Yup. For example: this is why the US automakers have shoved all
| the Brodozers down everybody's throats; it let them duck
| efficiency requirements.
| Loughla wrote:
| As a former full-time farmer, and current part-time farmer I
| wish people would go back to driving cars instead of trucks.
|
| At best you can find a four door truck with a 6.5' bed and a
| tiny 2.7 V6 nowadays. If you want anything with enough power
| to actually haul something and have an 8' bed, they're 90k+
| King Ranch Fords or whatever. Because people want short bed
| trucks with 4 doors to drive around the fucking suburbs so
| they can haul boards once a year for home improvement
| projects.
|
| Rant over. Subsequently, I've been shopping for a new farm
| truck this week. It's not gone well.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Casually it does seem like there should be an untapped
| market for "work trucks". 9/10 times when I see someone
| actually hauling stuff it's in something like a 30 year old
| pickup with 20% cab
| Loughla wrote:
| You can get them, but they're either fleet vehicles (not
| for sale to normies) or used fleet that have been rode
| hard and maybe maintained.
|
| It's no good.
| protocolture wrote:
| >There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are
| written in blood.
|
| Excellent thought terminating cliche. There might be a reason
| (cause) but there's rarely an available justification.
|
| Regulations dont exist on a spectrum between Hard (good) and
| Easy (COMPANIES ARE CHEATING NOW). Regulations compel specific
| actions and block specific actions. Its impossible to fit every
| regulation into your head to form an opinion on all of them.
| Taking a stand at "All regulations are good" or "all
| regulations are bad" is just signalling that you have never
| dealt with them.
|
| Having worked with multiple companies in multiple legal
| jurisdictions I can tell you that I have a vast VAST preference
| for Canada. They talk a big game, but in my honest opinion they
| have a lower regulatory overhead in certain areas (the ones
| that affect me) than Australia or the USA.
|
| Heres an excerpt from a canadian government website regarding
| building a telco tower.
|
| "The Government of Canada is not involved in the specifics of
| tower installations, but we do set the law; it's called the
| Radiocommunication Act. Providing technical requirements are
| met, we only get involved when there is an impasse between the
| municipality and the company. In these rare cases, we look at
| the facts and provide a decision."
|
| A Tower build that costs 5 - 10k in rural canada, can cost
| 100k+ in Australia.
|
| So rural canadian internet providers build more, and service
| more people. Cause : Effect.
|
| The last time I looked at a tower build for a customer in
| Australia, we lost interest trying to get a quote for the
| environmental impact statement required by the state it was to
| be built in.
|
| Towers, are not 10x more destructive or dangerous in australia
| than canada. Actually with snow season knocking so many down,
| the reverse is true. But providers and local governments have
| the flexibility to make arrangements to service customers.
|
| You need to drop this weird, reflexive defense of regulations,
| and consider that regulations prevent services, and regulations
| really do require justification. The Regulator owes you a
| justification. You are probably poorer for some regulations and
| those regulations may not be justified.
|
| Another semi relevant example. Gold Coast cops have unlimited
| search and seizure powers. The "Cause" they display on posters
| everywhere. A child got stabbed, the parents pushed to change
| the law to invade everyones privacy on their deceased childs
| behalf. They tell you the blood cause of the law, but there's
| no justification for the invasion of privacy or ongoing
| justification in lives supposedly saved. Just police getting
| the ability to ruin more peoples lives.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Great comment on HN recently put it this way paraphrasing a
| comment they liked on Usenet (yes the degree of separation is
| growing haha):
|
| >of course they shit on the floor, it's a corporation, it's
| what they do, the job of government is to be the rolled up
| newspaper applied to their nose when they do
|
| Whether you're a good company or a bad company, a large
| percentage of companies will always go up right to the limits
| that are set, and then another significant percentage will go
| past it until they are caught. That's just how it works in
| capitalism. You're constantly fighting a group of people's
| ravenous desire for more money as well as the (often
| significant) resources they will bring to bear to defend their
| revenue stream.
|
| You simply can't expect them to do the right thing without
| adequate consequences for failing to do the right thing. We
| have literally centuries of evidence.
| energy123 wrote:
| More parking minimums!
|
| Or maybe we can stop these silly attempts to bundle every
| regulation into a monolithic category?
|
| The OP provided an opportunity to engage with a specific set of
| regulations. Instead you took it as an opportunity to make a
| political statement about abstract "regulations", divorced from
| every detail in the article.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are
| written in blood.
|
| There are thousands of pages of regulations, by volume they're
| written by rather than opposed to the incumbents, and only a
| small minority are actually safety-critical, but those are the
| ones everyone retreats into when it comes time to defend all of
| the ones that aren't. _Most_ regulations are written in crayon.
|
| > It becomes too tempting to cheat otherwise - see Dieselgate /
| VW, for example.
|
| Dieselgate wasn't an instance of someone causing harm by
| satisfying a regulation that was too relaxed. They regulation
| was stringent and they were committing intentional fraud in
| order to violate it.
|
| > Since we can't tell what kind of person you are, REALLY - SBF
| also told people to trust him, for example - onerous
| regulations are required.
|
| So because liars lie, that justifies the government taking
| months or years to answer a question? Or requiring millions of
| dollars worth of certifications to test whether a device that
| customers only buy because it actually significantly improves
| fuel efficiency isn't reducing fuel efficiency?
|
| That's exactly the thing you _don 't_ need the government to
| test ahead of time because the customer is going to notice
| immediately and have a false advertising claim if it doesn't
| actually work.
|
| > Plus, I love how on the main page advertising to companies,
| Revoy advertises 3x-to-5x better fuel efficiency - I'm guessing
| this one is the one they'll need to back up and officially
| achieve or companies will dump them / sue.
|
| > In the blog post, he claims 94% less fuel and 7 mpg to 120
| mpg. I don't see how 7 mpg to 120 mpg is "only" 3x-5x better
| fuel efficiency - it seems like it's more 17x. Sounds to me
| like he's exaggerating the effect in the blog to try to get
| sympathy.
|
| The post linked in the article explains that the first version
| of their product resulted in a 78% reduction in fuel
| consumption (this is the 3x-5x) and the newer version is 94%.
|
| That the "onerous regulations" are demanded by people willing
| to condemn others when they themselves haven't done the reading
| is rather one of the issues.
| ETH_start wrote:
| If there were no cost to inaction, you would be right, but
| there is, so the abuses from lack of speed bumps to action does
| not automatically mean those speed bumps are a net good.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Very few regulations are written in blood. In fact, the ones
| you mention in your comment were not.
|
| Most regulations are written for reasons that have nothing to
| do with that:
|
| 1. Genuine public interest, but not safety related
|
| 2. To appease a loud interest group whose political influence
| greatly exceeds their numbers
|
| 3. As quid pro quo for support for a campaign contribution
|
| 4. To prevent unwanted competition to a politically powerful
| industry or union
|
| 5. Because it is in the interest of government employees who
| write the regulations, but not he general public
|
| 6. It is a particular pet issue of a powerful politician
|
| 7. As a flailing and arbitrary "we have to do something, and
| this is something" response to a moral panic
| chemotaxis wrote:
| > There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are
| written in blood.
|
| Sure, but it's a balancing act, right?
|
| My favorite example is that hairdryers sold in the US are
| required to have ground fault interrupters in the plug. This is
| touted as an important safety feature and it appears to prevent
| something like 2-4 deaths a year. Or at least, it used to when
| it first rolled out, because now you have GFCI outlets in the
| bathroom in any new or remodeled homes, so maybe it's
| redundant.
|
| The hairdryers sold in the EU don't have that.
|
| So yeah, it's a regulation written in blood, but it's a pretty
| good example of a gray area. Once you get into the business of
| preventing single-digit deaths, things get really weird. You
| probably should also ban pointy scissors (people trip),
| frankfurters (choking risk), only allow the sale of pre-peeled
| bananas, etc.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Most European electrical codes don't allow electrical outlets
| in the bathroom at all.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| That's just not true. Electric toothbrushes, shavers, it's
| also not uncommon to have a washing machine in the
| bathroom.
|
| Maybe the UK is doing something weird here, but bathroom
| outlets are very much common in the EU.
| card_zero wrote:
| British standards are all BS. The electrical wiring one
| is BS7671. It divides the bathroom into zones: https://fl
| ameport.com/wiring_regulations/BS7671_selected_sub...
|
| Zone 0 is inside the bathtub. Damn, so I can't put an
| outlet there? Zone 1 is over it, and zone 2 is 2 feet
| around it, and allows 12-volt outlets for small gadgets.
| Beyond that you can have ordinary outlets with the right
| circuit breakers (aka RCDs, GFCIs) integrated into them.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > see Dieselgate / VW
|
| Oh man this is the one that sets me off every time. Not that I
| condone VW's cheating, but have you ever looked at how many
| diesel passenger cars are sold in the USA? It's effectively
| zero, and has been for a long, long time. Americans don't like
| diesel cars. They could be totally uncontrolled from an
| emissions standpoint and it would not make any difference at
| all.
|
| It makes no sense to regulate emissions on diesel passenger
| cars in the USA.
| cpgxiii wrote:
| > Americans don't like diesel cars... It makes no sense to
| regulate emissions on diesel passenger cars in the USA.
|
| That doesn't follow. Americans don't like diesel cars because
| emissions-compliant diesel cars are a massive pain in the
| ass. Diesel emissions treatment systems are a maintenance
| pain, as indicated by how many people with diesel trucks
| perform illegal emissions "deletes". The "magic" of VW's
| cheating was that it minimized or eliminated this pain, so
| all the owner was left with was the increased MPG, and this
| was pretty popular. It wasn't more popular because (1) plenty
| of people who would have considered a diesel with this ease-
| of-use would not have considered a VW, and (2) none of the
| other automakers could compete, because, you know, the
| cheating.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Diesel cars became popular in Europe because the tax regime
| changed to favour them, their economy was incidental.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I don't want to breathe that shit. Should we pipe it into
| your house?
|
| The attitude that we can just throw it into the atmosphere
| and it won't hurt anything is exactly why we regulate
| emissions in the first place.
|
| I'd be in favor of making diesel vehicles have to pass the
| exact same emissions requirements as gasoline vehicles.
| XorNot wrote:
| Good lord the tone of this article is insufferable. "We're saving
| the world! It's so unreasonable anyone ask us to verify these
| claims because _we 're saving the world!_"
| AirMax98 wrote:
| So true -- this thing is designed to go on our streets; I
| expect an attitude of maximum compliance. This shit can
| literally kill you if something goes wrong?
| ehnto wrote:
| The testing is solely about emissions, it's an electric
| powertrain dolly and they want it to be proven it doesn't
| increase emissions rather than decrease them. It has nothing
| to do with safety as far as on road safety is concerned.
|
| The weird thing is they want to test it against all the
| different trucks it can be towed behind, which doesn't make
| any sense. If it works it works, doesn't matter which
| specific truck it's behind so long as the already verified
| specifications of the truck engine and electric dolly align.
|
| They should verify the electric dolly does what it says it
| does, compare that to the configurations of trucks they
| already have on file. Do the math. Does that cost $100,000
| per configuration?
| pxtail wrote:
| Especially when combined with the fact that the company is
| deeply involved in carbon credits "business"
| protocolture wrote:
| >I've been shocked to find that the single biggest barrier--by
| far--is over-regulation from the massive depth of bureaucracy.
|
| Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment
| of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are
| immediately have this thought.
| strictnein wrote:
| I bet it's still like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, where they
| think that the regulations they're encountering are bad, but
| clearly all the other ones are good.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Almost but not quite.
|
| For most people, they never directly interact with government
| regulations because somebody else does it. They work for a
| large corporation and then the corporation requires them to
| do wasteful or nonsensical things which they ascribe to
| management incompetence, but it's really because the
| corporation's lawyers made it a requirement.
|
| Then there are the people who are actually doing the
| compliance paperwork, but they don't object because it's the
| thing that pays their salary. Moreover, it's their occupation
| so all the time required to figure out how to do it is now a
| sunk cost for them and the last thing they want is to get rid
| of it and make all that time they invested worthless.
|
| The people who object are the people trying to start a new
| business, because nobody is paying them to do things that
| don't make sense and all they want is to get on with what
| they're actually trying to accomplish instead of paying one
| fee after another or waiting on unaccountable regulators who
| have no reason to say no to something but still take
| excruciatingly long to say yes.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > The people who object are the people trying to start a
| new business, because nobody is paying them to do things
| that don't make sense and all they want is to get on with
| what they're actually trying to accomplish instead of
| paying one fee after another or waiting on unaccountable
| regulators who have no reason to say no to something but
| still take excruciatingly long to say yes.
|
| This is an extremely disingenuous opinion, which causally
| omits the whole reason regulations are necessary and exist
| to start with.
|
| The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that
| it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to
| "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has
| considerable negative impact on society in general.
|
| Regulation is absolutely necessary because these orgs
| either don't care or are oblivious to the harm they are
| causing, and either way have absolutely no motivation to
| right their wrongs.
|
| Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist
| opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that
| don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you
| from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too
| much of an inconvenience?
|
| It's perfectly fine to expect regulators to streamline
| their processes. What is not ok is to frame regulations as
| whimsical rentism from bureaucrats. They are accountability
| mechanisms designed to proactively prevent bad actors from
| causing harm to society as a whole, and they work by
| requiring that organizations proactively demonstrate they
| aren't causing said harm.
|
| Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations
| already have a long track record of causing that very harm
| to society. Why is this fact ignored?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is
| that it ignores the fact that what these organizations
| claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually
| harmful and has considerable negative impact on society
| in general.
|
| The article is about a company trying to make an electric
| "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of
| diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids.
| What actual harm and considerable negative impact on
| society in general are you referring to in this context?
|
| > Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist
| opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that
| don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you
| from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too
| much of an inconvenience?
|
| Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill
| considered or poorly drafted and require things that are
| not aligned with their ostensible purpose.
|
| > What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical
| rentism from bureaucrats.
|
| How about whimsical rentism from incumbents who want to
| exclude competitors or avaricious middlemen who want
| their services to be expensive and mandatory, and capture
| the regulators to make that happen?
|
| > Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations
| already have a long track record of causing that very
| harm to society. Why is this fact ignored?
|
| The subset of the rules that aren't actually necessary
| aren't actually necessary. Why is this fact ignored?
| duskdozer wrote:
| What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of
| opinion. Just as you can come up with a few examples of
| things you think should be less regulated (and many
| people may agree), others can come up with a few examples
| of things they think should be more regulated (and many
| people may also agree).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of
| opinion.
|
| To begin with, no it isn't. There are a lot of existing
| regulations that serve no legitimate purpose. Some exist
| solely at the behest of incumbents and are enacted under
| a false pretext by corrupt government officials; no one
| supports them who isn't being disingenuous. Others aren't
| even wanted by anyone and are simply regulatory errors
| that failed to account for something that actually
| happens, but the people impacted don't have the political
| influence to correct it.
|
| Moreover, what if there are some regulations that people
| differ on? Should we keep the ones only a minority of
| people think are a good idea, just because they already
| exist?
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > To begin with, no it isn't. There are a lot of existing
| regulations that serve no legitimate purpose.
|
| Citation needed. Specially referring to TFA.
|
| You know what there is a lot of? Organizations trying to
| push onto the public hazardous and subpar products. Those
| are the ones mostly affected by regulation, because
| that's precisely what regulation is designed to shield
| society from.
|
| So it comes as no surprise that there are companies
| complaining that regulation prevents them from doing
| business. That's by design, and represents a much needed
| market pressure to prevent bad actors from screwing
| everything and everyone around them.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Citation needed. Specially referring to TFA.
|
| Explain the legitimate purpose of requiring a device that
| runs on batteries to be tested for emissions, not just
| once but for every subspecies of truck you want to use it
| with.
|
| > You know what there is a lot of? Organizations trying
| to push onto the public hazardous and subpar products.
| Those are the ones mostly affected by regulation, because
| that's precisely what regulation is designed to shield
| society from.
|
| You're confusing the nominal intention of the regulations
| with their actual effect. The map is not the territory.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of
| opinion.
|
| The blog post clearly tries to frame their problems
| complying with existing regulation as stumbling upon road
| blocks which just so happen to comprise only of
| unnecessary rules.
|
| It's quite the coincidence how each and every single
| restriction that isn't met ends up being unnecessary.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > The article is about a company trying to make an
| electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel
| efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them
| into hybrids. What actual harm and considerable negative
| impact on society in general are you referring to in this
| context?
|
| For almost any regulation, no matter how important it is
| and how much good it does, there will be some things it
| does not allow that it should. A regulation will either
| need to let the bad stuff through, not let the good stuff
| through, or some mixture of the two.
|
| Now consider that many individual regulations get added;
| the vast majority of them for good reasons. But since
| each one has some cases it fails for, the combination of
| them has a combination (generally larger than the sum of
| it's parts) that it fails for.
|
| But that mean that regulations are bad in general. It
| means that making rules to protect society is HARD. Like
| REALLY hard, staggeringly so. And even doing the best you
| possibly can (which is a stretch for most government),
| you're still going to wind up with things that can't be
| done... but should be able to.
|
| The solution isn't to get rid of (all) regulations...
| it's to try to figure out how to make them better.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The claim that something is hard to do properly is an
| argument for doing it less often, i.e. limiting it to the
| cases when the benefit is unambiguously large and staying
| away from borderline cases where overhead and collateral
| damage will leave you underwater.
|
| It's also an argument for requiring the government to
| internalize the costs it imposes, e.g. if it wants
| testing done then it should pay for it from general
| revenue so that the cost of it is accounted for in the
| government budget instead of imposing an unfunded
| mandate. Then if the cost is reasonable this isn't a
| problem and if the cost is unreasonable the government is
| causing a problem for itself instead of innocent third
| parties, which puts the incentive to fix it in the right
| place.
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| > The claim that something is hard to do properly is an
| argument for doing it less often
|
| I don't even believe that _you_ believe this.
|
| > the benefit is unambiguously large and staying away
| from borderline cases
|
| If this was easy, don't you think maybe that's what
| people would be doing?
|
| > if it wants testing done then it should pay for it from
| general revenue
|
| ???
|
| So if I build a car, screw it up, have to test it 500
| times just to pass and be allowed to sell it, that's the
| governments problem? If I open a bank and take peoples
| money, its up to the government to take initiative on
| making sure I'm not screwing them over?
|
| > instead of imposing an unfunded mandate
|
| What? So now any test the government mandates is an
| unfunded mandate? Like food tests?
|
| This is obviously getting way to political because none
| of the arguments are making any sense, and are completely
| disconnected from reality.
|
| I don't even consider myself pro regulation but this is
| just the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears
| and shouting LALALALALALA.
| jpfromlondon wrote:
| you'll be more at home over on https://www.reddit.com
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| This doesn't seem constructive.
| jpfromlondon wrote:
| Agreed, I'd say it's on par with:
|
| "
|
| What? So now any test the government mandates is an
| unfunded mandate? Like food tests?
|
| This is obviously getting way to political because none
| of the arguments are making any sense, and are completely
| disconnected from reality.
|
| I don't even consider myself pro regulation but this is
| just the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears
| and shouting LALALALALALA.
|
| "
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| I'd disagree, because at least I'm trying to explain
| myself.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I don't even believe that _you_ believe this.
|
| Is your position that when something is intractably easy
| to screw up we should do it as much as possible?
|
| > If this was easy, don't you think maybe that's what
| people would be doing?
|
| Which people? The ones with a structural incentive to
| _not_ do that?
|
| > So if I build a car, screw it up, have to test it 500
| times just to pass and be allowed to sell it, that's the
| governments problem?
|
| It seems like it's still your problem because you want to
| sell the car and therefore want it to pass.
|
| Whereas if the test is unreasonably expensive then the
| government has a problem, but the problem is of its own
| making and it now has the incentive to fix the problem
| instead of burdening someone else with it.
|
| > If I open a bank and take peoples money, its up to the
| government to take initiative on making sure I'm not
| screwing them over?
|
| It is indeed the role of law enforcement to enforce the
| laws.
|
| > What? So now any test the government mandates is an
| unfunded mandate? Like food tests?
|
| Is your argument that it isn't an unfunded mandate
| supposed to be that the test isn't mandated or that the
| government is actually funding it?
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| > Is your position that when something is intractably
| easy to screw up we should do it as much as possible?
|
| No, if that was my position, you would've found out by me
| saying that was my position.
|
| > Which people? The ones with a structural incentive to
| not do that?
|
| Why would they have such an incentive? This is all
| hyperbole.
|
| > but the problem is of its own making
|
| It really isn't. Its expensive to test cars, and its also
| necessary for safety.
|
| > It is indeed the role of law enforcement to enforce the
| laws.
|
| Yes, which get codified as _regulation_.
|
| > Is your argument that it isn't an unfunded mandate
|
| Again, if my argument was something you would find out.
|
| I'm saying what I'm saying: your arguments don't make
| sense, they are hyperbole, I am not defending or
| attacking a specific take on regulation, other than the
| take that, guess what, _its hard_.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > No, if that was my position, you would've found out by
| me saying that was my position.
|
| That was the contrary to the thing you were originally
| incredulous about.
|
| > Why would they have such an incentive?
|
| Why would members of the government have a structural
| incentive to pass laws at the behest of special
| interests? Because they get money for it.
|
| > It really isn't. Its expensive to test cars, and its
| also necessary for safety.
|
| If it's worth more to the public than it costs then the
| public should pay for it. If it isn't worth more than it
| costs then it shouldn't be done. Why would either of
| these be a problem?
|
| > Yes, which get codified as _regulation_.
|
| If the bank takes your money and loses it at the casino,
| they're going to be in trouble, and they're supposed to
| be in trouble.
|
| If the bank takes your money and it's all still in the
| vault and was never at any risk, but the government wants
| to punish them for letting you open an account in the
| name of your dog, or for not filing enough suspicious
| activity reports even if it requires filing them against
| innocent people, the government is wrong and the bank
| should _not_ be in trouble for that.
|
| > Again, if my argument was something you would find out.
|
| Apparently I wouldn't, because there are only three
| options and you're not revealing which one you believe.
| Is it:
|
| a) an unfunded mandate
|
| b) not mandated
|
| c) the government is funding it
|
| That is the entire solution space, it has to be at least
| one of those, so which one is your position?
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| > That was the contrary to the thing you were originally
| incredulous about
|
| Indeed, and not everything or everybody in the world
| consists of completely contrarian opposite opinions :-)
|
| > Why would members of the government have a structural
| incentive to pass laws at the behest of special
| interests? Because they get money for it.
|
| Not in a functioning democratic government, i.e most of
| them.
|
| > If it's worth more to the public than it costs then the
| public should pay for it.
|
| I think you should write a 10 page book that solves all
| the worlds problem by just taking surface-level obvious
| directions on big nuanced topics, I'm sure it will be
| transformational.
|
| > and they're supposed to be in trouble.
|
| Again simplified, the bank doesn't do this. It does
| things _similar to it_ , how similar is too similar?
| That's what regulation tells you.
|
| > because there are only three options
|
| Again, no there aren't. I understand that you feel this
| way, but things can differ on a case by case basis
| without being hypocritical. The world is complex, unique
| circumstances require unique responses. Overly unique
| responses create bureaucracy and overhead and edge cases.
| Neither is ideal. Walk the line, balance it out, that's
| governments' job. Do they always succeed? No. Can the
| problem be solved by a two paragraph simplified solution
| on an online board? Also no.
|
| Needlessly polarizing every topic into dogmatic rules is
| exactly the thing you are accusing governments of, and
| are yourself now doing. Reality is harder than
| mathematical or rhetorical logic, because of ethics,
| because of complex interacting systems, because people
| don't act rationally, because people don't act in their
| own interest etc etc etc.
|
| There are plenty of governments that use tools to
| overstep their bounds, yours included, those same
| governments are also using tools to protect people from
| harm. Both tools are the same tools.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > Whereas if the test is unreasonably expensive then the
| government has a problem
|
| There's a matter of scale here...
|
| A single company doing the test(s) for itself
|
| vs
|
| The government paying for the tests for as many companies
| has happen to want to try their hand in the field.
|
| Expecting the government to pay for testing for every
| company is, for most cases, unreasonable.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > The article is about a company trying to make an
| electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel
| efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them
| into hybrids.
|
| No. The article is about someone who is whining about
| having to comply with regulation. But not all regulation,
| only the one they feel they are having trouble complying
| with.
|
| There is a difference. And a nuance.
|
| You'd be naive if you were hoping to get objective
| statements from what reads clearly as a promotion piece.
|
| > Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill
| considered or poorly drafted and require things that are
| not aligned with their ostensible purpose.
|
| You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish. We need to
| discuss objectively verifiable facts if you want to
| attack specific regulations, though. I don't see fact-
| based arguments being made, and that reads like a
| desperate straw man.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > No. The article is about someone who is whining about
| having to comply with regulation. But not all regulation,
| only the one they feel they are having trouble complying
| with.
|
| Which brings us to the question of whether the regulation
| they're complaining about is actually objectionable. And
| it appears that they rather have a point. Why should they
| have to spend millions of dollars testing for something
| that makes no sense in this context? Why is the
| government even testing for this at all, when fuel is a
| semi truck's primary operating cost and buyers are going
| to be highly sensitive to fuel efficiency independent of
| any government regulations?
|
| > You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish.
|
| This is not a hypothetical unless your contention is that
| all existing regulations are entirely without flaws or
| inefficiencies.
|
| > We need to discuss objectively verifiable facts if you
| want to attack specific regulations, though.
|
| Do you want to try to defend the rule requiring them to
| spend millions of dollars on certifications for no
| apparent benefit to anyone?
| friendzis wrote:
| > Why should they have to spend millions of dollars
| testing for something that makes no sense in this
| context?
|
| To have data to back the claims being made.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The requirement doesn't depend on the company having made
| any particular claims.
| friendzis wrote:
| False. The claim, even if implicit, is "does not increase
| emissions beyond particular threshold within particular
| operational domain".
|
| Further, the article makes a claim that there are more
| emissions testing groups to test on than there are
| individual members, which cannot be true.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The claim, even if implicit, is "does not increase
| emissions beyond particular threshold within particular
| operational domain".
|
| So the government wants data to validate a claim the
| company never explicitly made, but the government doesn't
| want to pay for the data, and the nature of the product
| is such that data showing higher emissions would be
| baffling and implausible. We're back to, how does this
| make any sense?
|
| > Further, the article makes a claim that there are more
| emissions testing groups to test on than there are
| individual members, which cannot be true.
|
| Consider the possibility that an "engine family" could be
| an engine configured in a given way rather than a set of
| distinct engines.
| friendzis wrote:
| > So the government wants data to validate a claim
|
| The claim is "our contraption is roadworthy", which
| implicitly includes claims regarding roadworthiness
| requirements, including emissions. This is literally how
| market availability works.
|
| > Consider the possibility that an "engine family" could
| be an engine configured in a given way rather than a set
| of distinct engines.
|
| "Engine family" _is_ a set of particular engine
| configurations /codes, specifically to reduce re-test
| burden. Group validation automatically validates all
| group members, therefore there are _at most_ number of
| engines groups to test. I suspect the testing
| requirements are not for the engines, though, but why
| would an article by a startup struggling to follow
| regulations misrepresent the regulations?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The claim is "our contraption is roadworthy", which
| implicitly includes claims regarding roadworthiness
| requirements, including emissions. This is literally how
| market availability works.
|
| You can't get around the government demanding that
| someone else pay an unreasonable amount of money for data
| that only the government wants. If they think the value
| to the public of the testing is worth the cost then why
| aren't they paying for it? If it isn't worth the cost
| then why are they forcing someone else to pay for it?
|
| > Group validation automatically validates all group
| members, therefore there are at most number of engines
| groups to test.
|
| Unless the state requires you to test all 270 engine
| groups regardless of how many you're actually using.
| terminalshort wrote:
| It's an electric motor with no emissions and therefore
| can't possibly increase emissions. There's your data. No
| regulations needed.
| protocolture wrote:
| >The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is
| that it ignores the fact that what these organizations
| claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually
| harmful and has considerable negative impact on society
| in general.
|
| The problem with blind government maximalism is that it
| ignores the fact that what these governments claim to
| actually be trying to accomplish can actually be harmful
| and have considerable negative impact on society in
| general.
| komali2 wrote:
| Sure, but the fundamental premise is that good
| corporations are seeking to generate profits, and good
| governments are seeking to provide for their
| constituents.
|
| A corporation that doesn't prioritize profits isn't a
| good corporation. You wouldn't buy stock in it. A
| government that isn't prioritizing its constituents is a
| bad one, you wouldn't vote for it.
|
| Everything else is implementation detail but it's obvious
| that governments need to check corporate power because
| otherwise the inevitable end game is a corpotocracy
| ruling over factory towns of debt slaves.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| I would challenge both of those.
|
| Corporations exist to do whatever their directors or
| shareholders want them to do. For publicly-traded
| corporations that's typically to generate profits, but
| not all corporations are listed on a stock exchange and
| even the public ones could in principle have their
| shareholders vote to do something else. If a corporation
| wants to build electric cars to fight climate change or
| build housing to reduce housing scarcity, that doesn't
| make it "bad" -- it's good, and you don't want the
| government impeding that when somebody wants to do it. Or
| even when they want to do the same thing to make money,
| because it can be both things at once.
|
| And just because a government that doesn't prioritize its
| constituents is bad doesn't mean that the government we
| have is good, or that every existing regulation is
| benefiting constituents rather than harming them.
|
| > Everything else is implementation detail
|
| Which is kind of the part that matters.
| komali2 wrote:
| > If a corporation wants to build electric cars to fight
| climate change or build housing to reduce housing
| scarcity, that doesn't make it "bad" -- it's good, and
| you don't want the government impeding that when somebody
| wants to do it.
|
| It's good so long as it's profitable and grows. The
| market determines good and bad, nothing else. Companies
| must grow indefinitely or their stock price drops, any
| earnings announcement makes this obvious, even positive
| growth earnings might cause a stock price drop if the
| earnings growth wasn't large enough. Flat earnings, with
| a margin increase? Stock price devaluation, see Microsoft
| / Xbox. The word is right there, _value_. The value of a
| company is _determined by its market price_ (or
| theoretical market price if it 's still private), and
| nothing else. The market value of its shares are the
| final word.
|
| Sure, companies might occasionally do good things, but
| that core definition of value under capitalism doesn't
| change.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're still stuck on publicly-traded corporations.
|
| Try one of these. A non-profit gets a million dollars in
| donations to build new housing with the model of selling
| it into the market and using the proceeds to build even
| more. They still have to comply with all the laws, so you
| don't want the laws to adversarially impede its
| humanitarian mission to improve housing affordability and
| reduce homelessness, right?
| komali2 wrote:
| > They still have to comply with all the laws, so you
| don't want the laws to adversarially impede its
| humanitarian mission to improve housing affordability and
| reduce homelessness, right?
|
| I do want the laws to ensure that the buildings have fire
| escapes and no asbestos...
|
| Non profits can, apparently, convert to for-profit ones,
| or be bought, or be corrupt funnels of government
| contract money to for-profit corporations.
|
| These are arguments for improving and simplifying
| regulations, but not arguments against the idea that
| there should be an entity the represents nothing other
| than the needs of the constituents (the government) that
| will enforce rules on entities that wish to extract value
| from constituents (corporations). Non profit corps are
| attempts to exist within that system while playing by the
| rules but it doesn't change the fact that we still need
| the rules to control the hyperfauna wandering around.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I do want the laws to ensure that the buildings have
| fire escapes and no asbestos...
|
| The classic retreat into the subset of the rules that
| make sense.
|
| But do you also want to ensure that they're no more than
| two stories tall and supply housing for no more than one
| family per lot?
|
| > Non profits can, apparently, convert to for-profit
| ones, or be bought, or be corrupt funnels of government
| contract money to for-profit corporations.
|
| Which one of these is the concern justifying that a house
| of a particular size not have a finished basement?
|
| > These are arguments for improving and simplifying
| regulations, but not arguments against the idea that
| there should be an entity the represents nothing other
| than the needs of the constituents (the government) that
| will enforce rules on entities that wish to extract value
| from constituents (corporations).
|
| You're back to that assumption that the government
| represents nothing other than the needs of the
| constituents. That one's the broken one.
|
| The government has a monopoly on force and anyone who
| seeks power will work to capture it. It's not a loyal pet
| and its teeth have blood on them.
| komali2 wrote:
| > The classic retreat into the subset of the rules that
| make sense.
|
| Yes, because lasseiz-faire has no allowance for the
| subset of rules that make sense, so I oppose that
| mindset, but I don't oppose one that promotes simplified,
| context aware regulations, such as what the PRC has.
|
| > The government has a monopoly on force and anyone who
| seeks power will work to capture it. It's not a loyal pet
| and its teeth have blood on them.
|
| Right, my argument applies only if there's an existent
| state, and is basically to make the most of it by at
| least checking the power of corporations, which are more
| motivated to harm people than governments. If you say
| there can be bad governments, sure yes, but that's just
| as much an indictment of lasseiz-faire economics since
| there can be bad corporations too, and in fact that's far
| more likely.
|
| Ideally there's no state at all, but the only way to have
| that without corpotocracy is to also dismantle capitalism
| and private property, and something tells me you wouldn't
| be a fan of that either...
| ptrl600 wrote:
| In the situation that the personnel and legal code of the
| government depend very little on the outcome of elections
| in practice, would you say that the incentives for a
| government would be rather different?
| strictnein wrote:
| > The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is
| that it ignores the fact that what these organizations
| claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually
| harmful and has considerable negative impact on society
| in general.
|
| We were trying to make our weather monitoring systems
| better, at minimal or no cost to our customers and the
| public.
|
| > What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical
| rentism from bureaucrats
|
| In our case it was, and we were told that it was from one
| of the people involved in the approval process.
| strictnein wrote:
| > For most people
|
| I guess I wasn't clear enough that I was referring to
| people who are directly encountering them, like the author
| of the post we're discussing.
|
| I've worked directly with them. In my case, to get things
| approved didn't require any concerted effort or significant
| cost, it was just time. The government group would sit on
| the requests for a long time, doing nothing with them,
| asking no questions about what was submitted, and then
| approve them.
|
| This wasn't speculation on our part either. We were told
| that was how it was done by one of the people involved in
| the approval process who was also frustrated by how long it
| took, but didn't have the power to change things.
|
| The end result was that we did less work in these areas,
| even though there would have been significant benefit to
| the users of our systems and the public in general.
| protocolture wrote:
| Theres a lot of that. Its just people need a first exposure
| to the thing to realise its terrible. Like the other
| commenter says, most people are completely shielded.
|
| I know a few local people who have only been impacted for the
| first time by regulations preventing the sale of vapes, and
| local regulations preventing the resale of used tyres to
| motorsport enthusiasts. Its the first spark for a lot of
| people.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > I know a few local people who have only been impacted for
| the first time by regulations preventing the sale of vapes,
| and local regulations preventing the resale of used tyres
| to motorsport enthusiasts. Its the first spark for a lot of
| people.
|
| Please point out what regulations you speak of, and why
| they are in place.
|
| For example, vape pen regulation imposes requirements such
| as maximum nicotine concentration and minimum acceptable
| purity, and must be child-resistant. Regulation prevents
| you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and
| will pose a health risk. What spark does this fire in you?
|
| Or would you prefer to blindly resell things that harm the
| people around you without being bothered about
| consequences?
| protocolture wrote:
| >For example, vape pen regulation imposes requirements
| such as maximum nicotine concentration and minimum
| acceptable purity, and must be child-resistant.
| Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous
| vape pens that can and will pose a health risk. What
| spark does this fire in you?
|
| Over a period of ~8 months, they were subjected to like 4
| different levels of restriction over here, culminating in
| them only being provided by pharmacies to prescription
| holders. An entire cottage industry of compliant vape
| selling businesses were forced to close, and significant
| numbers of users have been deprived access to the
| commodity. Honestly its been a goldmine for discussing
| law/regulation with the up and coming generation.
|
| >Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous
| vape pens that can and will pose a health risk.
|
| Regulation forces the non prescription having user to the
| black market where no safety or quality checks are
| conducted. And they did this on the basis that the health
| risk is unknown, having already banned the vape juices
| that we know can in a small number of cases cause
| complications.
|
| >Or would you prefer to blindly resell things that harm
| the people around you without being bothered about
| consequences?
|
| I think you internalise the standard fallacy. I explain
| in another post that all regulations need to justify
| themselves, not simply have a stated cause. You seem to
| believe as most people who are unimpacted, that one can
| simply write law like code, and the execution proceeds
| flawlessly. There need be no thought given to the
| negative case, to the behaviour changes outside of your
| scope. Its quite a suffocating arrogance.
|
| Not to mention you also immediately fall into "OH YOU ARE
| AGAINST X, WELL YOU MUST LOVE Y", which is telling.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > Over a period of ~8 months, they were subjected to like
| 4 different levels of restriction over here, culminating
| in them only being provided by pharmacies to prescription
| holders.
|
| Can you explain what do you think is wrong with that?
|
| > An entire cottage industry of compliant vape selling
| businesses were forced to close, and significant numbers
| of users have been deprived access to the commodity.
|
| What a questionable assertion. Your whole argument is
| that businesses that were not compliant had to close, but
| somehow you chose to frame them as compliant?
|
| And exactly what "commodities" do you think the public is
| being deprived of? Hazardous noncompliant vape pens that
| pose a health risk? That's hardly something anyone would
| complain about.
|
| > Regulation forces the non prescription having user to
| the black market where no safety or quality checks are
| conducted.
|
| No, not really. Anyone can stroll into any store that
| sells them and buy a compliant vape pen.
|
| Your argument is even comical, in the way that you opted
| to complain about regulation somehow causing the problem
| of people selling hazardous products that don't comply
| with regulation. I mean, do you expect all products to
| magically comply with regulation after that ceases to be
| enforced? Schrodinger's regulation!
|
| The main problem with laissez-faire fundamentalists is
| their incoherence driven by despair.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Yeah, this whole argument sounds a lot like
|
| company> These regulations are preventing us from selling
| our product
|
| government> We have a set of standards that your type of
| product must meet; because we believe not meeting them is
| dangerous to society.
|
| company> But, our products don't meet those standards,
| and we can't sell them... and since selling them is what
| our business plan is, we're going to go out of business
|
| government> And? I'm not seeing the problem here.
|
| It is part of government's job to decide what is safe for
| society and, where something isn't safe, decide if the
| harm in preventing it outweighs the good in doing so.
| protocolture wrote:
| >It is part of government's job to decide what is safe
| for society and, where something isn't safe, decide if
| the harm in preventing it outweighs the good in doing so.
|
| And they are quite often very wrong, trying to be seen to
| be acting rather than making considered changes.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| That's an argument to do better, not to avoid doing at
| all.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| That's a pretty disingenuous interpretation. It's a lot
| more like:
|
| Company > we are selling something that's legal.
|
| Government > well now you have to do X. (Testing?
| Certification? Reporting?)
|
| Company > why? X industry doesn't have this reg. Europe/
| the next state over doesn't have this reg?
|
| Government> because I'm the government and its my job
|
| Company > fine
|
| Repeat 4x.
|
| > Company, um we did they last 4 things you asked us to
| and if we have to do the next we are going to go out of
| business.
|
| > Gov: get fucked, I'm just doing my job: read [I have an
| ideological problem with your business, my buddy is in
| the business and I'm giving him an exception, and/or I've
| got a special interest group to please].
|
| >Public: _cheers_
|
| >Public: Why is their a housing shortage? Why is our
| manufacturing less competitive than China? Why do we need
| to import rare earths?
| protocolture wrote:
| >Your whole argument is that businesses that were not
| compliant had to close, but somehow you chose to frame
| them as compliant?
|
| Businesses that were compliant with rounds 1, 2 and 3 of
| regulation still got kicked out with number 4, because
| the regulation denoted them as businesses that aren't
| allowed to sell vapes. They did nothing morally wrong and
| harmed no one, and invested time and money in compliance
| with earlier regulation.
|
| >On 1 July 2024, the Therapeutic Goods and Other
| Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Act 2024
| (Commonwealth vaping reforms) came into effect.
| Therapeutic vapes (which include nicotine and zero-
| nicotine vapes) are only available in pharmacies for the
| purposes of smoking cessation or managing nicotine
| dependence. It is illegal for any other retailer--
| including tobacconists, vape shops and convenience stores
| --to sell any type of vaping goods
|
| I wont bore you with the details of the restrictions
| pharmacies impose for access to vapes, but rest assured,
| the _effect_ is a prescription is required for 0 tobacco
| vapes.
|
| And its worth mentioning, this was the _compromise_
| position, where the government was pushing for a total
| ban.
|
| >And exactly what "commodities" do you think the public
| is being deprived of?
|
| Previously compliant vapes that are now only permitted
| via prescription.
|
| >Hazardous noncompliant vape pens that pose a health
| risk? That's hardly something anyone would complain
| about.
|
| Dubious risk that is so far completely unsubstantiated.
| We regulate tobacco cigarettes to a lower degree. You can
| enjoy aerosolised burning tar in your lungs far easier
| than a simple vape. There is no justification for
| restricting something less harmful, to a greater degree.
| None.
|
| >No, not really. Anyone can stroll into any store that
| sells them and buy a compliant vape pen.
|
| You really dont engage with anyone in good faith do you.
|
| >Your argument is even comical, in the way that you opted
| to complain about regulation somehow causing the problem
| of people selling hazardous products that don't comply
| with regulation. I mean, do you expect all products to
| magically comply with regulation after that ceases to be
| enforced? Schrodinger's regulation!
|
| You make the same logical fallacy, that something is
| hazardous _because_ it is regulated. When they
| specifically did not have any evidence to base their
| later rounds of regulation on. Its based on an
| assumption, that vaping _might_ be harmful, after having
| already removed products from shelves that were shown to
| be (ever so slightly) harmful. That is, they removed the
| bad stuff, then removed the unknown _without
| justification_. My point again is that you need more than
| a reason, you need continual ongoing justification.
|
| We have literally had an increase in violent crime
| associated with the vape ban. Black market vapes are
| completely unregulated (often including the banned juices
| that were largely complied with). I dont see why you have
| a problem with that. This is not a binary. You arent
| being asked to believe in a 100% regulation free utopia.
| Just to abandon your weird, and completely
| unsubstantiated starting position that there cannot be
| negative impacts from regulation. If I wanted to be an
| a*hole I would have started with the war on drugs. Not a
| weird little street level mirror of it that's part of my
| lived experience.
|
| >https://colinmendelsohn.com.au/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/02/Th...
|
| >Australia's 'de facto' prohibition of vapes has helped
| create a thriving and highly profitable black market
| controlled by the same criminal networks that import
| illicit tobacco. These criminal gangs are engaged in an
| escalating turf war to gain market share, with
| firebombing of tobacco shops and public executions.
|
| Will just point out that firebombing and public
| executions are also banned. I am not trying to get them
| unbanned. But they occur anyway.
|
| >The main problem with laissez-faire fundamentalists is
| their incoherence driven by despair.
|
| What a weird thing to say, that unfounded smothering
| arrogance again.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The second one is the better one.
|
| There are some laws prohibiting the sale of used tires
| with less than a certain amount of tread. In some
| motorsports you _want_ tires with no tread (slicks).
| Moreover, they 're being used in a different context (a
| vehicle on a track rather than public roads). But the law
| prohibits the sale because it takes no account of the
| context.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > There are some laws prohibiting the sale of used tires
| with less than a certain amount of tread.
|
| I think you're confused. I'll explain why.
|
| Some contries enforce regulations on what tyres are
| deemed road-legal, due to requirements on safety and
| minimum grip. It's also why it's illegal to drive around
| with bald tyres.
|
| However, said countries also allow the sale of tyres for
| track and competitive use, as long as they are clearly
| sold as not road-legal and for competitive use only.
|
| So, no. You can buy track tyres. You just can't expect to
| drive with them when you're dropping off your kids at
| school and not get a fine.
|
| Also, it should be noted that some motorsport competition
| ban or restrict the use of slick tyres.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| A better example might be mattresses. There are states
| (Kansas) where it is illegal to sell a used mattress,
| under any circumstances. Even if, for your specific
| circumstances, the "it's unsanitary" reasoning isn't
| valid. You, as an individual, cannot sell your "I slept
| in it a few times and realized I don't like it" mattress
| to your friend.
| eurleif wrote:
| Do you have a link to an actual Kansas statute which
| makes it illegal to sell a used mattress? I searched for
| it without success. Various sites claim that Kansas makes
| this illegal without citing a statute (often in the
| context of hokey stories about people finding silly
| loopholes in this purported law), but I'm suspicious that
| it's an urban legend.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I did some digging and, like you note, was unable to find
| any official documentation for it. Given the number of
| sites that indicate it is illegal in Kansas (when listing
| state by state), I took in on faith that it wasn't a mass
| hallucination. It seems like this may be false.
|
| Thank you for prompting me to look into it further.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Now I'll explain why I think you're confused.
|
| Some jurisdictions ban the sale _whatsoever_ of used
| tires with less than a certain amount of tread. It 's not
| that you can't put them on a car to drive on public
| roads, it's that no one can sell them to you. They
| prohibited the sale rather than the use, thereby
| interfering with the people wanting to make the purchase
| for a different purpose.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > Some jurisdictions ban the sale whatsoever of used
| tires with less than a certain amount of tread.
|
| No, not really. This appears to be the source of your
| confusion. In Europe+US, thread restrictions are enforced
| on standard road tyres marketed for use in public roads.
| You can buy slicks if they are marked for track use, but
| it's illegal to drive around with them.
|
| But feel free to cite exactly what jurisdiction and
| regulation prevents you from buying tyres. I'm sure
| you'll eventually stumble upon the source of your
| confusion once you start to look up your sources.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Let's try this one:
|
| https://law.justia.com/codes/new-
| jersey/title-56/section-56-...
|
| Do you see anything in it restricting the ban to motor
| vehicles used on public roads?
| friendzis wrote:
| > A person shall not sell at retail, or offer for sale at
| retail, to the general public any tire intended for use
| on a motor vehicle if the tire:
|
| The law you cite literally applies _only_ to general
| public sales, i.e. where the the intention is to use on
| public roads. I cannot see where this regulation would
| apply to solely used tires in the first place and if we
| slip down the slope you have put in this thread, this
| regulation would forbid sales of track-only tires
| altogether.
|
| Which is just not the case. I am 99% certain one can sell
| tires, new or used, to any registered motorsport
| organization, for track-only use. That's the case in
| first world countries anyway.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The law you cite literally applies _only_ to general
| public sales, i.e. where the the intention is to use on
| public roads.
|
| If you sell key chains to the general public, that
| implies the key chains are intended only to be used on
| public roads? I don't think that's right.
|
| > I cannot see where this regulation would apply to
| solely used tires in the first place and if we slip down
| the slope you have put in this thread, this regulation
| would forbid sales of track-only tires altogether.
|
| It forbids the sale if it "has a tread depth of less than
| 1/16 inch measurable in any groove" which ostensibly
| wouldn't apply to new tires with more tread than that nor
| new slicks that come from the factory with no grooves to
| measure.
|
| But then you're buying a new tire, when what they want is
| the used one with negligible tread left and therefore a
| much more attractive price.
| nehal3m wrote:
| That depends whether regulators interpret "intended for
| use on motor vehicles" as "for road use". The bill's
| sponsors seem to think so:
|
| USTMA research shows that more than 30 million used tires
| are available for sale nationally each year. The
| legislation does not ban all used tire sales. It targets
| used tires that have specific, well-established, unsafe
| conditions. "This is a common-sense, pro-safety, pro-
| consumer bill," said Anne Forristall Luke, USTMA
| president and CEO. "Preventing these unsafe used tires
| from operating on New Jersey roads will reduce the risk
| of crashes and save lives. It's that simple." [1]
|
| Seems clear to me this is intended to affect road use,
| although the bill could use an amendment to that effect.
| I could not find jurisprudence implying resale of racing
| slicks is illegal under this law.
|
| [1] https://www.ustires.org/newsroom/new-jersey-assembly-
| advance...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > That depends whether regulators interpret "intended for
| use on motor vehicles" as "for road use". The bill's
| sponsors seem to think so:
|
| That was their _intention_ , but the _effect_ of a law is
| not always the same thing -- that 's the point. If you go
| to the local tire place and want to pay them to fit your
| track car with used tires that have minimal tread on
| them, is the clerk going to read the legislative history
| and take the risk that the judge takes that
| interpretation despite the law saying something else, or
| are they going to fob you off because corporate says
| they're not allowed to sell tires like that?
| nehal3m wrote:
| In my experience companies tend to err on the side of
| making money, so they'd probably just fit them and take
| the risk of a 500 dollar fine.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're not thinking like a corporation. What happens if
| you crash your car after they broke the law to sell you
| the tires? Corporations will throw away _epic_ amounts of
| money in the interests of not getting sued.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >Some contries enforce regulations on what tyres are
| deemed road-legal, due to requirements on safety and
| minimum grip. It's also why it's illegal to drive around
| with bald tyres.
|
| Yes, this is a good thing. Where it becomes bad is when
| someone says "Oh, we should stop that from happening,
| let's ban the sell of such tires." With no exception.
|
| This isn't a problem unique to regulations and laws. In
| software development, it is very common for the user to
| not think about exceptions. The rare the exception, the
| more likely it is missed in the requirements. It is the
| same fundamental problem of not thinking about all the
| exception cases, just in different contexts. You also see
| this commonly in children learning math. They'll learn
| and blindly apply a rule, not remembering the exceptions
| they were told they need to handle (can't divide by zero
| being a very common one).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >In some motorsports you want tires with no tread
| (slicks)
|
| You are wrong.
|
| Laws prohibit selling used tires because the consumable
| part of the tire that contains the part engineered to
| safely interact with the road _is used up_. That part
| happens to contain the tread.
|
| A "slick" for racing is not a tire that has had the tread
| worn down FFS. A "slick" still has a significant quantity
| of rubber engineered to wear down over use as you drive
| on it.
|
| If you are using a used up tire in place of an actual
| racing tire, what you are doing is cheaping out on
| safety.
|
| A tire worn down to the tread wear indicator or similar
| is only useful as a burnout tire.
|
| Cheaping out on safety in auto racing is so damn stupid
| that even the 24 Hours of Lemons race, which bans cars
| that cost more than 500$ with all upgrades, excludes
| safety equipment from that calculation and requires
| thousands of dollars of safety equipment.
|
| Exactly because of situations like this, where people who
| say they "Know what they are doing" just don't.
|
| >ut the law prohibits the sale because it takes no
| account of the context.
|
| The law prohibits it because every dumb asshole who
| thinks the government is an evil bogeyman like this will
| insist on buying worn out tires "For racing" and putting
| them on their daily driver and people will die. See https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro..
| . for what happens when tires are even just a little
| messed up, and how it killed 238 people in the US alone.
| Both companies involved BTW neglected to inform the NHTSA
| about the issues they knew existed, because people dying
| in their vehicles while they point fingers around is more
| profitable than doing a recall
| KaiserPro wrote:
| THe problem is that the main argument for this assertion is:
| "we are trying to dispose of large amount of industrial waste,
| the regulator is slowing us down"
|
| Now, we are told that this waste is actually going to benefit
| us, as its taking all of those nasty CO2 and PM2 emissions and
| locking them away. Great. but what's the chemical make up of
| those captured emissions? When you inject them into old wells,
| are they sealed against leakage?
|
| I assume its capturing raw exhaust from things, and that has a
| non-negligible heavy metal content. Can you guarantee that
| those aren't going to leak into the ground water?
|
| So yeah that kind of regulation probably is quite onerous,
| mainly because for the last ~60 years people have been taking
| the piss.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| On the other hand, there are thousands of invisible interaction
| points in your day that are the result of regulation, and your
| life is better for it. You only get to see the bad in current
| regulation, not in the bad that could have been caused without
| it.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| On the other hand, how many regulations are written in blood or
| cancer?
| Animats wrote:
| This company's business is regulatory arbitrage. Of course they
| have to deal with regulators. Capturing CO2 and pumping it into
| the ground is not a commercial enterprise. It's something done to
| get some sort of regulatory credit.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _company 's business is regulatory arbitrage_
|
| This isn't arbitrage any more than selling warships is military
| arbitrage.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| It's not pork because I like it?
| xendipity wrote:
| The problem is that dealing with regulators takes years and
| millions of dollars, reducing competition and societal benefit.
| He's quoting $200m in additional health costs borne mostly by
| Medicare/Medicaid. Regulations aren't a useful part of the
| system if they're gunked up.
| wredcoll wrote:
| The thing is, we really don't need people competing at
| selling carbon credits because it's an industry that
| literally only exists due to badly written regulations so
| it's hard to come up with a ton of sympathy.
| mnau wrote:
| Saying it exists only due to badly written regulations is
| rather bold assertion. It exists, because companies damage
| what isn't theirs. It is a regulation to protect property
| rights.
|
| Companies are polluting shared resources. Classic tradegy
| of commons.
|
| Credits is one of things we have come up that does work.
|
| Sure, we could just ban it outright and say goodbye to
| industrial civilization. Most people don't agree with that.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Doesn't that go away as a cost if the government stops paying
| for healthcare? I heard they were doing this in the US?
| mminer237 wrote:
| The government pays for healthcare for about 43% of
| Americans. The rest mostly get it from work.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is not a
| commercial enterprise. It's something done to get some sort of
| regulatory credit.
|
| I would have said that it's something done to improve the
| health of the planet, but sure.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Business doesn't have goals beyond money. Any good it does is
| completely incidental.
| ozornin wrote:
| That's a wild oversimplification
| scotty79 wrote:
| Sometimes it's good to look beyond myriad of narratives
| to see what actually makes a thing tick.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| Would you please like to tell everyone how that's
| oversimplified?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Would you please like to tell everyone how that 's
| oversimplified?_
|
| People aren't one dimensional. Simplifying businesses
| into perfectly-rational automatons is high-school
| economics.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Businesses aren't people and people's motivations aren't
| businesses motivations. Business are automatons, just
| running on carbon instead of silicon and if they are not
| perferct they are just bad.
| mouse_ wrote:
| You don't make a billion dollars thinking like that. Dude's
| playing a different game.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| I'm glad that I'm not the only one who saw the profound irony
| in this. I don't think anybody of their own free will would pay
| someone to inject processed agricultural waste into the ground.
| And honestly, I'm not that upset that bureaucratic inertia has
| obstructed a process where working people get tax farmed for
| 50% of their earnings to give people like this his next
| "multibillion-dollar exit". Especially when the benefits
| require so much confidence in extremely simple models of an
| extremely complex system that they are essentially articles of
| faith.
|
| Now the cynic in me reads this article is an appeal to his
| creditors. Maybe they thought that because he made money in
| software, he must just smarter than everyone else and would
| clearly be a virtuoso in any market, kind of like a Buckaroo
| Bonzai. However, now their millions have vanished with nothing
| to show for it, and he needs to convince his creditors that
| it's not he who is wrong, but the world who is wrong.
| stego-tech wrote:
| While I am firmly in the "de-regulation is bad, because every
| single one of those is written in blood" camp, I also sympathize
| with startups and businesses desperately trying to innovate in a
| regulated market and being stymied by said bureaucracy.
|
| What I've come around to is the exact opposite of most de-
| regulation stans: _bigger government_. The tradeoff for
| regulations _from_ the government is having said government
| shoulder the burden of helping new businesses successfully
| navigate said regulations quickly and efficiently. It shouldn't
| be on the small business owner or startup founder to trawl
| through thousands of pages of texts and attempt to figure out
| where their business sits within them, the government should
| instead have an ombudsman or agent - paid with by tax dollars
| from successful businesses - work full-time with that business to
| figure things out.
|
| Want to start a bar? Here's the application for a liquor license,
| here's the plain-language requirements for accessibility and
| hygiene, here's a taxpayer-supported payroll system to ensure
| labor law compliance, and here's the map of areas where you can
| setup shop without requiring a separate permit process.
|
| Of course, the problem with said approach is that it requires
| funding, which requires more tax revenue, which means higher
| taxes. Under the current neoliberal, laissez-faire Capitalism
| system in the USA, that simply isn't happening at present, if for
| no other reason than established players have captured regulatory
| agencies and government officials to deliberately hamstring new
| businesses.
|
| Selling deregulation in business, _especially_ "hardtech", is
| exactly what those ghouls want. Don't take the bait. Be better,
| even if it's harder.
| some_random wrote:
| The reality is that many, many regulations are not in fact
| written in blood.
| t-writescode wrote:
| And many, many of them are written in Lawful
| Good/Neutral/Evil people trying to enact their will in the
| system; however,
|
| in all cases, Chesterton's Fence is a good reminder.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| If the accessibility and hygiene laws can be explained in plain
| language, why not just write them in plain language?
|
| If labor laws can be automated by software why not just make
| them simpler?
|
| If you can make a map to explain the permitting process why not
| just simplify the process?
|
| If you made the regulations less complex and excessive you
| wouldn't need to add another layer of bureaucracy to explain
| them.
| stego-tech wrote:
| It's a stopgap measure until such time that _an entire
| country 's bureaucracy_ can be rewritten to meet the needs of
| its populace, rather than its legislators and elites.
|
| Aside from laws being written the way they are (because the
| legal system is highly verbose _and_ incredibly specific,
| which necessitates said language), I 'm generally in
| agreement with you! Maps should be publicly available and
| kept up-to-date so citizens can quickly glance at them to
| identify potential business locations that have lower
| permitting requirements, and said permitting processes should
| be handled by the government rather than forcing new business
| owners to shell out for expensive attorneys and compliance
| officers right off the bat.
|
| It's about balancing the needs of small business for
| flexibility and adaptability with limited resources, with the
| regulations needed to keep larger business interests from
| exploiting and monopolizing markets to the point of harming
| third-parties (consumers, small businesses, governments, the
| environment, etc). Striking that balance is hard, and
| maintaining it over time harder still, but it _can be done_
| without resorting to either extreme.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| How do any of the examples you gave keep larger business
| interests from exploiting and monopolizing markets?
| terminalshort wrote:
| Liquor licenses shouldn't exist, and private payroll systems
| are perfectly functional, so I have no interest in paying for
| it.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| Private payroll systems are expensive, and all the risk
| remains with the purchaser. Why are they expensive? There is
| limited competition (often through acquisition) and the
| product is sold just below the price that the majority of
| companies would find an alternative. What results is no
| development and improvement of payroll, but instead companies
| incentivised to create complexity moats through regulation.
|
| If the government is forced to provide at least one working
| payroll system for free or reasonable cost then private
| companies compete with specific verticals and ease of use.
| And when the government wants to change how payroll works for
| some third benefit... they just can.
| terminalshort wrote:
| There is no meaningful improvement to be made in payroll
| systems. They just have to get it right, and they almost
| always do. And they aren't expensive. When I ran a business
| the payroll system wasn't even expensive enough to even be
| on the radar for ways to cut costs.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think the trouble is that regulators have done a bad job at
| setting themselves up to learn from their mistakes. Regulations
| should expire more quickly so their next incarnation can be
| better sooner.
|
| Instead we're so afraid that the other guys will be in power in
| the future that we make them hard for people in the future to
| alter.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| It ain't regulation holding back america, it's profit. Our
| investors have failed us in every way imaginable, and our
| inability to consider any other manner of funding means we're
| dead in the water.
| strictnein wrote:
| Huh? The US has the largest private investment pool in the
| world.
|
| Why would investors invest their money in things that have no
| chance of recouping that investment?
| TylerE wrote:
| Nd they're all concerned with next quarters results, not the
| next hundred years.
| strictnein wrote:
| Are your investments in places where you're interested in
| the next 100 years and won't see the benefits until after
| your dead?
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Exactly! It's an absolutely foolish thing to build a society
| around, and the benefits are largely squandered on the
| private lives of private investors.
| strictnein wrote:
| "Absolutely foolish" - the tech sector doesn't exist
| without this "foolishness", but other than that, great
| idea.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Is that necessarily a bad thing? There are other ways to
| develop technology.
| ETH_start wrote:
| "Incredibly brave post from Peter about the insane regulatory
| friction our society must endure and which is directly
| responsible for the premature deaths of the startups attempting
| to build wealth for our future, as well as millions of people
| whose emancipation from (inter alia) air pollution is delayed for
| _decades_ by the same regulations that were intended to drive
| improvement of the environment.
|
| Peter is brave because, descriptively, the regulatory state
| functions collectively as a cartel with a monopoly on the veto
| and can apply it essentially at will with no real accountability.
| If one of the thousands of officials Peter's companies work with
| takes a dim view of this post, they could quietly and anonymously
| kill the company by shadow banning progression of any of hundreds
| of strands of regulatory approvals needed to obtain permission to
| operate.
|
| What are Peter's companies trying to do? Crush babies into gold?
| No, they're finding economic ways to fix air pollution. He's
| going to spend the better part of a decade of his life fighting
| some avatar of "the department of improving the environment" for
| the right to spend his own money improving the environment.
|
| I too have heard, and experienced, insane horror stories.
|
| The US is currently rapidly losing an energy production war with
| China. We have all the money and natural resources anyone could
| ever want, and China - a communist dictatorship - is deploying
| more electricity generation capacity in months than the US has
| deployed, ever, since the invention of electricity.
|
| Why?
|
| Solar photovoltaic power, which is approximately free and works
| best in uninhabitable deserts that are otherwise so economically
| useless that they remain federal land and are used for such
| things as atomic bomb testing, must go through the same
| environmental impact assessments, which take many years, as an
| oil refinery or explosives plant. Solar energy, which has a lower
| impact than practically any other land use and is by far the best
| per dollar spend for improving the environment. We should be
| granting 99 year solar leases on BLM land and inviting the top 10
| deployers to an annual dinner at the White House!
|
| This is not a market failure. This is a regulatory failure, and
| it is actively killing us. More Americans die every month than on
| 9/11 from the impacts of air pollution that would have been
| addressed a decade ago if builders were allowed to build. This is
| not some academic niche issue. Thousands of people are actively
| killed by our neglect of this problem.
|
| Two years ago I wrote this:
| https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/permitt...
|
| The situation, expressed in real world time-to-deployment, has
| not materially improved. The regulatory state is a bizarre hydra
| where, somehow, painstaking reforms to speed up review often end
| up taking longer. Such is the case for California's fire hazard
| reduction burn process, which takes so long that the forests
| often burn up in the mean time.
| (https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/01/17/the-los-angele...)
| Earlier this year, the fires took 10,000 houses and nearly 100
| people with them, and now, nearly a year later, almost none have
| been rebuilt, while the city council's response to housing
| scarcity is ... rent control. Elon, I'm ready to go to Mars!
|
| My radical view is that if McMaster-Carr can fit 500,000 SKUs
| into its 4000 page catalog, the federal government should be able
| to fit all its laws and regulations into the same space. The
| constitution can be on page 1. In 1875, the federal code was less
| than 2000 pages. Today it is over 12 million. At the current rate
| we are generating new law faster than anyone could ever read it.
|
| The law of the land should be portable."
|
| https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1991589814865654084?s=20
| JohnnyLarue wrote:
| It takes a brave businessman to speak out about how government
| regulations are killing their business. Thank you for your
| service.
| inetknght wrote:
| Your "over-regulation" is my "safety first".
| collingreen wrote:
| > every regulation is written in blood
|
| It doesn't mean everything is exactly right but it is a good
| reminder of what keeps happening when there are no rules there.
| nomel wrote:
| That's for safety regulations, and is somewhat true. That's
| not really what's being discussed here.
|
| There are many regulations that are drafted, and paid for, by
| monopolies. There's also just outright stupidity put into
| place, because lawmakers get paid to make laws, so they make
| laws that sound good, without considering the consequences.
| collingreen wrote:
| Regulatory capture and corruption are certainly horrible.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Sure and if this article actually brought up specific
| regulations and made a case against them... it probably
| wouldn't have made the front page and be full of flamewars.
| degamad wrote:
| Yep. My reaction to this line:
|
| > the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is the
| deathbed of thousands of hardtech companies that could be
| drastically improving our lives. We must unleash them.
|
| was "the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is also
| the deathbed of tens of thousands of hardtech companies who
| have no concern about destroying our communities in the
| interests of making a dollar", and that's what the regulations
| are there for.
| blitzar wrote:
| would be nice to extend the deathbed to include some of the
| soft-tech companies too
| fransje26 wrote:
| > some of the soft-tech companies
|
| Some? Let's be more generous than that..
|
| (Not that it matters anymore in the grand scheme of things,
| seeing the size of the tsunami wave of destruction building
| up in the current AI bubble..)
| YokoZar wrote:
| As the article points out, there is a safety cost from over-
| regulation. The impact on air quality from not allowing the new
| technology quickly enough is very real.
| inetknght wrote:
| There's a safety cost for getting things sold before they're
| proven to be safe.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I want air quality to improve. But I
| don't want shit products or snake oil to be produced which
| would only make air quality worse.
|
| Instead of blaming regulation: blame businesses that don't
| want to demonstrate the positive benefits of their product
| and want to hide the negative affects.
| energy123 wrote:
| What an intellectually bankrupt way to approach a question that
| has both downsides and upsides, and where those downsides and
| upsides vary depending on the specific regulation in question.
| dluan wrote:
| I was just in Hangzhou two days ago, and went through the
| Hangzhouxi train station. Needless to say it's utterly massive,
| straight out of a Star Trek scene, extremely efficient and clean.
| Construction was started in 2019, and finished in 2022. It cost
| $2.25bn. Hangzhou has 5 of these train stations, let alone one.
|
| I'm convinced that every SV founder or neolib politician who
| writes these hit/think-pieces is getting their enemy entirely
| mixed up. China is massively bureaucratic and regulation heavy,
| and just by the scale of these projects, it's simply impossible
| to think that if you just loosen some rules and fly by your seat
| pants, you can build a 11 platform train station in 3 years.
| Again, this station is mind bogglingly massive.
|
| The real answer is that China's regulatory loop is extremely
| short and small, where the government works very closely and
| reacts very quickly. You can talk to your regulator, even if
| you're a small startup working on a small hardware problem.
| Because every single community district has a CPC office, with
| representatives that can escalate things all the way up to the
| top. There's a clear chain of command, and throw in some guanxi
| to keep the gears greased up, things (problems, questions,
| hurdles) get to where they need to go. In the US, politicians
| don't work for their constituents, and even in the rare cases
| where they do (or have good intentions), they are up against
| other politicians who have ulterior agendas and their own goals.
| The machine thrashes against itself, not in a single direction.
| This is exactly the image of "democracy" in the the minds of the
| Chinese general public.
|
| The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing
| China is good at tackling because their democratic system is
| actually built for this.
| piker wrote:
| > The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of
| thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system
| is actually built for this.
|
| China does a lot of stuff right, and your points may be
| entirely valid, but calling that system "democratic" nullifies
| everything else said. It's a one party state.
| dluan wrote:
| This is incorrect. There are 9 parties. You are likely saying
| "well it's functionally a singe party system" yet you can't
| even read Chinese to understand what the policy positions of
| the different factions within the committees are.
|
| Here's a good primer if you're interested in learning more: h
| ttps://progressive.international/blueprint/cb7dbaf4-b106-41..
| .
| piker wrote:
| I'm not sure why you think I can't read Chinese, but Xi has
| been in power for 12 years and as far as I am aware cannot
| be removed by anyone other than the CCP. Please correct me
| if I'm wrong. If the people whom he governs can remove him
| by some kind of democratic process, then perhaps your
| points are valid. My understanding is that they cannot.
|
| > Socialist democracy must, therefore, be seen as a
| historic, multi-generational and dialectical process by
| which conditions that enable increasing parts of society to
| play an active role in governance are created, nurtured,
| and defended. China has advanced on this path further than
| most societies in modern history. From early experiments in
| village-level organization to building a nationwide process
| for 1.4 billion people from 56 ethnic groups across a
| country spanning over nine million square kilometers, this
| process has come to be contained in a concept called
| "whole-process people's democracy" -- a practice of
| democratic governance built on over a century of
| organizational experience.
|
| This (and the rest of this article) is nonsense propaganda
| if the above is correct.
| dluan wrote:
| There are 100 million members of the party, and these
| people vote directly for their local representatives, who
| then go onto vote for the village, town, city, province,
| etc representatives, all the way up to the Standing
| Committee which includes Xi. There are 3000 members of
| the National People's Congress that directly selects the
| Standing Committee. In rural areas or special
| administrative provinces, often anyone can vote,
| including union members who aren't officially party
| members. Comparatively, in the 2024 US election, 150
| million people voted. So there's roughly the same amount
| of votes happening.
|
| Maybe you don't agree that not being able to pick the
| head of state is not a valid definition of democracy. In
| that case I'd argue that having a twice-indicted
| convicted felon is not valid democracy either. In any
| case, feel free to keep your version.
| Zanfa wrote:
| Existence of elections does not mean a democratic
| process. Soviet Union had elections as well.
| blitzar wrote:
| Existence of elections does not mean a democratic
| process. United States of America has elections as well.
| dbdr wrote:
| I.e. existence of elections is necessary, but not
| sufficient.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Not bring up the US when someone is criticizing China,
| challenge level: impossible
| komali2 wrote:
| These statements about numbers are meaningless to make
| the case that democracy exists in the PRC. There's 1
| billion people there, comparison of vote counts to
| smaller countries doesn't make sense.
|
| Party membership comes with Guan Xi . It's not really
| about having the right to vote. Some people just join
| during school.
|
| The PRC gets many things right but we should be honest
| about its flaws. The truth is the CPC, and especially now
| Xi (you HAVE seen the updated textbooks about
| father/brother xi, right?), are single points of failure
| and unchallengeable authority. What happened to the left
| communists in the PRC? What happened to the smaller
| unions that didn't toe the party line, and not in the
| direction of capitalism but deeper into leftism? Where
| are the Chinese anarchists? Hell, where are the Chinese
| communists?
|
| The only path forward to a communist PRC is a split into
| province level states or better yet smaller entities.
| It's only a matter of time before Xi goes senile or has a
| big birthday he wants to celebrate by escalating
| imperialism into military intervention and tanks the
| entire PRC economy in doing so, or simply dies and kicks
| off a shitstorm power struggle that cripples the CPC and
| the country along with it.
| piker wrote:
| Yes, democracy includes the right for the people to elect
| a convicted felon. We do not agree on a definition of the
| democracy. Your usage continues to undermine your
| original valid point.
| terminalshort wrote:
| The argument you will hear from Americans and Europeans
| is that in order for it to be a "democracy" that anybody
| has to be able to vote. This is, of course, hypocritical
| because not a single one of those countries allows
| everyone to vote. And, just like China, every one of
| those countries has powerful government officials that
| are appointed by other government officials rather than
| elected by the public. And in many of them there is a
| parliamentary system where the public does not get to
| vote on the head of state, but rather the head of state
| is elected by the parliament.
|
| In fact, the US republic at its beginning was more
| similar to China. The president and Senate were elected
| by the state legislatures, not the public.
| komali2 wrote:
| There are other things that are critical to democracy to
| actually function in the spirit of democracy - universal
| suffrage obviously, and the USA fails in this insomuch as
| it removed the right to vote from felons and engages in
| gerrymandering and disenchantment.
|
| However other countries don't suffer the issue to quite
| the same degree, and the PRC is happy to restrict the
| right of some people to representation such as the Uighur
| Muslims in Xinjiang. You might say they don't deserve it,
| I say that's just a justification for disenfranchisement,
| and a bad one.
|
| You also need to let citizens have the ability to
| converse and discuss and try to influence each other and
| who they vote for, and to learn facts about politicians
| outside of channels that are supportive of the
| politician. By that I of course mean that mostly free
| speech and free press are a requirement for a functional
| democracy, else you could call North Korea a democracy
| which is of course absurd.
|
| The PRC may get many things right, and hell maybe we are
| entering The Chinese Century, but regardless it's not
| immune to criticism, and pretending otherwise just to
| oppose American hegemony simply hurts one's ability to do
| so as everyone will just accuse you of being a Little
| Pink.
| ok123456 wrote:
| The US is a one-party state because of elite capture.
|
| The interests of the mainstream political parties in the US
| are disconnected from the material conditions of the people.
| And what passes for debate is the narcissism of small
| differences that leaves the super-structure untouched.
|
| China found a system that works for them after a century of
| trying every system.
| Anon4Now wrote:
| Given all the videos I've seen on YouTube of bridge and
| building collapses in China, I think you're glossing over all
| their shortcomings. Maybe they do have a tight regulatory loop
| - I don't know - but their aggressive timelines and poor
| materials seem to have bitten them in the butt a number of
| times.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Was slave labour used for this one? Or did the Uyghurs catch a
| break?
| dluan wrote:
| Are you racist all of the time or just ignorant for fun?
| komali2 wrote:
| Please clarify what racist thing was said.
|
| Unless, wait, is criticism of the CPC racist? Well, that
| would only be true if the PRC was an ethnostate, after all,
| that's what makes criticism of Israel anti-Semitic, right?
| So, is the PRC an ethnostate?
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Fascist doesn't try to hide behind uncharitable accusations
| of racism, challenge level: impossible.
| terminalshort wrote:
| But by what definition do you say that is bureaucratic and
| regulation heavy? It sounds like the opposite to me. The
| decision to build was made by a single authority and then
| executed. In the US there would have been at least 3 different
| levels of government involved, and possibly multiple agencies
| at each level. And then after they have made their decision,
| which would take years, they would be sued by many different
| private organizations that are against the project. All those
| lawsuits would have to be resolved before work could start,
| which would take even more years and require modifications to
| be made to the plan to appease these organizations. To me it
| sounds like your system is very light on bureaucracy and
| regulation compared to ours.
| acyou wrote:
| You can tell when someone is a process or chemical engineer, by
| how they carefully consider each of the system boundaries and the
| inputs, outputs and processes inside and outside each of these
| boundaries.
|
| There seems to be a whole series of issues in considering system
| boundaries and where they can and should be drawn when
| considering the best course of action.
|
| EVs are a classic case, you draw the system boundary around the
| vehicle and get a MPG figure, and externalize the remaining
| costs. Might as well claim infinite MPG. Bill Gates proves
| himself as a process oriented guy here.
|
| Carbon capture is another funny one. You report that you
| sequester this amount of carbon, but on the other hand deplete
| the soil. The amount of carbon in healthy soil is staggering,
| activities leading to soil erosion and depletion of soil
| nutrients have to be very carefully considered. How do you draw a
| system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity
| extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the
| next 500 years? It's introducing predators into Australia all
| over again, people thinking they are smart and going for the
| course of action that is politically favorable in the very short
| term but ultimately ill considered.
|
| For regulation, this is pretty much why can't we just have
| regulations that benefit me right now? For people with deep
| pockets, they ignore the regulations and pay the fines. Problem
| with these guys is their entire business model revolves around
| making money off of externalizing costs onto the rest of the
| economy, via environmental regulatory burden. What is unsaid in
| the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily
| support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in
| general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone
| else.
| internetter wrote:
| > How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil
| with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict
| the carbon balance over the next 500 years?
|
| Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more
| significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and
| stop its production? It's hard for me to imagine this being so.
| Mind that the process that created these holes have also
| created tremendously large biohazards very consistently, yet
| are normalized by society. We must accelerate the pace we're
| on.
|
| > What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that
| regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the
| carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to
| those invested, but not to everyone else.
|
| Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me? I absolutely think
| businesses which are working to save millions of lives should
| receive regulatory support, instead of the oil companies which
| are still to this day benefiting from price subsidies?
| delusional wrote:
| Aren't the oil companies "working" on carbon capture?
| scotty79 wrote:
| To be honest they should be forced to actually work on it.
| The rule should be, if you want to be allowed to sell X
| amount of carbon as fuel on a given market, you have to
| capture k*X amount of CO2.
| rcxdude wrote:
| The oil companies are generally working on carbon capture
| that produces CO2 that can be sequestered with the
| equipment and know-how they already have (i.e. pumping
| pressurised CO2 back into underground reservoirs). Growing
| crops is one of their focuses (and it's not a very good
| form of carbon capture, anyhow).
| sfn42 wrote:
| Carbon capture is a waste of time. You essentially have to
| suck the entire atmosphere through capture facilities.
|
| It's completely infeasible in practice, the largest plant
| we have right now is called mammoth and in order to offset
| our current emissions we would need a million mammoths. A
| million of these large, expensive facilities that take
| years to build.
| oezi wrote:
| The key point contested is stated like this in the OP:
|
| > A regulatory system that structurally insists on
| legalistic, ultra-extreme caution is bound to generate a
| massive negative return for society.
|
| The OP mostly sees the downsides and disregards how hard
| earned any of those regulatory requirements are. Each
| requirement is usually the outcome of people being
| substantially impacted by industry before regulation. For
| instance the Thalidomide scandal with 10000 children born
| with deformities.
|
| If OP doesn't grasp the origin and rationale behind
| regulations, it doesn't mean there aren't any.
| terminalshort wrote:
| And now that we have these strict safety regulations after
| the Thalidomide fuck up, drugs are more expensive than ever
| due to the extreme cost of going through the approval
| process, but at least they're safer. Except, of course,
| that whole episode where people somehow forgot that opiates
| were addictive. What are we paying for again?
| torginus wrote:
| It's not like before Thalidomide companies were just cool
| with putting baby-mutating pills on the market. There were
| existing regulations, and concerned voices, but those were
| ignored or silenced. Even after concrete proof of harm was
| obtained, the medication was continued to be sold in some
| places.
|
| Diesel is another one of these stories - with dieselgate
| being Act 2 of the whole diesel scam - diesel was pushed as
| clean because it performed better on traditional tests of
| environmental impact gasoline was subjected to.
|
| Any chemist with half a brain would've told you that's
| because it produces different combustion products, which
| are in turn, not measured.
|
| Dieselgate was merely an attempt to continue the scam which
| shouldn't have been started in the first place.
|
| And strict regulation more often than not, favors the
| established players who don't have to comply with it -
| example is housing, where construction of new housing is
| subject to rules old houses are not needed to comply with -
| artificially limiting the ability to solve the housing
| crisis while pushing up prices.
|
| Various emissions and safety regulations in the auto
| industry were also basically straight up scams - they drove
| buyers towards more complex and less reliable, but more
| expensive to repair cars, and unfairly favored large
| vehicles which had an easier time complying with them.
|
| The various driver assist safety systems were also found to
| not lower accident rates to justify their existence - and
| are universally hated by drivers everywhere.
|
| Many people nowadays express the sentiment that they'd
| rather keep their old car around and drive it into the
| ground before purchasing a new one for these reasons.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| It doesn't follow that the regulations are sensible
| reactions to those problems.
| j_w wrote:
| > Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario
| more significant than the harms of failing to sequester
| carbon and stop its production? It's hard for me to imagine
| this being so.
|
| What percentage risk of it being worse would you draw the "we
| need regulators to take a careful look at this at? A 20%
| chance that they destroy up a local ecosystem or something
| else catastrophic? 5%? 1%?
|
| Now what if their operations were local to you? What does it
| become then?
| mnau wrote:
| Waiting 4 years until regulator even decides which regulation
| you fall under is "regulations that benefit me right now?"
| There is a lot of similar sentiment ITT. Speedy resolution by
| government is essential. They get too much slack from being
| slow, from regulators to court.
|
| > what kind of injection well is this? Should it be permitted
| as a Class I disposal, Class II oilfield disposal, or Class V
| experimental? This question on permitting path took four years
| to answer. Four years to decide which path to use, not even the
| actual permit! It took this long because regulators are
| structurally faced with no upside, only downside legal risk in
| taking a formal position on something new.
| fragmede wrote:
| Oil companies routinely flared off natural gas that came up
| with oil because it wasn't economically worthwhile build the
| infrastructure to capture it. It was expensive and it was
| just easier to flare it off and let it go to waste. North
| Dakota changed the calculus by implementing strict
| regulations that limited how much gas companies could flare
| in the state set a target that companies could only flare 10%
| of a natural gas production and if you exceeded that you
| would get a fine this regulatory pressure made previously un
| economical infrastructure investment suddenly worthwhile, and
| _suddenly_ , they managed to build pipelines.
| mnau wrote:
| What does that have to do with fact that company in the
| article had to wait 4 years before they knew what
| regulation even to use?
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >deplete the soil
|
| Doesn't carbon get pulled out of the air through
| photosynthesis? That's why people plant trees to address global
| warming, no?
|
| Your arguments seem very handwavey and not very well thought
| through. Do you _really_ believe that EV business owners are
| the only ones who benefit from more widespread EV usage?
|
| In any case, even if you're flagging real issues, there is no
| evidence that existing regulators identified those issues in
| the case of the OP? So it could still be the case that the
| existing regulatory scheme is useless overburden.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| Even to chemical engineers, life cycle analysis is not
| something that is general knowledge.
| mmsimanga wrote:
| In my country in Africa there is a huge shortage of homes in
| cities where building is regulated. Not enough homes are being
| built and many people live in shacks. Building in the villages
| has literally no regulations and amazing houses are being built
| at an amazing pace in the villages because you don't need any
| regulatory approval.
|
| I don't think all building regulations should be put aside but we
| have a crisis something needs to give.
| anovikov wrote:
| It's regulated everywhere it's just that corruption networks
| are so dense in the countryside, no one gives a damn about
| things being done legally.
| mmsimanga wrote:
| In my village there is no regulation for building residential
| property. You don't have title deeds either. You get
| allocated a piece of land by the local chief or headman/woman
| and you decide where and what you can build. The only
| regulation is you must have a toilet. Which tends to be a no
| brainer and one of the first things most people build. A
| simple Blair toilet.
| anovikov wrote:
| This is same that i meant myself. Local gang so
| established, it is seen as a government itself, runs the
| place and national laws do not apply, resulting properties
| being from perspective of law, illegal - can't be
| officially sold or mortgaged, have no title deeds, and
| would have been razed if government had access there,
| except if a city official with a bulldozer appears, the
| local gang will meet them with machetes and pitchforks, and
| sending in tanks and helicopters is not worth it. It's not
| "deregulation", it's "lawlessness".
| TylerE wrote:
| Which just leads to things like this
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/earthq...
| mmsimanga wrote:
| Typical structures in the villages are bungalows built by
| people you know. Sounds like the crisis in the link you
| shared is from corrupt approvals and poor construction of
| commercial properties sold to people. People build houses
| they will live in in the villages and for me this is a big
| enough incentive to build it properly. You will have no one
| to blame when your own roof falls on your head. The builders
| are also known and it would be a business ending move to
| build a rubbish house for your neighbour. Word would get out
| pretty quick. One thing people do in the village is talk as
| they have plenty time. I think all these other factors make
| up for the lack of regulation.
| delusional wrote:
| One of the earliest known laws humans created (almost 4000
| years ago) state that if a homeowner is killed by his house
| caving in, the builder must be put to death. We have known
| since forever that you can't just let people build shitty
| structures.
|
| Letting the free market take care of it isn't natural or
| neutral. It's literally never been how human society does
| things.
| card_zero wrote:
| The Code of Hammurabi. https://archive.org/details/hidden
| richessour0000hays/page/13...
|
| Probably wasn't a list of real laws? So says Wikipedia:
| "Rather than a code of laws, then, it may be a scholarly
| treatise."
|
| There's zero equality in it. Killing a commoner is
| cheaper than killing a noble. If the badly built house
| falls on a slave, the builder owes the owner a slave. So
| if the free market is an innovation like equality, and is
| not natural, well, fair point I guess, and natural isn't
| necessarily good. But was Babylon natural, anyway, or
| just old?
|
| The notion that the free market is natural means
| something. I suppose _organic_ is the real idea there,
| and that makes it just another appeal for using local
| knowledge as opposed to insensitive central management.
| rippeltippel wrote:
| I think the point is to avoid roofs to fall at all: that's
| what anti-seismic regulations are for. They saved countless
| lives in places like Japan. They may not prevent all
| deaths, but can be an effective damage containment
| strategy. When an earthquake devastated the Italian city of
| L'Aquila, the majority of the survived buildings were those
| following regulations. Many houses built in the Middle Ages
| are gone.
| nickpp wrote:
| Actually building in Turkey is strongly regulated - it's just
| that corruption in government allows bad players to easily
| ignore it.
|
| Just another way regulation fails to do what is supposed to,
| while its downsides (diminished competition, deterring
| startups and supporting incumbents) still apply.
|
| This is why blindly relying on regulation and ignoring its
| trade offs is just foolish.
| TylerE wrote:
| When the officials are nearly universally corrupt, the
| regulations de facto do not exist.
| nickpp wrote:
| > the regulations de facto do not exist
|
| But they do exist. Their downsides still apply. They will
| keep intimidating and burdening the honest players and
| deterring prospective startups while completely failing
| to stop bad players.
|
| They will even encourage corruption: obey heavy
| regulations and controls or simply pay a tribute to the
| ruler.
| TylerE wrote:
| Read more in depth into this catastrophe. There were for
| all intents and purposes NO honest players. In some towns
| 90%+ of buildings collapsed, when code compliant ones
| would not have - it wasn't even that strong an
| earthquake.
|
| FTA: " According to numbers published by the environment
| and urbanisation ministry in 2018, more than half of the
| buildings in Turkey - equivalent to almost 13m buildings
| - violate construction and safety regulations."
| dmix wrote:
| I've often wondered how much of the western homeless crisis is
| due to not allowing ghettos/slums to exist, the last place the
| very poor could afford rent. Cities have essentially made them
| illegal over the past 30yrs. Once it gentrifies it's gone.
| Including even large blocks of subsidized apartment buildings
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes
|
| All housing is now very carefully planned top-down. The only
| ones who get past all the red tape are high end condos or far-
| off single-family suburbs. So city government's only idea is to
| force each of those fancy buildings to have a subset of units
| as affordable housing. The supply of those is never enough to
| keep up. Government made buildings now take forever or straight
| up fail.
|
| Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and
| haven't come up with a replacement solution.
| card_zero wrote:
| In rural Gabon, presumably I wouldn't be renting but would
| _own_ my own unsafe shanty. It 's really tempting. But living
| in Libreville has more of a ring to it.
| delusional wrote:
| > Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor
| and haven't come up with a replacement solution.
|
| That doesn't seem like a fair take. You're implying that the
| sympathetic people who outlawed poor houses are the very same
| people who won't build anything new. That's not true.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| What? It's literally the same regulatory agency in this
| case, and more broadly it's the same ideological strain of
| banning doing X without also doing undesirable thing Y and
| not caring about whether that reduces the rate of X. Unless
| you are talking about the housing developers themselves, in
| which case you are falling for the same thing yourself.
| delusional wrote:
| "Ideological strains" arent people, nor are "agencies".
|
| Democratic politics will always be about compromise.
| Compromise means you don't get do all your Y's. It's the
| purpose of the system. We will never (I hope) live in
| either the libertarian nor the socialist utopia, not just
| because neither of those places really exist, but also
| because democracy doesn't lead to that.
|
| If you every find yourself thinking that "this problem
| would be solved if only we were closer to my utopia" then
| you're the ideological one.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| I didn't say 'utopia'. I can name exactly the things I
| want changed, and exactly what the proximate effects will
| be of doing so, good and bad.
|
| Yes, agencies are people. If you think that it's
| dishonest to castigate the SFHA for taking one action and
| not taking another because the one action was a little
| while ago and therefore there's been some personnel churn
| since, you are being unserious. Have you ever complained
| about past and present actions of e.g. Microsoft?
| kalaksi wrote:
| > western homeless crisis
|
| Haven't really heard about this crisis. Are you referring to
| the US?
| SpecialistK wrote:
| The US and Canada (and to some extent elsewhere) have been
| experiencing a lot of homelessness and open air drug use
| due to fentanyl, housing unaffordability, and "community"
| mental health treatment rather than "mental hospitals."
| arjie wrote:
| This is primarily an anglophone board so they are (perhaps
| inaccurately) referring to the Anglosphere which has far
| worse housing performance than elsewhere https://www.ft.com
| /content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f...
| card_zero wrote:
| Global, I guess. It has a wikipedia page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_crisis
|
| There's specific pages for some individual countries, too:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_crisis_in_the_United_
| S...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing_in_Canada#
| A...
| purple_turtle wrote:
| This one is about housing crisis, not "western homeless
| crisis".
|
| At least in Europe it is not (yet?) causing very large
| scale of homelessness problem.
| vladms wrote:
| I find the name "housing crisis" misleading, because if I
| look at average floor area per capita, I think we should
| call this "expectations changed faster than buildings".
| For example https://doi.org/10.2908/ILC_HCMH01 (variation
| between 43 to 141).
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'd say it's a bit more complex as you have to deal with
| capital financing and a number of regulations like
| parking in cities that lead to issues.
| ernst_klim wrote:
| Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm all have it.
| dmix wrote:
| US, Canada, Australia[1], Ireland [2], and many other
| places.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vg923vkdko [2]
| https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-
| planning/2025/03/...
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Making people live in slums/shacks isn't a solution to the
| western "homeless crisis".
|
| This website has been often prone to "social justice"
| recently, I'm amazed somebody can get away with such an
| idiotic comment without being flagged to hell.
|
| Houses are "carefully planed" because you don't want poor
| people to die in them due to poor construction, carbon
| monoxide when they need heat during winter, or a fire that
| would spread to other houses due to cheap materials, that's
| why,you know, the stuff that happens regularly in third world
| slums, but you can't fathom that fact.
| fff123qwerty wrote:
| Housing regulations have nothing to with protecting the
| people inside them.
|
| They are there to outsource inspection costs to tax payers
| for the banks to protect their loans on the houses
| themselves.
|
| And help nimbys protect property values.
|
| And create more bureaucracy for former contractors as most
| inspectors are.
|
| And reduce competition for existing contractors.
|
| And increase revenues for housing materials retailers.
|
| Housing regulations have zero benefit to the people who
| live in the house or don't live in the house because there
| aren't enough houses so people die in the cold.
| dmix wrote:
| I'd be happy with just allowing more low/middle-market
| housing development which is what eventually seeds low
| income housing. I don't think anyone's calling for more
| slums but rapidly building houses and less aggressive urban
| planning is the only way to solve what is easily the #1
| social problem here in Canada and many parts of the
| US/Europe and Australia.
|
| "Slums" in the west are mostly just old apartments that
| used to be middle class or cheap buildings in less
| 'desirable' locations. They aren't people living in shacks.
|
| In a housing shortage those old buildings which would
| normally decline in rent still cost $2000/m in many cities
| like Toronto due to lack of supply. And no developer can
| afford all the headaches just to build a new affordable
| low-rent buildings either.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I have a better idea to solve the western "homeless
| crisis", tax your salary and capital gains much more to
| finance affordable public housing construction. That way,
| nobody dies in some hazardous shack you think should be
| allowed to be built by slum lords. Done.
|
| Your "solutions" are so cynical you really want homeless
| people to die.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| The problem is zoning and building codes, which combine to
| effectively ban ghettos.
|
| People generally don't realize how much of the regulatory
| apparatus in the US comes from racist origins.
| baxtr wrote:
| This outlines the problem with most regulation:
|
| There is no/litte discussion about the trade-offs.
|
| You have to see the other side, then weigh all pros and cons
| and then make a decision.
|
| In most cases regulation is sold as something that will improve
| a field with no downside at all.
|
| That's just a lie and people find out over time.
| intended wrote:
| HN, and most US centric forums online - have been anti
| regulation, for a majority of their history.
|
| Straight up libertarian viewpoints were the norm during the
| earliest phases of the net. The anti-regulation view points
| are well known and well travelled.
|
| I've seen them exported to conversations in other countries,
| which dont have the same shared historical context.
|
| It was post 2008, that the zeitgeist began shifting in a
| durable manner, no matter what defense or arguments against
| regulations were brought forth.
|
| I don't think the average voter will trust a corporation, and
| the arguments against regulation are going to take a
| generation before they become popular again.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| You are surely not saying that because HN talks about it,
| it must be well-known and well-respected.
|
| Other political positions related to libertarianism, as you
| name it, have the exact same fate: some states respect
| them, others don't, and the parts of the national
| government lower on the totem pole than the cabinet think
| it's some sort of skin disease.
|
| You've never heard any mainstream pundit like John Oliver
| or Rachel Maddow ranting about overregulation; you've never
| heard anyone important in Democratic politics taking it
| seriously. The word 'abundance' in TFA was selected to
| deliberately refer to a book arguing for it, which nobody
| with establishment credentials had done until _this year_ ,
| and which is treated by the party as a brash bold
| unexpected controversial statement that should be treated
| with extreme suspicion.
| bnjms wrote:
| Anti regulation of a sort is still a popular position. It's
| just the libertarian hands of regulation that has fallen
| out of favor. I don't think it will return.
|
| At first I wasn't sure it would stick, the name isn't very
| catchy, but I've heard some politicians mention abundance.
| There is and will be more calls for corrected regulation to
| improve building pipelines. From the left it will be for
| faster procurement of public housing. It'll look different
| on the right.
| delusional wrote:
| Sure, western politics doesn't discuss the problem of
| regulation. Sure, sure, sure.
|
| Do you live in an alternate universe? The last 30 years have
| been dominated by deregulation and privatization.
| energy123 wrote:
| > deregulation
|
| Any word that conflates parking minimums with food safety
| regulation is counter-productive. These two things are so
| vastly different that they should never be discussed in the
| same breath.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > The last 30 years have been dominated by deregulation
|
| Maybe in USA, and not everywhere. From what I heard
| deregulation had not happened in USA healthcare.
|
| And describing last 30 years in EU as dominated by
| deregulation is clearly wrong.
| jltsiren wrote:
| There is no shortage of political debate in most developed
| countries.
|
| I think a bigger reason is that people who go to politics or
| administration often succumb to a certain kind of (reverse)
| teleological fallacy. They think that because their goal is
| to advance X, if they propose regulations for that purpose,
| their regulations will advance X.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I think a commonality is none of the agencies in the way feel
| an existential risk from failing to execute.
|
| You could imagine a system where a permit and planning
| department finds it's functions taken over by a minimal state
| agency when not enough housing is built in its area. The state
| of California is slowly moving that direction because it's so
| bad.
| anovikov wrote:
| Logical approach i think here, is to develop and first deploy
| tech in a less regulated country, just pick based on where
| regulation is the weakest and/or corruption works better in
| overcoming it. Use VC dollars to buy the officials to fast-track
| everything. Then if it works and brings benefit, it will be the
| nations' problems themselves on who will be ahead of others to
| adapt their regulations for faster deployment.
| blitzar wrote:
| This was the lesson on the software side of things, seems that
| it has not been learnt.
| m0llusk wrote:
| > We need a ...
|
| Here's were he loses me. The problem statement is detailed, but
| proposed solutions need more work. There must be ways to improve
| the system without abandoning the original intent. There may be
| way to account for costs, simplify reviews, and so on. Often
| changing regulations to have specific goals and sunset provisions
| changes enforcement for the better. Sometimes basic changes like
| the amount of time allowed for any given step can make a huge
| difference.
|
| Solving regulatory problems is as real as the engineering and
| marketing that make products in the first place.
| komali2 wrote:
| People often say this kind of argument is in opposition to
| regulation and in favor to deregulation, but lemme play devil's
| advocate and say, why is it not an argument in favor of stronger,
| centralized, simplified regulation, aka what they got going on
| over in the PRC? Sure it's nice having the ability for a blue
| city in a red state in a blue federal government all keeping each
| other from getting anything done, but on the other hand, seems
| there's something to be said for a government that can say "there
| should be a train here. We will cut a hole through your building
| now to make that happen."
| goku12 wrote:
| I can see two problems causing the pain described here, which I
| will discuss shortly. But the article seems to stretch that
| experience too much into the 'regulation is bad' territory.
| Regulations exist for a reason. They aren't created for the power
| trip of government officials. This is the same US where companies
| dump PFAS into drinking water sources with impunity, has some of
| the highest fees for the worst quality interest access, where
| insulin is unaffordable and corporate house renting is a thing.
| There are many such areas where regulation and oversight is
| woefully inadequate, much less any 'overregulation'. Regulations
| are practically the only thing standing between the rich and the
| powerful and their incessant attempt to drive even more wealth
| into their own pockets at the expense ordinary people's health,
| wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc.
|
| Now let's look at the specific problems here with a much narrower
| scope than 'regulations'. The first problem is the type of
| regulations. Some regulations are too arcane and don't reflect
| the current state of technology. Others affect the unprivileged
| people disproportionately. The solution for that is to amend
| these regulations fast enough - not deregulation. It's also
| important to assess the negative impacts of loosening these
| regulations - something I don't see discussed in this article.
|
| The other important requirement is to increase the staffing of
| the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload doesn't
| become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a scientific
| method to assess the staffing requirements of public service
| institutions. According to that, a significant number of
| government departments all over the world are understaffed.
| Regulatory agencies and police departments top that list.
| Increased workload on their officials lead to poor experience for
| the citizens availing their services (this is very evident in
| policing). Yet those same experiences are misconstrued and
| misrepresented to call for deregulation and defunding of these
| institutions - the opposite of what's actually needed. (PDs need
| more staff and more training in empathy. Not defunding, nor
| militarization.) This is exactly what I see in this article. An
| attempt to target regulations as a whole using a sob anecdote.
| energy123 wrote:
| > Regulations exist for a reason.
|
| Regulations exist for different reasons, not one reason. Some
| of those reasons are good reasons, like regulations against
| dumping or against contract killers or for food safety. Some of
| those are bad reasons, like regulations of parking minimums
| implemented to appease the property owning class. Some of those
| are for bad reasons pretending to be for good reasons, like the
| regulations that block renewable energy which are allegedly for
| the environment, but the true motives are more about aesthetic
| displeasure or ideological hostility.
| friendzis wrote:
| > like regulations of parking minimums implemented to appease
| the property owning class.
|
| Due to _current_ market conditions we can sell all apartments
| without any parking spaces, therefore regulation defining a
| housing unit with foresight for future market conditions is
| bad.
|
| > the regulations that block renewable energy
|
| Can you name one regulation that outright blocks renewable
| energy generation specifically and not externalities created
| by developments, that sometimes happen to be renewable
| energy?
| scotty79 wrote:
| > like regulations of parking minimums implemented to appease
| the property owning class.
|
| This regulations are crucial for preventing cities from being
| littered with cars (more than they already are). If
| developers were allowed they would build only very limited
| parking space and then people living there would have to park
| in public space burdening everybody. If anything it's a
| regulation against property owning class.
| zjuventus14 wrote:
| Are you suggesting that less "free" (cost-bundled) parking
| spaces would lead to more cars? Or do you just mean from an
| aesthetic perspective more street parking would be used
| when you say cities would be more littered with cars?
|
| We've ended up with such car-centric cities (in the U.S.)
| thanks in part to the presence of ample free (subsidized)
| parking thanks to parking minimums and free street parking.
| If the cost of parking was actually borne by car owners, it
| would reduce car ownership thanks to higher cost. This is
| less true today thanks to car ownership being near-
| mandator, but with the right investments that can change.
| I'd describe parking minimums as a regulation against non-
| car owners as they still pay in part for the parking spaces
| required by their apartment/home/every business they visit
| in most cases.
|
| As an aside, have you looked at how parking minimums are
| often set? It's only loosely correlated with the goal of
| sufficient parking.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > Or do you just mean from an aesthetic perspective more
| street parking would be used when you say cities would be
| more littered with cars?
|
| Yes, but I'm more concerned about practical aspect than
| esthetics. Blocked walkways, lower visibility for
| drivers, longer distance between place of living and the
| car, and the car you had to park far away on the crowded
| street snd your business. This are all costs that
| developers love to externalize to all members of society
| instead of passing them to the future owners of the
| property they are building.
|
| I'm not really talking about situation in US where people
| live so sparsely that they have plenty of space to patk
| their car when they are at home. Parking minimums I'm
| supporting are for medium to high density residential
| intermixed with conmercial zones. That is pretty much
| majority of spaces in European cities.
|
| I'm sure that mininum parking requirements for businesses
| in US in purely commercial zones might be too high.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >insulin is unaffordable
|
| In large part due to regulation. Reflexively adding more
| regulations to deal with the negative effects of existing
| regulations is like "fixing" a bug by adding special-case logic
| for inputs which trigger the bug, without understanding why the
| bug actually occurred. Just like code, regulations should
| ideally be simple and elegant with a minimum of special cases.
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| The bug occurs because of the power discrepancy of those who
| have the demand and those of who can supply. For some reason,
| the problem if insulin prices and absurd health costs only
| exist in the US. I wonder why.
| pipes wrote:
| The power to charge what you want comes from lack of
| competition. Regulation can make entry into a market too
| high, especially for small start ups.
|
| Ensuring that regulation is necessary and as straight
| forward as possible to comply with is good for consumers.
| rusk wrote:
| > competition
|
| We don't need competition in insulin production. It is a
| know quantity with fixed and closed quality parameters.
| Fix the price and let suppliers compete on cost.
| pastage wrote:
| There are many kinds of insulin variants on the market.
| The easy way to differentiate them is by release rate and
| duration. Gone in an hour for some and 24hours for
| others. There are other factors as well that make them
| incompatible with each other.
| rusk wrote:
| All clearly categorised and regulated. Fill the boxes and
| ship em and STFU
| purple_turtle wrote:
| The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so
| regulated that setting up and maintaining production is
| obnoxiously expensive.
|
| Note that if you cause by regulation or stupid laws
| something to be expensive to produce/import and then make
| it illegal to sell above that price - then you will get
| shortages.
|
| As noone will want to produce insuline if required
| paperwork costs more than it's selling price.
|
| Note that even if currently adding more regulation to
| solve problems caused by more regulation will not cause
| it, it may happen in future.
|
| US healthcare regulations are on Nth round of that.
| rusk wrote:
| > setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously
| expensive.
|
| This is what I meant by compete on cost. The
| manufacturers that are best at cutting these costs will
| make the most profit. That's where competition should be
| focused on such generic items.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| None of this is while insulin is so expensive in the US.
| None of it.
|
| We've been producing insulin for 100 years now. You guys
| are just making things up and it's wild.
|
| I don't think a single person who is claiming that
| regulation is driving up insulin prices has even Googled
| it to make sure what they're saying makes sense. Spoiler
| alert: It's not.
|
| The cost of insulin is a result of monopolies, pharmacy
| benefit managers, patents, and most importantly: a LACK
| of regulation on drug prices.
| fragmede wrote:
| We will have to wait see where it goes, but California is
| trying to make their own insulin, so starting January
| 1st, 2025 you can buy a pack for $55 a as a resident.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| 2026?
| toofy wrote:
| > The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so
| regulated that setting up and maintaining production is
| obnoxiously expensive.
|
| i don't buy it. no other oecd nation has insulin prices
| as absurd as the us. this is a greed problem.
|
| the only people to blame when the government starts
| producing insulin will be the pharmaceutical companies
| and their refusal to be decent members of society. if
| they were even a tiny fraction more decent they wouldn't
| be in the mess they're directly causing.
|
| far too often companies are directly to blame for
| regulation as they repeatedly absolutely refuse to self-
| regulate and be decent pieces of society.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >this is a greed problem.
|
| I'll take it even further, if you look at the price of
| goods over time, it's even possible to see the ebb and
| flow of greed in the numbers:
|
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G5Qi8_vXwAAbRTn.jpg?name=orig
|
| I wonder if prices are really a measurement of
| fluctuations in some underlying supernatural or cosmic
| psychic force?
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > this is a greed problem.
|
| Also that. But overregulation makes too hard for others
| to compete and offer cheaper insulin.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Greed explains nothing. People will be greedy when they
| are incentivized to be greedy, and thrifty when they are
| incentivized to be thrifty. There are plenty of
| incentives, I might add, for regulators to be greedy
| though.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so
| regulated that setting up and maintaining production is
| obnoxiously expensive.
|
| This has absolutely nothing to do with insulin costs.
| Nada. Zip. Nil.
|
| > As noone will want to produce insuline if required
| paperwork costs more than it's selling price.
|
| Where are you getting this information from? I've been in
| the industry for a bit now and this is a first for me.
| That the reason why insulin is so expensive in the US is
| because it costs money to make????
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >This has absolutely nothing to do with insulin costs.
| Nada. Zip. Nil.
|
| Why do you think there are so few insulin producers then?
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
| shots/2015/07/15/4229352...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| How many insulin producers are there in europe?
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Nothing has fixed and closed quality parameters. At least
| not if your concern is quality as understood by the
| people who want or need insulin as opposed to whatever
| arbitrary standard a bureaucrat could make up.
| rusk wrote:
| > whatever arbitrary standard a bureaucrat
|
| You do know these people are scientific experts and have
| teams of scientific experts working for them, right. It's
| not some blazing skulls stuffed shirt lol
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| No amount of scientific expertise will turn a subjective
| thing (which is what product quality is) into an
| objective thing. Credible, ethical, and well-trained
| scientists should be able to recognize that and desist
| from dressing up their preferences into scientific dress
| and passing it off as the results of objective science.
| pipes wrote:
| That would ensure that it is extremely unlikely we get
| innovation in insulin production as it removes the
| financial incentive to take the risk with innovation.
| zbentley wrote:
| People don't innovate to compete on cost?
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| The barrier for entry is primarily capital these days:
| have a moat, prevent competition, extract money, cease
| R&D. And if a competitor does come up, just buy them
| outright. This is the current economic model, as it is
| practiced by Private Equity.
|
| Power has become infectious and capitalism has changed.
| The game is about power and extracting more and more
| money from the productive economy, making it less
| competitive. Who wins? Those who already have excessive
| capital.
|
| The only one who would have enough legal power is
| exclusively the state. It's no surprise the state is
| under attack from so many fronts.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > The power to charge what you want comes from lack of
| competition
|
| Competition alone is never good enough to make price
| down, because companies and shareholders hate competition
| and will happily "consolidate" competitive markets into
| much more profitable oligopolies (when it's not straight
| monopolies).
| gorbachev wrote:
| You could make an argument that the problem is entirely
| due to bad regulation, because the regulations haven't
| mandated effective enforcement.
|
| I don't know if this applies to insulin production, but
| in several other areas enforcing anti-monopoly
| regulations is lacking at such a degree that the
| regulations are almost completely ignored.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Power discrepancy is not a category of pricing. The price
| is high because the supply is constrained relative to
| demand. And in this case, regulations cause a restriction
| of supply.
| complex_pi wrote:
| The EU also has regulations, but somehow it does not make
| insulin as expensive as in the US. Maybe the existence of a
| regulation is not the issue here.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I'm not against the existence of regulation, nor is the OP.
| I'm against bad regulation. The US healthcare system is a
| gigantic regulatory morass.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| Explain how the "gigantic regulatory morass" led to
| higher insulin costs?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Government capture by big players who promote heavy
| regulation in order to eliminate smaller competition?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I worked for a large company that did devices used in
| surgery. They regarded FDA regulation as a moat that kept
| out all but large, established competitors.
|
| Note that I am not saying that they tried to push (or
| worse, capture) regulators to achieve that end. I'm just
| saying that they didn't _mind_.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > Government capture by big players who promote heavy
| regulation in order to eliminate smaller competition?
|
| This is a meaningless statement without specifics. It has
| absolutely nothing concrete in it that would actually
| inform someone about what drives insulin production. It's
| a wrong and overly simplifies.
|
| Are you really saying the regulations regarding the
| actual production of insulin is what drives up costs?
| We've been manufacturing insulin for > 100 years now.
|
| And can you find a single resource that agrees with your
| assessment?
|
| When you say "big players", you mean the top 3 right?
| Would regulating monopolies in the pharmaceutical
| industry maybe be a good thing?
|
| Why do other counties pay less if it costs so much to
| make? Why does regulation in the US make US consumers pay
| more but not Europe, for example?
|
| Do you think PBM's have any part to play in this? What
| about over-zealous patents by the monopoly at the top?
|
| Do you have any actual experience in this field or are
| you just parroting talking points?
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I don't think there is a simple explanation, that's why I
| used the word "morass".
|
| "From when insulin is produced by the drug manufacturer
| to when it goes to a pharmacy, profit is extracted at
| every step of the way. The insulin market is dominated by
| three large drug manufacturers--Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and
| Novo Nordisk--that, with little competition, have raised
| their list prices in lockstep. But there are other
| players besides the Big Three that are contributing to
| the problem. Pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, contract
| with insurance carriers and act on behalf of the insurer
| to negotiate the price of insulin with the drug
| manufacturers. In negotiating the price, PBMs place a
| drug higher or lower on their tier of preferred drugs and
| receive rebates based on a percentage of the list price.
| This kind of system incentivizes high list prices, which
| determine the amount of co-insurance patients pay. And if
| patients have a high deductible or are uninsured, they
| might pay the entire list price."
|
| https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/the-price-of-
| insulin-...
|
| My position is simply that it is better to solve problems
| by taking regulations away than piling them on.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Existence of specific bad US regulation and overregulation
| caused this.
|
| Bad EU regulations and overregulation caused other
| problems. For example it is illegal for me to throw old
| socks full of holes into trash, I am supposed to take it to
| recycling centre on other side of the city.
| tumdum_ wrote:
| Oh yeah, because in the absence of regulation, the
| insulin producer would sell it at negligible margins,
| sure!
|
| As for the socks - my city has like ~5 locations where
| old textiles can be recycled, the closest one in slightly
| less than 1km from where I live. I see no problem with
| going there twice a year :)
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| With lack of regulations, the theory is, there will be
| many competing manufacturers of insulin, dropping the
| cost down. Probably not as simple as that, but that's the
| idea at least
| cons0le wrote:
| Absolutely. With no regulations I could produce/sell it
| for super cheap. Because I would be cutting it with tap
| water, and using forced labor
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Preventing forced labor is a feature of normal contract
| law and property rights, and has little to do with
| regulations.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| Now, that's all just regulations. What are regulations
| but laws that restrict/govern the way to do commerce?
| Anti-slavery is part of that, just like every other
| concession we've had to pry from the hands of capitalists
| over the last 100 years, like no child labor, no locking
| workers into factories, PPE, etc...
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| You're free to call contract law and private property law
| "regulations", but recognize that these branches of law
| have very different properties, history, and functions
| than what we traditionally refer to by regulations.
| Traditionally, when people talk about regulations they
| are talking about _legislation_ , i.e., rules and decrees
| created by a legislative body, voted into law by some
| parliamentary body or created by an executive agency to
| support decrees of a parliamentary or similar body with
| the power to declare law. You can think of this as
| legislation or declaratory law.
|
| Contrast this with contract and property law. These laws
| were created primarily out of common law, a long
| evolutionary process arising out of series of decisions
| from a judiciary attempting to reconcile conflicts
| between the parties. This is judicial or conciliatory
| law.
|
| Crucially, most if not all the advances and the rise of
| extreme productivity from capitalism that supports
| populations in excess of 8 billion as opposed to about
| 0.5 billion, have come from emphasis and pre-eminence on
| the latter kind of law and the smashing of the former
| kind of law, i.e., the destruction of the guild system of
| privileges, removing or minimizing protectionist laws,
| etc. And the former kind of law has either been nominal,
| merely codifying the advances caused by the latter law
| like in the case of child labor, or it has been
| reactionary and hampered the progress of the latter sort
| of law.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > there will be many competing manufacturers of insulin
|
| So... You are assuming market regulations still exist?
| Because without those, no, bio-chemical industry is
| absolutely one that consolidates quickly.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| I am not going to collect old clothes (used as rags and
| ready to be thrown out) for months. For start, my flat is
| not large enough for that.
|
| I just throw them away with rubbish and get less
| supportive of people and institutions that created this
| law.
| puszczyk wrote:
| Please just stop being antisocial.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Why don't the regulators stop being antisocial?
| throw4847285 wrote:
| If that were the case, there would be no HackerNews.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Yes, insulin producers would! It is illegal to compete,
| and insulin producers enjoy a _legally backed monopoly_.
| Yes, removing the regulations which support that monopoly
| will reduce prices. Any other option merely exists to
| support and uphold the special privileges that the
| current regulatory regjme grants to insulin producers.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| Can you please link the law that states that?
|
| I see too much bad faith shit thrown around.
| ruszki wrote:
| I don't know where they live, but I'm 100% that it's not
| an EU regulation, because I could throw socks into
| landfill/generic bins legally in the EU countries where I
| lived. Even the new EPR schemes about this is not about
| what's mandatory by users, but what's mandatory by
| textile manufacturers.
| u_sama wrote:
| Yeah but EU regulation makes other things expensive and
| inefficient (like the labour market, housing, building new
| companies because incumbents protect their interests
| trhough regulation).
|
| The fact is that with insulin the regulation issues comes
| from the patchwork system of healthcare the US developped
| through political concesssionns and lobbying from private
| firms, which makes the developpment and the subsequent
| commercialization expensive relative to Europe where
| centralized national bodies negotiate with the pharma
| companies.
|
| Regulation can be good or bad, in our era it is ineffective
| because politicians are boomers disconnected from the
| issues or in the EU a pseudo-technocratic (not really
| listening to technocrats recommendations) body far from
| reality
|
| This series of posts is a nice forray into managerialism
| (the source of many regulation issues)
| https://baazaa.github.io/2024/10/16/managers_p1.html
| general1465 wrote:
| > EU regulation makes other things expensive and
| inefficient (like the labour market, housing,
|
| Unlike the US, where federal minimal wage remained flat
| since 2009 or where Black Rock is buying all available
| housing to keep the prices as high as possible.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| US median wages are higher than most of Europe,
| especially when adjusted for cost of living:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-income-after-
| tax-l...
|
| Regarding BlackRock, I'm disappointed to see what appears
| to be populist misinformation on HN:
| https://www.investopedia.com/no-blackrock-isnt-buying-
| all-th...
| u_sama wrote:
| The real minimum wage is also stuck in many parts of
| Europe relative to 2008. For example in Spain the average
| salary didnt increase adusted to inflation.
|
| The blackrock thing seems like a myth, but private
| entities are also buying housing en masse in Spain for
| exammple
| wallaBBB wrote:
| "remained flat" and "remained flat when adjusted for
| inflation" are two very different things.
| u_sama wrote:
| The minimum wage doesnt mean much in general, many
| European countries either dont have it or recently
| instated it (Germany). What matters is the Median and
| quintile salaries in which, the US fares much better
| anyways
|
| Many other countries have official minimum wages and a
| big % of people working black, unreported because the
| minimum wage is to high relative to the average (Spain,
| Greece, Italy)
| tim333 wrote:
| Website here has the cost of a vial of insulin as $99 USA,
| $3 Turkey. They could just let people buy it from any
| regulated country? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-
| of-insulin-by-country/
|
| Not sure how the US consumer benefits from being banned
| from having such choices?
| eric-burel wrote:
| If you are an European, regulation also has the benefit to
| induce soft protectionism from countries that are less keen
| on consumer and environment protection. This is the heart of
| the debate about Mercorsur, as it creates an unfair
| competition by lowering regulation (in theory european
| regulation applies but in practice it's harder to verify),
| and also an internal debate in France related to some
| pesticide that other European countries can use. Some argue
| that we should allow the pesticide, some that we should stop
| importing products that are exposed to it.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Why not just have a single regulation, that products must
| be clearly labeled by their country of origin, and let
| consumers decide the rest?
| dbdr wrote:
| Maybe because people don't have unlimited amount of time
| to keep up-to-date on all data and research on toxicity,
| negative health effects, safety, etc on tens of thousands
| of products from a couple hundred countries.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Any product could apply for regulatory approval in the
| country where it is being sold. If the product does not
| get regulatory approval, it could be sold in a special
| shop, so customers are aware that they are taking a risk.
| That lets customers choose for themselves whether they
| want to take the risk.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| Because people don't look at country of origin. They are
| mostly price sensitive.
|
| If you allow imports from countries with looser
| regulations, you are basically putting your own sectors
| at a competitive disavantage in your own market. It's
| akin to killing it basically.
|
| It's obviously extremely stupid but in the case of the
| Mercosur agreement, predictably Germany doesn't care
| because the agribusiness is in France and they themselves
| will be able to export their cars.
|
| Generally speaking, Germany never cares about deeply
| shafting the rest of the union when it gives them a small
| advantage. See also how their economy is deeply
| unbalanced, they have under invested for decades and they
| only survive because they are part of a monetary union
| devoid of a fiscal union giving them the tremendous
| advantage of an undervalued currency at the expense of
| basically every southern members. See also how they made
| joining the currency union mandatory for entering the
| common market and are pushing for adding more poor
| eastern countries to exploit which also conveniently vote
| for the EPP and dillute any chance the southern countries
| could ally to oppose them.
|
| Obviously, the currency union has no clear path to exit
| it.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Genuine question, how does adding more Eastern countries
| help Germany?
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| 1. More euro using countries with weaker economies ensure
| the euro stay as low as possible which is insanely
| advantageous for Germany, a country which has built all
| its economy on exports. Plus it provides a new outcome
| for the German excess savings via credits which will
| amplify the unbalancing created by the monetary policies
| and add a vicious extractive cycle on top.
|
| 2. These countries tend to prioritise their immediate
| safety from Russia to any economical considerations and
| are strongly NATO aligned. They have historically voted
| for parties which are close to the EPP, the currently
| dominant European party which is itself controlled by and
| subservient to German interests. See how Von Der Leyen
| was basically saved by Poland in 2024. This ensure the
| EPP remains the dominant force in Europe and
| significantly dilutes the voices of countries strongly
| disavantaged by how the eurozone is working and which
| could be tempted to ally to try to push reforms
| (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, France). Generally,
| expension strongly favours the current status quo, itself
| extremely favourable to Germany, Austria and the
| Netherlands.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I'm confused, Europeans on HN are always telling me how
| NATO is a big scheme the US uses to keep the dollar
| strong. Now you're telling me the EPP is a big scheme
| from Germany to keep the euro weak. Something's not
| adding up.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| The EPP is a political party not a scheme but yes,
| Germany benefits immensely from a weak euro as a net
| exporter and the way the eurozone is structured, as a
| monetary union without a fiscal union, and how it
| operates, roughly with transfers being very limited, a
| big no no for the population of the advantaged countries
| if not an impossibility considering the historical
| rulings of the German constitutional court, ensure it
| stays this way.
|
| I have no personal opinion on NATO being a big scheme to
| keep the dollar strong. I personally think its creation
| had more to do with limiting the spread of the USSR and
| ensuring the former European empires remained in vassal
| positions following the second world war. Still, as a net
| importer, the USA generally benefits from a strong
| dollar. The dollar is in a fairly unique position anyway
| as it remains the internation reserve currency.
|
| I fail to see what's not adding up here personnaly.
|
| _Replying to inglor_cz here because dang rate limited me
| because one of my post about Rust was apparently grounded
| but written in what dang considers a "flamebaity" way
| while being highly upvoted:_
|
| To me, that's a deep misrepresentation of the systemic
| issue at stake.
|
| Germany didn't magically happen to have strong exports
| while it became an issue for France and Italy. That's a
| structural feature of the monetary union. The euro was
| always going to be weaker that the DM and stronger than
| the Lira. That gives an inherent advantage to Germany and
| conversely deeply disavantage Italy. That's why there
| never was a currency union without transfers in history
| before the euro. It plainly can't work.
|
| What Mitterand and Delor did was take a gamble. They
| pushed for an unsustainable currency union hoping it
| would extend to a fully featured fiscal union when a
| crisis inevitably came. Sadly, that's not what happened
| when said crisis came and we are now stuck with a setup
| which is either slowly erroding the competitivity of the
| periphery or forcing it into pro-cycle austerity in the
| name of a political doctrine it never chose while it
| favors a few core countries widely misallocating their
| excess savings while pretending to be virtuous. Our
| saving grace
|
| It's obviously completely unsustainable hence the
| constant rise of extremist parties in the perepheric
| countries but like a good quasi-neocolonial setup, you
| will see a lot of people actually defend it with
| arguments which are roughly the same as the one the
| empires used to use: leaving will be economical ruin, the
| alternative is chaos, you obviously can't manage your
| economy without us.
|
| It's no surprise the strongest industrial player in the
| EU is becoming Poland. It is because they are out of the
| euro. Look at how while they are theorically forced to
| join by the treaty, they are doing everything they can to
| stay out.
|
| Amusingly, we might all end up being saved by Trump
| because tariffs on top of two decades of systemic
| underinvestements have put the German economy so out of
| balance, we might finally witness the end of
| ordoliberalism.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >Still, as a net importer, the USA generally benefits
| from a strong dollar. The dollar is in a fairly unique
| position anyway as it remains the internation reserve
| currency.
|
| I would say the causality goes the other way, we are a
| net importer because foreigners need dollars since they
| are the reserve currency.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This requires some actual history, not just memes and
| conspiracy theories.
|
| Originally, it was the French during Mitterrand times who
| pushed for a unified European currency. Kohl granted it
| to them in exchange for their consent to unify Germany,
| but wasn't happy about it, because he knew that
| conservative German voters were attached to the strength
| of the Deutsche Mark.
|
| Nevertheless, 15-20 years on, it actually turned out that
| a weaker euro was a problem for industry in places like
| France and Italy, while supporting German exports.
| Germany had a streak of really strong exports.
|
| Nowadays, it does not matter anymore, though. Aging of
| the population, expensive energies, bureaucracy gone wild
| and bad immigration policies have made Germany a sick man
| of Europe again. When it comes to raw industrial growth,
| the strongest player in the EU is now Poland, which does
| not even use the euro.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| But how does weakness of their economies lead to the euro
| being undervalued?
| troupo wrote:
| The EU already has country of origin requirements. They
| still had to specify things like "X% of the product has
| to be made in country Y to be qualified for the 'made in
| Y' label". And even _that_ can and does get muddy.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| For the purpose of this discussion, the % made in country
| Y doesn't matter--the important thing is whether the
| product is compliant with regulations in country Y.
| vladms wrote:
| Using the same idea, are you personally for legalizing
| all drugs as well or not requiring doctors to be
| licensed? Because I think there are lots of things
| forbidden/regulated across the world, mostly because
| people do not to make (or are not able to make due to
| lack of information) the best decisions for them, and
| then society suffers as a whole.
|
| Me personally, if I have to choose between food 10%
| cheaper that will give 1 in 1000 people a cancer, or
| eating something more local/boring I prefer the latter,
| even if I would never buy it myself.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I already stated in this thread that I'm in favor of
| smart regulation, not zero regulation. For example,
| instead of government licensing of doctors, I would be
| interested in a more elegant solution like requiring all
| doctors to carry malpractice insurance and publish
| information about the insurance rate they're currently
| paying. If graduating from a particular medical school is
| truly associated with reduced malpractice rates, that
| should be reflected in lower insurance rates for those
| doctors. Insurers would design their own exams which
| would probably be better than government licensing exams
| since insurers have skin in the game.
| vladms wrote:
| The problem is the "root of trust". Someone has to decide
| if it was "malpractice" or not. The doctor (and the
| insurer) have the interest to say "it was the best
| service we could provide", and even if you involve a
| lawsuit/judge/etc., they will have no clue who is
| correct. And if you have a "root of trust", they can
| directly test/manage the doctors (the current system).
|
| Returning to the topic to which I responded: I prefer
| some organization responsible to make and check a set of
| rules about food, rather than each person to have to do
| their own research (and the first does not exclude anyhow
| the second). I find that smart in the sense that it will
| reuse knowledge of some people and will not require a lot
| of people learning a lot of things. I have the impression
| that I do care about food quality more than the average,
| so I am not at all worried about too strict requirements.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Realistically, the reason the EU is a customs union and not
| a trade union is because they need to implement
| protectionist policies to prevent their imdustry from being
| outcompeted by countries which don't suffer from these
| regulations.
| mexicocitinluez wrote:
| > In large part due to regulation.
|
| Wait, what? With this type of claim I was sure you were going
| to back it up with at least _some_ evidence but apparently I
| was wrong.
|
| I'm sorry, but the irony in this comment too much. The reason
| insulin is so high is because of a lack of regulation.
|
| If the government took a stronger stance towards monopolies
| in the pharma industry, this wouldn't be happening. If the
| government _REGULATED_ insulin prices, it wouldn 't be so
| high. If the government reigned in PBMs, it wouldn't be so
| high. IF the government reigned in patents and the tricks
| drug companies play with them, it wouldn't be so high.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I don't think that price fixing by government should be
| allowed in any situation. Reducing barriers to entry and a
| tough stance on monopolies has the result of lowering
| prices without distorting the market with an artificial set
| price.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Patents are form of regulation, by the way. They grant a
| legal monopoly over production of a particular product.
| coredog64 wrote:
| When most people think of insulin, they think it's the same
| medication isolated over 100 years ago and it's just big
| Pharma sticking it to people by charging anything more than a
| couple of bucks. There are side effects and downsides to
| insulin, and all of these expensive versions are attempts at
| reducing/eliminating side effects.
|
| In 49 US states, you can walk into a Walmart with $25 and
| walk out with a vial of insulin, no prescription necessary.
| For $75, you can get a much newer Novo Nordisk analog
| insulin.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| I'm guessing you're American? What regulations make it
| expensive in America but affordable in other parts of the
| world?
| matu3ba wrote:
| > Regulations are practically the only thing standing between
| the rich and the powerful and their incessant attempt to drive
| even more wealth into their own pockets at the expense ordinary
| people's health, wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc.
|
| Try to rethink how money is created and how money gets its
| value and how and by whom that wealth is distributed.
| Regulation as in "make rules" does not enforce rules, which is
| the definition of (political) power.
|
| > The other important requirement is to increase the staffing
| of the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload
| doesn't become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a
| scientific method to assess the staffing requirements of public
| service institutions. According to that, a significant number
| of government departments all over the world are understaffed.
|
| Why are you claiming "There is a scientific method" and do not
| provide it? Governments do (risk) management by 1 rules, 2
| checks and 3 punishment and we already know from software that
| complexity in system is only bounded by system working with
| eventual necessary (ideally partial) resets. Ideally
| governments would be structured like that, but that goes
| against governments interest of extending power/control. Also,
| "system working" is decided by the current ruling class/group.
| Besides markets and physical constrains.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > Try to rethink how money is created and how money gets its
| value and how and by whom that wealth is distributed.
|
| Please elaborate.
| matu3ba wrote:
| Money is created and distributed via 1 banking system and 2
| government. Are 1 rules, 2 checks and 3 punishment enforced
| against the banking system and government or only to
| stabilize and extend those systems? I'd argue the
| introduction of (arbitrary) rules are often just the
| excuses to amass power, but enforcement of checks and
| punishments decides who holds (political) power.
| Mitochondriac wrote:
| Money is printed out of thin air by the FED and then loaned
| out to the government for them to spend, so it enters the
| economy. Something along those lines.
| torginus wrote:
| The problem is that the regulators themselves are insanely
| corrupt - how else would you explain the emergence of proposals
| like (thrice-resurrected) Chat Control, that clearly is harmful
| to _every citizen_ of the EU, and I have yet to see a single
| individual supporting it.
|
| Every governing decision and rule is either fully made by
| powerful shadow interests, proposed by said interests and is
| only thwarted (for the time being) by some politicians on the
| other side or made out to be benign or even beneficial but is
| in actuality compromised in some major way.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >Every governing decision and rule is either fully made by
| powerful shadow interests, proposed by said interests
|
| The Useful Idiots(TM) will be along shortly to tell you how
| you're technically wrong because the rules are "only" 99%
| made/proposed by shadow interests.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I hope you enjoy the superiority high that that comment
| gave you before it disappear
| potato3732842 wrote:
| We are all useful idiots in some context, comrade.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > regulators are structurally faced with no upside, only downside
| legal risk in taking a formal position on something new.
|
| This is my big takeway from this article and others like it that
| I've read.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I wonder what adding a second hinge in a truck does to it's
| performance in an accident? When the trailer jack knifes, for
| instance?
|
| I guess someone who wants to put them on our roads should answer
| some questions on that. Especially as they are clearly given to
| absurd claims like, 'it goes from 7 to 120 mpg', as if that
| happened without any other input.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Indeed. The idea is interesting, but the claim is obviously
| exaggerated: sure, you're burning less gas, but you're tanking
| electrons. Whatever the final mpg equivalent is, it isn't
| 120mpg.
|
| His other company is yet another green washing idea. Taking
| what could and should be valuable natural fertilizer and
| sequestering it. Also, for most of these ideas, the energy
| costs of transport and processing outweigh any supposed
| benefits.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Did you even bother reading the article? The problem is that
| the government is making them prove the same thing 270 times.
| And the only thing absurd here is your statement. It's an
| electric motor. Of course there is "other input."
| jimnotgym wrote:
| My bike can do over a million mpg. It is at best a stupid
| statement
| loglog wrote:
| I estimate the fraction of carbon removal cost wasted to
| regulation at 100% rather than 50%. Regulation must be truly
| insane if producing synthetic oil and pumping it underground is
| somehow more appealing than not extracting the equivalent amount
| of fossil oil in the first place.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Is part of the problem the federal system itself? Did I read that
| you have different regulations in different states?
| pkrein wrote:
| Hi HN, author here.
|
| I wanted to address the most common theme in the comments:
| safety.
|
| The regulatory burdens I've encountered and described were not
| related to safety requirements. They are procedural questions
| with no bearing on safety.
|
| Whether an injection well is Class I disposal, Class II oilfield
| disposal or Class V experimental has no bearing on the (strong
| and reasonable) safety requirements to protect underground
| sources of drinking water... the problem is the delay that comes
| from deciding which class is most appropriate (turns out, Class V
| experimental).
|
| And ditto, whether a Revoy is a tractor, a trailer, or a
| converter dolly for the purposes of DMV registration paperwork
| has no bearing or relation to the (again strong and reasonable)
| NHTSA FMVSS safety requirements... the problem is the delay on
| the procedural paperwork.
|
| I think we can all agree that these procedural issues are not
| "written in blood", but are in fact regulatory bikeshedding that
| we'd all be better off without.
| temp123789246 wrote:
| Indeed. Thank you for writing this and speaking up in public.
|
| Many of the comments here that essentially reply to your
| article by saying "regulation is good, stop criticizing it",
| are deeply depressing. That is a regulatory mind virus that
| must be destroyed before it kills us.
| _ink_ wrote:
| The issue I see is that companies have limited liability. If
| they mess up, they can just go bankrupt and sometimes pass the
| cleanup costs on to society.
|
| Therefore, I think it's fair that society wants to have a say
| in what gets done and what doesn't.
|
| Maybe a way around this would be companies operating without
| limited liability. Would you be willing to put your entire
| fortune on the line in exchange for a fast track through
| regulations?
|
| Edit: to clarify: I'm not arguing that all companies should
| lose limited liability. I'm suggesting the introduction of a
| new type of company structure.
| fransje26 wrote:
| > If they mess up, they can just go bankrupt and sometimes
| pass the cleanup costs on to society.
|
| Or as Dupont, Dow, the Ethyl Corporation et al have shown,
| don't even go bankrupt and still pass on the cleanup costs on
| to society.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Casually looking at classifications at
| https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
|
| it seems that you could be hitting an edge case that
| inconveniences you. On the other hand if the classification
| were made irrelevant, someone working with Class V "Air
| conditioning return flow wells used to return to the supply
| aquifer the water used for heating or cooling in a heat pump;"
| might be aggravated by being held to the same standard as Class
| I "Wells used by generators of hazardous waste or owners or
| operators of hazardous waste management facilities to inject
| hazardous waste beneath the lowermost formation containing,
| within one quarter (1/4) mile of the well bore, an underground
| source of drinking water.". Because if the regulations were
| merged, it would be inappropriate not to use the stricter
| safety standard of all.
| avhception wrote:
| Maybe that guy needs a trip to Germany to feel a little better
| about the processes in the USA. The stuff I've seen over the
| years is completely insane. And I'm not even working for
| industries that do any novel stuff, just boring old stuff.
| Getting permits for building something as trivial as a small
| storage facility for literal nuts and bolts will make you feel
| like you've entered Kafkas "Der Prozess".
|
| And if you, somehow, through some miracle, after decades, get
| said permit and build something (to absurdly high costs), you're
| under constant threat of being shut down for arbitrary reasons.
| Again, the nuts and bolts storage is a literal nuts and bolts
| storage. Just some maybe 200 metal crates with metal nuts and
| bolts in there, with a roof on top. It was shut down after we
| built it. "Fire hazard". And we're not talking hot stuff just off
| the production line or something, no. Just ambient-temperature
| nuts and bolts in metal crates with a metal roof on top.
|
| The stories that I've heard or sometimes even was somehow
| involved in would take many hours to write down and have the
| reader shake their head in disbelief. And, again, I'm not even
| anywhere near any new innovation. Just regular boring stuff.
| avhception wrote:
| We also had a facility for sorting nuts and bots shut down
| because the original building permit was for a CNC shop or
| something, "metal works" or whatever the technical term is in
| English.
|
| You see, sorting nuts and bolts is not "metal work" because
| you're not altering the metal. So the permit was revoked, they
| wouldn't issue a new one, and we had to move shop. That alone
| almost cost that little sorting spin-off it's live.
| _ink_ wrote:
| Sounds like the show extra3 might be interested in your story
| :)
| mnau wrote:
| There is always something worse. We should focus on making
| things better, not on "at we are not North Korea."
|
| I have no doubt that Germany is insane, but that doesn't
| retract from fact that current environment is bad. We want it
| to be "good".
| avhception wrote:
| Ah, ja, this wasn't so much a comment about that guy but
| mostly a comment about Germany. Could have done without the
| "that guy" sentence, my bad.
| ljouhet wrote:
| TLDR: "I drive an ambulance and I could save more people if I
| could drive faster, so speed limits are bad!"
| maccard wrote:
| It's not over regulation, it's bad regulation.
|
| Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at
| not just achieving the letter of the law but actually solving the
| problem it was defined for. Good regulation IMO looks bad because
| you never hear of anyone being punished for breaking it because
| it is complied with.
|
| The EU banned roaming charges in 2017. Most networks by then had
| already abolished them, _but only because this change was
| coming_. The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and
| pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the
| roaming charges.
|
| EU flight compensation rules are another great example - they
| don't pay out often because what's happened is the airlines don't
| get delayed to that point as often as they used to.
|
| Scotland has a "right to roam", which can be summarised as "don't
| be a dick and you can go anywhere you want outdoors". So you can
| walk, camp etc pretty much anywhere (it's a bit more complex). In
| theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and walk
| across their fields. In practice, this means that most popular
| walking paths have access routes maintained by landowners that
| people use.
|
| On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad
| regulation. They're super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the
| result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and
| absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
| croon wrote:
| Frankly, the cookie banners are an example of bad enforcement.
| Most of the annoying ones are actually non-compliant with the
| regulation. I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| A good point. Regulation is worth nothing if not enforced.
| There are new right to repair laws but nothing has been
| enforced.
| maccard wrote:
| I disagree - I think they're a bad law. Ideally it wouldn't
| need to be enforced at all, because companies would comply
| with it. The last website I worked on we had 0 telemetry in
| cookies but we used a cookie for non telemetry uses. When we
| were putting together a privacy policy, one of legal's
| questions was "are there any cookies", to which we said yes.
| We explained, but as far as they were concerned cookies means
| cookie bar.
|
| > I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well. Personally
| I've never looked at a cookie bar and said "wow I'm glad I
| now know how many people they're selling my data too" and
| then changed my behaviour. And the companies have just
| slapped non compliant (and unenforced/able) banners to
| justify what they were already doing. That's a bad
| regulation.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Isn't that bad lawyers rather than bad rules?
| maccard wrote:
| That's the "you're holding it wrong" defense.
|
| Good rules will have their intent followed by bad
| lawyers. Bad rules will have their letter followed but
| their intent missed.
|
| Most lawyers aren't bad, they're just risk averse. I've
| had very few outright "no" answers from legal, even when
| pushing the boundaries in the grey areas, but the result
| of that is the PM doesn't get a straight yes from legal
| so they decide to take the most complicit option. In the
| cookie banners case, that's show by default especially if
| you don't understand.
| whstl wrote:
| It definitely is.
|
| My experience with GDPR lawyers is that they treat every
| "cookie" as requiring consent purely because of lack of
| information and difficulty in fully assessing the full
| picture.
|
| In every other field, lawyers have to work together with
| experts. Technical experts must engage with the lawyers.
| This here is a failure from both sides.
| cm2012 wrote:
| If the rules are so opaque even professional lawyers are
| confused, thats a bad law.
| rollcat wrote:
| Yep, bad law, I'd also say bad intent.
|
| Apple is ahead of the curve[1]. You get a system-level
| popup asking you for consent to be tracked. Actual, not
| _implied_ consent - only "yes" means "yes".
|
| So you say "no" and it means "no". Apps are blocked from
| all basic forms of tracking (like device ID), and the App
| Store rules state that apps that try to circumvent that
| will be kicked out. Apple doesn't fuck around - they've
| kicked Meta and Epic without blinking an eye.
|
| EU's response? Kick Apple, because EU companies can no
| longer do targeted advertising on Apple's platform. Our
| regulators are full of shit.
|
| [1]: Well Apple still tracks you in their first-party apps,
| but that's a different story.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Apple doesn't fuck around - they've kicked Meta and
| Epic without blinking an eye.
|
| Sorry what?
|
| Everyone lies on those "privacy nutrition labels" on the
| App Store listings and gets away with it, and everyone is
| free to embed dozens of analytics/tracking SDKs in their
| app that track the user by fingerprinting and IP address.
|
| Apple doesn't care. If Apple cared, they could simply say
| that all apps must comply with the laws of the locale
| they are distributed in - which they do for things like
| copyright infringement, etc - and thus ban Meta and most
| their competitors all the way back in 2018 when the GDPR
| went into effect. But they didn't.
| supermatt wrote:
| > EU's response?
|
| It wasn't the EU, it was France who fined Apple over ATT
| (although there are ongoing discussions at the EU level).
|
| They were fined for self-preferencing, which is exactly
| the "different story" in your footnote.
|
| It was also pointed out that consenting to ATT still
| isn't sufficient to provide informed consent required
| under GDPR and is misleading for implementers who think
| they can just rely on ATT (its effectively yet another
| non-compliant cookie banner), but the fine was just for
| the self-preferencing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >EU's response? Kick Apple, because EU companies can no
| longer do targeted advertising on Apple's platform
|
| I guess if you ignore the 3 years of non-compliance and
| feet dragging on tangential cases, you can say that.
| That's like saying "Fortnite made apple and what was
| their respones? Kick Epic from their platform".
|
| The EU courts don't just let that fly like in the US.
| croon wrote:
| In your case you wouldn't have needed a popup/bar.
|
| In all other cases, a "Decline All" option should be a the
| most prominent option (or defaulted to would be fine). The
| current implementations are either non-compliant (if hiding
| the decline option behind more clicks than the "Accept All"
| option), or malicious compliance in making their own
| products worse to shift blame to regulations, because the
| unregulated previous status quo was extremely user
| exploitative on tracking data. Of course (exploitative)
| companies would like to continue selling data on top of
| whatever their main business supposedly is.
|
| No company _needs_ a cookie bar, unless they have no other
| business than selling user data.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Ideally it wouldn't need to be enforced at all, because
| companies would comply with it
|
| The non-compliance is a result of the lack of enforcement.
| If it went into effect and a few fines were handed down the
| next day for non-compliant consent flows, you can bet
| everyone else would quickly go into compliance.
|
| But that effectively never happened, and the probability of
| getting fined for a non-compliant consent flow appears to
| be less than winning the lottery, so of course everyone
| just ignores the regulation.
| cons0le wrote:
| Agreed 100%. "Enforcement" of the law has gotten so bleak
| that people can't imagine a world where we have to follow
| the laws as they are now.
|
| Imagine a world where activity like this was fined, or
| where the police actually persecuted white collar
| criminals. A world where politicians and corporations
| were both afraid to engage in open corruption. Where
| companies got fined for uncompetitive practices and
| weren't able to pollute the environment or engage in
| union busting.
|
| We wouldn't need any new laws to live in a world like
| that. We would just need the "enforcement" wing of the
| government to actually be effective and do thier jobs
| jmward01 wrote:
| !00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right
| answer, 'we need the right regulations' is. The article points
| out areas that improvements to regulation, and process, would
| help and that second part 'and process' is often overlooked. A
| complex regulatory structure may be needed but that doesn't
| mean it has to be as hard as it is. Is it really the problem
| that the regulations were complex or was it a problem that
| navigating them was a challenge? I've had this discussion with
| local permitting where I live. Permits are needed, but that
| doesn't mean they should be hard or that the job of the city is
| to just tell you no. There is a world where the city is a
| partner trying to help you achieve something so when permitting
| comes up, and you pay your fees, the answer they give isn't
| just 'yes/no' but 'you may want to consider' and 'let's work
| together on a plan that...'. There isn't a regulation here,
| just a process improvement and the difference can be massive. A
| similar view of how to improve federal regulations, through
| simple process improvement and not just regulatory change,
| could really make a difference.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer
|
| Sometimes it is. For example some countries had or have
| regulation that only nobles can work in specific professions
| or wear specific clothes or live in specific places. Some had
| the same but race-based.
|
| This entire class of regulation deserved to be thrown out.
| And yes, at least partially there are claims how it was
| necessary for safety or whatever else.
|
| There are are also some dumb taxes with bad side effects like
| tax on windows.
|
| Some regulation is terrible and deserves to be removed rather
| than replaced or improved.
| PxldLtd wrote:
| I think you may be misinterpreting the point. It's not that
| we never need less regulation, this may be the case. We
| should never make 'less regulation' the target. The right
| regulation may be less in some cases.
| maccard wrote:
| https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-complexity I think this
| section on complexity sums it up really well whether
| you're talking about code or laws
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Less regulation is a good target.
|
| Just not sole one.
|
| Harm reduction (a good reason for regulation) also needs
| to be balanced with it.
|
| But piles of regulation have costs - both in reduction of
| competitiveness, increasing expenses, reducing
| willingness of people to follow and support it and so on.
|
| Regulation is bad, just it is often less bad than
| alternatives.
|
| But reducing amount of regulation is a good goal.
|
| Otherwise you end in situation where you need lawyer to
| understand anything, you are not allowed to throw torn
| socks into garbage and general population applauds people
| breaking law and happily support it.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| "Less regulation is a good target" is only true under
| regimes where good faith outcomes can be expected without
| regulation. Given the frequency with which financial
| incentives align with undesirable outcomes there's no
| evidence to support this idea.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Regulations aren't free.
|
| Say someone silly makes a rule that your need X hours of
| training annually to be an interior decorator. Now
| besides the training, you also have to _know_ that that
| 's required, you have to maintain records to prove you've
| had the training, the government needs a process for
| verifying that you've had the training, ...
| rstupek wrote:
| Unfortunately your silly rule is something that exists
| (not for interior decorators of course) but for countless
| other trade jobs (barber, plumber, etc). Whether that's
| good or bad I can't say
| novok wrote:
| It does exist!
| https://occupationallicensing.com/occupation/interior-
| design...
|
| Yes, it has gotten that bad.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| It's unambiguously good, and that's coming from the
| perspective of someone who is routinely frustrated by
| regulations around residential plumbing and electrical
| work. It would be utterly insane to remove minimum
| credential and testing requirements from trades where
| fucking up results in catastrophic damage to a structure,
| fires, etc.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Whether that's good or bad I can't say
|
| I personally see it as good. Why wouldn't I want someone
| I trust with my hair or pipes to not have something to
| vouch for them?
|
| It's only a downside if you see cost as the most
| important thing about all else. The clear consequence is
| that a trained barber/plumber will require higher
| compensation to make up for the training, and due to less
| supply since not everyone will be able to get a license.
| cogman10 wrote:
| That's the point of regulations.
|
| If correct/moral/societally beneficial behavior was the
| most profitable then no regulation would be needed.
|
| Lacking regulation also has a cost, it's just not to the
| unregulated. Dumping waste into a river is cheap for the
| business doing the dumping, but has environmental impacts
| on everyone downstream. It's more expensive to properly
| dispose of or recycle waste material, that's why a
| regulation that you must do that is needed.
|
| The market simply does not hold bad actors accountable in
| any meaningful way. As a result, it pays to be a bad
| actor.
|
| It's simply not a black and white issue. There are bad
| regulations to be sure. But it's not nearly as simple as
| saying that less regulation is better or that more
| regulation is better. The right amount is good and the
| wrong amount is bad. What that amount is is up for
| debate.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Sadly, sometimes people are wrong.
|
| This applies also to enacting monstrously stupid
| regulations. Or even ones that were introduced entirely
| as revenge or to create opportunity for corruption.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So you identify that tools can be used wrong, but still
| choose to blame the tool instead of the user abusing it?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That all sounds good, we just need to make sure "X" is
| reasonable. Having reassurance that any licensed
| decorator had an amount of training/testing is good for
| the customer.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| Note that I am not saying that "throw away regulation,
| always less regulation is better".
|
| That would be asking to drop all regulations.
|
| I am saying that regulations have cost so you should have
| as little as regulation as possible to achieve wanted
| effect.
|
| And wanted effect often should not be literally zero of
| accidents or bribery or corruption. As it may be either
| impossible to achieve or extra side effects not worth it
| past certain point.
|
| In other words minimisation of how much regulations you
| have should be one of targets.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| > It's not that we never need less regulation
|
| this would be going against
|
| > 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer
| bsenftner wrote:
| What we "we need" is less corruption, this means better
| educations, educations that actually teach the secondary
| considerations of why these regulations exist, and how
| many corruptions they prevent. Then that education should
| continue with how our over regulated situation is caused
| by not teaching critical analysis such that these
| corruptions look like a good idea at all, they become
| exploited, and the end result is over regulation.
| bluGill wrote:
| Or will education make things worse by teaching groups
| how to use corruption to create even more regulations
| that benefits them against everything else.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I tend to be in the camp that educating people in general
| is better than not; we've been trying the "educate people
| in narrow silos" approach, but that creates a really
| gullible population. Which is kind of why things are in
| such a mess.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >by teaching groups how to use corruption to create even
| more regulations
|
| more people who learn corruption is massively outbalanced
| by more people who will be civilly active and realize
| "this is bad for us, let's vote him out". As it is now,
| they simply trick the non-active people into thinking
| their corruption is good. See: 2024 national US
| elections.
| taeric wrote:
| I feel this is exactly the same as efficiency. It isn't
| that we want inefficient solutions. But aiming for
| efficiency as a target often produces perverse
| incentives.
| eru wrote:
| > !00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right
| answer, 'we need the right regulations' is.
|
| Well, much of the time the right regulation is 'let existing
| general laws (eg around safety and fraud) and contract law
| and private agreements handle it'.
|
| But it's pretty fair to sum that Right Regulation up as 'less
| regulation'.
|
| To give a crazy example: the Right Regulation about the
| colour of your underwear is to just let you decide what you
| want to wear, also known as no regulation of the colour of
| your underwear.
|
| See
| https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html
| for less silly example of airline regulation.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >and private agreements handle it
|
| We've had an example all year of why that's a pretty
| horrible idea. At least, why it's bad for the general
| public to let private aggreements run rampant.
| akst wrote:
| Sure, but sometimes a repealing a bad piece of regulation
| doesn't necessitate a replacement.
|
| Policy reform decisions need to be evidence based and
| sometimes evidence suggests ditching the law over updating.
| And sometimes it'll say update it.
|
| What makes Good regulation is path dependent (in respect to
| existing institutions) and context sensitive, it's important
| to analysis the costs of enforcement, not just the
| administrative side but in terms of lost opportunities. Do
| they make a suite of desirable economic activity infeasible
| or unjustifiable more expensive (relative to the goal of the
| policy)
|
| > There isn't a regulation here, just a process improvement
| and the difference can be massive
|
| Are those binding constraints? If so it's effectively
| regulation or part of the regulatory regime even if they
| aren't the rules themselves
| akst wrote:
| I was typing that in the shower, but a more complete
| version of "Do they make a suite of desirable economic
| activity infeasible or unjustifiable more expensive
| (relative to the goal of the policy)" is
|
| Does the added benefit or reduced cost of the law outsize
| any cost or lost benefit from the introduction of the law?
| This question isn't always asked and in many cases it's
| only asked after someone picks up on a problem well after
| the fact.
|
| Understandably you can't always wait for measurements to
| come in to evaluate a policy, it's also a political
| environment in which these decisions are made. That fact
| also leads to reactionary regulation as its the easiest way
| for leaders to show they're responding to a problem.
|
| Having the ability to gather evidence to assess policy in a
| timely manner is actually pretty hard without some kind of
| history of research in the space, and you need to develop
| institutions that help answer these questions faster and
| with some level of independence from the government to
| demonstrate a level of legitimacy. Even in a scenario where
| evidence continues to come in, saying "the existing
| legislation is unideal", you'll have people with who have
| made a living out of the existing regime defend that status
| quo. And the longer that legislation is in place the harder
| it will be to challenge those people as they will only
| become more organised as time goes on, but in a democracy
| all you need is the people by and large on your side, but
| an organised beneficiary of the status quo will definitely
| not go down without a fight.
|
| It's very difficult to generalise stuff like this.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Based on your opinion of local permitting I have a strong
| suspicion you've never applied for any sort of local permit
| for something where issuance of the permit requires any real
| consideration.
|
| Petty homeowner renovation stuff is basically a weird tax in
| disguise. They don't care, they were never gonna tell you no.
| They just want your money and want you to make work for
| whatever trade is being made work for in the process.
|
| Go for a variance and then see how you feel about it. Better
| yet, go try and create any sort of occupied structure or
| commercial use where one doesn't already exist.
|
| Local permitting is riddled with bike shedding, people trying
| to avoid responsibility, people trying to advance their pet
| interests at other people's cost and probably more stuff I'm
| forgetting. At least with state level stuff you can be all
| "I've paid my engineer big bucks, here's there work output,
| here's why it's GTG, and if it is in fact GTG they typically
| rubber stamp it. But little guys can't afford to play in that
| arena unfortunately.
| quotemstr wrote:
| The HN bias towards state regulation of, well, everything
| comes from the epistemic invincibility felt by people who
| have never seriously failed.
|
| Understanding that we should let markets, prices, and
| individual choices guide policy comes out of personal
| experience of having been 100% certain of something and
| having been wrong. Once that happens to you a few dozen
| times, you start to appreciate that your feeling of being
| certain does not necessarily correspond to your having
| discovered a predictive theory of reality.
|
| You must understand that much of HN is literally too young
| to have had a chance to interact in any way with building
| regulations. It's not literally every user of course, but
| it's obvious that HN is biased towards the brashness of
| youth.
| only-one1701 wrote:
| You're possibly right that HN is young, but in that case
| you're missing how the circumstances of their youth and
| young adulthood have made them wary of deregulation in
| the macro sense.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I guess I'm "young" as someone in their 30's. but I was
| raised around regulations being loosened and seeing
| corruption flow as a result. So I'm wary anytime someone
| suggests "we need less regulations!" when they only have
| to gain from working faster and treating human lives as
| an accounting detail.
| gkoz wrote:
| Isn't the purpose of many regulations to stop people who
| are wrong from harming themselves and others? That is,
| the experience of being wrong also teaches respect for
| rules one doesn't understand.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is claimed, but often the real purpose is to stop
| people who otherwise could do something from taking that
| work away from whatever group created the regulation.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Electrician/plumber/hvac trade groups salivate over the
| idea of having the products they install be as locked
| down as Hyundai brake pads.
| bluGill wrote:
| Which is why I can't legally replace my water heater - a
| simple job that I've done myself several times in other
| cities. Or lots of other basic home maintenance. (I grew
| up in a house built by a plumber, and my current house
| was owned by a builder before me - so I have plenty of
| first hand experience with how bad trades can do their
| own work)
| Fwirt wrote:
| That's horrible that you legally cannot replace your own
| water heater. What region mandates that?
|
| Where I live I can replace my own water heater, but it's
| more cost-effective not to because the most reliable
| brands will only sell to licensed plumbers. So I can get
| a big box store model that will leak or die in 3 years
| for $300, and then have to pay for fittings, wiring, etc.
| myself and pay to dispose of the old one and provide my
| own labor, or pay a plumber buddy of mine who has access
| to the good stuff that will last 10-15 years $1000 to
| install one for me.
|
| Building permits and inspections make sense in a lot of
| cases for things that could cause societal damage. E.g.
| if I wire my house wrong and it burns down, it could kill
| the people living in it (even if it's not me) or set my
| neighbor's house on fire. If I put in a septic system
| wrong it could poison all the wells in the area. But when
| you start needing permit and inspections for basic
| maintenance, it becomes difficult to justify the
| regulations.
| gbacon wrote:
| Which purpose do you mean? Stated purpose? Intended
| purpose? Regulators' purpose? Legislators' purpose?
| Donors' and other special interests' purpose? Harm as
| defined by whom? The field of public-choice economics
| rests on the insight that employees of agencies and
| bureaus act in their own self-interest, which is not
| always the same as the public interest.
| heddycrow wrote:
| Someone please tell me we are not living in a time where
| the kids are pro-regulation. I'm not doubting you, it's
| just sad if it's true.
|
| When I was younger, the youth were anti-establishment -
| that was cool and rebellious.
|
| I guess this is what happens when the rage against the
| machine becomes part of the machine. Now we need the
| machine to do our raging for us?
|
| I feel old now, thanks.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > this is what happens when the rage against the machine
| becomes part of the machine. Now we need the machine to
| do our raging for us
|
| That's an excellent way to put it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Someone please tell me we are not living in a time where
| the kids are pro-regulation
|
| Hard to say. I'm not really "old" nor "young" per se. I'm
| a late millenial so I probably have pieces of both
| millenial and Gen Z in my experience. I'd love to know
| how this makeup really is at large, but from my
| observation:
|
| >When I was younger, the youth were anti-establishment -
| that was cool and rebellious.
|
| The "Gen Z" side me me spent its life seeing my parents
| (late Gen X) struggle through the results of '08 where we
| didn't regulate banks enough, and under a ruling that
| basically deregulated election spending. Then I graduate
| into a term of a president wanted to deregulate
| everything and am entering part 2 of such.
|
| The "millenial" side of me just barely escaped the
| explosive costs of rent and college, but still felt the
| beginning of that impact. And got to experience almost a
| decade of decent work before seeing the job market
| completely turn on America. Because we spent decades de-
| regulating collective bargaining.
|
| So I would not be surprised if Gen Z proper does want
| more regulation to reel in those who exploited
| deregulation. But that "cool and rebellious" mentality is
| still there given last year. It seems they already
| learned the results of that rebellion, though.
|
| > Now we need the machine to do our raging for us?
|
| Pretty much. When minimum wage can't even cover rent, you
| get less time to rage yourself, outside of the ballot
| box.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Excellent comment. I'll also add that many HN commenters,
| even those with a great deal of experience, have never
| worked on projects that are mission critical, safety
| critical, or where loss of life is a possible consequence
| of failure. They've never been in industries where
| regulations are written in past victims' blood.
| lenkite wrote:
| HN is also biased towards software developers. Now, if
| you start putting in regulations into everything software
| developers do in the software development pipeline, only
| then will begin to _truly_ feel the bite of mind-numbing
| regulations. Until then all regulation is good - since
| regulations are someone else 's problem.
|
| Now, enforce multi-month/multi-year government approval
| for your productive projects deployments with a 100 page
| form in triplicate. Every re-build to production needs a
| root cause analysis with mitigation plan. You need to
| pass expensive certification and re-up every couple of
| years. You can only develop using regulatory approved
| languages and decade old compiler versions that have been
| certified. Breaking regulations involves removal of your
| license and negligence lawsuits. Tack on another few
| dozen regulations, so that you are forced to hire an
| expert consultant+lawyer to feel safe.
|
| You will see the opinion of HN commenters change like
| magic. Basically software developers will always support
| BIG SLOW NANNY for _other_ engineers. Until BIG SLOW
| NANNY stomps them hard, they won 't change their
| position.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Couldn't brashness or naive certainty (whether correlated
| with youth or not) also lead to... this article? Where a
| founder is _so sure_ his startup is so amazing and
| virtuous that it uniquely deserves to bypass the
| regulations that were put in place by older people for
| good reasons the founder doesn't yet understand?
|
| The costs he's complaining about, the costs of
| compliance, are costs he wishes he could externalize onto
| all of us, like they used to before those regulations
| existed.
| gbacon wrote:
| A giant helping of hubris may be a factor in this
| tendency. 'Programming a computer is thrilling enough;
| imagine programming an entire country of people!'
|
| Those who think this way need to read Bastiat: "Oh,
| sublime writers! Please remember sometimes that this
| clay, this sand, and this manure which you so arbitrarily
| dispose of, are men! They are your equals! They are
| intelligent and free human beings like yourselves! As you
| have, they too have received from God the faculty to
| observe, to plan ahead, to think, and to judge for
| themselves!"
|
| http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Not even, they just need to read a history book.
|
| Save perhaps unqualified kings who inherited the throne
| at too young an age and under unstable circumstances no
| demographic has run more societies off cliffs than
| "comfortable professionals".
|
| Seriously, go read about the run up to europe's religious
| wars of the 1500s or the french revolution.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| My vibes on the community are the exact opposite,
| actually. Even if it leads towards the same conclusion.
| Older folk who lived in an industry completely
| unregulated and saw it rise into a trillion dollar
| empire. No government involved (or at least, that's what
| it looks like on the surface).
|
| Unfortunately, most industries cannot cheaply and quickly
| break things to iterate upon it like code. moving fast
| and breaking buildings costs lives.
|
| I suspect there's a similar mentality here with regards
| to unionization. Many older folk will only have seen the
| riches of tech and not the abuse of labor in nearly every
| other sector.
| soiltype wrote:
| This literally doesn't disagree with its parent comment at
| all from my point of view. You're describing badly
| implemented or corruptly designed regulations which cause
| inficiencies. I think everyone here is agreeing those are a
| problem.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I am actively trying to work on non-legislated ways of
| improving the permitting process for my local city. I have
| met with builders and city officials and I have done a
| review of programs in other cities (comparable and larger)
| to find programs that help get to yes and how the city can
| support them. Key are things like pre-approved plans and
| builder workshops. What I have found so far is this is 99%
| communication, or lack there of, and almost no actual bad
| actors actively trying to create harm. I think approaches
| like this can go a long way to helping. Basically, if we
| keep the conversation only at 'regulations need to be
| changed' then we are missing a huge opportunity to actually
| address the problems people are really having.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| >Petty homeowner renovation stuff is basically a weird tax
| in disguise.
|
| Where I live, in California, that's a direct response to a
| state constitutional amendment that strangled property
| taxes (and pretty much any other taxes). Because permits
| are fee-for-service, they're not considered a tax in the
| same way, and can be increased freely. Permitting costs
| ballooned predictably.
|
| So, yes, it's literally a tax in disguise, because,
| ironically, we've over regulated municipalities abilities
| to raise tax revenue in the most straightforward, fair,
| intuitive way possible, so every service has to pay for
| itself or find a weird oblique source of revenue, and
| services pursued by people with money (such as modifying a
| property you owned) get to pay for other things too.
| graemep wrote:
| > The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty
| much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the
| roaming charges.
|
| Even better, a lot of the MVNOs added nothing or far less in
| roaming charges. I think its purely because they have more
| price sensitive customers. In general people seem very
| reluctant to switch providers despite number portability, the
| right to unlock phones after a certain time, etc.
|
| Roaming charges are far from the only example. The big
| operators are sometimes several times as expensive for the same
| package (the Vodafone equivalent to my 1p mobile packages is
| approx three times the price, even ignoring roaming costs) so
| clearly just do not need to compete on price.
|
| One problem with getting good regulation is the influence of
| the currently dominant players. They are adept at lobbying to
| twist regulation to strengthen their position and maintain the
| status quo. We see a lot of this in IT, of course, but it
| happens elsewhere too.
| phatfish wrote:
| The EU removing roaming is better than the situation in the
| UK. Although some operators (O2 I know of) give a fixed
| roaming allowance in the EU that is OK. Not as good as
| getting your full contract/PAYG allowance though.
|
| eSIMs have made the virtual mobile operators attractive for
| short term data usage. Switzerland not being in the EU has
| very high roaming charges, but you can buy data on an eSIM
| for not terrible prices. Much better than standard network
| roaming data charges for sure.
| immibis wrote:
| The fixed allowance is the same within the EU. It's not "no
| roaming charges", but it is that you must not be charged
| for occasional fair-use roaming (which is quite a lot of
| roaming). They can still ban you from roaming if you are
| living in a different country from your contract provider -
| you're not allowed to buy a contract in Slovakia and then
| move to Denmark.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > you're not allowed to buy a contract in Slovakia and
| then move to Denmark.
|
| You'd be surprised: I picked up a French SIM when I was
| on holiday there years ago on a very competitive package
| (including on roaming)... it's still working and I have
| been living full-time abroad.
|
| Is it "allowed"? Probably not. What are they gonna do
| about it, cut me off? Well godspeed and thanks for the
| years of cheap data.
| graemep wrote:
| eSIMs help with outgoing calls and data, but people need
| incoming calls and SMSs too so still get gouged on price.
|
| EU roaming is only a partial solution, as your example of
| Switzerland. The moment you set foot outside the EU you get
| gouged.
|
| Interestingly a number of British operators do provide
| cheap or free roaming to Switzerland. Vodafone has free
| roaming to a few European countries, mostly non-EU. So the
| situation in the UK might be better depending on where you
| are going, which operator you use, whether you are making
| phone calls or using data.....
|
| This is interesting because I would have guessed that most
| people would have had broadly similar changes in price to
| the MVNO I use but just proportion to already higher
| prices. IN fact, the entire structure is different, and
| which countries are free/cheap/expensive is entirely
| different too.
|
| The underlying problem is that these are heavily bundled
| goods with complex price structures so the operators always
| find a way to make an excessive profit - very likely an
| abnormal profit although I have not looked at the numbers I
| would need to confirm that.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Incoming calls work with a $3 eSIM since I receive calls
| fine with WiFi based calling, perfect example of the free
| market (Apple) solving a problem instead of trying to use
| a maze of government regulations to do the same thing
| while hampering the progress of technology.
| stefan_ wrote:
| If only they removed roaming. Roaming charges are an
| absurdity since the internet exists and that is how mobile
| operators run their backend. They should be outlawed fully.
| graemep wrote:
| Its somewhat complicated by countries that still have
| high pricing on international calls imposed by
| regulators, and by pricing differences between country.
|
| It might be possible for a regulator to say something
| such as prices should not exceed a price set comparative
| to the operator you are using, or not more than what it
| coses your operator plus a percentage.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of
| bad regulation. They're super easy to (allegedly) comply with
| and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people
| and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
|
| While I agree that cookie banners are bad, they are not the
| result of bad regulation. They work perfectly for what they
| are. They signal that the web page is tracking you and has
| tracking cookies. Essential cookies are allowed and do not
| trigger a cookie banner requirement.
|
| On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the
| new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show
| preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by
| default in most cases.
|
| Even this is a _win_.
| 7bit wrote:
| > On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends
| the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show
| preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by
| default in most cases.
|
| They come as disabled because that is required by GDPR. All
| settings that are not strictly necessary, consent must be
| opt-in. Not because you enabled DNT. That's just a flag
| companies don't care about because they are not legally
| required to care.
| troupo wrote:
| And thise settings originally were all toggled on because
| ads industry doesn't care
| bayindirh wrote:
| Nope. I don't live in a country covered by GDPR. They used
| to come enabled before. OneTrust's banners also show a
| little green text reading "Your signal to opt-out has been
| honored".
| maccard wrote:
| The problem with this is that DNT header is used by such a
| tiny minority of people that it's basically a walking unique
| identifier for all of the side channels. Arguably it's as
| identifying as the cookie you're asking them not to store in
| the first place.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I believe Firefox ships it enabled. So, it's already
| evident from my browser of choice.
|
| Like security, it's a matter of tradeoff and reducing the
| surface area.
| whstl wrote:
| This is such a tired HN cliche response and it comes up as
| a negative whenever people mention things that actually
| improve users privacy, even ad blockers.
|
| It honestly boils down to this:
|
| If some website is breaking GDPR regulations, sure, you
| might get somehow fingerprinted. (EDIT: Because, surprise,
| fingerprinting also requires consent under GDPR!)
|
| But for websites actually following the law, DNT is
| effective at best, ignored at worst. Because fingerprinting
| is also PII.
|
| Sure: saying "people might fingerprint you" is technically
| correct. But virtually everything else in your browser,
| from the size in pixels of your browser tab to your IP
| address can be used for fingerprinting by malicious actors.
|
| So yeah, if you have to use TOR (which actually has actual
| anti-fingerprinting measures), go ahead and remove the DNT
| bit. If you don't need TOR, get an ad-blocker ASAP so it at
| least protects you from AdWare and Tracking stuff that
| _might_ fingerprint you.
| maccard wrote:
| > This is such a tired HN cliche response and it comes up
| as a negative whenever people mention things that
| actually improve users privacy, even ad blockers.
|
| We're talking about regulation here. Some things (like ad
| blockers) are a unanimous win for privacy but have
| nothing to do with regulation.
|
| > If some website is breaking GDPR regulations, sure, you
| might get somehow fingerprinted.
|
| The ePrivacy Directive (cookie law) has nothing to do
| with GDPR. The directive only deals with cookies, and
| informed consent for the cookies. If the goal is to
| improve privacy it's a failure because it doesn't touch
| any of the other numerous ways that tracking happens. If
| it's to improve how websites handle cookies then it's
| succeeded there I guess, but to what end?
|
| GDPR on the other hand is a better attempt. It's not
| perfect but it actually gets to the heart of it. GDPR
| changed behaviours, the cookie law slapped a banner in
| front of half the western world and continued as things
| were.
| whstl wrote:
| Most of this reply has nothing to do with mine.
|
| Your post that I replied to was about fingerprinting
| caused by DNT.
|
| This has nothing to do with ePrivacy. Websites don't get
| to "follow one regulation but not another", so if you
| fingerprint someone and create an ID that can identify
| someone, that's PII. If you don't get consent, you're
| breaking GDPR, period, regardless of following ePrivacy
| or not.
|
| Once again: the DNT header is only an issue for
| fingerprinting and side-channels on website that DON'T
| follow GDPR.
|
| I mentioned ad blocking because anti-ad-blocking posts
| here also mention the same concern about "ad blocking
| helping fingerprinting".
| gbacon wrote:
| If the pro-regulation side refuses to admit that cookie
| banners are bad regulation, then engaging with these True
| Believers is a complete waste of time.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Why should I admit anything just because somebody told me
| so?
|
| Then give me a better solution.
|
| Google tried to move tracking from cookies to browser
| _twice_. How can you regulate that kind of cat and mouse
| game?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The anti-regulation side never gave a better solution here.
| Are we suddenly fine with Facebook mining all our data now?
|
| If public sentiment changed that much, then there's not
| much to say. We had Privacy and Security and chose neither.
| But it's still a choice.
| dmpk2k wrote:
| Both can be true: over-regulation and bad regulation. And the
| West (especially the EU) is arguably suffering from both to
| various degrees.
|
| At some point a regulation is no longer worth the weight in the
| overhead it imposes. Even if all regulation was effective, at
| some point the collective burden would be too high.
|
| Sadly, this also means that some bad behaviour is inescapable
| at the margins. There are always a few people looking for an
| angle to make a quick buck in a certain way, yet not enough for
| a regulation to be supported.
| cassepipe wrote:
| It reminds of the "The optimal amount of Fraud is non-zero"
| that once ended up on HN frontpage :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913
|
| I wonder, is there a legal principle to call-out someone who
| is trying to exploit the word of the law against the spirit
| of the law ?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That's called Lawful Evil in tabletop gaming circles.
| exploiting the law to your benefit, even if it goes against
| the original intent.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The textbook ideal regulation is zero in the same way that a
| textbook ideal operating system costs no ram, takes no cpu
| cycles, or consumes and disk space.
|
| Reality is more complicated. And once you incur the cost of
| reality there's probably some things that you should bundle
| with it for convenience and consistency.
| immibis wrote:
| I think bad regulation and over-regulation are different words
| for the same thing, but calling it over-regulation pushes a
| certain agenda that _all_ regulations are bad, which people who
| profit from deregulation would like you to think.
| roenxi wrote:
| > but calling it over-regulation pushes a certain agenda that
| all regulations are bad
|
| Over-regulation implies that there is an optimal level of
| regulation that is non-zero. It just happens in practice that
| people don't complain when the level is pretty good and it is
| unusual for something to be under-regulated because the
| regulators are eager beavers for regulating things. The
| default state when there is a regulatory problem is usually
| over-regulation.
|
| Like when the thread ancestor tried to find an example of a
| situation moving to under-regulated the first thing that
| leapt to mind was roaming charges which it must be admitted
| is a pretty minor problem. But the first thing that leaps to
| mind for over-regulation is things like the article where the
| cost of something expensive doubled and a potentially good
| idea struggles to be born into the world.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The Lower Thames Crossing project in the UK already generated
| 360000 pages of paper in the planing phase:
|
| https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/lower-thames-
| crossin...
|
| The Works in Progress magazine says that, in comparison,
| environmental assessment for an extension of a line of the
| Madrid metro, had only 19 pages.
|
| https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-madrid-built-its-
| metro-...
|
| Granted, this is not completely the same, but 360 000 pages
| is a LOT. Most civilizational infrastructure around the world
| was built using orders of magnitude less bureaucracy.
|
| That is overregulation for me, and I don't think this pushes
| any agenda except "360 000 pages for a tunnel is freaking
| insane".
| lopis wrote:
| > On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of
| bad regulation. They're super easy to (allegedly) comply with
| and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people
| and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
|
| Companies were at least forced to separate what were essential
| cookies from non-essential ones. While enforcement was not
| strong specially for small companies, basically any company
| could be sued for non compliance -- and many were. I guess this
| was bad regulation because it wasn't strict and clear enough.
| It should have been clear that cookie banners must had 2
| buttons: agree and disagree. None of that bullshit of selecting
| partners. None of that "disagreeing takes longer to save your
| preferences" or refreshes the whole page, or sends you to the
| home page. And if you didn't want to comply, you're free to
| block European traffic.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| > Companies were at least forced to separate what were
| essential cookies from non-essential ones.
|
| The question here isn't if it cost companies money. It did.
| It's whether it was a good law. It wasn't, because compliance
| generated no benefit to anyone.
|
| You seem to be saying that it was a good law because it could
| have been a good law if written differently.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >because compliance generated no benefit to anyone.
|
| if you don't value privacy over an extra click or two, then
| I can see why you'd think that. But if that's the case we
| wouldn't also be so adamant against mass surveillance.
| Which is it?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > In theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and
| walk across their fields
|
| You absolutely can, though, as long as you leave everything
| exactly the way you found it and don't actually walk right
| through my garden.
|
| You can in fact actually walk right through my garden if you
| ask first and get permission, but that holds true anywhere.
| maccard wrote:
| I could have written 4x the amount on Right to Roam, but I
| didn't. My point is that it changes how landowners treat
| their land and access by default. They _could_ provide gates
| and come after people for not respecting their land, but
| instead they (usually) provide alternative access which
| actually delivers the spirit of the law - a right to roam.
|
| I'm Irish, living in Scotland, and it's just unbelieveable
| the difference it makes. Here [0] is a perfect example of a
| situation that this solves. Murder Hole beach (in the same
| ish area) has similar issues, the farmer who owned the field
| that you accessed it kept a bull in that field.
|
| [0] https://www.donegaldaily.com/2017/06/22/fury-as-access-
| shut-...
| thebruce87m wrote:
| Take only pictures, leave only footprints and jobbies.
| HenriTEL wrote:
| About the cookie banners, I'm honestly not sure it's a
| regulation issue. For >90% of the websites the "reject all"
| option have no impact on user experience, so either everybody
| is breaching or the banner is useless in the first place.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Do you get prompted for the choice the next time you visit
| the website? Are they websites you need to log in to? Those
| are really the only user experience things that would be
| obvious in most instances -- everything else is just pure
| data mining for usage analytics (::knowing wink::) and overt
| tracking. Some sites absolutely do not respect any of the
| choices, but that's not the normal behavior.
| HenriTEL wrote:
| Login fall under the strictly necessary category and does
| not require consent for cookie storage under GDPR.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Cookie banners usually refer to pre GDPR, where there is no
| reject, just info that site uses cookies. Useless info.
| prophesi wrote:
| Good regulation is how air travel became the safest method of
| travel in the past few decades without impeding on innovation
| or affordability. Bad regulation is when that same regulatory
| body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same
| companies they should be overseeing.
|
| IMO, we're in an age where regulation is the only tool left for
| a civilized society to leash their multi-billion corporations
| to actually help benefit society and not only their
| shareholders. I've been beating around the bush, but Boeing has
| already rebounded (tremendously) after the tragic incidents in
| the past few years.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Those decades were an era that followed massive airline
| deregulation. This is another case of the good regulation
| being less regulation.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Aviation is still one of the most heavily regulated areas
| in the country, though, and its excellent safety record is
| due to the practices adopted within that regulatory
| environment.
|
| If the FAA were to disappear tomorrow, I _guarantee_ with
| absolute, utter certainty, that aviation 's safety
| performance would drop--in some cases over time, in some
| cases, overnight. I would bet any amount of money on that.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I will take the other side of the bet. I offer you 1 to
| 10000 odds that, if the FAA disappears or otherwise
| becomes defunct, that the airline safer would be broadly
| agreed to be marginally safer 100 years afterwards.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I know where you are going with this. The FAA is indeed a
| burden when it comes to bringing new technology to
| market, including safety-critical technology. The cost of
| new tech and safety improvements would indeed go down
| without regulation, but on the balance, would all the
| other deep cost-cutting measures that airlines,
| manufacturers, airports, ATC would invoke actually result
| in _increased_ safety overall? I 'm not going to live 100
| years so we'll never know, but I'm absolutely confident
| that it won't given how every other business in every
| other under-regulated industry sacrifices everything for
| the sake of profits.
| gbacon wrote:
| Regional and commercial jets cost tens and hundreds of
| millions of USD. The greediest caricature capitalist will
| want to protect this investment. Their insurers will
| demand certain terms to accept the risk of having to
| replace such a costly asset. Our greedy capitalist
| villain wants repeat business. Dead customers don't pay
| again. Lawsuits are costly. Their friends and family will
| be reluctant to book fares with airlines they perceive as
| being unsafe. "Qantas never crashed."
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This just isn't true even in the already regulated
| environment.
|
| It is "irrational" for a "greedy" slaveowner to kill
| their slave, a significant monetary investment sometimes,
| and yet it happened all the time, because capital owners
| are not rational.
|
| A significant fraction of aviation fatalities can be
| traced directly back to those "greedy capitalist
| villains" actually completely cutting corners to save a
| penny and losing million dollar aircraft.
|
| Business owners are not rational actors, they are
| gamblers.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| That is not obvious, and evidence in the airline industry
| shows that deregulation did not lead to the catastrophe
| you claim it will, but will make things better.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I am sympathetic to your claim but after reading the article it
| does seem to be a case of overregulation, or lack of
| flexibility at least. Could you use the examples of the article
| in order to illustrate how this is bad regulatation rather than
| overregulation ?
|
| To go in the direction of your claim, hasn't the FDA model
| often been criticized for how easy it is to comply with for
| medical devices/complements ?
| Frost1x wrote:
| Businesses are great at optimizing in profit and left to their
| own accord, that's ultimately what they'll do. In many cases
| that means risking safety, externalizing costs to others,
| creating anticompetitive unions like cartels, and so on.
|
| Regulation exists to guide that optimization process so it's
| forced to factor in other things like safety, environment,
| competitiveness for consumers and so on. The point being that
| if you can optimize in a way for profit AND for society at
| large then we have a reasonable balance to justify your
| existence. If you can't, well then we probably shouldn't be
| doing what you're tying to do because the costs you would
| otherwise opaquely externalize on society are too high for your
| profit motive.
|
| That isn't to say things can't go awry. Over regulation can
| occur where constraints are added that become crippling and the
| constraints are too risk averse or just poorly constructed that
| they do more to break the process than actually protect
| society. But whenever someone cries at over regulation, they
| need to point out the specific regulation(s) and why they're
| nonsensical.
|
| I've worked in highly regulated environments and you're often
| very aware of what regulations you need to conform to. Part of
| that process is often asking why it exists because it can be
| frustrating having a roadblock presented before you with no
| rationale. Most the time I can think of good reasons something
| exists and it's easy to consider and honor that. Meanwhile
| there are some regulations I scratch my head and can't find
| what they justify, so there should be a channel back to
| lawmakers or regulators where people can inquire and work can
| be done to see if those regulation are actually effective or
| not at achieving their goal, or if they're just constraints
| that makes things more expensive.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| It also allows corps to lock out competitors who cannot
| afford to wade through regulatory hell.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's a double edged sword. It creates a floor but also
| lowers the ceiling so a company can't lock out competitors
| through brute force. it's best to introduce such regulation
| before we have to worry about monopolies, though.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Profit-seeking incentivizes safety and makes any cartel
| situation inherently unstable.
|
| Regulations, on the other hand, allow stable equilibria
| featuring cartels.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| I bet you believe in wizards and magic fairy dust too.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| This is called projection
| miltonlost wrote:
| > Profit-seeking incentivizes safety and makes any cartel
| situation inherently unstable
|
| Do you have ANY knowledge of economic history? Profit-
| seekers putting $1 into safety equipment rather than their
| own pocket is a laughable thought.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Yes, and a distinct feature are pressure groups funded by
| corporations drumming up fake issues in order to get
| regulations passed that remove the competitors to those
| corporations.
|
| The sidelining of tort law also didn't help one bit.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So we're going to ignore the pressure groups who are
| deregulating in real time to tear down regulations that
| also remove competitors to those corporations? Or is it
| okay to be anti-competitive when it helps you get paid?
| gbacon wrote:
| This is the Schoolhouse Rock version that ignores the real
| phenomenon of regulatory capture, formalized by Stigler way
| back in 1971.
|
| "We propose the general hypothesis: every industry or
| occupation that has enough political power to utilize the
| state will seek to control entry. In addition, the regulatory
| policy will often be so fashioned as to retard the rate of
| growth of new firms."
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yes, that's why it's important to regulate before the
| industry gets enough political power to buy the
| "regulations" they want.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > It's not over regulation, it's bad regulation.
|
| A distinction without almost any practical difference. If this
| isn't overregulation, how would you define it? What law would
| you ever look at and say, "that's overregulation"?
| quotemstr wrote:
| So what distinguishes the good regulation from the bad? Good
| regulations either
|
| 1) solve collective action problems (i.e. situations in which
| we're all better off if we all do X but it's in nobody's
| immediate personal interest to do X), or
|
| 2) short circuit short term corporate hill-climbing and let us
| "jump" from one local economic maximum to a higher one
| elsewhere in configuration space without having to traverse the
| valley between (which corporations won't do on their own).
|
| I think even the most hardcore objectivist types would
| appreciate that these classes of problem exist. Even if you
| delegate their solutions to some ostensibly private actor (e.g.
| let insurance companies make the building codes) you end up
| with an inescapable system of rules that's de facto state
| control anyway. Doesn't help.
|
| The problem with the cookie law is that it doesn't solve a real
| problem. Look, I'm probably going to get downvoted to hell for
| saying this, but the people who make "tracking" a cause celebre
| are a tiny, noisy minority and most real world people don't
| actually care. They're more annoyed by cookie dialogs than the
| cookies.
|
| Policymakers overestimated the size of the privacy advocate
| constituency and so enacted regulations that solve a problem
| that exists only in the minds of diehard privacy advocates.
| Now, policymakers are reversing this policy. They're doing is
| slowly and tentatively (because they're still spooked by how
| loud the cookie banner people are), but they're doing it.
| Credit where it's due for finding their gonads.
|
| The cookie affair isn't unique though. It's just one example of
| a regulation that went wrong because it came out of non-market
| decision making. Money is an honest, clean signal.
|
| You know what a market is? It's a policy diffusion engine that
| uses profit as its loss signal. Works remarkably well almost
| all the time!
|
| In those few situations in which we depart from the market as a
| decision making mechanism, we have to be careful not to allow
| ourselves to be corrupted by the usual suite of bugs in human
| reasoning: availability bias, recency bias, social desirability
| bias, and so on. The market, because money is an honest signal,
| resists these corruptions. Regulatory bodies? Much more
| vulnerable.
|
| The cookie law is a central example of a time when a non-market
| regulatory apparatus was corrupted by a cognitive bias: social
| desirability bias in particular.
|
| Of course we need some regulations. But when we make them, we
| need to be aware that we're likely getting them wrong in some
| way. All regulations should have
|
| - automatic sunsets,
|
| - public comment periods,
|
| - judicial and legislative review mechanisms,
|
| - variance and exception mechanisms, and
|
| - the lightest possible touch.
|
| Just as in software, each additional line of (legal) code is a
| liability, not a feature. Keep it simple.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I liked your opening here a lot, but by the time you got
| here:
|
| > Money is an honest, clean signal.
|
| I was lost. Money is neither clean nor honest, because as a
| signal it is based on a highly non-uniform distribution that
| arises substantially from processes that are not proxies for
| "things we collectively want". Markets reflect what those
| with money want, and while that theoretically could be a good
| proxy for collective desire, it doesn't take a particular
| notable GINI coefficient for that to no longer be true.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's easy to say "keep it simple" when you don't consider
| that Law is a centuries, or millenia, old legacy codebase
| that no one has lived long enough to truly understand the
| whole of. Yes, there's a lot of things that don't make sense
| because it was written 300 years ago for something
| technological progress has eliminated, or because it was some
| niche edge case made for a specific issue that doesn't exist
| anymore.
|
| We unfortunately can't just throw it out and start a new
| codebase like we do in tech. Or at least, I don't see much
| interest in that.
| cowpig wrote:
| A great tragedy of the past 50 years is how successful the
| `regulation==bad` propaganda has been at convincing engineer-
| entrepreneurs to shut off their brains when it comes to the
| government.
|
| So many of these SV entrepreneurs are great at designing
| systems and processes, and great at finding creative solutions
| to complex problems.
|
| If we all thought of `designing great regulation` as something
| to aspire to, then we'd see a bunch of interesting HN
| discussions around the details of new policy, predictions
| around their effects, etc.
|
| Instead you get these extremely shallow articles that read like
| a sullen teenager complaining about how they didn't get what
| they wanted and a comment section discussing whether or not
| `regulations==bad`.
|
| I'm dying to find a community of engineers who have good-faith,
| informed discussions about policy. If anyone knows of such a
| group or place, please let me know.
| bluGill wrote:
| > A great tragedy of the past 50 years is how successful the
| `regulation==bad` propaganda has been at convincing engineer-
| entrepreneurs to shut off their brains when it comes to the
| government.
|
| This is strongly aided by plenty of examples of regulations
| that just get in the way of people who know how to do
| something.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| And I think the winds are changing when seeing examples of
| deregulation that instead make the people's lives worse
| instead of better. The people who "know how to do
| something" sure aren't using it for the public good.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| Whether it's propaganda or not, it is a good heuristic
| supported by nuanced policy analysis. The switch to more
| knee-jerk sympathy towards regulation, on the other hand, has
| much more to do with propaganda than with any kind of
| credible analysis.
| claw-el wrote:
| A regulation being good or bad is not a fixed thing. A
| regulation that was good when created could change to bad due
| to circumstances or new innovation introduced.
|
| Maybe something innovators can learn to do better is to involve
| regulators earlier in the design process of this innovation
| process, so that regulation does not become the bottleneck for
| introducing the innovation to the market.
|
| The tricky thing about involving regulators earlier is that it
| sometimes can be seen as aggressive or unethical lobbying.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| All regulation increases costs. It doesn't matter whether you
| consider it good or bad. And if you consider it good, recall
| that there can be too much of a good thing.
| mrighele wrote:
| Every regulation has a cost, even the good ones. The biggest
| cost is that they slow down the ability of people and companies
| to do business, which come out as a lower economic growth.
| Compared to its peers, EU's GDP has been growing very slowly
| for the past 20 years, I don't think it is a coincidence.
|
| Some regulation is fine, but it should be really a fraction of
| what we currently have in Europe.
|
| (Somewhat unrelated, but the EU's situation reminds me of "The
| End of Eternity" by Asimov, sans the time traveling)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Compared to its peers, EU's GDP has been growing very slowly
| for the past 20 years, I don't think it is a coincidence.
|
| Meamwhile, US's GDP exploded and the bust cycles are more or
| less screwing over 2 generations from such gains. GDP is
| completely divorced from how the people are doing these days.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Tomato, tomato. I think the problem is, much like Google
| engineers get promoted by shipping features (even if no one
| uses them), politicians get ahead by shipping laws, even if
| they're ineffective or cause more harm than good, so long as
| they can convince enough voters that it was a good thing (hence
| the proliferation of bills with names like Ultra-Triple-Plus-
| Good-For-The-Children-Act").
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective
| at not just achieving the letter of the law but actually
| solving the problem it was defined for.
|
| You missed a key component - Cost. It must not only work, be
| enforceable, but it also must cost less than alternative
| options and the value of the externality it's aiming to fix.
|
| Solving ProblemA could be agreeable. But if ProblemA causes
| $100 a year in problems, and the regulated fix is $110 then
| it's not a good regulation. If the Regulated fix is $110 and
| there is a market solution for $75, then it's not good
| regulation. If the regulated fix $100 but it is over-applied
| into 2x as many scenarios, then it's not good regulation.
|
| Often the government loses out not in it having bad ideas, but
| that they break the flexibility of better options that require
| nuance and context to see.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Most regulations are misregulation. Many regulations are
| malregulation.
|
| The people who write regulations, through incompetence or
| malevolence it matters not which, prefer malregulation. Those
| that have blind faith in regulation, especially from their
| favored party, cheer them on and demand more. Humanity yearns
| to live in a world where the HOA busybody measures their grass
| with a ruler at 7am on a Sunday morning and noisily knocks on
| their door to inform them that if they do not get the extra
| 3/4" mowed within 48 hours a $175/day fine plus interest will
| apply.
| w10-1 wrote:
| "Bad" regulation just raises the question what would be better
| for all concerned. Sometimes that means reducing the weight and
| impact of a concern (redefining the problem), but more often it
| means a different approach or more information.
|
| In this case, pumping first-ever possible toxins into the
| ground could be toxic, destructive, and irreversible, in ways
| that are hard to test or understand in a field with few
| experts. The benefit is mainly a new financial quirk, to meet
| carbon accounting with uncertain gains for the environment.
| It's not hard to see why there's a delay, which would only be
| made worse with an oppositional company on a short financial
| leash pushing the burden back onto regulators.
|
| The regulation that needs attention is not the unique weird
| case, but the slow expansion of under-represented, high-
| frequency or high-traffic - exactly like the cellular roaming
| charges or housing permits or cookies. It's all-too-easy to
| learn to live with small burdens.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >They're super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result
| is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely
| no change to company behaviour whatsoever
|
| If it was implemented a decade earlier before Web 2.0, it would
| have been effective suppression given what we know of click
| through rates. Adding an extra click (even if most agree) would
| just turn people to the competition.
|
| in 2017 though, a lot of the internet already consolidated to a
| dozen websites, which were too sticky to let a button disrupt
| them. It wasn't strong enough for the new environment.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| > They're super easy to (allegedly) comply with
|
| Without wishing to derail from the main point, they are very
| easy to comply with, but they have broadly _not_ been complied
| with.
|
| Any site with PII collection where the "deny optional cookies"
| button isn't right there, and not deemphasized, is conducting
| illegal data collection. But as the enforcement is carried out
| by national agencies who appear not to have given any shits for
| a decade, everyone has been getting away with making users jump
| though stupid hoops (that not only are not _required_ by the
| law as the sites imply, but are actually outright forbidden)
| like navigating a dark pattern minigame or outright cunty
| behaviour like making the "deny" button hang with a spinner
| indefinitely.
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| >at the end of the day, it leaves us all worse off
|
| I don't know, I like having meds that are radioactive be clearly
| labeled, for example. It's hard to draw the line as to what is
| _over_ regulation and what is really needed, but it'd reather
| have too much than not enough.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| More regulations need phase in clauses. If you build <100
| vehicles a year almost no regulation should apply. Give people
| room to demonstrate the case for change.
| _ink_ wrote:
| Same for if you fill < 100 old oil wells with toxic waste? (not
| implying that anyone is doing that). How to prevent that if you
| want to build 200 vehicles, you just found a new company? Or
| 50.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| No, the harm needs to be considered. Usually courts dont take
| kindly to people obviously skirting the rules. It's not
| really a different company if it uses the same design and
| factory/tooling.
|
| The goal is to create more competition and not entrench
| existing players through burdensome regulation that treats
| kit cars the same as GM.
| Paracompact wrote:
| Sequestering CO2 is not toxic waste dumping. And as I
| understand, creating dummy companies to skirt regulations or
| taxes is already a known tactic with known antidotes.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| everyone wants to live in a dog eat dog world until they are
| being consumed themselves
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'm highly suspicious of anyone who can't clearly state that
| fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change.
|
| When they then claim, against all obvious facts, that there is a
| clear political consensus on fixing climate change in the USA,
| that becomes active distrust of their message.
|
| This appears to be another subset of the so-called "Abundance"
| movement where people avoid the elephant in the room (political
| power of fossil fuels) and get all screechy about those damn
| environmentalists and regulators who are the real villains
| holding us back from solving climate change with the free market.
|
| Meanwhile solar and wind farms are being illegally shut down by
| the government.
|
| But sure, it's abstract regulation at fault, not the politicians
| paid off by oil who regularly state that the problem his company
| is solving isn't even a problem.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Regulation is a nebulous term, dozens of posts about it in here
| and no one defined regulation, nevermind agreed on a definition
| of regulation.
|
| On one side, It's a useful buzz word for libertarians to
| attack, saying these prevent companies doing anything they want
| constantly, which Libs believe would help the world.
|
| Meanwhile it seems less ideological comments see shades of
| effectiveness in good vs bad regulations. There's also shades
| of law vs regulation, enforcement laxity, hidden purposes
| behind regs supposed reasons, etc.
|
| It's a tangled web and HN loves debating regulations more than
| almost anything!
| fff123qwerty wrote:
| One regulation definition is the international building code.
| Due to this regulation houses cost more than twice as much to
| build.
|
| Thus we get more homeless people, which creates more
| bureaucracy trying to solve the homeless problem created by
| the housing bureaucracy.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| It's a company doing carbon removal, the environmental
| equivalent of snake oil. They claim to have removed 11,234
| tonnes of CO2e, which might sound like a lot, but for context,
| a single seat on a return flight from New York to London
| produces 1.7 tonnes.
|
| There is only one solution, stop burning fossil fuels. No
| amount of stuffing agricultural waste down abandoned oil wells
| will make a dent in the climate crisis.
|
| PS: One of the investors in Charm Industrial also owns half a
| company that produces equipment for the oil and gas industry.
|
| https://charmindustrial.com/blog/accelerating-carbon-removal...
|
| https://www.exor.com/pages/companies-investments/companies/w...
| reop2whiskey wrote:
| Over-regulation is without a doubt one of the top, if not the
| top, reasons for many of our woes. Propagandists will continue to
| say they are necessary for our safety or environment, but the
| negative repercussions are obvious and abundant. The only true
| beneficiaries will always be a handful of potential victims and
| the monopolists.
| choffee wrote:
| So the argument is, we have manufactured something to create a
| noxious goop that we would like to inject into the ground at high
| pressure. Why are people so scared that this is going to have a
| long term impact our company has a short term profit to deliver
| to shareholders.
| yard2010 wrote:
| There is no such thing as over regulation, just regulation done
| wrong. And the solution for a bad regulation might be a better
| regulation rather than no regulation at all.
| temp123789246 wrote:
| In the same way that people struggle to comprehend exponential
| growth, they seem to also struggle to comprehend the cost of
| inaction, compounded over time.
|
| Imagine if the steam engine had not been allowed by regulators
| during the time of the Industrial Revolution.
|
| If that happened and we were all still working on farms today, I
| bet half the people would be telling us how much safer the
| government was making us with all its regulations. In blissful
| ignorance.
| imiric wrote:
| > If we had a regulatory system that could move fast to
| experiment with creative new technologies, we'd live in a world
| where our environment gets cleaned up faster, where awesome new
| hardware was constantly improving our lives by making things
| better and cheaper, and where large-scale hardtech innovation
| happened here at home in the USA, not in China.
|
| This is such a shortsighted, self-serving, and hypocritical
| mindset.
|
| "Move fast and break things" has been the motto of Big Tech for
| decades, even though they're slowly distancing themselves from
| the "break things" part. We know what this approach brings, and
| it's not something that inherently benefits the general
| population. It benefits corporations first and foremost, who when
| faced with little to no regulation as is the case with Big Tech,
| will take every opportunity they get to lie, cheat, and exploit
| their way into making themselves and their shareholders rich. The
| idea that removing the regulatory burden on companies will make
| "our world" better is a fantasy sold primarily by corporations
| themselves. It's no wonder the author is a CEO.
|
| I'm sure regulations are a major pain in the ass for companies. I
| experience similar frustrations as a citizen, and I can only
| imagine what large companies whose main product is innovative
| technology have to go through. I'm also sure that the regulatory
| system can be made more efficient, as most government systems
| can. But the answer isn't to allow companies to "move fast".
| Moving slow is precisely the correct approach for introducing new
| technology, regardless of how benevolent their CEO makes it sound
| to be. Governments need time to understand the impact of the
| technology, and plan accordingly. Companies need time to address
| any potential issues. Society needs time to adapt to it. All of
| these are good things. The only reason we would need to "move
| fast" is so that executives can get richer quicker. There are
| very few cases when moving faster is paramount, such as when
| there's a pandemic and people's lives are in immediate risk, but
| in all other situations it is the wrong approach.
|
| The claimed political tech race where nations must ensure that
| innovation happens within their borders is also a red herring.
| Companies have been offloading manufacturing to China for decades
| so that they can sell us cheaply made garbage while they skim off
| the margins, and now when the politics are shifting, they're all
| about keeping innovation home? Give me a break.
| cassepipe wrote:
| > CO2 captured in farm & forestry plant residues, convert it into
| a carbon-rich, BBQ sauce-like liquid
|
| How much carbon do forestry residues (dead branches, leaves and
| wood chips ?) take to release their carbon back to the atmosphere
| through rotting ? How much of that carbon woudl have stayed in
| the ground (unless there's wildfire) ?
| torginus wrote:
| But European companies need over-regulation - they are not
| competitive by themselves, so they need to raise artificial
| barriers to external market entrants.
|
| Since Europe is hopelessly behind by its own decision to pursue
| protectionism instead of competition, the choice remains between
| keeping overregulation which will continue the managed decline,
| or deregulation, in which companies would find their services are
| not competitive on cost, experience and would be wiped out in a
| freely competitive landscape.
|
| Of course the reality is not that black and white, it's clear
| that deregulation would hurt powerful and wealthy interests, so
| it will not happen at once - it'll happen to those most behind
| and least able to garner favorable political treatment.
|
| Overall I think the future of Europe still lies in managed
| decline, with its innovative capacities only able to be
| manifested in crafting new regulations and making the efforts to
| comply with them - it's future companies and startups will be
| funded and supported by governmental grants and/or powerful old
| money investors who also have vested interests in other
| companies.
| aallaall wrote:
| Some regulation _should_ double the costs, to prevent evil people
| from doing bad things.
|
| Also, under-regulation might triple the costs for society.
| tajd wrote:
| There has got to be opportunities here for abstracting over
| regulation to make it easier to comply with and prove compliance
| so that risk owners/govt can enact change faster. Now to figure
| out who would pay for that.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I get the idea but it is a very one-sided argument. It sounds
| like "but can't they just trust us?". And no, they can't, that's
| the reason why regulation exists. They said they have done all
| sorts of research to make sure their tech is safe, but would they
| have done it if there wasn't any regulation? Many companies
| wouldn't have, because it is not profitable, even accounting for
| the risk and especially for startups that don't have a lot to
| lose.
|
| They also claim that by not letting they do their things,
| regulation caused the emission of plenty of CO2, NO, etc... Yeah,
| right, we can say the same for drug testing too, drug testing may
| have killed millions by delaying the adoption of life saving
| drugs, so should we stop testing drugs? It is debatable really,
| but I am sure that experts studied to question seriously and that
| the answer is no.
|
| Regulation is costly and inefficient, obviously, that's the
| point, if it wasn't you wouldn't need regulation because that's
| what companies would do naturally. It is also not perfect and you
| can always find bad regulation. But overall, they are important.
| j_w wrote:
| > They said they have done all sorts of research to make sure
| their tech is safe...
|
| We've heard this one before. This really is a regulation bad
| because "trust me bro our product/service is so good for
| you/the environment/the world/etc and it's just regulations
| that are holding us back."
|
| This isn't to say that it's not a fine product/service, but we
| are talking about a service that alters how companies may
| comply with current/future emissions regulations. By apparently
| pumping it back into the ground. We might want the regulators
| to really make sure that is a good idea and not just take their
| word for it.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| It is a quagmire created out of the environmental regulatory
| regime. Until that is removed and replaced, innovations will
| be hampered, and the countries part of that regime will
| suffer or even stagnate.
| BellLabradors wrote:
| Do you think your points are applicable to the specific
| examples he gives? e.g.:
|
| >As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do
| certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn't
| increase emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this
| certification across every single truck engine family. It costs
| $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine
| families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use.
| That's $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in
| mind that this is to certify that a device--whose sole reason
| for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has
| demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and
| operations--is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It's
| a complete waste of money for everyone.
|
| And that $27M dollar cost doesn't include the cost to society.
| This over-regulation will delay deployment of EV trucks by
| years, increasing NO[?] and PM 2.5 air pollution exposure for
| many of society's least well-off who live near freeways
| hedora wrote:
| It's quite possible that the pollution controls on some of
| those engines wig out and turn the truck into a coal roller.
| Even with 10-100x fuel efficiency improvements, it could
| increase particulates, etc due to a bad fuel mix.
|
| The real question is why they're paying $100K per truck for a
| mobile smog test rig.
|
| The test equipment can't possibly cost more than $100K. That
| leaves $26.9M of "you're doing something obviously wrong".
|
| My guess is that the regulations aren't actually forcing the
| idiocy, or they are designed to subsidize emissions testers
| in some way. I'd guess it is the latter, which is just bad
| regulation.
|
| Smog checks in California have been pretty poorly
| administered for years. For one of my cars, the lowered the
| nox standard until it would have failed fresh from the
| factory, then made me spend more than the car was worth on a
| special cat that reduced emissions by < 10%.
|
| These days, cars continuously smog check themselves, so there
| could be a mandatory "send smog check report to the state"
| button on the dash, but that'd stop the gravy train for the
| smog test operators. At least they don't make you smog test
| EVs, I guess.
|
| With all the money that's wasted on having stations that
| check dashboard error lights, they could install air and
| noise pollution monitoring sensors, and seize cars that have
| been modified to be non-street-legal. This would be stronger
| and better regulation than we currently have (less disruption
| to people obeying it, more bad cars taken off the road,
| minimal privacy implications for anyone in compliance with
| the law, and lower cost to enforce).
|
| Also, it'd eliminate the need for the startup to test their
| truck retrofit, since the trucks would just light the
| stations up like a Christmas tree if there was an actual
| problem.
| areyousure wrote:
| > The real question is why they're paying $100K per truck
|
| > The test equipment can't possibly cost more than $100K.
| That leaves $26.9M of "you're doing something obviously
| wrong".
|
| It seems clear from the original text ("It costs $100,000
| per certification") that it's the certification FEE that is
| $100k. For example, https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/fi
| les/2024-08/mac202403... includes an individual base fee of
| $126,358.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >This over-regulation will delay deployment of EV trucks by
| years
|
| And we only need to look at Tesla to see what under-
| regulation could bring.
|
| I don't know if 27 million is a lot for a business at this
| scale. It sounds like a lot, but I see 62 "contacts" at the
| company. 62 workers making 100k a year means a year of
| compensation is already pushing on half this amount after
| other benefits (and that's just this companies employees, who
| are mostly management. So I'm probably underselling
| compensation and other companies they work with).
| some_random wrote:
| Did you read the article? The very first example is about
| taking _4 years_ to decide which regulatory framework applied
| to their carbon sequestration process. Does that seem
| acceptable to you? Again, that wasn 't to actually complete the
| regulatory review to determine that it was safe, that only took
| 14 months, that 4 years was just arguing over which of three
| permits applied to them.
|
| It's not "just trust me bro", the entire point of the article
| is that there are costs to doing nothing that regulators refuse
| to accept. It's the same thing with drug trials actually, we
| need testing for very obvious reasons but every day that
| lifesaving drugs are stuck in testing and review is another day
| that they aren't saving or improving the lives of patients.
| There _is_ a tradeoff.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > that 4 years was just arguing over which of three permits
| applied to them.
|
| sounds like an average legal case for a business at this
| level, yes.
|
| I'm all for overhauling the legal system and the meaning of
| "speedy trials", but the enforcement of regulations that
| seems tangential to if regulations are good/bad/over/under.
| jyounker wrote:
| Peter Reinhardt is specifically talking about pumping massive
| amounts of a synthetic liquid into the ground.
|
| The history of the 20th century is full of people insisting that
| some industrial product is perfectly safe to dump into the
| environment in massive amounts, and then it turns out years later
| that it's not safe at all. I can't imagine the process for
| injecting some new synthetic into the ground taking less than
| four years _in any situation_. It 's going to take more time than
| that just to do basic studies.
|
| The specific kinds of regulations he's arguing about have been
| written in blood and tumors, and they exist for good reasons.
| jyounker wrote:
| It's nobody on here is talking about Rheinhardt's #2 point: The
| US is not spending _enough_ on regulation. He specifically points
| out that regulators are underfunded and understaffed. In the US,
| this is often an active strategy by conservative politicians to
| undermine regulations, and portray the story that the regulations
| are bad, when in fact, the regulatory agencies are being
| intentionally preventing doing their jobs efficiently.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| The current administration is defunding anything they dont
| agree with. How many departments have folded within the past
| year?
|
| It's zero surprise that they wont fund any regulations. I'm
| honestly still surprised the NHTSB is still around at the rate
| they're going.
| tantalor wrote:
| They are trying to kill the Chemical Safety Hazard and
| Investigation Board (CSB)
|
| https://cen.acs.org/safety/industrial-safety/White-House-
| mov...
|
| Same group that makes these amazing post-portems on YouTube
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcMnf86n8_U
| lukeschlather wrote:
| If he believes the US is not spending enough on regulation, he
| shouldn't describe the situation as "over-regulation."
| user____name wrote:
| I wonder how much existing regulation is a result of ass-covering
| related to insurance premiums.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Everyone is against regulation, until their tap water is catching
| on fire.
| ckemere wrote:
| Potential counterpoint. Is it possible that one challenge is the
| lack of expertise in government? I think it's clear that most
| novel permitting situations involve one expert party (who want
| the permit but are potentially motivated to not report downsides)
| but the other party (the regulator) has to either develop their
| own expertise or say "no"/"wait".
|
| I was unimpressed by the situation described. It seems that
| existing injection wells often have all sorts of negative
| consequences that are avoided by bankruptcy. I suspect more
| "no"/"waits" in the past might have been reasonable
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Just on bad rule could more than double the cost. Or even put
| your project completely out of any feasibility region
| sharts wrote:
| > After building a software company to a multi-billion dollar
| exit...
|
| _sigh_
| sfink wrote:
| This is a great point, and I'm sympathetic to the problems
| raised, but it's not a great post. It's pushing the view that the
| relevant question is how much regulation there should be. That's
| just mechanism. Better questions are: how good are the
| regulations? What is the incentive structure to improve them?
| What are the mechanisms to improve them, by whittling away the
| problematic parts, modifying things that missed their target, and
| adding ones that would have better outcomes?
|
| Even here, I wouldn't want injecting CO2 into old oil wells to
| get a free pass. I think we'd agree that injecting CO2 into deep
| lakes would be a bad idea -- or rather, it would be a great idea,
| up until the lake turns over and suffocates thousands of people
| and most of the life in the area. Do I know that that can't
| happen if the injection is underground? I do not. What's actually
| needed here is research, and regulation is the blunt instrument
| that you have to use when the research is not yet available or
| suspiciously funded by those who will benefit and/or there's no
| mechanism for paying for it (who should be paying, anyway?) [Note
| that this is speculative; perhaps this research does exist and is
| of good quality. But this dynamic will still come up when anyone
| tries doing anything new and potentially dangerous.]
|
| I agree that over-regulation is a major impediment. I just don't
| think the argument "over-regulation bad, let's throw away all of
| our seat belts" is productive.
| m101 wrote:
| Couple comments having read gist of comments here:
|
| 1) It's not about bad regulation either: it may be impossible to
| design good regulation
|
| "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how
| little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
| - Friedrich Hayek
|
| 2) Everyone agrees that controlling bad externalities is good.
| The point is _at what cost_?
|
| 3) Regulation isn't the only answer to things. Perhaps the issue
| is private property isn't properly enforced? Perhaps things could
| be solved through insurance schemes? There are many complex
| systems that have been solved _without the use of government
| mandated regulation_
| thesnide wrote:
| it is usually the result of
| https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/04/brains-prefer-adding...
| vannevar wrote:
| I'm sure there are bad regulations. But the reason that there is
| reliance on simple one-size-fits-all rules is that we are
| unwilling to pay the cost of investigating each special case and
| having someone make an expert judgment.
|
| Taking the trucking case as an example, it's certainly reasonable
| to require proof that the proposed technology solution doesn't
| actually make the problem worse in practice. While most people
| are honest, there are dishonest businesses that would claim
| environmental benefits for their product that simply don't exist
| (see the case of VW and their "clean diesel" fraud). So the
| regulation is a good one. The author's complaint is that it took
| too long and cost too much to provide the proof. Maybe he's
| right, but maybe he's not. Maybe he was satisfied by less
| evidence than the government, because he had a financial interest
| in believing in the technology. Just saying it was all
| unnecessary doesn't make it so.
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