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.
!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.
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
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.
I guess I don’t stand directly underneath while typing, occasionally wipe water droplets off the screen, and ask myself if I should wrap up my shower first
> '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.
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.
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.
"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.
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, ...
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.
This applies also to enacting monstrously stupid regulations. Or even ones that were introduced entirely as revenge or to create opportunity for corruption.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or will education make things worse by teaching groups how to use corruption to create even more regulations that benefits them against everything else.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
>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.
I'm not arguing that pro-regulation is a bad stance just noting that my image of youth is wounded by thinking that the new youth are hands down in favor of it in general.
This is a silly and sad sentiment. Part of me just wants to think that some among us are crazy or naive enough to tend towards resistance. I don't blame anyone for not being so.
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.
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.
> !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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
None of this is true. A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else. Every cost of their business that's possible to externalize will be externalized. Every corner will be cut in the name of marginally better profits.
For example, you say lawsuits are costly. To a company, that's meaningless. The only question is, is the cost of a lawsuit greater than the money saved cutting corners? If not, it's better to kill people and deal with the lawsuits: [1].
Moreover, companies are still run by people, and people have biases. Most notable of which is the short-term thinking bias that results in companies irrationally optimizing for short-term gains, compromising long-term ones. And what fits perfectly into that trap? Yep, safety. Do you know how much money you could save by delaying maintenance? Lots, lots of money to be had right now vs a nebulous concept of potentially higher chance of an accident at some uncertain point in the future. The monkey with its primitive brain chooses the immediate reward every time.
> A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else.
You probably meant public companies because otherwise this sentence and rest of your comment do not reflect reality.
According to [0] (2019), 90% of (6.1m) businesses have < 10 employees. Lawsuits are a very big deal to these enterprises. They are not out to kill people for marginal profits.
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.
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.
I'm actually just taking the very outside view on this. I cannot think of any industry which has both existed for 100 years and would not be called safer today than it was 100 years ago. The closest I get are industries which stopped existing entirely because new industries supplanted them, but even there the argument is suspect. This seems to be a general trend regardless of the amount of regulation applied to the industry.
I think you might be unaware of the various regulations that are driving all of these other non-aviation industries towards better safety. Not only that, but liability and insurance claims also drive safety measures, which are also enabled by workman's comp and other regulations). I'm having trouble imagining a single company policy around safety (either for workers or customers) that is not ultimately driven by government involvement or the legal system.
I never claimed anything about company safety policies. Let's keep separate the concept of an industry becoming safer from whatever policies those companies officially adopt after rounds of writing and rewriting.
To wit, three prominent examples of industries frontrunning safety advances well in advance of any regulation around them. One: In the late 19th century, early electrification was burning cities down. Private insurance companies banded together to form the Underwriter's Laboratory to test products, refusing to insure buildings that didn't use UL-listed devices. Manufacturers voluntarily submitted to rigorous safety testing not because the police would arrest them, but because it got them access to insurance at a considerably lower cost.
Two: In 1959, Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin invented the three-point seatbelt. Volvo gave the patent away voluntarily to all competitors, partly to establish a brand identity of safety and innovation, and partly because they genuinely recognized that seatbelts saved lives. If your claims were right, Volvo would have either kept the patent to monopolize safety or, worse, buried it to save manufacturing costs. Instead, the market rewarded them for being the "safe car," and other manufacturers had to follow suit to compete, decades before seatbelt laws became universal.
Three: There currently exists almost no federal law governing recreational scuba diving in the United States. Yet, the industry is obsessed with safety. Shops by and large will not fill your tank without a C-card. The PADI and the NAUI update their standards constantly. If tourists started drowning en masse, in a sport virtually custom designed to do so, the industry would vanish. They self-regulate to preserve their market cap.
With all that, let's return to the claim you are endorsing. You say you are "absolutely confident", >99.99%, that the FAA's dissolution would lead an entire industry to be less safe a century from now. This seems like, at minimum, a lack of imagination regarding how markets solve coordination problems. You are assuming that in the absence of the FAA, a vacuum would remain. History suggests the opposite. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that without a shield of regulatory compliance to hide behind in court, liability pressures might actually make airlines more risk-averse, not less.
Ah yes, the best thing for society is surely to take the power from private people and businesses and to centralize it in government bureaucracy. Then only a small handful of people get to decide how we live! Along with the threat of imprisonment or violence if we don’t comply! Such a great idea.
> Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing.
I wrote about this in the past, but the TLDR is that it’s anywhere between extremely tough to impossible to do it. The TLDR is that modern tech systems are so many and so advanced that only engineers of the company can truly understand it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Well in contrast to the enterprises which can survive free competition, those which rely on regulations to survive receive rents for which no corresponding benefit to consumers can be recovered. This is what rentseeking is.
There is a very big difference between succeeding against competition because you're able to deliver a cheaper or better product, as in free competition, and succeeding because a government decree happens to exclude your product from certain liabilities that your competitors aren't excluded from.
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.”
You’re never gonna get these people to understand basic economics if they don’t already. It’s mindblowing people do not understand that more regulation = more red tape = less competition as the only companies that can afford to do business in that environment are the ones already in power with resources. Taxation and regulation genuinely only further embed those in power. Ironically, most leftists that advocate for more taxation and regulation in an effort to help the poor and working classes seem to have no grasp of economic realities at all.
> 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.
> 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.
>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?
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.
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.
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)
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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".
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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”?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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."
> 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?
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.
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
> 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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Which may also be expressed as an expectation for a particular quality at a particular cost. There are no deadweights to exploit in insulin production. It seems to some people that regulation is the deadweight but without that quality guarantee you’re dependent on suppliers which duplicates the cost of “self regulation” across the sector.
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.
> 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????
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.
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.
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
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.
The quality of a product is subjective to the user of that product. This is a scientific fact of economics, and insistence otherwise is science denial.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
The euro being undervalued is a relative statement. It’s undervalued for Germany in the sense that considering Germany current policies and trade balance, an equivalent German only currency would be considerably stronger. That’s a significant part of how Germany remains competitive despite investing so little in their productivity.
Conversely, it’s extremely overvalued for the economy of the periphery. If you look at their trade balance and policies, their own currency would be far weaker. Paradoxically this would be a boon for them. Sure it would impact their ability to import but it would make their exports far cheaper in relative terms.
Adding country with economy pulling down the value of the euro is therefore extremely advantageous to Germany at the expense of the periphery. This is by design. A currency union can’t work without transfers.
That’s why it’s extremely unfair to impose the euro as part of the criteria for joining and why you see country like Poland doing its best to not join. Sadly, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy are stuck in. I personally can’t refrain from strongly resenting the union every time I see someone from the advantaged core pretending to be morally virtuous while being the direct beneficiary of one of the most unfair transfer setup since decolonisation and pretend the south should just go with austerity which is the exact reverse of what’s actually needed (investment and devaluation).
I somehow understand how we got there and the weight the completely botched unification of Germany in 1990 carries in it. It doesn’t really make the pill easier to swallow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't let customer to decide if they love pesticide or not, their are basic functions even to a minimal state and environment and health protection is among them.
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.
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.
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.
> I don't think that price fixing by government should be allowed in any situation
You're confusing fixing with negotiating.
The govt provides healthcare. They pay for the meds. Are you saying the government shouldn't be allowed to negotiate what it pays for it's own insurance????
I was responding to a comment that said "regulating insulin prices". Regulating and negotiating are not the same. Regulation is the government using its power to dictate the price a seller is allowed to sell a product for (price fixing). Negotiation means the pharmaceutical company can just say no if the government offers a price that is too low.
Or maybe you are thinking that government force is "negotiating". Something along the lines of give us this price or we make it illegal for you to do "x". Or, alternatively, we will allow you to do "x" if you give us this price. While that is technically negotiating it is malignant government behavior known as coercion.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 NOₓ and PM 2.5 air pollution exposure for many of society’s least well-off who live near freeways
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.
>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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The entire point of the article is that this timeline is utterly unacceptable, and honestly if you disagree then I don't really care about any of your other opinions.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> tax your salary and capital gains much more to finance affordable public housing construction
I would have taken that position when I was younger so I won't be too critical. But IRL trusting centrists politicians to spend that money properly and actually build mass housing is mostly a pipe dream. They can't even build a single railroad in the country let alone hundreds of thousands of houses in the city proper.
Radicals rarely take government for long... and as long a capitalism is the only true wealth generator for the public I wouldn't gamble on the far-left being the party that achieves that rare feat (absent a dictatorship).
It's easier to just campaign for government to do less instead of more. Just let people build things they need. There's already massive pent up demand and private capital ready to build housing the second government lets them. It doesn't need risky advertising for more taxation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
Right but thats no reason to try and protect all regulation from criticism.
The problem is that most people assume it is all good, but if you ever get a bunch of people together from a specific industry you will get a sense on how bad regulation of that industry is. Often in places laughably bad. But no one generally cares enough outside of that group to change it. You need to expose people to bad regulation enough that they develop some empathy, to the extent that they can turn a critical eye to the rest of it. Thats the only way to develop an informed voting base these days.
To put it in context, I love to joke with people in wireless about how bad different regulatory frameworks are. I have never once in my entire life heard anyone complain about working at heights/ rope and rescue requirements in any jurisdiction. They are smart requirements and directly save lives. If a tower climber ever tells me "No I am not climbing that", that's basically gospel for me.
We don't disagree at all. I was disagreeing with the notion that regulation as an idea is bad. I completely agree that people and experts should have a democratic voice in the regulation that governs them
>Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are immediately have this thought.
The problem is that such people often have no (original) thoughts. As the old saying going about bring the horse to the water etc.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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...
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?
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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).
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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?
>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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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?
>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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
No in my locality, angry old karens got together to get the local government to prevent used tyre sales (small fine from memory), and actively damage and break tyres that are being provided to motorsport enthusiasts for free. Actually they were able to create a police task force to damage the tyres for them. They also had a tyre buyback scheme at one point, to make bald tyres unaffordable.
Its a social harassment scheme that has become popular for the local government to buy into and legitimize.
It is already illegal to drive with bald tyres, so the extra regulations and enforcement really only serve to make life difficult for law abiding citizens.
Keep in mind we have 2 local legal motorsport venues that have open track days. And theres a separate police task force that spend their time chasing down our principle hoons, who are public enough that they have an official facebook page and sell illegal car modifications over facebook sales groups.
>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).
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.
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.
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.
>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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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?
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.
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 ..?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Regulating lead in petrol was very much not uncontroversial when it was regulated. Same with asbestos - the industries involved fought really hard against it.
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.
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.
> 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.
An inane, intentionally bad-faith reading of my comment that you fell back on because you know you don’t have the requisite background knowledge to refute anything I’m saying.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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".
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
By this logic US is two-halves-party state. You are no less dictatorial than China, just better at hiding it at the cost of how performant it is. Democracy is an European thing that rarely ever got successfully exported.
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.
> The US is a one-party state because of elite capture.
This is demonstrably false given the election result in 2016. Donald Trump was absolutely the anti-elite candidate with all of the establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle denouncing him as a candidate and calling his supporters fascists. His election was a national shock.
> China found a system that works for them after a century of trying every system.
Fine, and we'll see how that system works over the next century. This thread isn't about the efficacy of the Chinese system. It's about protecting the concept of democracy from propaganda.
> This is demonstrably false given the election result in 2016. Donald Trump was absolutely the anti-elite candidate with all of the establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle denouncing him as a candidate and calling his supporters fascists. His election was a national shock.
And then he governed in a reactionary way that favored the elites with whom he transacted. One man cannot change the superstructure through electoral means, as Lenin pointed out. All the undemocratic, unilateral powers that Trump has taken advantage of didn't start with him; they began with his predecessors and the larger national security state, who expanded executive power without oversight.
>Fine, and we'll see how that system works over the next century. This thread isn't about the efficacy of the Chinese system. It's about protecting the concept of democracy from propaganda.
Propaganda is how you control public opinion and sentiment in a democracy. See the work of Edward Bernays and Chomsky. Propaganda is an integral part of modern liberal democracies to arrive at a consensus that is largely disconnected from the needs or will of the electorate.
China doesn't need us to tell them how to run their country or their provinces.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 關係. 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
“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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your article reminds me of Elon's run-ins with insane regulations for the Starship development, where he had to evaluate the risk of rockets landing on top of endangered sharks, but the department he was dealing with kept the density of sharks in the ocean a secret from themselves because they were worried about the information leaking out to illegal sharkfin poachers. Then SpaceX having to put headphones on seals and play sounds of sonic booms for them to see if they're terrified or not.
Lots of people right here on HN were making the argument that yes, yes, it makes perfect sense to nail humanity's feet to the ground, that we shouldn't reach for the stars, because there's an infinitesimal chance that one shark could be hurt by a falling rocket one day!
The main problem I see is that in some sense regulators have infinite power to say "no" or make demands, often with no recourse available to those applying for permits.
What might be needed is some sort of independent arbitration, where a CEO could go and say: "Hey, random paper-pusher here is holding up a $10 billion dollar project because they think it's hilarious to make me wrangle seals." and then have that result in a real consequence for the bureaucracy in question. As in: Your dumb arse is fired, because you wilfully mis-interpreted the intention of the law, doing millions or even billions in economic costs, you're doing more harm than good, etc...
There's precedent for such monopolistic organisations. For example, the telecommunications industry ombudsman in Australia. Individual citizens can submit complaints to the ombudsman and the result is always spectacular: Suddenly the impossible is possible, the unfair sneaky bullshit charge becomes miraculously reversible, etc...
Something like that could work for government bureaucracy also. Something vaguely like DOGE, but actually useful, and independently controlled and funded in some manner so it isn't captured by the special interests it is meant to curtail.
Think it's hilarious to make someone fill out paperwork where the required input is a secret nobody is allowed to know? Let's go see the ombudsman and have you risk getting kicked out of public office for life. Still need the paperwork filled out? No? Funny that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"This slashes emissions that negatively impact both air quality and climate..." So... Your entire supply is carbon free? I think not, as well as the permitting for an additional axle group and the extra weight.
If you recharge from the standard energy mix you are still burning fossil fuel. But let's just gloss over that.
Now again with the weight, how easy is it to corner and stop? There is probably a minimum of 12,000 lbs of extra weight... And you need a charging network at the truck stops... There is so much just glossed over ... Nice sales job.
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
> 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) ?
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
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.
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!"
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That belies why relying on individual investors to guide society is never going to work. You might as well cede the globe over to whichever society had the balls to centralize the economy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 overregulation and what is really needed, but it'd reather have too much than not enough.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
“All outsourced, vendor, and subcontractor companies down the entire production/waste chain to the raw material must meet US environmental regulations.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
>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.
> You don't get Dieselgsate without convoluted regulation and compliance industries. You can't game a complex text without a complex test to be gamed.
No you do not. You get smokes of diesel fumes without dieselgate.
Yes, some regulations are going too far and yes, it's hard to rewind it back, but that is mostly because any time something was under-regulated, companies abused it far harder.
I do think the regulations should get review period some time after enactment (whether the desired affect was met, the cost, whether it was worth it, could it be done other, easier way etc.) but it is still probably preferable than under-regulation.
And one rarely considered (by rule-makers) context is how much more they affect smaller players, making competing with established industry giants that much harder
"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.
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.
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.
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.
!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.
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
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.
Ok, I'll bite... how do you type in the shower?
Aren't most phones these days fairly waterproof?
Yes, but they're a PITA to use when wet because the touch screen doesn't work.
I guess I don’t stand directly underneath while typing, occasionally wipe water droplets off the screen, and ask myself if I should wrap up my shower first
> '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.
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.
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.
"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.
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, ...
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.
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.
So you identify that tools can be used wrong, but still choose to blame the tool instead of the user abusing it?
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.
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
It does exist! https://occupationallicensing.com/occupation/interior-design...
Yes, it has gotten that bad.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Or will education make things worse by teaching groups how to use corruption to create even more regulations that benefits them against everything else.
>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.
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.
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.
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
> It's not that we never need less regulation
this would be going against
> 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Electrician/plumber/hvac trade groups salivate over the idea of having the products they install be as locked down as Hyundai brake pads.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I mean same
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.
>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.
This is a very thoughtful response; thank you.
I'm not arguing that pro-regulation is a bad stance just noting that my image of youth is wounded by thinking that the new youth are hands down in favor of it in general.
This is a silly and sad sentiment. Part of me just wants to think that some among us are crazy or naive enough to tend towards resistance. I don't blame anyone for not being so.
> 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.
Thanks. Not an original idea of mine, but I struggle to recall where I got it from.
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.
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.
> !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.
>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.
Sorry, what are you talking about?
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.
Those decades were an era that followed massive airline deregulation. This is another case of the good regulation being less regulation.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
None of this is true. A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else. Every cost of their business that's possible to externalize will be externalized. Every corner will be cut in the name of marginally better profits.
For example, you say lawsuits are costly. To a company, that's meaningless. The only question is, is the cost of a lawsuit greater than the money saved cutting corners? If not, it's better to kill people and deal with the lawsuits: [1].
Moreover, companies are still run by people, and people have biases. Most notable of which is the short-term thinking bias that results in companies irrationally optimizing for short-term gains, compromising long-term ones. And what fits perfectly into that trap? Yep, safety. Do you know how much money you could save by delaying maintenance? Lots, lots of money to be had right now vs a nebulous concept of potentially higher chance of an accident at some uncertain point in the future. The monkey with its primitive brain chooses the immediate reward every time.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE
> A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else.
You probably meant public companies because otherwise this sentence and rest of your comment do not reflect reality.
According to [0] (2019), 90% of (6.1m) businesses have < 10 employees. Lawsuits are a very big deal to these enterprises. They are not out to kill people for marginal profits.
[0] https://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-data/
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.
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.
I'm actually just taking the very outside view on this. I cannot think of any industry which has both existed for 100 years and would not be called safer today than it was 100 years ago. The closest I get are industries which stopped existing entirely because new industries supplanted them, but even there the argument is suspect. This seems to be a general trend regardless of the amount of regulation applied to the industry.
I think you might be unaware of the various regulations that are driving all of these other non-aviation industries towards better safety. Not only that, but liability and insurance claims also drive safety measures, which are also enabled by workman's comp and other regulations). I'm having trouble imagining a single company policy around safety (either for workers or customers) that is not ultimately driven by government involvement or the legal system.
I never claimed anything about company safety policies. Let's keep separate the concept of an industry becoming safer from whatever policies those companies officially adopt after rounds of writing and rewriting.
To wit, three prominent examples of industries frontrunning safety advances well in advance of any regulation around them. One: In the late 19th century, early electrification was burning cities down. Private insurance companies banded together to form the Underwriter's Laboratory to test products, refusing to insure buildings that didn't use UL-listed devices. Manufacturers voluntarily submitted to rigorous safety testing not because the police would arrest them, but because it got them access to insurance at a considerably lower cost.
Two: In 1959, Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin invented the three-point seatbelt. Volvo gave the patent away voluntarily to all competitors, partly to establish a brand identity of safety and innovation, and partly because they genuinely recognized that seatbelts saved lives. If your claims were right, Volvo would have either kept the patent to monopolize safety or, worse, buried it to save manufacturing costs. Instead, the market rewarded them for being the "safe car," and other manufacturers had to follow suit to compete, decades before seatbelt laws became universal.
Three: There currently exists almost no federal law governing recreational scuba diving in the United States. Yet, the industry is obsessed with safety. Shops by and large will not fill your tank without a C-card. The PADI and the NAUI update their standards constantly. If tourists started drowning en masse, in a sport virtually custom designed to do so, the industry would vanish. They self-regulate to preserve their market cap.
With all that, let's return to the claim you are endorsing. You say you are "absolutely confident", >99.99%, that the FAA's dissolution would lead an entire industry to be less safe a century from now. This seems like, at minimum, a lack of imagination regarding how markets solve coordination problems. You are assuming that in the absence of the FAA, a vacuum would remain. History suggests the opposite. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that without a shield of regulatory compliance to hide behind in court, liability pressures might actually make airlines more risk-averse, not less.
Ah yes, the best thing for society is surely to take the power from private people and businesses and to centralize it in government bureaucracy. Then only a small handful of people get to decide how we live! Along with the threat of imprisonment or violence if we don’t comply! Such a great idea.
> Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing.
I wrote about this in the past, but the TLDR is that it’s anywhere between extremely tough to impossible to do it. The TLDR is that modern tech systems are so many and so advanced that only engineers of the company can truly understand it.
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.
It also allows corps to lock out competitors who cannot afford to wade through regulatory hell.
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.
Profit-seeking incentivizes safety and makes any cartel situation inherently unstable.
Regulations, on the other hand, allow stable equilibria featuring cartels.
There's plenty of examples where companies have explicitly put profit ahead of safety (e.g. Ford Pinto).
> 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.
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.
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?
Well in contrast to the enterprises which can survive free competition, those which rely on regulations to survive receive rents for which no corresponding benefit to consumers can be recovered. This is what rentseeking is.
There is a very big difference between succeeding against competition because you're able to deliver a cheaper or better product, as in free competition, and succeeding because a government decree happens to exclude your product from certain liabilities that your competitors aren't excluded from.
I bet you believe in wizards and magic fairy dust too.
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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.”
You’re never gonna get these people to understand basic economics if they don’t already. It’s mindblowing people do not understand that more regulation = more red tape = less competition as the only companies that can afford to do business in that environment are the ones already in power with resources. Taxation and regulation genuinely only further embed those in power. Ironically, most leftists that advocate for more taxation and regulation in an effort to help the poor and working classes seem to have no grasp of economic realities at all.
Yes, that's why it's important to regulate before the industry gets enough political power to buy the "regulations" they want.
> 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.
> 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.
>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?
Was any privacy actually gained?
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.
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 ?
That's called Lawful Evil in tabletop gaming circles. exploiting the law to your benefit, even if it goes against the original intent.
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.
Beware the spherical cow-shaped orb of regulations!
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)
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The idea is they don’t want people from the Netherlands wrapping and reselling Romanian data and cutting the bottom out of the market.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Login fall under the strictly necessary category and does not require consent for cookie storage under GDPR.
Cookie banners usually refer to pre GDPR, where there is no reject, just info that site uses cookies. Useless info.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
And thise settings originally were all toggled on because ads industry doesn't care
You're completely missing the point...
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".
If you don't live in a GDPR country, your experience doesn't really prove or disprove anything I just said...
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
Isn't that bad lawyers rather than bad rules?
If the rules are so opaque even professional lawyers are confused, thats a bad law.
They are not that opaque
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
A good point. Regulation is worth nothing if not enforced. There are new right to repair laws but nothing has been enforced.
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 ?
> 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.
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-...
Take only pictures, leave only footprints and jobbies.
Aha, the North Coast 500 Motorhome mentality.
Don't buy a thing, do 15mph regardless of how many cars are behind you, tip your chemical toilet right outside people's houses.
Next year we're going to have fully restored WW2 gun emplacements along it.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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".
> 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”?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
[dead]
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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
> 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.
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
Preventing forced labor is a feature of normal contract law and property rights, and has little to do with regulations.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Please just stop being antisocial.
If that were the case, there would be no HackerNews.
Why don't the regulators stop being antisocial?
Can you please link the law that states that?
I see too much bad faith shit thrown around.
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.
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.
Explain how the "gigantic regulatory morass" led to higher insulin costs?
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.
lol did you actually read the quoted text? Because 0% of it backs up your argument
Low regulation means almost anyone can make it, almost anyone can sell it, almost anyone can buy it.
Government capture by big players who promote heavy regulation in order to eliminate smaller competition?
> 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?
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.
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?
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
> 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.
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
"remained flat" and "remained flat when adjusted for inflation" are two very different things.
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)
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
>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?
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.
> this is a greed problem.
Also that. But overregulation makes too hard for others to compete and offer cheaper insulin.
Which may also be expressed as an expectation for a particular quality at a particular cost. There are no deadweights to exploit in insulin production. It seems to some people that regulation is the deadweight but without that quality guarantee you’re dependent on suppliers which duplicates the cost of “self regulation” across the sector.
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.
2026?
yes, thanks.
> 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????
>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...
Because it’s such a basic commodity with very little differentiation so profitability can only be achieved at scale.
You're sharing a 10 year old article to back up your claims?
And the answer is because it's a monopoly that the govt refuses to regulate.
How many insulin producers are there in europe?
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.
All clearly categorised and regulated. Fill the boxes and ship em and STFU
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.
> 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
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.
> subjective thing
There is nothing subjective about insulin quality you dimwit
The quality of a product is subjective to the user of that product. This is a scientific fact of economics, and insistence otherwise is science denial.
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.
People don't innovate to compete on cost?
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
Why not just have a single regulation, that products must be clearly labeled by their country of origin, and let consumers decide the rest?
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.
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.
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.
Genuine question, how does adding more Eastern countries help Germany?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
But how does weakness of their economies lead to the euro being undervalued?
The euro being undervalued is a relative statement. It’s undervalued for Germany in the sense that considering Germany current policies and trade balance, an equivalent German only currency would be considerably stronger. That’s a significant part of how Germany remains competitive despite investing so little in their productivity.
Conversely, it’s extremely overvalued for the economy of the periphery. If you look at their trade balance and policies, their own currency would be far weaker. Paradoxically this would be a boon for them. Sure it would impact their ability to import but it would make their exports far cheaper in relative terms.
Adding country with economy pulling down the value of the euro is therefore extremely advantageous to Germany at the expense of the periphery. This is by design. A currency union can’t work without transfers.
That’s why it’s extremely unfair to impose the euro as part of the criteria for joining and why you see country like Poland doing its best to not join. Sadly, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy are stuck in. I personally can’t refrain from strongly resenting the union every time I see someone from the advantaged core pretending to be morally virtuous while being the direct beneficiary of one of the most unfair transfer setup since decolonisation and pretend the south should just go with austerity which is the exact reverse of what’s actually needed (investment and devaluation).
I somehow understand how we got there and the weight the completely botched unification of Germany in 1990 carries in it. It doesn’t really make the pill easier to swallow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't let customer to decide if they love pesticide or not, their are basic functions even to a minimal state and environment and health protection is among them.
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.
I'm guessing you're American? What regulations make it expensive in America but affordable in other parts of the world?
> 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.
Patents are form of regulation, by the way. They grant a legal monopoly over production of a particular product.
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.
> I don't think that price fixing by government should be allowed in any situation
You're confusing fixing with negotiating.
The govt provides healthcare. They pay for the meds. Are you saying the government shouldn't be allowed to negotiate what it pays for it's own insurance????
I was responding to a comment that said "regulating insulin prices". Regulating and negotiating are not the same. Regulation is the government using its power to dictate the price a seller is allowed to sell a product for (price fixing). Negotiation means the pharmaceutical company can just say no if the government offers a price that is too low.
Or maybe you are thinking that government force is "negotiating". Something along the lines of give us this price or we make it illegal for you to do "x". Or, alternatively, we will allow you to do "x" if you give us this price. While that is technically negotiating it is malignant government behavior known as coercion.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
I hope you enjoy the superiority high that that comment gave you before it disappear
We are all useful idiots in some context, comrade.
Another word for "regulations" is "protections".
We still need to ask what is being protected (and if was what we intended), and if the cost is worth it.
>They aren't created for the power trip of government officials.
They weren't created for that reason, but it end up being used precisely for that.
That is the conundrum we all face - how much power do we give the gvt.
> 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.
> Try to rethink how money is created and how money gets its value and how and by whom that wealth is distributed.
Please elaborate.
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.
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.
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.
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 NOₓ and PM 2.5 air pollution exposure for many of society’s least well-off who live near freeways
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.
> 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/files/2024-08/mac202403... includes an individual base fee of $126,358.
>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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The entire point of the article is that this timeline is utterly unacceptable, and honestly if you disagree then I don't really care about any of your other opinions.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
It doesn't follow that the regulations are sensible reactions to those problems.
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?
> 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?
Aren't the oil companies "working" on carbon capture?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
Even to chemical engineers, life cycle analysis is not something that is general knowledge.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
> western homeless crisis
Haven't really heard about this crisis. Are you referring to the US?
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...
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.
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).
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.
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...
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."
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/...
Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm all have it.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> tax your salary and capital gains much more to finance affordable public housing construction
I would have taken that position when I was younger so I won't be too critical. But IRL trusting centrists politicians to spend that money properly and actually build mass housing is mostly a pipe dream. They can't even build a single railroad in the country let alone hundreds of thousands of houses in the city proper.
Radicals rarely take government for long... and as long a capitalism is the only true wealth generator for the public I wouldn't gamble on the far-left being the party that achieves that rare feat (absent a dictatorship).
It's easier to just campaign for government to do less instead of more. Just let people build things they need. There's already massive pent up demand and private capital ready to build housing the second government lets them. It doesn't need risky advertising for more taxation.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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.
Which just leads to things like this
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/earthq...
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.
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.
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.
The Code of Hammurabi. https://archive.org/details/hiddenrichessour0000hays/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.
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.
When the officials are nearly universally corrupt, the regulations de facto do not exist.
> 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
You don't make a billion dollars thinking like that. Dude's playing a different game.
Business doesn't have goals beyond money. Any good it does is completely incidental.
That's a wild oversimplification
Sometimes it's good to look beyond myriad of narratives to see what actually makes a thing tick.
Would you please like to tell everyone how that's oversimplified?
> 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.
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.
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.
> company's business is regulatory arbitrage
This isn't arbitrage any more than selling warships is military arbitrage.
It’s not pork because I like it?
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't that go away as a cost if the government stops paying for healthcare? I heard they were doing this in the US?
The government pays for healthcare for about 43% of Americans. The rest mostly get it from work.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
Right but thats no reason to try and protect all regulation from criticism.
The problem is that most people assume it is all good, but if you ever get a bunch of people together from a specific industry you will get a sense on how bad regulation of that industry is. Often in places laughably bad. But no one generally cares enough outside of that group to change it. You need to expose people to bad regulation enough that they develop some empathy, to the extent that they can turn a critical eye to the rest of it. Thats the only way to develop an informed voting base these days.
To put it in context, I love to joke with people in wireless about how bad different regulatory frameworks are. I have never once in my entire life heard anyone complain about working at heights/ rope and rescue requirements in any jurisdiction. They are smart requirements and directly save lives. If a tower climber ever tells me "No I am not climbing that", that's basically gospel for me.
We don't disagree at all. I was disagreeing with the notion that regulation as an idea is bad. I completely agree that people and experts should have a democratic voice in the regulation that governs them
>Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are immediately have this thought.
The problem is that such people often have no (original) thoughts. As the old saying going about bring the horse to the water etc.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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...
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?
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
you'll be more at home over on https://www.reddit.com
This doesn't seem constructive.
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.
"
I'd disagree, because at least I'm trying to explain myself.
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).
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
The requirement doesn't depend on the company having made any particular claims.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
It's an electric motor with no emissions and therefore can't possibly increase emissions. There's your data. No regulations needed.
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.
> 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?
>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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
That's an argument to do better, not to avoid doing at all.
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?
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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...
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
No in my locality, angry old karens got together to get the local government to prevent used tyre sales (small fine from memory), and actively damage and break tyres that are being provided to motorsport enthusiasts for free. Actually they were able to create a police task force to damage the tyres for them. They also had a tyre buyback scheme at one point, to make bald tyres unaffordable.
Its a social harassment scheme that has become popular for the local government to buy into and legitimize.
It is already illegal to drive with bald tyres, so the extra regulations and enforcement really only serve to make life difficult for law abiding citizens.
Keep in mind we have 2 local legal motorsport venues that have open track days. And theres a separate police task force that spend their time chasing down our principle hoons, who are public enough that they have an official facebook page and sell illegal car modifications over facebook sales groups.
>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).
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.
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.
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.
>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
>A tire worn down to the tread wear indicator or similar is only useful as a burnout tire.
Correct. And thats a motorsport.
On the other hand, how many regulations are written in blood or cancer?
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.
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.
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
If he believes the US is not spending enough on regulation, he shouldn't describe the situation as "over-regulation."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
What is the average age of a corporation?
I say that as someone who actually thinks a little central planning is good.
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 ..?
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?
Some corps live 1 year and others have been around for 150+ and they all use central planning. This seems unrelated.
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.
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.
Is that a useful metric in a vacuum like that?
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.
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.
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.
"All blanket statements are wrong" (is a blanket statement).
There's wide agreement that reality is complicated and that simple elegant theories are valuable.
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.
Yes, contradictory ones abound. Look before you leap, seize the day.
> 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.
Regulating lead in petrol was very much not uncontroversial when it was regulated. Same with asbestos - the industries involved fought really hard against it.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
You mean the British Empire, that committed all sorts of atrocities? Thats what you call "works"?
Yes.
> Europe conquered the world using central planning.
Ah yes, I remember when the country of Europe conquered the world.
An inane, intentionally bad-faith reading of my comment that you fell back on because you know you don’t have the requisite background knowledge to refute anything I’m saying.
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.
[dead]
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.
>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?
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.
Who proved it works really well in several configurations?
And how do you codify the threshold for what "very similar" configurations don't need to be tested and those that do?
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.
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.
The null hypothesis is that interventions are just as if not more likely to cause harm than do good.
Aren't regulations a form of intervention?
Yeah thats my point.
Ah, I read it backwards, since companies selling things to make trucks "better" is also an intervention.
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.
Some kind of testing should be required but 27mil seems egregious
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?
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.
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.
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
This is such a bizarre myth but I guess it matches your priors.
> 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?
Its not usually one person, but many well meaning committees.
It's not like anyone ever added a device to an engine to deliberately defeat these tests.
lol
state and federal bureaucrats do not lose jobs
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.
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.
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.
>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?
Because they can't afford the required testing for all of them?
The testing that is clearly theater and a waste of money for all involved?
It looks like theater when everything goes right.
But when it catches a problem suddenly it’s not theater.
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.
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...
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?
Spoken like someone who has no idea how hard it is to actually get anything done in real life vs your armchair.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
Mississippi? I bet it's a flyover state with a tiny sliver of road that sees massive trucking volume.
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).
mississippi doesn't make people do certifications lol. unless you drive a hybrid, then you pay the hybrid tax.
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.
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.
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."
My bike can do over a million mpg. It is at best a stupid statement
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.
> 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.
> It’s a one party state.
By this logic US is two-halves-party state. You are no less dictatorial than China, just better at hiding it at the cost of how performant it is. Democracy is an European thing that rarely ever got successfully exported.
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.
> The US is a one-party state because of elite capture.
This is demonstrably false given the election result in 2016. Donald Trump was absolutely the anti-elite candidate with all of the establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle denouncing him as a candidate and calling his supporters fascists. His election was a national shock.
> China found a system that works for them after a century of trying every system.
Fine, and we'll see how that system works over the next century. This thread isn't about the efficacy of the Chinese system. It's about protecting the concept of democracy from propaganda.
> This is demonstrably false given the election result in 2016. Donald Trump was absolutely the anti-elite candidate with all of the establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle denouncing him as a candidate and calling his supporters fascists. His election was a national shock.
And then he governed in a reactionary way that favored the elites with whom he transacted. One man cannot change the superstructure through electoral means, as Lenin pointed out. All the undemocratic, unilateral powers that Trump has taken advantage of didn't start with him; they began with his predecessors and the larger national security state, who expanded executive power without oversight.
>Fine, and we'll see how that system works over the next century. This thread isn't about the efficacy of the Chinese system. It's about protecting the concept of democracy from propaganda.
Propaganda is how you control public opinion and sentiment in a democracy. See the work of Edward Bernays and Chomsky. Propaganda is an integral part of modern liberal democracies to arrive at a consensus that is largely disconnected from the needs or will of the electorate.
China doesn't need us to tell them how to run their country or their provinces.
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: https://progressive.international/blueprint/cb7dbaf4-b106-41...
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.
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.
Existence of elections does not mean a democratic process. Soviet Union had elections as well.
Existence of elections does not mean a democratic process. United States of America has elections as well.
I.e. existence of elections is necessary, but not sufficient.
Not bring up the US when someone is criticizing China, challenge level: impossible
The article is about the US.
The OP made a false claim about China.
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.
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.
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.
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 關係. 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.
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.
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.
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Fascist doesn't try to hide behind uncharitable accusations of racism, challenge level: impossible.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Your "over-regulation" is my "safety first".
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.
would be nice to extend the deathbed to include some of the soft-tech companies too
> 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..)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Regulatory capture and corruption are certainly horrible.
> 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.
I wonder how much existing regulation is a result of ass-covering related to insurance premiums.
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.
>It's fairly clear to me that our civilization is in decline
Because of deregulation, if anything.
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...
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.
No. Such laissez-faire economic gaslighting and accelerationist mob terrorism-condoning sophistry. Read Chalmers Johnson and Edward Gibbon instead.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Your article reminds me of Elon's run-ins with insane regulations for the Starship development, where he had to evaluate the risk of rockets landing on top of endangered sharks, but the department he was dealing with kept the density of sharks in the ocean a secret from themselves because they were worried about the information leaking out to illegal sharkfin poachers. Then SpaceX having to put headphones on seals and play sounds of sonic booms for them to see if they're terrified or not.
Lots of people right here on HN were making the argument that yes, yes, it makes perfect sense to nail humanity's feet to the ground, that we shouldn't reach for the stars, because there's an infinitesimal chance that one shark could be hurt by a falling rocket one day!
The main problem I see is that in some sense regulators have infinite power to say "no" or make demands, often with no recourse available to those applying for permits.
What might be needed is some sort of independent arbitration, where a CEO could go and say: "Hey, random paper-pusher here is holding up a $10 billion dollar project because they think it's hilarious to make me wrangle seals." and then have that result in a real consequence for the bureaucracy in question. As in: Your dumb arse is fired, because you wilfully mis-interpreted the intention of the law, doing millions or even billions in economic costs, you're doing more harm than good, etc...
There's precedent for such monopolistic organisations. For example, the telecommunications industry ombudsman in Australia. Individual citizens can submit complaints to the ombudsman and the result is always spectacular: Suddenly the impossible is possible, the unfair sneaky bullshit charge becomes miraculously reversible, etc...
Something like that could work for government bureaucracy also. Something vaguely like DOGE, but actually useful, and independently controlled and funded in some manner so it isn't captured by the special interests it is meant to curtail.
Think it's hilarious to make someone fill out paperwork where the required input is a secret nobody is allowed to know? Let's go see the ombudsman and have you risk getting kicked out of public office for life. Still need the paperwork filled out? No? Funny that.
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.
This was the lesson on the software side of things, seems that it has not been learnt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Sounds like the show extra3 might be interested in your story :)
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.
"This slashes emissions that negatively impact both air quality and climate..." So... Your entire supply is carbon free? I think not, as well as the permitting for an additional axle group and the extra weight.
If you recharge from the standard energy mix you are still burning fossil fuel. But let's just gloss over that.
Now again with the weight, how easy is it to corner and stop? There is probably a minimum of 12,000 lbs of extra weight... And you need a charging network at the truck stops... There is so much just glossed over ... Nice sales job.
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
> 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) ?
Just on bad rule could more than double the cost. Or even put your project completely out of any feasibility region
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
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.
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!"
Especially when combined with the fact that the company is deeply involved in carbon credits "business"
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Everyone is against regulation, until their tap water is catching on fire.
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.
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?
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.
"Absolutely foolish" - the tech sector doesn't exist without this "foolishness", but other than that, great idea.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? There are other ways to develop technology.
Nd they’re all concerned with next quarters results, not the next hundred years.
Are your investments in places where you're interested in the next 100 years and won't see the benefits until after your dead?
That belies why relying on individual investors to guide society is never going to work. You might as well cede the globe over to whichever society had the balls to centralize the economy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some regulation should double the costs, to prevent evil people from doing bad things.
Also, under-regulation might triple the costs for society.
Is part of the problem the federal system itself? Did I read that you have different regulations in different states?
it is usually the result of https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/04/brains-prefer-adding...
>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 overregulation and what is really needed, but it'd reather have too much than not enough.
everyone wants to live in a dog eat dog world until they are being consumed themselves
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
“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.
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.
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.
Oh of course, just onshore your entire supply chain. What an obviously easy thing to do.
Before the container ship existed that wasn’t such a crazy idea.
If the chain is all onshore then it must all be compliant ... right?
The world is so simple when you can just assert that your intervention will have positive effects eh.
Congratulations! Now just wait until next election when you get the boot in a landslide because of how much you raised prices for consumers.
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.
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.
The reality is that many, many regulations are not in fact written in blood.
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.
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.
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.
How do any of the examples you gave keep larger business interests from exploiting and monopolizing markets?
Liquor licenses shouldn't exist, and private payroll systems are perfectly functional, so I have no interest in paying for it.
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.
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.
> 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.
> After building a software company to a multi-billion dollar exit…
sigh
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Diesel cars became popular in Europe because the tax regime changed to favour them, their economy was incidental.
> 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.
Most European electrical codes don't allow electrical outlets in the bathroom at all.
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.
British standards are all BS. The electrical wiring one is BS7671. It divides the bathroom into zones: https://flameport.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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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> You don't get Dieselgsate without convoluted regulation and compliance industries. You can't game a complex text without a complex test to be gamed.
No you do not. You get smokes of diesel fumes without dieselgate.
Yes, some regulations are going too far and yes, it's hard to rewind it back, but that is mostly because any time something was under-regulated, companies abused it far harder.
I do think the regulations should get review period some time after enactment (whether the desired affect was met, the cost, whether it was worth it, could it be done other, easier way etc.) but it is still probably preferable than under-regulation.
And one rarely considered (by rule-makers) context is how much more they affect smaller players, making competing with established industry giants that much harder
Plenty of states have eliminated exhaust inspections. They were wholly ineffective and barely "caught" anyone.
Which is itself a debunked, totally fake book of lies
"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
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TLDR: "I drive an ambulance and I could save more people if I could drive faster, so speed limits are bad!"
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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.
No they can't. Dieselgate cost VW over $33 billion.
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.
Sounds like regulations work, then. We just need to get a functioning government back to enforce it.
It takes a brave businessman to speak out about how government regulations are killing their business. Thank you for your service.