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.
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.
Done, fixed the loophole.
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.
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.
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.
But that's a tiny bit tangential from regulations.
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.)
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 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.
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.
> 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.
Shady as all hell.
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.
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
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.
You cant just restore the river from a backup after you realise it was pretty dumb to dump toxic waste into it.
> “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.
Because of deregulation, if anything.
> 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...
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.
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.
Yup. For example: this is why the US automakers have shoved all the Brodozers down everybody's throats; it let them duck efficiency requirements.
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.
It's no good.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Maybe the UK is doing something weird here, but bathroom outlets are very much common in the EU.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are immediately have this thought.
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.
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 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?
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
To have data to back the claims being made.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> Everything else is implementation detail
Which is kind of the part that matters.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
And they are quite often very wrong, trying to be seen to be acting rather than making considered changes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for prompting me to look into it further.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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?
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).
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.
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
Correct. And thats a motorsport.
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.
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.
The problem is that such people often have no (original) thoughts. As the old saying going about bring the horse to the water etc.
This isn't arbitrage any more than selling warships is military arbitrage.
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 would have said that it's something done to improve the health of the planet, but sure.
People aren’t one dimensional. Simplifying businesses into perfectly-rational automatons is high-school economics.
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.
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.
in all cases, Chesterton's Fence is a good reminder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would investors invest their money in things that have no chance of recouping that investment?
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."
It doesn't mean everything is exactly right but it is a good reminder of what keeps happening when there are no rules there.
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.
> 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.
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..)
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.
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.
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.
Here's a good primer if you're interested in learning more: https://progressive.international/blueprint/cb7dbaf4-b106-41...
> 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.
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.
It often results in them completely disregarding the opinions, motivations, and agency of anyone that isn't American or a citizen of the PRC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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 don't think all building regulations should be put aside but we have a crisis something needs to give.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/earthq...
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
Haven't really heard about this crisis. Are you referring to the US?
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...
At least in Europe it is not (yet?) causing very large scale of homelessness problem.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vg923vkdko [2] https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/03/...
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.
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.
"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.
Your "solutions" are so cynical you really want homeless people to die.
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.
People generally don't realize how much of the regulatory apparatus in the US comes from racist origins.
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.
Do you live in an alternate universe? The last 30 years have been dominated by deregulation and privatization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ensuring that regulation is necessary and as straight forward as possible to comply with is good for consumers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Also that. But overregulation makes too hard for others to compete and offer cheaper insulin.
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????
Why do you think there are so few insulin producers then?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/15/4229352...
And the answer is because it's a monopoly that the govt refuses to regulate.
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
There is nothing subjective about insulin quality you dimwit
Oh Lordy what has become of HN a load of fresh dummies with no grounding in the basic principles of libertarianism. All the fire none of the intellect.
Just no sport.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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 :)
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.
So... You are assuming market regulations still exist? Because without those, no, bio-chemical industry is absolutely one that consolidates quickly.
I just throw them away with rubbish and get less supportive of people and institutions that created this law.
I see too much bad faith shit thrown around.
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
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.
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 blackrock thing seems like a myth, but private entities are also buying housing en masse in Spain for exammple
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)
Not sure how the US consumer benefits from being banned from having such choices?
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.
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 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.
I would say the causality goes the other way, we are a net importer because foreigners need dollars since they are the reserve currency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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????
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.
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.
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.
Please elaborate.
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.
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.
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.
We still need to ask what is being protected (and if was what we intended), and if the cost is worth it.
This is my big takeway from this article and others like it that I've read.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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, ...
Yes, it has gotten that bad.
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.
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 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.
this would be going against
> 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like security, it's a matter of tradeoff and reducing the surface area.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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'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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 ?
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.
Regulations, on the other hand, allow stable equilibria featuring cartels.
Do you have ANY knowledge of economic history? Profit-seekers putting $1 into safety equipment rather than their own pocket is a laughable thought.
The sidelining of tort law also didn't help one bit.
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.
“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.”
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”?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is strongly aided by plenty of examples of regulations that just get in the way of people who know how to do something.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The goal is to create more competition and not entrench existing players through burdensome regulation that treats kit cars the same as GM.
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.
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!
Thus we get more homeless people, which creates more bureaucracy trying to solve the homeless problem created by the housing bureaucracy.
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...
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.
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.
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) ?
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.
Also, under-regulation might triple the costs for society.
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.
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.
>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
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 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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
https://cen.acs.org/safety/industrial-safety/White-House-mov...
Same group that makes these amazing post-portems on YouTube
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
sigh
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.
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
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.
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.
itsdrewmiller•2mo ago
Wild - whoever did this should lose their job.
dangus•2mo ago
This company wants to put a bunch of stuff on the road going 70mph that could crash into you and kill you and is complaining about a measly $27 million of regulatory cost.
They are making up a bunch of scary numbers about the cost of the status quo and the tone of the article is basically holding us all hostage. Speed out special snowflake startup company through the regulatory process (written in blood) or else you’ll lose bajillions of dollars in suffering and pain from the “status quo.”
$27 million is basically a rounding error for automotive companies. Maybe do better at raising funds next time, bro.
some_random•2mo ago
dangus•2mo ago
I assume that out of 270 entire families that some are more popular than others? Why not pick the 20-30 most popular ones?
The tone of this article is that OP’s company has a savior complex. If they aren’t given expedient special treatment regulatory approval, the status quo is causing a bunch of fake make up dollar values of damage. It’s kind of a gross tone.
some_random•2mo ago
Where in this sentence is asbestos mentioned? As for the families, if they know their product works in 270 engine families why would they chose to only sell to 20-30?
amanaplanacanal•2mo ago
cm2012•2mo ago
potato3732842•2mo ago
Like a civil engineer preparing an existing conditions plan of a flat field...
amanaplanacanal•2mo ago
dangus•2mo ago
But when it catches a problem suddenly it’s not theater.
ehnto•2mo ago
In my view though the goal of the regulation isn't bad, but the cost of the process is prohibitive. Why is it so expensive to measure engine emissions?
cm2012•2mo ago
dangus•2mo ago
Complying with regulations is a sometimes-difficult but necessary part of my existence.
Small business owners like myself are the ones who comply while the biggest corporations use their armies of lawyers and bean counters to see how many pennies they can save by skirting those regulations. Just like OP.
terminalshort•2mo ago
wredcoll•2mo ago
cool_dude85•2mo ago
Why's that? Because a guy who's apparently friends with the owner of the company that produces these things told you that it saves emissions? Doesn't it seem reasonable to verify these claims?
some_random•2mo ago
cool_dude85•2mo ago
squigz•2mo ago
XorNot•2mo ago
Every single regulatory process has them, so the fact that this very ranty article omits any mention of an attempt to use them is highly suspect.
I've worked with plenty of systems where for all sorts of reasons exemptions are granted for the express purpose of promoting innovation or recognizing a special circumstance.
shortrounddev2•2mo ago
ehnto•2mo ago
etothepii•2mo ago
Workaccount2•2mo ago
During the process we forgot/missed that the product serial needed a single letter appended to the end to denote that it was the UL compliant version. We caught this after paying $15k for just recertification with new parts, no testing, only paperwork.
We went back to UL and told them about the mistake. They charged us $5k to open a new case just to append a "-5" to the name of the product on a handful of documents.
It's a total fucking racket.
appreciatorBus•2mo ago
Just as we should also verify claims that every regulation that has ever been written into law is by definition Good (tm) and can never be questioned.
It's possible for the friend of the company owner to astroturf an online form to get a good regulation eliminated, just because it didn't benefit him.
It's also possible for the such wealthy individuals to astrotruf in favour of bad regulations, just because it would benefit him.
samdoesnothing•2mo ago
aidenn0•2mo ago
samdoesnothing•2mo ago
aidenn0•2mo ago
Dylan16807•2mo ago
How many types of truck engine do you reasonably need to test with? The number should fit on one hand. And really you should only need to do the full test with one model and limited verifications with others. That'll get it down from $27M to $200k, which would be a far more reasonable requirement.
darth_avocado•2mo ago
The other alternative that I can think of is that experimental engines get an exception to be not certified for X miles of operation. Once the candidates are chosen for mass production, mandatory certifications can be introduced. Even if your new design doubles the emissions for some reason, over 100000 miles, that’s barely a drop in the bucket. For reference, double the emissions for 100000 miles is roughly equivalent to having an extra semi on the road for a year, which is nothing.
nerdponx•2mo ago
Is the regulation well intentioned poorly designed? Is it anti-competitive gatekeeping drafted by lobbyists? Is the author misrepresenting something? All of the above? Hard to say.
maxerickson•2mo ago
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of what larger operators have in their fleets. It could be that a few certifications go a long ways. They are going to be at least somewhat inclined to avoid variation.
samdoesnothing•2mo ago
We know central planning doesn't work, yet we are inclined to do it anyway under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
johnnyanmac•2mo ago
No it isn't. Rent control is made to provide short term relief. Regulations tend to be long term requriements. Of course making a short term temporary solution long term does not work.
>we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes
For policy, I think it is important to be risk averse. Regulations are extremely risk averse. Slowing down reckless actions so that people don't die should be considered a good thing. Of course, that can be anathema to businesses who rush to be first to market.
I don't see regulations being a problem here, but the cost of the regulations. Instead of focusing on de-regulations we look into what that 100k certification is going to? Hopefully not yet another for-profit middleman with incentives to bog the process down.
terminalshort•2mo ago
Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the market value diverge further with each lease renewal. There are people in NY who have been in their apartments 50 years and pay 10% of the market rate.
johnnyanmac•2mo ago
Of course after multiple generations you scare off housing investment. But not after 5. And that should be the goal of rent control. Short term relief while doing the long term plan of building more housing.
Politicians not doing it this way is like blaming your duct tape for falling apart after a few weeks of adhesive duty.That doesn't mean duct tape is bad. It means no one bothered to fix the underlying issue.
parineum•2mo ago
Even when there's a plan in place, it's unpopular to remove handouts like that. Any politician up for re-election isn't going to let that expire.
Dylan16807•2mo ago
They're right. Rent control is useful as a short term measure to keep rents from spiking, but it does long term damage to supplies and you need completely different methods to fix the supplies.
davidgay•2mo ago
You're assuming a form of rent control where new tenants pay market rate. That's not the only form, e.g., Berkeley's rent control used to continue "forever", until California forbade that (Costa Hawkins act in 1995).
heddycrow•2mo ago
If so, I've not met this group of people, but I'd like to share your first point with them because I tend to agree.
vkou•2mo ago
Tostino•2mo ago
I say that as someone who actually thinks a little central planning is good.
card_zero•2mo ago
Tostino•2mo ago
wredcoll•2mo ago
samdoesnothing•2mo ago
komali2•2mo ago
Forgeties79•2mo ago
samdoesnothing•2mo ago
The issue is that as the context expands, we lose the ability to make accurate predictions. To some extent we can't even predict our own lives although we try our best. When you expand that to the size of a corporation it's mostly just guessing. Corporations fail all of the time. When we expand that to a society, we are just guessing for everything but the most simple of predictions.
vkou•2mo ago
This kind of lazy ideological posturing is thought-terminating and incredibly tiring.
Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction materials, safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes. It would be truly baffling if of all conceivable points on the axis it was a global optimum.
card_zero•2mo ago
The earliest regulations were about the purity of bread and beer, and I tend to think of them as a good thing. But concepts like gypsum doesn't go in bread are simple enough for a king to understand, so perhaps those early regulations were more suitable for central administration. This was before there were brand names or consumer organizations. I suppose a non-central form of regulation would have to be along those lines, adversarial but symbiotic with the specific industry. Restaurant rating stars. IDK. Some stuff isn't consumer-facing though.
When unmonitored, people aren't motivated to behave, and they make a mess. When monitored, the people comply, but the monitors aren't motivated to be wise or understanding, only to enforce. Sometimes you get situations where an entire culture of people are spontaneously careful and good, or where they are regulated by regulators who are wise and perceptive and flexible. This state of affairs comes about, so far as I can tell, at random, or by voodoo.
wredcoll•2mo ago
"all regulations are bad" is a much simpler premise than "rule #3.70.66.345 should be adjusted to consider multiple drive trains with the same engine to pass the same tests".
Like, if you found a specific regulation that was badly designed and advocated for it to change, no one would argue against it, but you wouldn't get any internet engagement either.
card_zero•2mo ago
There's wide agreement that reality is complicated and that simple elegant theories are valuable.
vkou•2mo ago
Trying to squeeze blood out of a rock from people who cut corners and hurt others after-the-fact is a fuckin' nightmare and leads to globally bad outcomes.
card_zero•2mo ago
samdoesnothing•2mo ago
You're gonna complain about "lazy ideological posturing" and then in the same breath construct a tired, boring straw man? Was this on purpose to prove a point or something?
Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. Regulating lead in petrol is simple, uncontroversial, and very reasonably likely to do more good than harm. It's an example of an intervention on society that is relatively safe and easy to predict the outcome. And it's also an outlier, because most political action is neither uncontroversial, simple, or likely to do more good than harm.
yxhuvud•2mo ago
lurk2•2mo ago
This doesn’t follow from your premise.
> We know central planning doesn't work
Europe conquered the world using central planning. Every society on earth with any measure of security, order, and cleanliness to speak of is dominated by a central bureaucracy. It works.
> under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
Doing nothing is precisely why anarcho-capitalists failed to change anything. Everyone smart associated with that movement studied power dynamics and moved onto other projects.
parineum•2mo ago
Ah yes, I remember when the country of Europe conquered the world.
lurk2•2mo ago
samdoesnothing•2mo ago
lurk2•2mo ago
wat10000•2mo ago
If you leave things alone, you get the light bulb and the airplane, but also leaded gasoline and radioactive tonics. The notion that it’s always better to do nothing rather than something is as fallacious as the opposite.
fragmede•2mo ago
Most corporations and dictatorships seem to be centrally planned. Communism didn't work out for the Soviets, but they also didn't have smartphones and ChatGPT.
AnthonyMouse•2mo ago
This isn't quite right. There are some regulations that have such obviously enormous benefits that even if our estimates are imperfect, they'd have to be off by a thousand miles to not be the right thing. Examples like banning leaded gasoline or asbestos, or having antitrust laws that kick in if a market gets too consolidated for any reason.
The problem is then people start making a bunch of other rules that on paper would improve things by a couple of percent, but in practice because they're not accounting for overhead or their numbers aren't perfect they're actually making things slightly worse, and then multiply that by thousands of such individual rules and you've got a huge mess.
samdoesnothing•2mo ago
1. Simple. For example, “Demand curves slope downward.” The more complicated a theory is, the more ways there are for it to go wrong.
2. Accepted by experts. For example, there is a broad consensus in economics that protectionism is undesirable. If a theory is well-justified, then the great majority of reasonable and intelligent people will usually come to accept the theory, once they understand the arguments for it.
3. Non-ideological. Theories that have an ideological flavor and that call forth strong emotions tend to be pseudo-knowledge–for example, the theory that behavioral differences between men and women are entirely due to socialization. Reality is unlikely to conform to ideology.
4. Weak. For instance, we do not know that free markets are always perfectly efficient. We can say only that free markets are usually approximately efficient.
5. Specific and concrete. We can be much more confident in a concrete claim such as “Ted Bundy’s murders were wrong” than in an abstract theory such as “It is always wrong to initiate violence against another person.”
6. Supported by appropriate evidence. For example, the claim “violent entertainment increases violent crime” cannot be known without empirical evidence. In this case, a study based on a large, random sample would be appropriate, rather than, say, a few anecdotes.
7. Undefeated by counter-evidence. If there is a large quantity of evidence against P, or if one does not know whether there is such counter-evidence, then one does not know that P. For example, if one has read several studies supporting gun control while having read none of the literature on the other side, then one cannot claim to know whether gun control is desirable.
The claim "Leaded gasoline should be banned" reasonably fits most of these requirements, thus it's probably a relatively safe intervention with upside.
locknitpicker•2mo ago
Any form of regulation is attacked by those who seek to profit by freely causing the harm that regulation prevents. These attacks aim at completely eliminating any and all regulation, but also aim at eroding it so that complying with the letter of the law is ineffective at actually complying with the spirit of the law.
Trying to make mountains out of molehills is one way to attack regulation.
Look at OP's example. In no way did OP offer any support for the $100k price tag for certification, or even mentioned what this hypothetical amount represents in the total investment in a product such as an engine. We're talking about investments that range well in the tens of million of dollars. It's an insignificant drop in the bucket. The design team's salaries alone eclipse that value. On top of that, a single engine alone sells for thousands. Is this hypothetical regulatory cost that high if it can be covered by selling a few dozen units?
The combinatorial explosion is also a far-fetched example of this desire to make mountains out of molehills. You do not need to recertify a whole engine if you do a minor change out of a whim such as changing the color of a knob.
Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that whoever wants to sell an engine isn't putting out subpar products that underperform and outpollute at clearly unacceptable levels. If proving that your product is not poorly designed and irredeemably broken is too much to ask, is regulation really the problem?
shkkmo•2mo ago
I think you missed the context here. Revey, the company being asked to do these certifications, doesn't make diesel engines for semi-trucks. The company makes an electric "powered converter dolly" which puts a mini trailer between the semi truck and trailer that uses batteries and electric motors to reduce the amount of diesel burnt per mile.
It's clever solution, there are externalities to consider (increased truck weight and length, changes to turning behavior, etc) but expensive certification per motor to prove that giving a truck an extra electric push doesn't increase the emissions doesn't strike me as making sense.
Workaccount2•2mo ago
IG_Semmelweiss•2mo ago
Luckily, the internet, software, and the digital world in general; were a bit too out of left field for regulators.
That's why we kept supremacy over them.
If we are lucky, AI may not be regulated to death
wredcoll•2mo ago
cm2012•2mo ago
potato3732842•2mo ago
And it's not just this, every f-ing regulated industry is like this. I work with someone who specs out where the wires and fixtures for the lights are gonna go in commercial buildings. Ceiling lighting is full of crap like this for christ sake. The whole system is rotten.
rdtsc•2mo ago
Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough". And then "if we come to an understanding, we might be able to look the other way".
Wonder what state that is? Anyone want to guess?
AnthonyMouse•2mo ago
This is often fully formalized, i.e. you're not bribing a specific government official, instead you're paying a huge certification fee hundreds of times because it's a source of revenue generation for the government and whoever passed the bill gave zero fucks that it's a heavily regressive tax on new and small businesses.
ecocentrik•2mo ago
maxerickson•2mo ago
That they don't put the state on blast sort of points to the big cost not being entirely real (where they either think they can induce regulatory change or the number of tests that is needed to sell the systems is quite a lot less than the number of tests that would be needed to allow 100% of the market to use their system).
greenie_beans•2mo ago
bpodgursky•2mo ago
state and federal bureaucrats do not lose jobs
jimnotgym•2mo ago
_ink_•2mo ago
Then it should be easy to answer that request? Where does the $27M price tag come from?