Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at not just achieving the letter of the law but actually solving the problem it was defined for. Good regulation IMO looks bad because you never hear of anyone being punished for breaking it because it is complied with.
The EU banned roaming charges in 2017. Most networks by then had already abolished them, but only because this change was coming. The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges.
EU flight compensation rules are another great example - they don’t pay out often because what’s happened is the airlines don’t get delayed to that point as often as they used to.
Scotland has a “right to roam”, which can be summarised as “don’t be a dick and you can go anywhere you want outdoors”. So you can walk, camp etc pretty much anywhere (it’s a bit more complex). In theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and walk across their fields. In practice, this means that most popular walking paths have access routes maintained by landowners that people use.
On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
!00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer, 'we need the right regulations' is. The article points out areas that improvements to regulation, and process, would help and that second part 'and process' is often overlooked. A complex regulatory structure may be needed but that doesn't mean it has to be as hard as it is. Is it really the problem that the regulations were complex or was it a problem that navigating them was a challenge? I've had this discussion with local permitting where I live. Permits are needed, but that doesn't mean they should be hard or that the job of the city is to just tell you no. There is a world where the city is a partner trying to help you achieve something so when permitting comes up, and you pay your fees, the answer they give isn't just 'yes/no' but 'you may want to consider' and 'let's work together on a plan that...'. There isn't a regulation here, just a process improvement and the difference can be massive. A similar view of how to improve federal regulations, through simple process improvement and not just regulatory change, could really make a difference.
> 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer
Sometimes it is. For example some countries had or have regulation that only nobles can work in specific professions or wear specific clothes or live in specific places. Some had the same but race-based.
This entire class of regulation deserved to be thrown out. And yes, at least partially there are claims how it was necessary for safety or whatever else.
There are are also some dumb taxes with bad side effects like tax on windows.
Some regulation is terrible and deserves to be removed rather than replaced or improved.
Sure, but sometimes a repealing a bad piece of regulation doesn’t necessitate a replacement.
Policy reform decisions need to be evidence based and sometimes evidence suggests ditching the law over updating. And sometimes it’ll say update it.
What makes Good regulation is path dependent (in respect to existing institutions) and context sensitive, it’s important to analysis the costs of enforcement, not just the administrative side but in terms of lost opportunities. Do they make a suite of desirable economic activity infeasible or unjustifiable more expensive (relative to the goal of the policy)
> There isn't a regulation here, just a process improvement and the difference can be massive
Are those binding constraints? If so it’s effectively regulation or part of the regulatory regime even if they aren’t the rules themselves
Based on your opinion of local permitting I have a strong suspicion you've never applied for any sort of local permit for something where issuance of the permit requires any real consideration.
Petty homeowner renovation stuff is basically a weird tax in disguise. They don't care, they were never gonna tell you no. They just want your money and want you to make work for whatever trade is being made work for in the process.
Go for a variance and then see how you feel about it. Better yet, go try and create any sort of occupied structure or commercial use where one doesn't already exist.
Local permitting is riddled with bike shedding, people trying to avoid responsibility, people trying to advance their pet interests at other people's cost and probably more stuff I'm forgetting. At least with state level stuff you can be all "I've paid my engineer big bucks, here's there work output, here's why it's GTG, and if it is in fact GTG they typically rubber stamp it. But little guys can't afford to play in that arena unfortunately.
> !00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer, 'we need the right regulations' is.
Well, much of the time the right regulation is 'let existing general laws (eg around safety and fraud) and contract law and private agreements handle it'.
But it's pretty fair to sum that Right Regulation up as 'less regulation'.
To give a crazy example: the Right Regulation about the colour of your underwear is to just let you decide what you want to wear, also known as no regulation of the colour of your underwear.
Good regulation is how air travel became the safest method of travel in the past few decades without impeding on innovation or affordability. Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing.
IMO, we're in an age where regulation is the only tool left for a civilized society to leash their multi-billion corporations to actually help benefit society and not only their shareholders. I've been beating around the bush, but Boeing has already rebounded (tremendously) after the tragic incidents in the past few years.
Businesses are great at optimizing in profit and left to their own accord, that’s ultimately what they’ll do. In many cases that means risking safety, externalizing costs to others, creating anticompetitive unions like cartels, and so on.
Regulation exists to guide that optimization process so it’s forced to factor in other things like safety, environment, competitiveness for consumers and so on. The point being that if you can optimize in a way for profit AND for society at large then we have a reasonable balance to justify your existence. If you can’t, well then we probably shouldn’t be doing what you’re tying to do because the costs you would otherwise opaquely externalize on society are too high for your profit motive.
That isn’t to say things can’t go awry. Over regulation can occur where constraints are added that become crippling and the constraints are too risk averse or just poorly constructed that they do more to break the process than actually protect society. But whenever someone cries at over regulation, they need to point out the specific regulation(s) and why they’re nonsensical.
I’ve worked in highly regulated environments and you’re often very aware of what regulations you need to conform to. Part of that process is often asking why it exists because it can be frustrating having a roadblock presented before you with no rationale. Most the time I can think of good reasons something exists and it’s easy to consider and honor that. Meanwhile there are some regulations I scratch my head and can’t find what they justify, so there should be a channel back to lawmakers or regulators where people can inquire and work can be done to see if those regulation are actually effective or not at achieving their goal, or if they’re just constraints that makes things more expensive.
> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
Companies were at least forced to separate what were essential cookies from non-essential ones. While enforcement was not strong specially for small companies, basically any company could be sued for non compliance -- and many were. I guess this was bad regulation because it wasn't strict and clear enough. It should have been clear that cookie banners must had 2 buttons: agree and disagree. None of that bullshit of selecting partners. None of that "disagreeing takes longer to save your preferences" or refreshes the whole page, or sends you to the home page. And if you didn't want to comply, you're free to block European traffic.
Both can be true: over-regulation and bad regulation. And the West (especially the EU) is arguably suffering from both to various degrees.
At some point a regulation is no longer worth the weight in the overhead it imposes. Even if all regulation was effective, at some point the collective burden would be too high.
Sadly, this also means that some bad behaviour is inescapable at the margins. There are always a few people looking for an angle to make a quick buck in a certain way, yet not enough for a regulation to be supported.
> The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges.
Even better, a lot of the MVNOs added nothing or far less in roaming charges. I think its purely because they have more price sensitive customers. In general people seem very reluctant to switch providers despite number portability, the right to unlock phones after a certain time, etc.
Roaming charges are far from the only example. The big operators are sometimes several times as expensive for the same package (the Vodafone equivalent to my 1p mobile packages is approx three times the price, even ignoring roaming costs) so clearly just do not need to compete on price.
One problem with getting good regulation is the influence of the currently dominant players. They are adept at lobbying to twist regulation to strengthen their position and maintain the status quo. We see a lot of this in IT, of course, but it happens elsewhere too.
The EU removing roaming is better than the situation in the UK. Although some operators (O2 I know of) give a fixed roaming allowance in the EU that is OK. Not as good as getting your full contract/PAYG allowance though.
eSIMs have made the virtual mobile operators attractive for short term data usage. Switzerland not being in the EU has very high roaming charges, but you can buy data on an eSIM for not terrible prices. Much better than standard network roaming data charges for sure.
About the cookie banners, I'm honestly not sure it's a regulation issue.
For >90% of the websites the "reject all" option have no impact on user experience, so either everybody is breaching or the banner is useless in the first place.
Do you get prompted for the choice the next time you visit the website? Are they websites you need to log in to? Those are really the only user experience things that would be obvious in most instances — everything else is just pure data mining for usage analytics (::knowing wink::) and overt tracking. Some sites absolutely do not respect any of the choices, but that’s not the normal behavior.
> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
While I agree that cookie banners are bad, they are not the result of bad regulation. They work perfectly for what they are. They signal that the web page is tracking you and has tracking cookies. Essential cookies are allowed and do not trigger a cookie banner requirement.
On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases.
The problem with this is that DNT header is used by such a tiny minority of people that it’s basically a walking unique identifier for all of the side channels. Arguably it’s as identifying as the cookie you’re asking them not to store in the first place.
> On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases.
They come as disabled because that is required by GDPR. All settings that are not strictly necessary, consent must be opt-in. Not because you enabled DNT. That's just a flag companies don't care about because they are not legally required to care.
I am sympathetic to your claim but after reading the article it does seem to be a case of overregulation, or lack of flexibility at least. Could you use the examples of the article in order to illustrate how this is bad regulatation rather than overregulation ?
To go in the direction of your claim, hasn't the FDA model often been criticized for how easy it is to comply with for medical devices/complements ?
I could have written 4x the amount on Right to Roam, but I didn't. My point is that it changes how landowners treat their land and access by default. They could provide gates and come after people for not respecting their land, but instead they (usually) provide alternative access which actually delivers the spirit of the law - a right to roam.
I'm Irish, living in Scotland, and it's just unbelieveable the difference it makes. Here [0] is a perfect example of a situation that this solves. Murder Hole beach (in the same ish area) has similar issues, the farmer who owned the field that you accessed it kept a bull in that field.
Frankly, the cookie banners are an example of bad enforcement. Most of the annoying ones are actually non-compliant with the regulation. I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well.
I disagree - I think they’re a bad law. Ideally it wouldn’t need to be enforced at all, because companies would comply with it. The last website I worked on we had 0 telemetry in cookies but we used a cookie for non telemetry uses. When we were putting together a privacy policy, one of legal’s questions was “are there any cookies”, to which we said yes. We explained, but as far as they were concerned cookies means cookie bar.
> I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well.
Personally I’ve never looked at a cookie bar and said “wow I’m glad I now know how many people they’re selling my data too” and then changed my behaviour. And the companies have just slapped non compliant (and unenforced/able) banners to justify what they were already doing. That’s a bad regulation.
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”?
I think bad regulation and over-regulation are different words for the same thing, but calling it over-regulation pushes a certain agenda that all regulations are bad, which people who profit from deregulation would like you to think.
So what distinguishes the good regulation from the bad? Good regulations either
1) solve collective action problems (i.e. situations in which we're all better off if we all do X but it's in nobody's immediate personal interest to do X), or
2) short circuit short term corporate hill-climbing and let us "jump" from one local economic maximum to a higher one elsewhere in configuration space without having to traverse the valley between (which corporations won't do on their own).
I think even the most hardcore objectivist types would appreciate that these classes of problem exist. Even if you delegate their solutions to some ostensibly private actor (e.g. let insurance companies make the building codes) you end up with an inescapable system of rules that's de facto state control anyway. Doesn't help.
The problem with the cookie law is that it doesn't solve a real problem. Look, I'm probably going to get downvoted to hell for saying this, but the people who make "tracking" a cause celebre are a tiny, noisy minority and most real world people don't actually care. They're more annoyed by cookie dialogs than the cookies.
Policymakers overestimated the size of the privacy advocate constituency and so enacted regulations that solve a problem that exists only in the minds of diehard privacy advocates. Now, policymakers are reversing this policy. They're doing is slowly and tentatively (because they're still spooked by how loud the cookie banner people are), but they're doing it. Credit where it's due for finding their gonads.
The cookie affair isn't unique though. It's just one example of a regulation that went wrong because it came out of non-market decision making. Money is an honest, clean signal.
You know what a market is? It's a policy diffusion engine that uses profit as its loss signal. Works remarkably well almost all the time!
In those few situations in which we depart from the market as a decision making mechanism, we have to be careful not to allow ourselves to be corrupted by the usual suite of bugs in human reasoning: availability bias, recency bias, social desirability bias, and so on. The market, because money is an honest signal, resists these corruptions. Regulatory bodies? Much more vulnerable.
The cookie law is a central example of a time when a non-market regulatory apparatus was corrupted by a cognitive bias: social desirability bias in particular.
Of course we need some regulations. But when we make them, we need to be aware that we're likely getting them wrong in some way. All regulations should have
- automatic sunsets,
- public comment periods,
- judicial and legislative review mechanisms,
- variance and exception mechanisms, and
- the lightest possible touch.
Just as in software, each additional line of (legal) code is a liability, not a feature. Keep it simple.
I get the idea but it is a very one-sided argument. It sounds like "but can't they just trust us?". And no, they can't, that's the reason why regulation exists. They said they have done all sorts of research to make sure their tech is safe, but would they have done it if there wasn't any regulation? Many companies wouldn't have, because it is not profitable, even accounting for the risk and especially for startups that don't have a lot to lose.
They also claim that by not letting they do their things, regulation caused the emission of plenty of CO2, NO, etc... Yeah, right, we can say the same for drug testing too, drug testing may have killed millions by delaying the adoption of life saving drugs, so should we stop testing drugs? It is debatable really, but I am sure that experts studied to question seriously and that the answer is no.
Regulation is costly and inefficient, obviously, that's the point, if it wasn't you wouldn't need regulation because that's what companies would do naturally. It is also not perfect and you can always find bad regulation. But overall, they are important.
> They said they have done all sorts of research to make sure their tech is safe...
We've heard this one before. This really is a regulation bad because "trust me bro our product/service is so good for you/the environment/the world/etc and it's just regulations that are holding us back."
This isn't to say that it's not a fine product/service, but we are talking about a service that alters how companies may comply with current/future emissions regulations. By apparently pumping it back into the ground. We might want the regulators to really make sure that is a good idea and not just take their word for it.
I can see two problems causing the pain described here, which I will discuss shortly. But the article seems to stretch that experience too much into the 'regulation is bad' territory. Regulations exist for a reason. They aren't created for the power trip of government officials. This is the same US where companies dump PFAS into drinking water sources with impunity, has some of the highest fees for the worst quality interest access, where insulin is unaffordable and corporate house renting is a thing. There are many such areas where regulation and oversight is woefully inadequate, much less any 'overregulation'. Regulations are practically the only thing standing between the rich and the powerful and their incessant attempt to drive even more wealth into their own pockets at the expense ordinary people's health, wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc.
Now let's look at the specific problems here with a much narrower scope than 'regulations'. The first problem is the type of regulations. Some regulations are too arcane and don't reflect the current state of technology. Others affect the unprivileged people disproportionately. The solution for that is to amend these regulations fast enough - not deregulation. It's also important to assess the negative impacts of loosening these regulations - something I don't see discussed in this article.
The other important requirement is to increase the staffing of the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload doesn't become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a scientific method to assess the staffing requirements of public service institutions. According to that, a significant number of government departments all over the world are understaffed. Regulatory agencies and police departments top that list. Increased workload on their officials lead to poor experience for the citizens availing their services (this is very evident in policing). Yet those same experiences are misconstrued and misrepresented to call for deregulation and defunding of these institutions - the opposite of what's actually needed. (PDs need more staff and more training in empathy. Not defunding, nor militarization.) This is exactly what I see in this article. An attempt to target regulations as a whole using a sob anecdote.
In large part due to regulation. Reflexively adding more regulations to deal with the negative effects of existing regulations is like "fixing" a bug by adding special-case logic for inputs which trigger the bug, without understanding why the bug actually occurred. Just like code, regulations should ideally be simple and elegant with a minimum of special cases.
The EU also has regulations, but somehow it does not make insulin as expensive as in the US. Maybe the existence of a regulation is not the issue here.
The bug occurs because of the power discrepancy of those who have the demand and those of who can supply. For some reason, the problem if insulin prices and absurd health costs only exist in the US. I wonder why.
If you are an European, regulation also has the benefit to induce soft protectionism from countries that are less keen on consumer and environment protection. This is the heart of the debate about Mercorsur, as it creates an unfair competition by lowering regulation (in theory european regulation applies but in practice it's harder to verify), and also an internal debate in France related to some pesticide that other European countries can use. Some argue that we should allow the pesticide, some that we should stop importing products that are exposed to it.
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.
Regulations exist for different reasons, not one reason. Some of those reasons are good reasons, like regulations against dumping or against contract killers or for food safety. Some of those are bad reasons, like regulations of parking minimums implemented to appease the property owning class. Some of those are for bad reasons pretending to be for good reasons, like the regulations that block renewable energy which are allegedly for the environment, but the true motives are more about aesthetic displeasure or ideological hostility.
> like regulations of parking minimums implemented to appease the property owning class.
Due to current market conditions we can sell all apartments without any parking spaces, therefore regulation defining a housing unit with foresight for future market conditions is bad.
> the regulations that block renewable energy
Can you name one regulation that outright blocks renewable energy generation specifically and not externalities created by developments, that sometimes happen to be renewable energy?
> like regulations of parking minimums implemented to appease the property owning class.
This regulations are crucial for preventing cities from being littered with cars (more than they already are). If developers were allowed they would build only very limited parking space and then people living there would have to park in public space burdening everybody. If anything it's a regulation against property owning class.
The problem is that the regulators themselves are insanely corrupt - how else would you explain the emergence of proposals like (thrice-resurrected) Chat Control, that clearly is harmful to every citizen of the EU, and I have yet to see a single individual supporting it.
Every governing decision and rule is either fully made by powerful shadow interests, proposed by said interests and is only thwarted (for the time being) by some politicians on the other side or made out to be benign or even beneficial but is in actuality compromised in some major way.
>Every governing decision and rule is either fully made by powerful shadow interests, proposed by said interests
The Useful Idiots(TM) will be along shortly to tell you how you're technically wrong because the rules are "only" 99% made/proposed by shadow interests.
> Regulations are practically the only thing standing between the rich and the powerful and their incessant attempt to drive even more wealth into their own pockets at the expense ordinary people's health, wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc.
Try to rethink how money is created and how money gets its value and how and by whom that wealth is distributed. Regulation as in "make rules" does not enforce rules, which is the definition of (political) power.
> The other important requirement is to increase the staffing of the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload doesn't become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a scientific method to assess the staffing requirements of public service institutions. According to that, a significant number of government departments all over the world are understaffed.
Why are you claiming "There is a scientific method" and do not provide it? Governments do (risk) management by 1 rules, 2 checks and 3 punishment and we already know from software that complexity in system is only bounded by system working with eventual necessary (ideally partial) resets.
Ideally governments would be structured like that, but that goes against governments interest of extending power/control.
Also, "system working" is decided by the current ruling class/group. Besides markets and physical constrains.
You can tell when someone is a process or chemical engineer, by how they carefully consider each of the system boundaries and the inputs, outputs and processes inside and outside each of these boundaries.
There seems to be a whole series of issues in considering system boundaries and where they can and should be drawn when considering the best course of action.
EVs are a classic case, you draw the system boundary around the vehicle and get a MPG figure, and externalize the remaining costs. Might as well claim infinite MPG. Bill Gates proves himself as a process oriented guy here.
Carbon capture is another funny one. You report that you sequester this amount of carbon, but on the other hand deplete the soil. The amount of carbon in healthy soil is staggering, activities leading to soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have to be very carefully considered. How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years? It's introducing predators into Australia all over again, people thinking they are smart and going for the course of action that is politically favorable in the very short term but ultimately ill considered.
For regulation, this is pretty much why can't we just have regulations that benefit me right now? For people with deep pockets, they ignore the regulations and pay the fines. Problem with these guys is their entire business model revolves around making money off of externalizing costs onto the rest of the economy, via environmental regulatory burden. What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
> How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years?
Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so. Mind that the process that created these holes have also created tremendously large biohazards very consistently, yet are normalized by society. We must accelerate the pace we’re on.
> What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me? I absolutely think businesses which are working to save millions of lives should receive regulatory support, instead of the oil companies which are still to this day benefiting from price subsidies?
> Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so.
What percentage risk of it being worse would you draw the "we need regulators to take a careful look at this at? A 20% chance that they destroy up a local ecosystem or something else catastrophic? 5%? 1%?
Now what if their operations were local to you? What does it become then?
The key point contested is stated like this in the OP:
> A regulatory system that structurally insists on legalistic, ultra-extreme caution is bound to generate a massive negative return for society.
The OP mostly sees the downsides and disregards how hard earned any of those regulatory requirements are. Each requirement is usually the outcome of people being substantially impacted by industry before regulation. For instance the Thalidomide scandal with 10000 children born with deformities.
If OP doesn't grasp the origin and rationale behind regulations, it doesn't mean there aren't any.
Waiting 4 years until regulator even decides which regulation you fall under is "regulations that benefit me right now?" There is a lot of similar sentiment ITT. Speedy resolution by government is essential. They get too much slack from being slow, from regulators to court.
> what kind of injection well is this? Should it be permitted as a Class I disposal, Class II oilfield disposal, or Class V experimental? This question on permitting path took four years to answer. Four years to decide which path to use, not even the actual permit! It took this long because regulators are structurally faced with no upside, only downside legal risk in taking a formal position on something new.
Oil companies routinely flared off natural gas that came up with oil because it wasn’t economically worthwhile build the infrastructure to capture it. It was expensive and it was just easier to flare it off and let it go to waste. North Dakota changed the calculus by implementing strict regulations that limited how much gas companies could flare in the state set a target that companies could only flare 10% of a natural gas production and if you exceeded that you would get a fine this regulatory pressure made previously un economical infrastructure investment suddenly worthwhile, and suddenly, they managed to build pipelines.
Doesn't carbon get pulled out of the air through photosynthesis? That's why people plant trees to address global warming, no?
Your arguments seem very handwavey and not very well thought through. Do you really believe that EV business owners are the only ones who benefit from more widespread EV usage?
In any case, even if you're flagging real issues, there is no evidence that existing regulators identified those issues in the case of the OP? So it could still be the case that the existing regulatory scheme is useless overburden.
I'm highly suspicious of anyone who can't clearly state that fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change.
When they then claim, against all obvious facts, that there is a clear political consensus on fixing climate change in the USA, that becomes active distrust of their message.
This appears to be another subset of the so-called "Abundance" movement where people avoid the elephant in the room (political power of fossil fuels) and get all screechy about those damn environmentalists and regulators who are the real villains holding us back from solving climate change with the free market.
Meanwhile solar and wind farms are being illegally shut down by the government.
But sure, it's abstract regulation at fault, not the politicians paid off by oil who regularly state that the problem his company is solving isn't even a problem.
Regulation is a nebulous term, dozens of posts about it in here and no one defined regulation, nevermind agreed on a definition of regulation.
On one side, It’s a useful buzz word for libertarians to attack, saying these prevent companies doing anything they want constantly, which Libs believe would help the world.
Meanwhile it seems less ideological comments see shades of effectiveness in good vs bad regulations. There’s also shades of law vs regulation, enforcement laxity, hidden purposes behind regs supposed reasons, etc.
It’s a tangled web and HN loves debating regulations more than almost anything!
In my country in Africa there is a huge shortage of homes in cities where building is regulated. Not enough homes are being built and many people live in shacks. Building in the villages has literally no regulations and amazing houses are being built at an amazing pace in the villages because you don't need any regulatory approval.
I don't think all building regulations should be put aside but we have a crisis something needs to give.
I've often wondered how much of the western homeless crisis is due to not allowing ghettos/slums to exist, the last place the very poor could afford rent. Cities have essentially made them illegal over the past 30yrs. Once it gentrifies it's gone. Including even large blocks of subsidized apartment buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes
All housing is now very carefully planned top-down. The only ones who get past all the red tape are high end condos or far-off single-family suburbs. So city government's only idea is to force each of those fancy buildings to have a subset of units as affordable housing. The supply of those is never enough to keep up. Government made buildings now take forever or straight up fail.
Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.
In rural Gabon, presumably I wouldn't be renting but would own my own unsafe shanty. It's really tempting. But living in Libreville has more of a ring to it.
> Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.
That doesn't seem like a fair take. You're implying that the sympathetic people who outlawed poor houses are the very same people who won't build anything new. That's not true.
Making people live in slums/shacks isn't a solution to the western "homeless crisis".
This website has been often prone to "social justice" recently, I'm amazed somebody can get away with such an idiotic comment without being flagged to hell.
Houses are "carefully planed" because you don't want poor people to die in them due to poor construction, carbon monoxide when they need heat during winter, or a fire that would spread to other houses due to cheap materials, that's why,you know, the stuff that happens regularly in third world slums, but you can't fathom that fact.
There is no shortage of political debate in most developed countries.
I think a bigger reason is that people who go to politics or administration often succumb to a certain kind of (reverse) teleological fallacy. They think that because their goal is to advance X, if they propose regulations for that purpose, their regulations will advance X.
HN, and most US centric forums online - have been anti regulation, for a majority of their history.
Straight up libertarian viewpoints were the norm during the earliest phases of the net. The anti-regulation view points are well known and well travelled.
I’ve seen them exported to conversations in other countries, which dont have the same shared historical context.
It was post 2008, that the zeitgeist began shifting in a durable manner, no matter what defense or arguments against regulations were brought forth.
I don’t think the average voter will trust a corporation, and the arguments against regulation are going to take a generation before they become popular again.
I think a commonality is none of the agencies in the way feel an existential risk from failing to execute.
You could imagine a system where a permit and planning department finds it's functions taken over by a minimal state agency when not enough housing is built in its area. The state of California is slowly moving that direction because it's so bad.
Typical structures in the villages are bungalows built by people you know. Sounds like the crisis in the link you shared is from corrupt approvals and poor construction of commercial properties sold to people. People build houses they will live in in the villages and for me this is a big enough incentive to build it properly. You will have no one to blame when your own roof falls on your head. The builders are also known and it would be a business ending move to build a rubbish house for your neighbour. Word would get out pretty quick. One thing people do in the village is talk as they have plenty time. I think all these other factors make up for the lack of regulation.
Actually building in Turkey is strongly regulated - it’s just that corruption in government allows bad players to easily ignore it.
Just another way regulation fails to do what is supposed to, while its downsides (diminished competition, deterring startups and supporting incumbents) still apply.
This is why blindly relying on regulation and ignoring its trade offs is just foolish.
In my village there is no regulation for building residential property. You don't have title deeds either. You get allocated a piece of land by the local chief or headman/woman and you decide where and what you can build. The only regulation is you must have a toilet. Which tends to be a no brainer and one of the first things most people build. A simple Blair toilet.
It's nobody on here is talking about Rheinhardt's #2 point: The US is not spending enough on regulation. He specifically points out that regulators are underfunded and understaffed. In the US, this is often an active strategy by conservative politicians to undermine regulations, and portray the story that the regulations are bad, when in fact, the regulatory agencies are being intentionally preventing doing their jobs efficiently.
Potential counterpoint. Is it possible that one challenge is the lack of expertise in government? I think it’s clear that most novel permitting situations involve one expert party (who want the permit but are potentially motivated to not report downsides) but the other party (the regulator) has to either develop their own expertise or say “no”/“wait”.
I was unimpressed by the situation described. It seems that existing injection wells often have all sorts of negative consequences that are avoided by bankruptcy. I suspect more “no”/“waits” in the past might have been reasonable
>I’ve been shocked to find that the single biggest barrier—by far—is over-regulation from the massive depth of bureaucracy.
Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are immediately have this thought.
THe problem is that the main argument for this assertion is: "we are trying to dispose of large amount of industrial waste, the regulator is slowing us down"
Now, we are told that this waste is actually going to benefit us, as its taking all of those nasty CO2 and PM2 emissions and locking them away. Great. but what's the chemical make up of those captured emissions? When you inject them into old wells, are they sealed against leakage?
I assume its capturing raw exhaust from things, and that has a non-negligible heavy metal content. Can you guarantee that those aren't going to leak into the ground water?
So yeah that kind of regulation probably is quite onerous, mainly because for the last ~60 years people have been taking the piss.
I bet it's still like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, where they think that the regulations they're encountering are bad, but clearly all the other ones are good.
For most people, they never directly interact with government regulations because somebody else does it. They work for a large corporation and then the corporation requires them to do wasteful or nonsensical things which they ascribe to management incompetence, but it's really because the corporation's lawyers made it a requirement.
Then there are the people who are actually doing the compliance paperwork, but they don't object because it's the thing that pays their salary. Moreover, it's their occupation so all the time required to figure out how to do it is now a sunk cost for them and the last thing they want is to get rid of it and make all that time they invested worthless.
The people who object are the people trying to start a new business, because nobody is paying them to do things that don't make sense and all they want is to get on with what they're actually trying to accomplish instead of paying one fee after another or waiting on unaccountable regulators who have no reason to say no to something but still take excruciatingly long to say yes.
Theres a lot of that. Its just people need a first exposure to the thing to realise its terrible. Like the other commenter says, most people are completely shielded.
I know a few local people who have only been impacted for the first time by regulations preventing the sale of vapes, and local regulations preventing the resale of used tyres to motorsport enthusiasts. Its the first spark for a lot of people.
This company's business is regulatory arbitrage. Of course they have to deal with regulators. Capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is not a commercial enterprise. It's something done to get some sort of regulatory credit.
The problem is that dealing with regulators takes years and millions of dollars, reducing competition and societal benefit. He's quoting $200m in additional health costs borne mostly by Medicare/Medicaid. Regulations aren't a useful part of the system if they're gunked up.
The thing is, we really don't need people competing at selling carbon credits because it's an industry that literally only exists due to badly written regulations so it's hard to come up with a ton of sympathy.
I wonder what adding a second hinge in a truck does to it's performance in an accident? When the trailer jack knifes, for instance?
I guess someone who wants to put them on our roads should answer some questions on that. Especially as they are clearly given to absurd claims like, 'it goes from 7 to 120 mpg', as if that happened without any other input.
Indeed. The idea is interesting, but the claim is obviously exaggerated: sure, you're burning less gas, but you're tanking electrons. Whatever the final mpg equivalent is, it isn't 120mpg.
His other company is yet another green washing idea. Taking what could and should be valuable natural fertilizer and sequestering it. Also, for most of these ideas, the energy costs of transport and processing outweigh any supposed benefits.
Did you even bother reading the article? The problem is that the government is making them prove the same thing 270 times. And the only thing absurd here is your statement. It's an electric motor. Of course there is "other input."
I think the trouble is that regulators have done a bad job at setting themselves up to learn from their mistakes. Regulations should expire more quickly so their next incarnation can be better sooner.
Instead we're so afraid that the other guys will be in power in the future that we make them hard for people in the future to alter.
> As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device—whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations—is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It’s a complete waste of money for everyone.
The problem isn’t that regulations exist. The problem is that they are defined in a way that reasonable work arounds or alternative pathways do not exist for situations like this. 270 engine families for 9 engine suggests that the designs may be small variations that would not significantly change the emissions between them. The bureaucrats should waive off some requirements here.
The other alternative that I can think of is that experimental engines get an exception to be not certified for X miles of operation. Once the candidates are chosen for mass production, mandatory certifications can be introduced. Even if your new design doubles the emissions for some reason, over 100000 miles, that’s barely a drop in the bucket. For reference, double the emissions for 100000 miles is roughly equivalent to having an extra semi on the road for a year, which is nothing.
> The problem isn’t that regulations exist. The problem is that they are defined in a way that reasonable work arounds or alternative pathways do not exist for situations like this. 270 engine families for 9 engine suggests that the designs may be small variations that would not significantly change the emissions between them. The bureaucrats should waive off some requirements here.
Any form of regulation is attacked by those who seek to profit by freely causing the harm that regulation prevents. These attacks aim at completely eliminating any and all regulation, but also aim at eroding it so that complying with the letter of the law is ineffective at actually complying with the spirit of the law.
Trying to make mountains out of molehills is one way to attack regulation.
Look at OP's example. In no way did OP offer any support for the $100k price tag for certification, or even mentioned what this hypothetical amount represents in the total investment in a product such as an engine. We're talking about investments that range well in the tens of million of dollars. It's an insignificant drop in the bucket. The design team's salaries alone eclipse that value. On top of that, a single engine alone sells for thousands. Is this hypothetical regulatory cost that high if it can be covered by selling a few dozen units?
The combinatorial explosion is also a far-fetched example of this desire to make mountains out of molehills. You do not need to recertify a whole engine if you do a minor change out of a whim such as changing the color of a knob.
Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that whoever wants to sell an engine isn't putting out subpar products that underperform and outpollute at clearly unacceptable levels. If proving that your product is not poorly designed and irredeemably broken is too much to ask, is regulation really the problem?
We need more information. How does this work for internal combustion truck engines?
Is the regulation well intentioned poorly designed? Is it anti-competitive gatekeeping drafted by lobbyists? Is the author misrepresenting something? All of the above? Hard to say.
You cannot separate the idea of regulation from their harm because they are inherent to the concept. A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical effects. Rent control is a fantastic if trivial example of such.
We know central planning doesn't work, yet we are inclined to do it anyway under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
The magic of the system is that we all did it, comrade. There's multiple people, laws define what those people can do, processes, comment periods. It's all spiderman pointing at spiderman. You can't find any one party so clearly culpable that they can in good conscience suffer real consequence.
And it's not just this, every f-ing regulated industry is like this. I work with someone who specs out where the wires and fixtures for the lights are gonna go in commercial buildings. Ceiling lighting is full of crap like this for christ sake. The whole system is rotten.
Having dealt with regulatory bodies before - they probably did lose their job, maybe multiple times, before becoming an engineer that doesn't have to engineer anything, just come up with rules.
Why's that? Because a guy who's apparently friends with the owner of the company that produces these things told you that it saves emissions? Doesn't it seem reasonable to verify these claims?
No that doesn't seem reasonable at all if it's been proven to work _really well_ in several configurations and there's no particular reason to expect that the results would be drastically different in other very similar configurations.
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.
> whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations
Then it should be easy to answer that request? Where does the $27M price tag come from?
Seems somewhat reasonable. I don’t know why the company is supporting all 270 engine families.
This company wants to put a bunch of stuff on the road going 70mph that could crash into you and kill you and is complaining about a measly $27 million of regulatory cost.
They are making up a bunch of scary numbers about the cost of the status quo and the tone of the article is basically holding us all hostage. Speed out special snowflake startup company through the regulatory process (written in blood) or else you’ll lose bajillions of dollars in suffering and pain from the “status quo.”
$27 million is basically a rounding error for automotive companies. Maybe do better at raising funds next time, bro.
If you want to argue that adding an electric engine to existing trucks is going to make them go out of control and kill people in some completely common sense defying manner, then the burden of proof is on you and not on the company to prove a negative.
> one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks and that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item.
Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough". And then "if we come to an understanding, we might be able to look the other way".
> Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough".
This is often fully formalized, i.e. you're not bribing a specific government official, instead you're paying a huge certification fee hundreds of times because it's a source of revenue generation for the government and whoever passed the bill gave zero fucks that it's a heavily regressive tax on new and small businesses.
I was just in Hangzhou two days ago, and went through the Hangzhouxi train station. Needless to say it's utterly massive, straight out of a Star Trek scene, extremely efficient and clean. Construction was started in 2019, and finished in 2022. It cost $2.25bn. Hangzhou has 5 of these train stations, let alone one.
I'm convinced that every SV founder or neolib politician who writes these hit/think-pieces is getting their enemy entirely mixed up. China is massively bureaucratic and regulation heavy, and just by the scale of these projects, it's simply impossible to think that if you just loosen some rules and fly by your seat pants, you can build a 11 platform train station in 3 years. Again, this station is mind bogglingly massive.
The real answer is that China's regulatory loop is extremely short and small, where the government works very closely and reacts very quickly. You can talk to your regulator, even if you're a small startup working on a small hardware problem. Because every single community district has a CPC office, with representatives that can escalate things all the way up to the top. There's a clear chain of command, and throw in some guanxi to keep the gears greased up, things (problems, questions, hurdles) get to where they need to go. In the US, politicians don't work for their constituents, and even in the rare cases where they do (or have good intentions), they are up against other politicians who have ulterior agendas and their own goals. The machine thrashes against itself, not in a single direction. This is exactly the image of "democracy" in the the minds of the Chinese general public.
The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system is actually built for this.
> The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system is actually built for this.
China does a lot of stuff right, and your points may be entirely valid, but calling that system “democratic” nullifies everything else said. It’s a one party state.
This is incorrect. There are 9 parties. You are likely saying "well it's functionally a singe party system" yet you can't even read Chinese to understand what the policy positions of the different factions within the committees are.
Given all the videos I've seen on YouTube of bridge and building collapses in China, I think you're glossing over all their shortcomings. Maybe they do have a tight regulatory loop - I don't know - but their aggressive timelines and poor materials seem to have bitten them in the butt a number of times.
But by what definition do you say that is bureaucratic and regulation heavy? It sounds like the opposite to me. The decision to build was made by a single authority and then executed. In the US there would have been at least 3 different levels of government involved, and possibly multiple agencies at each level. And then after they have made their decision, which would take years, they would be sued by many different private organizations that are against the project. All those lawsuits would have to be resolved before work could start, which would take even more years and require modifications to be made to the plan to appease these organizations. To me it sounds like your system is very light on bureaucracy and regulation compared to ours.
But European companies need over-regulation - they are not competitive by themselves, so they need to raise artificial barriers to external market entrants.
Since Europe is hopelessly behind by its own decision to pursue protectionism instead of competition, the choice remains between keeping overregulation which will continue the managed decline, or deregulation, in which companies would find their services are not competitive on cost, experience and would be wiped out in a freely competitive landscape.
Of course the reality is not that black and white, it's clear that deregulation would hurt powerful and wealthy interests, so it will not happen at once - it'll happen to those most behind and least able to garner favorable political treatment.
Overall I think the future of Europe still lies in managed decline, with its innovative capacities only able to be manifested in crafting new regulations and making the efforts to comply with them - it's future companies and startups will be funded and supported by governmental grants and/or powerful old money investors who also have vested interests in other companies.
> the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is the deathbed of thousands of hardtech companies that could be drastically improving our lives. We must unleash them.
was "the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is also the deathbed of tens of thousands of hardtech companies who have no concern about destroying our communities in the interests of making a dollar", and that's what the regulations are there for.
What an intellectually bankrupt way to approach a question that has both downsides and upsides, and where those downsides and upsides vary depending on the specific regulation in question.
As the article points out, there is a safety cost from over-regulation. The impact on air quality from not allowing the new technology quickly enough is very real.
That's for safety regulations, and is somewhat true. That's not really what's being discussed here.
There are many regulations that are drafted, and paid for, by monopolies. There's also just outright stupidity put into place, because lawmakers get paid to make laws, so they make laws that sound good, without considering the consequences.
> CO₂ captured in farm & forestry plant residues, convert it into a carbon-rich, BBQ sauce-like liquid
How much carbon do forestry residues (dead branches, leaves and wood chips ?) take to release their carbon back to the atmosphere through rotting ? How much of that carbon woudl have stayed in the ground (unless there's wildfire) ?
I wanted to address the most common theme in the comments: safety.
The regulatory burdens I've encountered and described were not related to safety requirements. They are procedural questions with no bearing on safety.
Whether an injection well is Class I disposal, Class II oilfield disposal or Class V experimental has no bearing on the (strong and reasonable) safety requirements to protect underground sources of drinking water... the problem is the delay that comes from deciding which class is most appropriate (turns out, Class V experimental).
And ditto, whether a Revoy is a tractor, a trailer, or a converter dolly for the purposes of DMV registration paperwork has no bearing or relation to the (again strong and reasonable) NHTSA FMVSS safety requirements... the problem is the delay on the procedural paperwork.
I think we can all agree that these procedural issues are not "written in blood", but are in fact regulatory bikeshedding that we'd all be better off without.
The issue I see is that companies have limited liability. If they mess up, they can just go bankrupt and sometimes pass the cleanup costs on to society.
Therefore, I think it’s fair that society wants to have a say in what gets done and what doesn’t.
Maybe a way around this would be companies operating without limited liability. Would you be willing to put your entire fortune on the line in exchange for a fast track through regulations?
Edit: to clarify: I’m not arguing that all companies should lose limited liability. I’m suggesting the introduction of a new type of company structure.
Indeed. Thank you for writing this and speaking up in public.
Many of the comments here that essentially reply to your article by saying “regulation is good, stop criticizing it”, are deeply depressing. That is a regulatory mind virus that must be destroyed before it kills us.
it seems that you could be hitting an edge case that inconveniences you. On the other hand if the classification were made irrelevant, someone working with Class V "Air conditioning return flow wells used to return to the supply aquifer the water used for heating or cooling in a heat pump;" might be aggravated by being held to the same standard as Class I "Wells used by generators of hazardous waste or owners or operators of hazardous waste management facilities to inject hazardous waste beneath the lowermost formation containing, within one quarter (1⁄4) mile of the well bore, an underground source of drinking water.". Because if the regulations were merged, it would be inappropriate not to use the stricter safety standard of all.
There has got to be opportunities here for abstracting over regulation to make it easier to comply with and prove compliance so that risk owners/govt can enact change faster. Now to figure out who would pay for that.
He described “the missed acceleration in sales” of pumping Liquid Smoke down old oil wells as “a direct hard cost” of the regulatory regime. That tells me all I need to know about our narrator’s intellectual honesty.
I’m open to being convinced that there are better ways of doing things, but despite what half a century of propaganda has been saying, regulations generally aren’t enacted for funsies. They’re there for a reason, specially the reason that in the absence of those regulations, commercial actors were privatizing profit at the expense of society as a whole, and democratic society made a decision to make rules to stop that from happening.
“Regulation obviously has a critical role in protecting people and the environment”
and then quantifies “a mindblowing $40m/year in healthcare costs” and a total of “about $400M” in societal cost from one delay, mostly borne by the public.
In that context, the line you are reacting to is just one item in a long list:
“We’ve also spent untold millions on regulatory affairs at all levels of government, not to mention the missed acceleration in sales”
He even says,
“What pains me most is the 5 years of lost carbon removal and pollutant reduction”
So the piece is not “regulations bad, profits good.” It is: regulations are essential, but the current process is generating huge public harms by slowing down tech whose whole purpose is to reduce pollution.
Maybe he’s wrong on any given point, but he’s clearly trying to describe the utilitarian trade-offs in good faith
> regulations are essential, but the current process is generating huge public harms by slowing down tech whose whole purpose is to reduce pollution.
I hear this with a call to action of "we need to deregulate to help reduce pollution". And not the real call to action in that "these regulations need an overhaul". The title of "over-regulations" and the general tone seems to place the issue as an obstacle to be eliminated, not a system to be corrected.
So the argument is, we have manufactured something to create a noxious goop that we would like to inject into the ground at high pressure. Why are people so scared that this is going to have a long term impact our company has a short term profit to deliver to shareholders.
Edison Motors, a manufacturer of hybrid and electric semi and other trucks in Canada, is currently battling regulation. They have a series of videos on their Youtube channel going over what's been taking place.
That was pretty surprising when I saw it unfold. Especially because they utilised state grants specifically to achieve the goal they are now being blocked by regulation on.
There is no such thing as over regulation, just regulation done wrong. And the solution for a bad regulation might be a better regulation rather than no regulation at all.
Maybe that guy needs a trip to Germany to feel a little better about the processes in the USA. The stuff I've seen over the years is completely insane.
And I'm not even working for industries that do any novel stuff, just boring old stuff.
Getting permits for building something as trivial as a small storage facility for literal nuts and bolts will make you feel like you've entered Kafkas "Der Prozess".
And if you, somehow, through some miracle, after decades, get said permit and build something (to absurdly high costs), you're under constant threat of being shut down for arbitrary reasons. Again, the nuts and bolts storage is a literal nuts and bolts storage. Just some maybe 200 metal crates with metal nuts and bolts in there, with a roof on top. It was shut down after we built it. "Fire hazard". And we're not talking hot stuff just off the production line or something, no. Just ambient-temperature nuts and bolts in metal crates with a metal roof on top.
The stories that I've heard or sometimes even was somehow involved in would take many hours to write down and have the reader shake their head in disbelief.
And, again, I'm not even anywhere near any new innovation. Just regular boring stuff.
We also had a facility for sorting nuts and bots shut down because the original building permit was for a CNC shop or something, "metal works" or whatever the technical term is in English.
You see, sorting nuts and bolts is not "metal work" because you're not altering the metal. So the permit was revoked, they wouldn't issue a new one, and we had to move shop. That alone almost cost that little sorting spin-off it's live.
More regulations need phase in clauses. If you build <100 vehicles a year almost no regulation should apply. Give people room to demonstrate the case for change.
Same for if you fill < 100 old oil wells with toxic waste? (not implying that anyone is doing that). How to prevent that if you want to build 200 vehicles, you just found a new company? Or 50.
No, the harm needs to be considered. Usually courts dont take kindly to people obviously skirting the rules. It's not really a different company if it uses the same design and factory/tooling.
The goal is to create more competition and not entrench existing players through burdensome regulation that treats kit cars the same as GM.
Sequestering CO2 is not toxic waste dumping. And as I understand, creating dummy companies to skirt regulations or taxes is already a known tactic with known antidotes.
Peter Reinhardt is specifically talking about pumping massive amounts of a synthetic liquid into the ground.
The history of the 20th century is full of people insisting that some industrial product is perfectly safe to dump into the environment in massive amounts, and then it turns out years later that it's not safe at all. I can't imagine the process for injecting some new synthetic into the ground taking less than four years in any situation. It's going to take more time than that just to do basic studies.
The specific kinds of regulations he's arguing about have been written in blood and tumors, and they exist for good reasons.
Over-regulation is without a doubt one of the top, if not the top, reasons for many of our woes. Propagandists will continue to say they are necessary for our safety or environment, but the negative repercussions are obvious and abundant. The only true beneficiaries will always be a handful of potential victims and the monopolists.
>at the end of the day, it leaves us all worse off
I don't know, I like having meds that are radioactive be clearly labeled, for example. It's hard to draw the line as to what is overregulation and what is really needed, but it'd reather have too much than not enough.
I estimate the fraction of carbon removal cost wasted to regulation at 100% rather than 50%. Regulation must be truly insane if producing synthetic oil and pumping it underground is somehow more appealing than not extracting the equivalent amount of fossil oil in the first place.
In the same way that people struggle to comprehend exponential growth, they seem to also struggle to comprehend the cost of inaction, compounded over time.
Imagine if the steam engine had not been allowed by regulators during the time of the Industrial Revolution.
If that happened and we were all still working on farms today, I bet half the people would be telling us how much safer the government was making us with all its regulations. In blissful ignorance.
People often say this kind of argument is in opposition to regulation and in favor to deregulation, but lemme play devil's advocate and say, why is it not an argument in favor of stronger, centralized, simplified regulation, aka what they got going on over in the PRC? Sure it's nice having the ability for a blue city in a red state in a blue federal government all keeping each other from getting anything done, but on the other hand, seems there's something to be said for a government that can say "there should be a train here. We will cut a hole through your building now to make that happen."
While I am firmly in the “de-regulation is bad, because every single one of those is written in blood” camp, I also sympathize with startups and businesses desperately trying to innovate in a regulated market and being stymied by said bureaucracy.
What I’ve come around to is the exact opposite of most de-regulation stans: bigger government. The tradeoff for regulations from the government is having said government shoulder the burden of helping new businesses successfully navigate said regulations quickly and efficiently. It shouldn’t be on the small business owner or startup founder to trawl through thousands of pages of texts and attempt to figure out where their business sits within them, the government should instead have an ombudsman or agent - paid with by tax dollars from successful businesses - work full-time with that business to figure things out.
Want to start a bar? Here’s the application for a liquor license, here’s the plain-language requirements for accessibility and hygiene, here’s a taxpayer-supported payroll system to ensure labor law compliance, and here’s the map of areas where you can setup shop without requiring a separate permit process.
Of course, the problem with said approach is that it requires funding, which requires more tax revenue, which means higher taxes. Under the current neoliberal, laissez-faire Capitalism system in the USA, that simply isn’t happening at present, if for no other reason than established players have captured regulatory agencies and government officials to deliberately hamstring new businesses.
Selling deregulation in business, especially “hardtech”, is exactly what those ghouls want. Don’t take the bait. Be better, even if it’s harder.
Private payroll systems are expensive, and all the risk remains with the purchaser. Why are they expensive? There is limited competition (often through acquisition) and the product is sold just below the price that the majority of companies would find an alternative. What results is no development and improvement of payroll, but instead companies incentivised to create complexity moats through regulation.
If the government is forced to provide at least one working payroll system for free or reasonable cost then private companies compete with specific verticals and ease of use. And when the government wants to change how payroll works for some third benefit... they just can.
It's a stopgap measure until such time that an entire country's bureaucracy can be rewritten to meet the needs of its populace, rather than its legislators and elites.
Aside from laws being written the way they are (because the legal system is highly verbose and incredibly specific, which necessitates said language), I'm generally in agreement with you! Maps should be publicly available and kept up-to-date so citizens can quickly glance at them to identify potential business locations that have lower permitting requirements, and said permitting processes should be handled by the government rather than forcing new business owners to shell out for expensive attorneys and compliance officers right off the bat.
It's about balancing the needs of small business for flexibility and adaptability with limited resources, with the regulations needed to keep larger business interests from exploiting and monopolizing markets to the point of harming third-parties (consumers, small businesses, governments, the environment, etc). Striking that balance is hard, and maintaining it over time harder still, but it can be done without resorting to either extreme.
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.
Logical approach i think here, is to develop and first deploy tech in a less regulated country, just pick based on where regulation is the weakest and/or corruption works better in overcoming it. Use VC dollars to buy the officials to fast-track everything. Then if it works and brings benefit, it will be the nations' problems themselves on who will be ahead of others to adapt their regulations for faster deployment.
Everyone should read or at least be familiar with Joseph Tainter and his research on societal collapse.
> “It is suggested that the increased costs of sociopolitical evolution frequently reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. This is to say that the benefit/investment ratio of sociopolitical complexity follows the marginal product curve… After a certain point, increased investments in complexity fail to yield proportionately increasing returns. Marginal returns decline and marginal costs rise. Complexity as a strategy becomes increasingly costly, and yields decreasing marginal benefits.”
Government regulation and intervention are one such contributor to complexity, and as Michael Huemer demonstrates in his paper In Praise of Passivity we are akin to medieval doctors administering medical procedures on society that are more likely to cause harm than create benefits.
It's fairly clear to me that our civilization is in decline, and it pains me to no end to see people push for more regulation and government intervention. "The patient is getting sicker, we need to let more blood! Fetch me more leaches!"
The good news is that collapse, as Tainter puts it, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a return to less complexity, and it often brings great benefits to large swathes of people. For example, the collapse of the Roman Empire was beneficial to serfs who would actually welcome raiding parties into their villages.
What data do you have to suggest that our societies are becoming less regulated? Because what I can tell, regulation is increasing throughout the western world and has been for at least the past five decades. In the US for example:
> From 1970 to 1981, restrictions were added at an average rate of about 24,000 per year. From 1981 to 1985, that pace slowed to an average of 620 restrictions per year, before accelerating back to 18,000 restrictions per year from 1985 to 1995. A decrease of 27,000 restrictions occurred from 1995 to 1996—3.2 percent of the 1995 total—and in the 20 years since then, regulation has grown steadily by about 13,000 restrictions per year. These periods do not match up neatly with any president or party; rather, regulatory accumulation seems to be a bipartisan trend—or perhaps a bureaucratic trend independent of elected officials’ ideologies.
Good lord the tone of this article is insufferable. "We're saving the world! It's so unreasonable anyone ask us to verify these claims because we're saving the world!"
So true — this thing is designed to go on our streets; I expect an attitude of maximum compliance. This shit can literally kill you if something goes wrong?
The testing is solely about emissions, it's an electric powertrain dolly and they want it to be proven it doesn't increase emissions rather than decrease them. It has nothing to do with safety as far as on road safety is concerned.
The weird thing is they want to test it against all the different trucks it can be towed behind, which doesn't make any sense. If it works it works, doesn't matter which specific truck it's behind so long as the already verified specifications of the truck engine and electric dolly align.
They should verify the electric dolly does what it says it does, compare that to the configurations of trucks they already have on file. Do the math. Does that cost $100,000 per configuration?
There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written in blood.
Now sure, you may be the one "good corporation" out there, who will do things the right way and (edit: not) sell a cheap product or mislead anyone. But if the regulations aren't super stringent, others will undercut you by skimping on safety/emissions and selling a similar product for way less.
It becomes too tempting to cheat otherwise - see Dieselgate / VW, for example. Make it possible to easily profit by cheating (via relaxed regulations) and people will. Again, not you specifically (maybe), but people in general.
Since we can't tell what kind of person you are, REALLY - SBF also told people to trust him, for example - onerous regulations are required.
Plus, I love how on the main page advertising to companies, Revoy advertises 3x-to-5x better fuel efficiency - I'm guessing this one is the one they'll need to back up and officially achieve or companies will dump them / sue.
In the blog post, he claims 94% less fuel and 7 mpg to 120 mpg. I don't see how 7 mpg to 120 mpg is "only" 3x-5x better fuel efficiency - it seems like it's more 17x. Sounds to me like he's exaggerating the effect in the blog to try to get sympathy.
Or maybe we can stop these silly attempts to bundle every regulation into a monolithic category?
The OP provided an opportunity to engage with a specific set of regulations. Instead you took it as an opportunity to make a political statement about abstract "regulations", divorced from every detail in the article.
Oh man this is the one that sets me off every time. Not that I condone VW's cheating, but have you ever looked at how many diesel passenger cars are sold in the USA? It's effectively zero, and has been for a long, long time. Americans don't like diesel cars. They could be totally uncontrolled from an emissions standpoint and it would not make any difference at all.
It makes no sense to regulate emissions on diesel passenger cars in the USA.
> Americans don't like diesel cars... It makes no sense to regulate emissions on diesel passenger cars in the USA.
That doesn't follow. Americans don't like diesel cars because emissions-compliant diesel cars are a massive pain in the ass. Diesel emissions treatment systems are a maintenance pain, as indicated by how many people with diesel trucks perform illegal emissions "deletes". The "magic" of VW's cheating was that it minimized or eliminated this pain, so all the owner was left with was the increased MPG, and this was pretty popular. It wasn't more popular because (1) plenty of people who would have considered a diesel with this ease-of-use would not have considered a VW, and (2) none of the other automakers could compete, because, you know, the cheating.
> There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written in blood.
Sure, but it's a balancing act, right?
My favorite example is that hairdryers sold in the US are required to have ground fault interrupters in the plug. This is touted as an important safety feature and it appears to prevent something like 2-4 deaths a year. Or at least, it used to when it first rolled out, because now you have GFCI outlets in the bathroom in any new or remodeled homes, so maybe it's redundant.
The hairdryers sold in the EU don't have that.
So yeah, it's a regulation written in blood, but it's a pretty good example of a gray area. Once you get into the business of preventing single-digit deaths, things get really weird. You probably should also ban pointy scissors (people trip), frankfurters (choking risk), only allow the sale of pre-peeled bananas, etc.
If there were no cost to inaction, you would be right, but there is, so the abuses from lack of speed bumps to action does not automatically mean those speed bumps are a net good.
> There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written in blood.
There are thousands of pages of regulations, by volume they're written by rather than opposed to the incumbents, and only a small minority are actually safety-critical, but those are the ones everyone retreats into when it comes time to defend all of the ones that aren't. Most regulations are written in crayon.
> It becomes too tempting to cheat otherwise - see Dieselgate / VW, for example.
Dieselgate wasn't an instance of someone causing harm by satisfying a regulation that was too relaxed. They regulation was stringent and they were committing intentional fraud in order to violate it.
> Since we can't tell what kind of person you are, REALLY - SBF also told people to trust him, for example - onerous regulations are required.
So because liars lie, that justifies the government taking months or years to answer a question? Or requiring millions of dollars worth of certifications to test whether a device that customers only buy because it actually significantly improves fuel efficiency isn't reducing fuel efficiency?
That's exactly the thing you don't need the government to test ahead of time because the customer is going to notice immediately and have a false advertising claim if it doesn't actually work.
> Plus, I love how on the main page advertising to companies, Revoy advertises 3x-to-5x better fuel efficiency - I'm guessing this one is the one they'll need to back up and officially achieve or companies will dump them / sue.
> In the blog post, he claims 94% less fuel and 7 mpg to 120 mpg. I don't see how 7 mpg to 120 mpg is "only" 3x-5x better fuel efficiency - it seems like it's more 17x. Sounds to me like he's exaggerating the effect in the blog to try to get sympathy.
The post linked in the article explains that the first version of their product resulted in a 78% reduction in fuel consumption (this is the 3x-5x) and the newer version is 94%.
That the "onerous regulations" are demanded by people willing to condemn others when they themselves haven't done the reading is rather one of the issues.
>There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written in blood.
Excellent thought terminating cliche. There might be a reason (cause) but there's rarely an available justification.
Regulations dont exist on a spectrum between Hard (good) and Easy (COMPANIES ARE CHEATING NOW). Regulations compel specific actions and block specific actions. Its impossible to fit every regulation into your head to form an opinion on all of them. Taking a stand at "All regulations are good" or "all regulations are bad" is just signalling that you have never dealt with them.
Having worked with multiple companies in multiple legal jurisdictions I can tell you that I have a vast VAST preference for Canada. They talk a big game, but in my honest opinion they have a lower regulatory overhead in certain areas (the ones that affect me) than Australia or the USA.
Heres an excerpt from a canadian government website regarding building a telco tower.
"The Government of Canada is not involved in the specifics of tower installations, but we do set the law; it's called the Radiocommunication Act. Providing technical requirements are met, we only get involved when there is an impasse between the municipality and the company. In these rare cases, we look at the facts and provide a decision."
A Tower build that costs 5 - 10k in rural canada, can cost 100k+ in Australia.
So rural canadian internet providers build more, and service more people. Cause : Effect.
The last time I looked at a tower build for a customer in Australia, we lost interest trying to get a quote for the environmental impact statement required by the state it was to be built in.
Towers, are not 10x more destructive or dangerous in australia than canada. Actually with snow season knocking so many down, the reverse is true. But providers and local governments have the flexibility to make arrangements to service customers.
You need to drop this weird, reflexive defense of regulations, and consider that regulations prevent services, and regulations really do require justification. The Regulator owes you a justification. You are probably poorer for some regulations and those regulations may not be justified.
Another semi relevant example. Gold Coast cops have unlimited search and seizure powers. The "Cause" they display on posters everywhere. A child got stabbed, the parents pushed to change the law to invade everyones privacy on their deceased childs behalf. They tell you the blood cause of the law, but there's no justification for the invasion of privacy or ongoing justification in lives supposedly saved. Just police getting the ability to ruin more peoples lives.
As a former full-time farmer, and current part-time farmer I wish people would go back to driving cars instead of trucks.
At best you can find a four door truck with a 6.5' bed and a tiny 2.7 V6 nowadays. If you want anything with enough power to actually haul something and have an 8' bed, they're 90k+ King Ranch Fords or whatever. Because people want short bed trucks with 4 doors to drive around the fucking suburbs so they can haul boards once a year for home improvement projects.
Rant over. Subsequently, I've been shopping for a new farm truck this week. It's not gone well.
Great comment on HN recently put it this way paraphrasing a comment they liked on Usenet (yes the degree of separation is growing haha):
>of course they shit on the floor, it’s a corporation, it’s what they do, the job of government is to be the rolled up newspaper applied to their nose when they do
Whether you’re a good company or a bad company, a large percentage of companies will always go up right to the limits that are set, and then another significant percentage will go past it until they are caught. That’s just how it works in capitalism. You’re constantly fighting a group of people’s ravenous desire for more money as well as the (often significant) resources they will bring to bear to defend their revenue stream.
You simply can’t expect them to do the right thing without adequate consequences for failing to do the right thing. We have literally centuries of evidence.
> You don't get Dieselgsate without convoluted regulation and compliance industries. You can't game a complex text without a complex test to be gamed.
No you do not. You get smokes of diesel fumes without dieselgate.
Yes, some regulations are going too far and yes, it's hard to rewind it back, but that is mostly because any time something was under-regulated, companies abused it far harder.
I do think the regulations should get review period some time after enactment (whether the desired affect was met, the cost, whether it was worth it, could it be done other, easier way etc.) but it is still probably preferable than under-regulation.
And one rarely considered (by rule-makers) context is how much more they affect smaller players, making competing with established industry giants that much harder
> If we had a regulatory system that could move fast to experiment with creative new technologies, we’d live in a world where our environment gets cleaned up faster, where awesome new hardware was constantly improving our lives by making things better and cheaper, and where large-scale hardtech innovation happened here at home in the USA, not in China.
This is such a shortsighted, self-serving, and hypocritical mindset.
"Move fast and break things" has been the motto of Big Tech for decades, even though they're slowly distancing themselves from the "break things" part. We know what this approach brings, and it's not something that inherently benefits the general population. It benefits corporations first and foremost, who when faced with little to no regulation as is the case with Big Tech, will take every opportunity they get to lie, cheat, and exploit their way into making themselves and their shareholders rich. The idea that removing the regulatory burden on companies will make "our world" better is a fantasy sold primarily by corporations themselves. It's no wonder the author is a CEO.
I'm sure regulations are a major pain in the ass for companies. I experience similar frustrations as a citizen, and I can only imagine what large companies whose main product is innovative technology have to go through. I'm also sure that the regulatory system can be made more efficient, as most government systems can. But the answer isn't to allow companies to "move fast". Moving slow is precisely the correct approach for introducing new technology, regardless of how benevolent their CEO makes it sound to be. Governments need time to understand the impact of the technology, and plan accordingly. Companies need time to address any potential issues. Society needs time to adapt to it. All of these are good things. The only reason we would need to "move fast" is so that executives can get richer quicker. There are very few cases when moving faster is paramount, such as when there's a pandemic and people's lives are in immediate risk, but in all other situations it is the wrong approach.
The claimed political tech race where nations must ensure that innovation happens within their borders is also a red herring. Companies have been offloading manufacturing to China for decades so that they can sell us cheaply made garbage while they skim off the margins, and now when the politics are shifting, they're all about keeping innovation home? Give me a break.
It ain't regulation holding back america, it's profit. Our investors have failed us in every way imaginable, and our inability to consider any other manner of funding means we're dead in the water.
Exactly! It's an absolutely foolish thing to build a society around, and the benefits are largely squandered on the private lives of private investors.
"Incredibly brave post from Peter about the insane regulatory friction our society must endure and which is directly responsible for the premature deaths of the startups attempting to build wealth for our future, as well as millions of people whose emancipation from (inter alia) air pollution is delayed for decades by the same regulations that were intended to drive improvement of the environment.
Peter is brave because, descriptively, the regulatory state functions collectively as a cartel with a monopoly on the veto and can apply it essentially at will with no real accountability. If one of the thousands of officials Peter's companies work with takes a dim view of this post, they could quietly and anonymously kill the company by shadow banning progression of any of hundreds of strands of regulatory approvals needed to obtain permission to operate.
What are Peter's companies trying to do? Crush babies into gold? No, they're finding economic ways to fix air pollution. He's going to spend the better part of a decade of his life fighting some avatar of "the department of improving the environment" for the right to spend his own money improving the environment.
I too have heard, and experienced, insane horror stories.
The US is currently rapidly losing an energy production war with China. We have all the money and natural resources anyone could ever want, and China - a communist dictatorship - is deploying more electricity generation capacity in months than the US has deployed, ever, since the invention of electricity.
Why?
Solar photovoltaic power, which is approximately free and works best in uninhabitable deserts that are otherwise so economically useless that they remain federal land and are used for such things as atomic bomb testing, must go through the same environmental impact assessments, which take many years, as an oil refinery or explosives plant. Solar energy, which has a lower impact than practically any other land use and is by far the best per dollar spend for improving the environment. We should be granting 99 year solar leases on BLM land and inviting the top 10 deployers to an annual dinner at the White House!
This is not a market failure. This is a regulatory failure, and it is actively killing us. More Americans die every month than on 9/11 from the impacts of air pollution that would have been addressed a decade ago if builders were allowed to build. This is not some academic niche issue. Thousands of people are actively killed by our neglect of this problem.
The situation, expressed in real world time-to-deployment, has not materially improved. The regulatory state is a bizarre hydra where, somehow, painstaking reforms to speed up review often end up taking longer. Such is the case for California's fire hazard reduction burn process, which takes so long that the forests often burn up in the mean time. (https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/01/17/the-los-angele...) Earlier this year, the fires took 10,000 houses and nearly 100 people with them, and now, nearly a year later, almost none have been rebuilt, while the city council's response to housing scarcity is ... rent control. Elon, I'm ready to go to Mars!
My radical view is that if McMaster-Carr can fit 500,000 SKUs into its 4000 page catalog, the federal government should be able to fit all its laws and regulations into the same space. The constitution can be on page 1. In 1875, the federal code was less than 2000 pages. Today it is over 12 million. At the current rate we are generating new law faster than anyone could ever read it.
I was just reading an NYT article about lead battery recyclers in Africa and how their operations are basically unregulated and are poisoning entire towns.
Things going a little slow or costing a little more is very often preferable to the alternative where you begin operations recklessly and negatively impact neighbors, sometimes irreparably.
When someone says being overweight is bad, do you think they are saying they shouldn't exist at all?
Of course not, they want to be a normal weight. That's the discussion reasonable people hope to have about regulation. Your strawman isn't welcome here -- I've never seen anyone seriously argue that ALL regulations should be removed.
> I've never seen anyone seriously argue that ALL regulations should be removed.
I've been seeing it in real time this entire year in my country.
And yes, on certain topics I see it here quite a bit. Maybe not "ALL" regulation, but some members of the community have an extremely libertarian take on conducting business.
The US can't do much about other countries. We can definitely control how and who we outsource to, but the past 30 years of US government doesn't make me confident that we'll do that anytime soon.
But that's a tiny bit tangential from regulations.
“All outsourced, vendor, and subcontractor companies down the entire production/waste chain to the raw material must meet US environmental regulations.”
Meanwhile the established players with connections can break all the laws they want, and pay zero taxes to boot.
I think the problem isn't regulation (which the current admin is aggressively destroying, e.g. with the EPA) so much as corruption - which manifests partly as critical government functions being deliberately starved of resources. Regulatory bodies should get more funding to study and approve new technologies, and there should be more subsidies available for smaller innovators to offset the R&D investments and application waiting periods. That wouldn't be in the interest of big polluters and their captive politicians though.
It’s not over regulation, it’s bad regulation.
Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at not just achieving the letter of the law but actually solving the problem it was defined for. Good regulation IMO looks bad because you never hear of anyone being punished for breaking it because it is complied with.
The EU banned roaming charges in 2017. Most networks by then had already abolished them, but only because this change was coming. The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges.
EU flight compensation rules are another great example - they don’t pay out often because what’s happened is the airlines don’t get delayed to that point as often as they used to.
Scotland has a “right to roam”, which can be summarised as “don’t be a dick and you can go anywhere you want outdoors”. So you can walk, camp etc pretty much anywhere (it’s a bit more complex). In theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and walk across their fields. In practice, this means that most popular walking paths have access routes maintained by landowners that people use.
On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
!00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer, 'we need the right regulations' is. The article points out areas that improvements to regulation, and process, would help and that second part 'and process' is often overlooked. A complex regulatory structure may be needed but that doesn't mean it has to be as hard as it is. Is it really the problem that the regulations were complex or was it a problem that navigating them was a challenge? I've had this discussion with local permitting where I live. Permits are needed, but that doesn't mean they should be hard or that the job of the city is to just tell you no. There is a world where the city is a partner trying to help you achieve something so when permitting comes up, and you pay your fees, the answer they give isn't just 'yes/no' but 'you may want to consider' and 'let's work together on a plan that...'. There isn't a regulation here, just a process improvement and the difference can be massive. A similar view of how to improve federal regulations, through simple process improvement and not just regulatory change, could really make a difference.
> 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer
Sometimes it is. For example some countries had or have regulation that only nobles can work in specific professions or wear specific clothes or live in specific places. Some had the same but race-based.
This entire class of regulation deserved to be thrown out. And yes, at least partially there are claims how it was necessary for safety or whatever else.
There are are also some dumb taxes with bad side effects like tax on windows.
Some regulation is terrible and deserves to be removed rather than replaced or improved.
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Sure, but sometimes a repealing a bad piece of regulation doesn’t necessitate a replacement.
Policy reform decisions need to be evidence based and sometimes evidence suggests ditching the law over updating. And sometimes it’ll say update it.
What makes Good regulation is path dependent (in respect to existing institutions) and context sensitive, it’s important to analysis the costs of enforcement, not just the administrative side but in terms of lost opportunities. Do they make a suite of desirable economic activity infeasible or unjustifiable more expensive (relative to the goal of the policy)
> There isn't a regulation here, just a process improvement and the difference can be massive
Are those binding constraints? If so it’s effectively regulation or part of the regulatory regime even if they aren’t the rules themselves
Based on your opinion of local permitting I have a strong suspicion you've never applied for any sort of local permit for something where issuance of the permit requires any real consideration.
Petty homeowner renovation stuff is basically a weird tax in disguise. They don't care, they were never gonna tell you no. They just want your money and want you to make work for whatever trade is being made work for in the process.
Go for a variance and then see how you feel about it. Better yet, go try and create any sort of occupied structure or commercial use where one doesn't already exist.
Local permitting is riddled with bike shedding, people trying to avoid responsibility, people trying to advance their pet interests at other people's cost and probably more stuff I'm forgetting. At least with state level stuff you can be all "I've paid my engineer big bucks, here's there work output, here's why it's GTG, and if it is in fact GTG they typically rubber stamp it. But little guys can't afford to play in that arena unfortunately.
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> !00% agree. 'we need less regulation' is never the right answer, 'we need the right regulations' is.
Well, much of the time the right regulation is 'let existing general laws (eg around safety and fraud) and contract law and private agreements handle it'.
But it's pretty fair to sum that Right Regulation up as 'less regulation'.
To give a crazy example: the Right Regulation about the colour of your underwear is to just let you decide what you want to wear, also known as no regulation of the colour of your underwear.
See https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html for less silly example of airline regulation.
Good regulation is how air travel became the safest method of travel in the past few decades without impeding on innovation or affordability. Bad regulation is when that same regulatory body, the FAA, delegates most of the oversight to the very same companies they should be overseeing.
IMO, we're in an age where regulation is the only tool left for a civilized society to leash their multi-billion corporations to actually help benefit society and not only their shareholders. I've been beating around the bush, but Boeing has already rebounded (tremendously) after the tragic incidents in the past few years.
Businesses are great at optimizing in profit and left to their own accord, that’s ultimately what they’ll do. In many cases that means risking safety, externalizing costs to others, creating anticompetitive unions like cartels, and so on.
Regulation exists to guide that optimization process so it’s forced to factor in other things like safety, environment, competitiveness for consumers and so on. The point being that if you can optimize in a way for profit AND for society at large then we have a reasonable balance to justify your existence. If you can’t, well then we probably shouldn’t be doing what you’re tying to do because the costs you would otherwise opaquely externalize on society are too high for your profit motive.
That isn’t to say things can’t go awry. Over regulation can occur where constraints are added that become crippling and the constraints are too risk averse or just poorly constructed that they do more to break the process than actually protect society. But whenever someone cries at over regulation, they need to point out the specific regulation(s) and why they’re nonsensical.
I’ve worked in highly regulated environments and you’re often very aware of what regulations you need to conform to. Part of that process is often asking why it exists because it can be frustrating having a roadblock presented before you with no rationale. Most the time I can think of good reasons something exists and it’s easy to consider and honor that. Meanwhile there are some regulations I scratch my head and can’t find what they justify, so there should be a channel back to lawmakers or regulators where people can inquire and work can be done to see if those regulation are actually effective or not at achieving their goal, or if they’re just constraints that makes things more expensive.
> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
Companies were at least forced to separate what were essential cookies from non-essential ones. While enforcement was not strong specially for small companies, basically any company could be sued for non compliance -- and many were. I guess this was bad regulation because it wasn't strict and clear enough. It should have been clear that cookie banners must had 2 buttons: agree and disagree. None of that bullshit of selecting partners. None of that "disagreeing takes longer to save your preferences" or refreshes the whole page, or sends you to the home page. And if you didn't want to comply, you're free to block European traffic.
Both can be true: over-regulation and bad regulation. And the West (especially the EU) is arguably suffering from both to various degrees.
At some point a regulation is no longer worth the weight in the overhead it imposes. Even if all regulation was effective, at some point the collective burden would be too high.
Sadly, this also means that some bad behaviour is inescapable at the margins. There are always a few people looking for an angle to make a quick buck in a certain way, yet not enough for a regulation to be supported.
It reminds of the "The optimal amount of Fraud is non-zero" that once ended up on HN frontpage : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913
I wonder, is there a legal principle to call-out someone who is trying to exploit the word of the law against the spirit of the law ?
> The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges.
Even better, a lot of the MVNOs added nothing or far less in roaming charges. I think its purely because they have more price sensitive customers. In general people seem very reluctant to switch providers despite number portability, the right to unlock phones after a certain time, etc.
Roaming charges are far from the only example. The big operators are sometimes several times as expensive for the same package (the Vodafone equivalent to my 1p mobile packages is approx three times the price, even ignoring roaming costs) so clearly just do not need to compete on price.
One problem with getting good regulation is the influence of the currently dominant players. They are adept at lobbying to twist regulation to strengthen their position and maintain the status quo. We see a lot of this in IT, of course, but it happens elsewhere too.
The EU removing roaming is better than the situation in the UK. Although some operators (O2 I know of) give a fixed roaming allowance in the EU that is OK. Not as good as getting your full contract/PAYG allowance though.
eSIMs have made the virtual mobile operators attractive for short term data usage. Switzerland not being in the EU has very high roaming charges, but you can buy data on an eSIM for not terrible prices. Much better than standard network roaming data charges for sure.
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About the cookie banners, I'm honestly not sure it's a regulation issue. For >90% of the websites the "reject all" option have no impact on user experience, so either everybody is breaching or the banner is useless in the first place.
Do you get prompted for the choice the next time you visit the website? Are they websites you need to log in to? Those are really the only user experience things that would be obvious in most instances — everything else is just pure data mining for usage analytics (::knowing wink::) and overt tracking. Some sites absolutely do not respect any of the choices, but that’s not the normal behavior.
> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
While I agree that cookie banners are bad, they are not the result of bad regulation. They work perfectly for what they are. They signal that the web page is tracking you and has tracking cookies. Essential cookies are allowed and do not trigger a cookie banner requirement.
On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases.
Even this is a win.
The problem with this is that DNT header is used by such a tiny minority of people that it’s basically a walking unique identifier for all of the side channels. Arguably it’s as identifying as the cookie you’re asking them not to store in the first place.
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> On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases.
They come as disabled because that is required by GDPR. All settings that are not strictly necessary, consent must be opt-in. Not because you enabled DNT. That's just a flag companies don't care about because they are not legally required to care.
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I am sympathetic to your claim but after reading the article it does seem to be a case of overregulation, or lack of flexibility at least. Could you use the examples of the article in order to illustrate how this is bad regulatation rather than overregulation ?
To go in the direction of your claim, hasn't the FDA model often been criticized for how easy it is to comply with for medical devices/complements ?
> In theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and walk across their fields
You absolutely can, though, as long as you leave everything exactly the way you found it and don't actually walk right through my garden.
You can in fact actually walk right through my garden if you ask first and get permission, but that holds true anywhere.
I could have written 4x the amount on Right to Roam, but I didn't. My point is that it changes how landowners treat their land and access by default. They could provide gates and come after people for not respecting their land, but instead they (usually) provide alternative access which actually delivers the spirit of the law - a right to roam.
I'm Irish, living in Scotland, and it's just unbelieveable the difference it makes. Here [0] is a perfect example of a situation that this solves. Murder Hole beach (in the same ish area) has similar issues, the farmer who owned the field that you accessed it kept a bull in that field.
[0] https://www.donegaldaily.com/2017/06/22/fury-as-access-shut-...
Frankly, the cookie banners are an example of bad enforcement. Most of the annoying ones are actually non-compliant with the regulation. I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well.
I disagree - I think they’re a bad law. Ideally it wouldn’t need to be enforced at all, because companies would comply with it. The last website I worked on we had 0 telemetry in cookies but we used a cookie for non telemetry uses. When we were putting together a privacy policy, one of legal’s questions was “are there any cookies”, to which we said yes. We explained, but as far as they were concerned cookies means cookie bar.
> I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well. Personally I’ve never looked at a cookie bar and said “wow I’m glad I now know how many people they’re selling my data too” and then changed my behaviour. And the companies have just slapped non compliant (and unenforced/able) banners to justify what they were already doing. That’s a bad regulation.
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A good point. Regulation is worth nothing if not enforced. There are new right to repair laws but nothing has been enforced.
> It’s not over regulation, it’s bad regulation.
A distinction without almost any practical difference. If this isn’t overregulation, how would you define it? What law would you ever look at and say, “that’s overregulation”?
I think bad regulation and over-regulation are different words for the same thing, but calling it over-regulation pushes a certain agenda that all regulations are bad, which people who profit from deregulation would like you to think.
So what distinguishes the good regulation from the bad? Good regulations either
1) solve collective action problems (i.e. situations in which we're all better off if we all do X but it's in nobody's immediate personal interest to do X), or
2) short circuit short term corporate hill-climbing and let us "jump" from one local economic maximum to a higher one elsewhere in configuration space without having to traverse the valley between (which corporations won't do on their own).
I think even the most hardcore objectivist types would appreciate that these classes of problem exist. Even if you delegate their solutions to some ostensibly private actor (e.g. let insurance companies make the building codes) you end up with an inescapable system of rules that's de facto state control anyway. Doesn't help.
The problem with the cookie law is that it doesn't solve a real problem. Look, I'm probably going to get downvoted to hell for saying this, but the people who make "tracking" a cause celebre are a tiny, noisy minority and most real world people don't actually care. They're more annoyed by cookie dialogs than the cookies.
Policymakers overestimated the size of the privacy advocate constituency and so enacted regulations that solve a problem that exists only in the minds of diehard privacy advocates. Now, policymakers are reversing this policy. They're doing is slowly and tentatively (because they're still spooked by how loud the cookie banner people are), but they're doing it. Credit where it's due for finding their gonads.
The cookie affair isn't unique though. It's just one example of a regulation that went wrong because it came out of non-market decision making. Money is an honest, clean signal.
You know what a market is? It's a policy diffusion engine that uses profit as its loss signal. Works remarkably well almost all the time!
In those few situations in which we depart from the market as a decision making mechanism, we have to be careful not to allow ourselves to be corrupted by the usual suite of bugs in human reasoning: availability bias, recency bias, social desirability bias, and so on. The market, because money is an honest signal, resists these corruptions. Regulatory bodies? Much more vulnerable.
The cookie law is a central example of a time when a non-market regulatory apparatus was corrupted by a cognitive bias: social desirability bias in particular.
Of course we need some regulations. But when we make them, we need to be aware that we're likely getting them wrong in some way. All regulations should have
- automatic sunsets,
- public comment periods,
- judicial and legislative review mechanisms,
- variance and exception mechanisms, and
- the lightest possible touch.
Just as in software, each additional line of (legal) code is a liability, not a feature. Keep it simple.
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I get the idea but it is a very one-sided argument. It sounds like "but can't they just trust us?". And no, they can't, that's the reason why regulation exists. They said they have done all sorts of research to make sure their tech is safe, but would they have done it if there wasn't any regulation? Many companies wouldn't have, because it is not profitable, even accounting for the risk and especially for startups that don't have a lot to lose.
They also claim that by not letting they do their things, regulation caused the emission of plenty of CO2, NO, etc... Yeah, right, we can say the same for drug testing too, drug testing may have killed millions by delaying the adoption of life saving drugs, so should we stop testing drugs? It is debatable really, but I am sure that experts studied to question seriously and that the answer is no.
Regulation is costly and inefficient, obviously, that's the point, if it wasn't you wouldn't need regulation because that's what companies would do naturally. It is also not perfect and you can always find bad regulation. But overall, they are important.
> They said they have done all sorts of research to make sure their tech is safe...
We've heard this one before. This really is a regulation bad because "trust me bro our product/service is so good for you/the environment/the world/etc and it's just regulations that are holding us back."
This isn't to say that it's not a fine product/service, but we are talking about a service that alters how companies may comply with current/future emissions regulations. By apparently pumping it back into the ground. We might want the regulators to really make sure that is a good idea and not just take their word for it.
I can see two problems causing the pain described here, which I will discuss shortly. But the article seems to stretch that experience too much into the 'regulation is bad' territory. Regulations exist for a reason. They aren't created for the power trip of government officials. This is the same US where companies dump PFAS into drinking water sources with impunity, has some of the highest fees for the worst quality interest access, where insulin is unaffordable and corporate house renting is a thing. There are many such areas where regulation and oversight is woefully inadequate, much less any 'overregulation'. Regulations are practically the only thing standing between the rich and the powerful and their incessant attempt to drive even more wealth into their own pockets at the expense ordinary people's health, wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc.
Now let's look at the specific problems here with a much narrower scope than 'regulations'. The first problem is the type of regulations. Some regulations are too arcane and don't reflect the current state of technology. Others affect the unprivileged people disproportionately. The solution for that is to amend these regulations fast enough - not deregulation. It's also important to assess the negative impacts of loosening these regulations - something I don't see discussed in this article.
The other important requirement is to increase the staffing of the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload doesn't become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a scientific method to assess the staffing requirements of public service institutions. According to that, a significant number of government departments all over the world are understaffed. Regulatory agencies and police departments top that list. Increased workload on their officials lead to poor experience for the citizens availing their services (this is very evident in policing). Yet those same experiences are misconstrued and misrepresented to call for deregulation and defunding of these institutions - the opposite of what's actually needed. (PDs need more staff and more training in empathy. Not defunding, nor militarization.) This is exactly what I see in this article. An attempt to target regulations as a whole using a sob anecdote.
>insulin is unaffordable
In large part due to regulation. Reflexively adding more regulations to deal with the negative effects of existing regulations is like "fixing" a bug by adding special-case logic for inputs which trigger the bug, without understanding why the bug actually occurred. Just like code, regulations should ideally be simple and elegant with a minimum of special cases.
The EU also has regulations, but somehow it does not make insulin as expensive as in the US. Maybe the existence of a regulation is not the issue here.
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The bug occurs because of the power discrepancy of those who have the demand and those of who can supply. For some reason, the problem if insulin prices and absurd health costs only exist in the US. I wonder why.
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If you are an European, regulation also has the benefit to induce soft protectionism from countries that are less keen on consumer and environment protection. This is the heart of the debate about Mercorsur, as it creates an unfair competition by lowering regulation (in theory european regulation applies but in practice it's harder to verify), and also an internal debate in France related to some pesticide that other European countries can use. Some argue that we should allow the pesticide, some that we should stop importing products that are exposed to it.
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> In large part due to regulation.
Wait, what? With this type of claim I was sure you were going to back it up with at least some evidence but apparently I was wrong.
I'm sorry, but the irony in this comment too much. The reason insulin is so high is because of a lack of regulation.
If the government took a stronger stance towards monopolies in the pharma industry, this wouldn't be happening. If the government REGULATED insulin prices, it wouldn't be so high. If the government reigned in PBMs, it wouldn't be so high. IF the government reigned in patents and the tricks drug companies play with them, it wouldn't be so high.
> Regulations exist for a reason.
Regulations exist for different reasons, not one reason. Some of those reasons are good reasons, like regulations against dumping or against contract killers or for food safety. Some of those are bad reasons, like regulations of parking minimums implemented to appease the property owning class. Some of those are for bad reasons pretending to be for good reasons, like the regulations that block renewable energy which are allegedly for the environment, but the true motives are more about aesthetic displeasure or ideological hostility.
> like regulations of parking minimums implemented to appease the property owning class.
Due to current market conditions we can sell all apartments without any parking spaces, therefore regulation defining a housing unit with foresight for future market conditions is bad.
> the regulations that block renewable energy
Can you name one regulation that outright blocks renewable energy generation specifically and not externalities created by developments, that sometimes happen to be renewable energy?
> like regulations of parking minimums implemented to appease the property owning class.
This regulations are crucial for preventing cities from being littered with cars (more than they already are). If developers were allowed they would build only very limited parking space and then people living there would have to park in public space burdening everybody. If anything it's a regulation against property owning class.
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The problem is that the regulators themselves are insanely corrupt - how else would you explain the emergence of proposals like (thrice-resurrected) Chat Control, that clearly is harmful to every citizen of the EU, and I have yet to see a single individual supporting it.
Every governing decision and rule is either fully made by powerful shadow interests, proposed by said interests and is only thwarted (for the time being) by some politicians on the other side or made out to be benign or even beneficial but is in actuality compromised in some major way.
>Every governing decision and rule is either fully made by powerful shadow interests, proposed by said interests
The Useful Idiots(TM) will be along shortly to tell you how you're technically wrong because the rules are "only" 99% made/proposed by shadow interests.
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> Regulations are practically the only thing standing between the rich and the powerful and their incessant attempt to drive even more wealth into their own pockets at the expense ordinary people's health, wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc.
Try to rethink how money is created and how money gets its value and how and by whom that wealth is distributed. Regulation as in "make rules" does not enforce rules, which is the definition of (political) power.
> The other important requirement is to increase the staffing of the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload doesn't become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a scientific method to assess the staffing requirements of public service institutions. According to that, a significant number of government departments all over the world are understaffed.
Why are you claiming "There is a scientific method" and do not provide it? Governments do (risk) management by 1 rules, 2 checks and 3 punishment and we already know from software that complexity in system is only bounded by system working with eventual necessary (ideally partial) resets. Ideally governments would be structured like that, but that goes against governments interest of extending power/control. Also, "system working" is decided by the current ruling class/group. Besides markets and physical constrains.
> Try to rethink how money is created and how money gets its value and how and by whom that wealth is distributed.
Please elaborate.
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You can tell when someone is a process or chemical engineer, by how they carefully consider each of the system boundaries and the inputs, outputs and processes inside and outside each of these boundaries.
There seems to be a whole series of issues in considering system boundaries and where they can and should be drawn when considering the best course of action.
EVs are a classic case, you draw the system boundary around the vehicle and get a MPG figure, and externalize the remaining costs. Might as well claim infinite MPG. Bill Gates proves himself as a process oriented guy here.
Carbon capture is another funny one. You report that you sequester this amount of carbon, but on the other hand deplete the soil. The amount of carbon in healthy soil is staggering, activities leading to soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have to be very carefully considered. How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years? It's introducing predators into Australia all over again, people thinking they are smart and going for the course of action that is politically favorable in the very short term but ultimately ill considered.
For regulation, this is pretty much why can't we just have regulations that benefit me right now? For people with deep pockets, they ignore the regulations and pay the fines. Problem with these guys is their entire business model revolves around making money off of externalizing costs onto the rest of the economy, via environmental regulatory burden. What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
> How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years?
Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so. Mind that the process that created these holes have also created tremendously large biohazards very consistently, yet are normalized by society. We must accelerate the pace we’re on.
> What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me? I absolutely think businesses which are working to save millions of lives should receive regulatory support, instead of the oil companies which are still to this day benefiting from price subsidies?
> Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so.
What percentage risk of it being worse would you draw the "we need regulators to take a careful look at this at? A 20% chance that they destroy up a local ecosystem or something else catastrophic? 5%? 1%?
Now what if their operations were local to you? What does it become then?
The key point contested is stated like this in the OP:
> A regulatory system that structurally insists on legalistic, ultra-extreme caution is bound to generate a massive negative return for society.
The OP mostly sees the downsides and disregards how hard earned any of those regulatory requirements are. Each requirement is usually the outcome of people being substantially impacted by industry before regulation. For instance the Thalidomide scandal with 10000 children born with deformities.
If OP doesn't grasp the origin and rationale behind regulations, it doesn't mean there aren't any.
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Aren't the oil companies "working" on carbon capture?
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Waiting 4 years until regulator even decides which regulation you fall under is "regulations that benefit me right now?" There is a lot of similar sentiment ITT. Speedy resolution by government is essential. They get too much slack from being slow, from regulators to court.
> what kind of injection well is this? Should it be permitted as a Class I disposal, Class II oilfield disposal, or Class V experimental? This question on permitting path took four years to answer. Four years to decide which path to use, not even the actual permit! It took this long because regulators are structurally faced with no upside, only downside legal risk in taking a formal position on something new.
Oil companies routinely flared off natural gas that came up with oil because it wasn’t economically worthwhile build the infrastructure to capture it. It was expensive and it was just easier to flare it off and let it go to waste. North Dakota changed the calculus by implementing strict regulations that limited how much gas companies could flare in the state set a target that companies could only flare 10% of a natural gas production and if you exceeded that you would get a fine this regulatory pressure made previously un economical infrastructure investment suddenly worthwhile, and suddenly, they managed to build pipelines.
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>deplete the soil
Doesn't carbon get pulled out of the air through photosynthesis? That's why people plant trees to address global warming, no?
Your arguments seem very handwavey and not very well thought through. Do you really believe that EV business owners are the only ones who benefit from more widespread EV usage?
In any case, even if you're flagging real issues, there is no evidence that existing regulators identified those issues in the case of the OP? So it could still be the case that the existing regulatory scheme is useless overburden.
I'm highly suspicious of anyone who can't clearly state that fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change.
When they then claim, against all obvious facts, that there is a clear political consensus on fixing climate change in the USA, that becomes active distrust of their message.
This appears to be another subset of the so-called "Abundance" movement where people avoid the elephant in the room (political power of fossil fuels) and get all screechy about those damn environmentalists and regulators who are the real villains holding us back from solving climate change with the free market.
Meanwhile solar and wind farms are being illegally shut down by the government.
But sure, it's abstract regulation at fault, not the politicians paid off by oil who regularly state that the problem his company is solving isn't even a problem.
Regulation is a nebulous term, dozens of posts about it in here and no one defined regulation, nevermind agreed on a definition of regulation.
On one side, It’s a useful buzz word for libertarians to attack, saying these prevent companies doing anything they want constantly, which Libs believe would help the world.
Meanwhile it seems less ideological comments see shades of effectiveness in good vs bad regulations. There’s also shades of law vs regulation, enforcement laxity, hidden purposes behind regs supposed reasons, etc.
It’s a tangled web and HN loves debating regulations more than almost anything!
In my country in Africa there is a huge shortage of homes in cities where building is regulated. Not enough homes are being built and many people live in shacks. Building in the villages has literally no regulations and amazing houses are being built at an amazing pace in the villages because you don't need any regulatory approval.
I don't think all building regulations should be put aside but we have a crisis something needs to give.
I've often wondered how much of the western homeless crisis is due to not allowing ghettos/slums to exist, the last place the very poor could afford rent. Cities have essentially made them illegal over the past 30yrs. Once it gentrifies it's gone. Including even large blocks of subsidized apartment buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes
All housing is now very carefully planned top-down. The only ones who get past all the red tape are high end condos or far-off single-family suburbs. So city government's only idea is to force each of those fancy buildings to have a subset of units as affordable housing. The supply of those is never enough to keep up. Government made buildings now take forever or straight up fail.
Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.
> western homeless crisis
Haven't really heard about this crisis. Are you referring to the US?
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In rural Gabon, presumably I wouldn't be renting but would own my own unsafe shanty. It's really tempting. But living in Libreville has more of a ring to it.
> Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.
That doesn't seem like a fair take. You're implying that the sympathetic people who outlawed poor houses are the very same people who won't build anything new. That's not true.
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Making people live in slums/shacks isn't a solution to the western "homeless crisis".
This website has been often prone to "social justice" recently, I'm amazed somebody can get away with such an idiotic comment without being flagged to hell.
Houses are "carefully planed" because you don't want poor people to die in them due to poor construction, carbon monoxide when they need heat during winter, or a fire that would spread to other houses due to cheap materials, that's why,you know, the stuff that happens regularly in third world slums, but you can't fathom that fact.
This outlines the problem with most regulation:
There is no/litte discussion about the trade-offs.
You have to see the other side, then weigh all pros and cons and then make a decision.
In most cases regulation is sold as something that will improve a field with no downside at all.
That’s just a lie and people find out over time.
There is no shortage of political debate in most developed countries.
I think a bigger reason is that people who go to politics or administration often succumb to a certain kind of (reverse) teleological fallacy. They think that because their goal is to advance X, if they propose regulations for that purpose, their regulations will advance X.
HN, and most US centric forums online - have been anti regulation, for a majority of their history.
Straight up libertarian viewpoints were the norm during the earliest phases of the net. The anti-regulation view points are well known and well travelled.
I’ve seen them exported to conversations in other countries, which dont have the same shared historical context.
It was post 2008, that the zeitgeist began shifting in a durable manner, no matter what defense or arguments against regulations were brought forth.
I don’t think the average voter will trust a corporation, and the arguments against regulation are going to take a generation before they become popular again.
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Sure, western politics doesn't discuss the problem of regulation. Sure, sure, sure.
Do you live in an alternate universe? The last 30 years have been dominated by deregulation and privatization.
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I think a commonality is none of the agencies in the way feel an existential risk from failing to execute.
You could imagine a system where a permit and planning department finds it's functions taken over by a minimal state agency when not enough housing is built in its area. The state of California is slowly moving that direction because it's so bad.
Which just leads to things like this
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/earthq...
Typical structures in the villages are bungalows built by people you know. Sounds like the crisis in the link you shared is from corrupt approvals and poor construction of commercial properties sold to people. People build houses they will live in in the villages and for me this is a big enough incentive to build it properly. You will have no one to blame when your own roof falls on your head. The builders are also known and it would be a business ending move to build a rubbish house for your neighbour. Word would get out pretty quick. One thing people do in the village is talk as they have plenty time. I think all these other factors make up for the lack of regulation.
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Actually building in Turkey is strongly regulated - it’s just that corruption in government allows bad players to easily ignore it.
Just another way regulation fails to do what is supposed to, while its downsides (diminished competition, deterring startups and supporting incumbents) still apply.
This is why blindly relying on regulation and ignoring its trade offs is just foolish.
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It's regulated everywhere it's just that corruption networks are so dense in the countryside, no one gives a damn about things being done legally.
In my village there is no regulation for building residential property. You don't have title deeds either. You get allocated a piece of land by the local chief or headman/woman and you decide where and what you can build. The only regulation is you must have a toilet. Which tends to be a no brainer and one of the first things most people build. A simple Blair toilet.
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It's nobody on here is talking about Rheinhardt's #2 point: The US is not spending enough on regulation. He specifically points out that regulators are underfunded and understaffed. In the US, this is often an active strategy by conservative politicians to undermine regulations, and portray the story that the regulations are bad, when in fact, the regulatory agencies are being intentionally preventing doing their jobs efficiently.
Potential counterpoint. Is it possible that one challenge is the lack of expertise in government? I think it’s clear that most novel permitting situations involve one expert party (who want the permit but are potentially motivated to not report downsides) but the other party (the regulator) has to either develop their own expertise or say “no”/“wait”.
I was unimpressed by the situation described. It seems that existing injection wells often have all sorts of negative consequences that are avoided by bankruptcy. I suspect more “no”/“waits” in the past might have been reasonable
Just on bad rule could more than double the cost. Or even put your project completely out of any feasibility region
>I’ve been shocked to find that the single biggest barrier—by far—is over-regulation from the massive depth of bureaucracy.
Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are immediately have this thought.
THe problem is that the main argument for this assertion is: "we are trying to dispose of large amount of industrial waste, the regulator is slowing us down"
Now, we are told that this waste is actually going to benefit us, as its taking all of those nasty CO2 and PM2 emissions and locking them away. Great. but what's the chemical make up of those captured emissions? When you inject them into old wells, are they sealed against leakage?
I assume its capturing raw exhaust from things, and that has a non-negligible heavy metal content. Can you guarantee that those aren't going to leak into the ground water?
So yeah that kind of regulation probably is quite onerous, mainly because for the last ~60 years people have been taking the piss.
I bet it's still like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, where they think that the regulations they're encountering are bad, but clearly all the other ones are good.
Almost but not quite.
For most people, they never directly interact with government regulations because somebody else does it. They work for a large corporation and then the corporation requires them to do wasteful or nonsensical things which they ascribe to management incompetence, but it's really because the corporation's lawyers made it a requirement.
Then there are the people who are actually doing the compliance paperwork, but they don't object because it's the thing that pays their salary. Moreover, it's their occupation so all the time required to figure out how to do it is now a sunk cost for them and the last thing they want is to get rid of it and make all that time they invested worthless.
The people who object are the people trying to start a new business, because nobody is paying them to do things that don't make sense and all they want is to get on with what they're actually trying to accomplish instead of paying one fee after another or waiting on unaccountable regulators who have no reason to say no to something but still take excruciatingly long to say yes.
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Theres a lot of that. Its just people need a first exposure to the thing to realise its terrible. Like the other commenter says, most people are completely shielded.
I know a few local people who have only been impacted for the first time by regulations preventing the sale of vapes, and local regulations preventing the resale of used tyres to motorsport enthusiasts. Its the first spark for a lot of people.
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This company's business is regulatory arbitrage. Of course they have to deal with regulators. Capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is not a commercial enterprise. It's something done to get some sort of regulatory credit.
> Capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is not a commercial enterprise. It's something done to get some sort of regulatory credit.
I would have said that it's something done to improve the health of the planet, but sure.
You don't make a billion dollars thinking like that. Dude's playing a different game.
Business doesn't have goals beyond money. Any good it does is completely incidental.
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The problem is that dealing with regulators takes years and millions of dollars, reducing competition and societal benefit. He's quoting $200m in additional health costs borne mostly by Medicare/Medicaid. Regulations aren't a useful part of the system if they're gunked up.
Doesn't that go away as a cost if the government stops paying for healthcare? I heard they were doing this in the US?
The thing is, we really don't need people competing at selling carbon credits because it's an industry that literally only exists due to badly written regulations so it's hard to come up with a ton of sympathy.
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> company's business is regulatory arbitrage
This isn't arbitrage any more than selling warships is military arbitrage.
I wonder what adding a second hinge in a truck does to it's performance in an accident? When the trailer jack knifes, for instance?
I guess someone who wants to put them on our roads should answer some questions on that. Especially as they are clearly given to absurd claims like, 'it goes from 7 to 120 mpg', as if that happened without any other input.
Indeed. The idea is interesting, but the claim is obviously exaggerated: sure, you're burning less gas, but you're tanking electrons. Whatever the final mpg equivalent is, it isn't 120mpg.
His other company is yet another green washing idea. Taking what could and should be valuable natural fertilizer and sequestering it. Also, for most of these ideas, the energy costs of transport and processing outweigh any supposed benefits.
Did you even bother reading the article? The problem is that the government is making them prove the same thing 270 times. And the only thing absurd here is your statement. It's an electric motor. Of course there is "other input."
I think the trouble is that regulators have done a bad job at setting themselves up to learn from their mistakes. Regulations should expire more quickly so their next incarnation can be better sooner.
Instead we're so afraid that the other guys will be in power in the future that we make them hard for people in the future to alter.
> As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device—whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations—is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It’s a complete waste of money for everyone.
Wild - whoever did this should lose their job.
The problem isn’t that regulations exist. The problem is that they are defined in a way that reasonable work arounds or alternative pathways do not exist for situations like this. 270 engine families for 9 engine suggests that the designs may be small variations that would not significantly change the emissions between them. The bureaucrats should waive off some requirements here.
The other alternative that I can think of is that experimental engines get an exception to be not certified for X miles of operation. Once the candidates are chosen for mass production, mandatory certifications can be introduced. Even if your new design doubles the emissions for some reason, over 100000 miles, that’s barely a drop in the bucket. For reference, double the emissions for 100000 miles is roughly equivalent to having an extra semi on the road for a year, which is nothing.
> The problem isn’t that regulations exist. The problem is that they are defined in a way that reasonable work arounds or alternative pathways do not exist for situations like this. 270 engine families for 9 engine suggests that the designs may be small variations that would not significantly change the emissions between them. The bureaucrats should waive off some requirements here.
Any form of regulation is attacked by those who seek to profit by freely causing the harm that regulation prevents. These attacks aim at completely eliminating any and all regulation, but also aim at eroding it so that complying with the letter of the law is ineffective at actually complying with the spirit of the law.
Trying to make mountains out of molehills is one way to attack regulation.
Look at OP's example. In no way did OP offer any support for the $100k price tag for certification, or even mentioned what this hypothetical amount represents in the total investment in a product such as an engine. We're talking about investments that range well in the tens of million of dollars. It's an insignificant drop in the bucket. The design team's salaries alone eclipse that value. On top of that, a single engine alone sells for thousands. Is this hypothetical regulatory cost that high if it can be covered by selling a few dozen units?
The combinatorial explosion is also a far-fetched example of this desire to make mountains out of molehills. You do not need to recertify a whole engine if you do a minor change out of a whim such as changing the color of a knob.
Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that whoever wants to sell an engine isn't putting out subpar products that underperform and outpollute at clearly unacceptable levels. If proving that your product is not poorly designed and irredeemably broken is too much to ask, is regulation really the problem?
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We need more information. How does this work for internal combustion truck engines?
Is the regulation well intentioned poorly designed? Is it anti-competitive gatekeeping drafted by lobbyists? Is the author misrepresenting something? All of the above? Hard to say.
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You cannot separate the idea of regulation from their harm because they are inherent to the concept. A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical effects. Rent control is a fantastic if trivial example of such.
We know central planning doesn't work, yet we are inclined to do it anyway under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
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The magic of the system is that we all did it, comrade. There's multiple people, laws define what those people can do, processes, comment periods. It's all spiderman pointing at spiderman. You can't find any one party so clearly culpable that they can in good conscience suffer real consequence.
And it's not just this, every f-ing regulated industry is like this. I work with someone who specs out where the wires and fixtures for the lights are gonna go in commercial buildings. Ceiling lighting is full of crap like this for christ sake. The whole system is rotten.
[dead]
Having dealt with regulatory bodies before - they probably did lose their job, maybe multiple times, before becoming an engineer that doesn't have to engineer anything, just come up with rules.
>Wild - whoever did this should lose their job.
Why's that? Because a guy who's apparently friends with the owner of the company that produces these things told you that it saves emissions? Doesn't it seem reasonable to verify these claims?
No that doesn't seem reasonable at all if it's been proven to work _really well_ in several configurations and there's no particular reason to expect that the results would be drastically different in other very similar configurations.
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Of course we should verify such claims.
Just as we should also verify claims that every regulation that has ever been written into law is by definition Good (tm) and can never be questioned.
It's possible for the friend of the company owner to astroturf an online form to get a good regulation eliminated, just because it didn't benefit him.
It's also possible for the such wealthy individuals to astrotruf in favour of bad regulations, just because it would benefit him.
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Verifying is great!
How many types of truck engine do you reasonably need to test with? The number should fit on one hand. And really you should only need to do the full test with one model and limited verifications with others. That'll get it down from $27M to $200k, which would be a far more reasonable requirement.
Some kind of testing should be required but 27mil seems egregious
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This is China's secret weapon.
Luckily, the internet, software, and the digital world in general; were a bit too out of left field for regulators.
That's why we kept supremacy over them.
If we are lucky, AI may not be regulated to death
This is such a bizarre myth but I guess it matches your priors.
> whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations
Then it should be easy to answer that request? Where does the $27M price tag come from?
Its not usually one person, but many well meaning committees.
It's not like anyone ever added a device to an engine to deliberately defeat these tests.
lol
state and federal bureaucrats do not lose jobs
Seems somewhat reasonable. I don’t know why the company is supporting all 270 engine families.
This company wants to put a bunch of stuff on the road going 70mph that could crash into you and kill you and is complaining about a measly $27 million of regulatory cost.
They are making up a bunch of scary numbers about the cost of the status quo and the tone of the article is basically holding us all hostage. Speed out special snowflake startup company through the regulatory process (written in blood) or else you’ll lose bajillions of dollars in suffering and pain from the “status quo.”
$27 million is basically a rounding error for automotive companies. Maybe do better at raising funds next time, bro.
Why wouldn't they try to support a large number of engines, the testing was about emissions not safety, and they're not a huge automotive company.
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Spoken like someone who has no idea how hard it is to actually get anything done in real life vs your armchair.
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If you want to argue that adding an electric engine to existing trucks is going to make them go out of control and kill people in some completely common sense defying manner, then the burden of proof is on you and not on the company to prove a negative.
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> one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks and that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item.
Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough". And then "if we come to an understanding, we might be able to look the other way".
Wonder what state that is? Anyone want to guess?
> Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough".
This is often fully formalized, i.e. you're not bribing a specific government official, instead you're paying a huge certification fee hundreds of times because it's a source of revenue generation for the government and whoever passed the bill gave zero fucks that it's a heavily regressive tax on new and small businesses.
Mississippi? I bet it's a flyover state with a tiny sliver of road that sees massive trucking volume.
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I was just in Hangzhou two days ago, and went through the Hangzhouxi train station. Needless to say it's utterly massive, straight out of a Star Trek scene, extremely efficient and clean. Construction was started in 2019, and finished in 2022. It cost $2.25bn. Hangzhou has 5 of these train stations, let alone one.
I'm convinced that every SV founder or neolib politician who writes these hit/think-pieces is getting their enemy entirely mixed up. China is massively bureaucratic and regulation heavy, and just by the scale of these projects, it's simply impossible to think that if you just loosen some rules and fly by your seat pants, you can build a 11 platform train station in 3 years. Again, this station is mind bogglingly massive.
The real answer is that China's regulatory loop is extremely short and small, where the government works very closely and reacts very quickly. You can talk to your regulator, even if you're a small startup working on a small hardware problem. Because every single community district has a CPC office, with representatives that can escalate things all the way up to the top. There's a clear chain of command, and throw in some guanxi to keep the gears greased up, things (problems, questions, hurdles) get to where they need to go. In the US, politicians don't work for their constituents, and even in the rare cases where they do (or have good intentions), they are up against other politicians who have ulterior agendas and their own goals. The machine thrashes against itself, not in a single direction. This is exactly the image of "democracy" in the the minds of the Chinese general public.
The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system is actually built for this.
> The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system is actually built for this.
China does a lot of stuff right, and your points may be entirely valid, but calling that system “democratic” nullifies everything else said. It’s a one party state.
This is incorrect. There are 9 parties. You are likely saying "well it's functionally a singe party system" yet you can't even read Chinese to understand what the policy positions of the different factions within the committees are.
Here's a good primer if you're interested in learning more: https://progressive.international/blueprint/cb7dbaf4-b106-41...
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Given all the videos I've seen on YouTube of bridge and building collapses in China, I think you're glossing over all their shortcomings. Maybe they do have a tight regulatory loop - I don't know - but their aggressive timelines and poor materials seem to have bitten them in the butt a number of times.
But by what definition do you say that is bureaucratic and regulation heavy? It sounds like the opposite to me. The decision to build was made by a single authority and then executed. In the US there would have been at least 3 different levels of government involved, and possibly multiple agencies at each level. And then after they have made their decision, which would take years, they would be sued by many different private organizations that are against the project. All those lawsuits would have to be resolved before work could start, which would take even more years and require modifications to be made to the plan to appease these organizations. To me it sounds like your system is very light on bureaucracy and regulation compared to ours.
Was slave labour used for this one? Or did the Uyghurs catch a break?
Are you racist all of the time or just ignorant for fun?
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> regulators are structurally faced with no upside, only downside legal risk in taking a formal position on something new.
This is my big takeway from this article and others like it that I've read.
But European companies need over-regulation - they are not competitive by themselves, so they need to raise artificial barriers to external market entrants.
Since Europe is hopelessly behind by its own decision to pursue protectionism instead of competition, the choice remains between keeping overregulation which will continue the managed decline, or deregulation, in which companies would find their services are not competitive on cost, experience and would be wiped out in a freely competitive landscape.
Of course the reality is not that black and white, it's clear that deregulation would hurt powerful and wealthy interests, so it will not happen at once - it'll happen to those most behind and least able to garner favorable political treatment.
Overall I think the future of Europe still lies in managed decline, with its innovative capacities only able to be manifested in crafting new regulations and making the efforts to comply with them - it's future companies and startups will be funded and supported by governmental grants and/or powerful old money investors who also have vested interests in other companies.
Your "over-regulation" is my "safety first".
Yep. My reaction to this line:
> the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is the deathbed of thousands of hardtech companies that could be drastically improving our lives. We must unleash them.
was "the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is also the deathbed of tens of thousands of hardtech companies who have no concern about destroying our communities in the interests of making a dollar", and that's what the regulations are there for.
would be nice to extend the deathbed to include some of the soft-tech companies too
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What an intellectually bankrupt way to approach a question that has both downsides and upsides, and where those downsides and upsides vary depending on the specific regulation in question.
As the article points out, there is a safety cost from over-regulation. The impact on air quality from not allowing the new technology quickly enough is very real.
> every regulation is written in blood
It doesn't mean everything is exactly right but it is a good reminder of what keeps happening when there are no rules there.
That's for safety regulations, and is somewhat true. That's not really what's being discussed here.
There are many regulations that are drafted, and paid for, by monopolies. There's also just outright stupidity put into place, because lawmakers get paid to make laws, so they make laws that sound good, without considering the consequences.
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> CO₂ captured in farm & forestry plant residues, convert it into a carbon-rich, BBQ sauce-like liquid
How much carbon do forestry residues (dead branches, leaves and wood chips ?) take to release their carbon back to the atmosphere through rotting ? How much of that carbon woudl have stayed in the ground (unless there's wildfire) ?
Hi HN, author here.
I wanted to address the most common theme in the comments: safety.
The regulatory burdens I've encountered and described were not related to safety requirements. They are procedural questions with no bearing on safety.
Whether an injection well is Class I disposal, Class II oilfield disposal or Class V experimental has no bearing on the (strong and reasonable) safety requirements to protect underground sources of drinking water... the problem is the delay that comes from deciding which class is most appropriate (turns out, Class V experimental).
And ditto, whether a Revoy is a tractor, a trailer, or a converter dolly for the purposes of DMV registration paperwork has no bearing or relation to the (again strong and reasonable) NHTSA FMVSS safety requirements... the problem is the delay on the procedural paperwork.
I think we can all agree that these procedural issues are not "written in blood", but are in fact regulatory bikeshedding that we'd all be better off without.
The issue I see is that companies have limited liability. If they mess up, they can just go bankrupt and sometimes pass the cleanup costs on to society.
Therefore, I think it’s fair that society wants to have a say in what gets done and what doesn’t.
Maybe a way around this would be companies operating without limited liability. Would you be willing to put your entire fortune on the line in exchange for a fast track through regulations?
Edit: to clarify: I’m not arguing that all companies should lose limited liability. I’m suggesting the introduction of a new type of company structure.
> If they mess up, they can just go bankrupt and sometimes pass the cleanup costs on to society.
Or as Dupont, Dow, the Ethyl Corporation et al have shown, don't even go bankrupt and still pass on the cleanup costs on to society.
Indeed. Thank you for writing this and speaking up in public.
Many of the comments here that essentially reply to your article by saying “regulation is good, stop criticizing it”, are deeply depressing. That is a regulatory mind virus that must be destroyed before it kills us.
Casually looking at classifications at https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
it seems that you could be hitting an edge case that inconveniences you. On the other hand if the classification were made irrelevant, someone working with Class V "Air conditioning return flow wells used to return to the supply aquifer the water used for heating or cooling in a heat pump;" might be aggravated by being held to the same standard as Class I "Wells used by generators of hazardous waste or owners or operators of hazardous waste management facilities to inject hazardous waste beneath the lowermost formation containing, within one quarter (1⁄4) mile of the well bore, an underground source of drinking water.". Because if the regulations were merged, it would be inappropriate not to use the stricter safety standard of all.
There has got to be opportunities here for abstracting over regulation to make it easier to comply with and prove compliance so that risk owners/govt can enact change faster. Now to figure out who would pay for that.
He described “the missed acceleration in sales” of pumping Liquid Smoke down old oil wells as “a direct hard cost” of the regulatory regime. That tells me all I need to know about our narrator’s intellectual honesty.
I’m open to being convinced that there are better ways of doing things, but despite what half a century of propaganda has been saying, regulations generally aren’t enacted for funsies. They’re there for a reason, specially the reason that in the absence of those regulations, commercial actors were privatizing profit at the expense of society as a whole, and democratic society made a decision to make rules to stop that from happening.
He literally writes:
“Regulation obviously has a critical role in protecting people and the environment”
and then quantifies “a mindblowing $40m/year in healthcare costs” and a total of “about $400M” in societal cost from one delay, mostly borne by the public.
In that context, the line you are reacting to is just one item in a long list:
“We’ve also spent untold millions on regulatory affairs at all levels of government, not to mention the missed acceleration in sales”
He even says,
“What pains me most is the 5 years of lost carbon removal and pollutant reduction”
So the piece is not “regulations bad, profits good.” It is: regulations are essential, but the current process is generating huge public harms by slowing down tech whose whole purpose is to reduce pollution.
Maybe he’s wrong on any given point, but he’s clearly trying to describe the utilitarian trade-offs in good faith
> regulations are essential, but the current process is generating huge public harms by slowing down tech whose whole purpose is to reduce pollution.
I hear this with a call to action of "we need to deregulate to help reduce pollution". And not the real call to action in that "these regulations need an overhaul". The title of "over-regulations" and the general tone seems to place the issue as an obstacle to be eliminated, not a system to be corrected.
That's my big problem with the article.
The meeting of softwares 'move fast and break things' with hardwares 'move fast and break things'.
You cant just restore the river from a backup after you realise it was pretty dumb to dump toxic waste into it.
I wonder how much existing regulation is a result of ass-covering related to insurance premiums.
So the argument is, we have manufactured something to create a noxious goop that we would like to inject into the ground at high pressure. Why are people so scared that this is going to have a long term impact our company has a short term profit to deliver to shareholders.
Edison Motors, a manufacturer of hybrid and electric semi and other trucks in Canada, is currently battling regulation. They have a series of videos on their Youtube channel going over what's been taking place.
That was pretty surprising when I saw it unfold. Especially because they utilised state grants specifically to achieve the goal they are now being blocked by regulation on.
Wasn’t there a scandal about the consultants that write the grant applications also were contracted by the government to administer it?
Shady as all hell.
Some regulation should double the costs, to prevent evil people from doing bad things.
Also, under-regulation might triple the costs for society.
There is no such thing as over regulation, just regulation done wrong. And the solution for a bad regulation might be a better regulation rather than no regulation at all.
Maybe that guy needs a trip to Germany to feel a little better about the processes in the USA. The stuff I've seen over the years is completely insane. And I'm not even working for industries that do any novel stuff, just boring old stuff. Getting permits for building something as trivial as a small storage facility for literal nuts and bolts will make you feel like you've entered Kafkas "Der Prozess".
And if you, somehow, through some miracle, after decades, get said permit and build something (to absurdly high costs), you're under constant threat of being shut down for arbitrary reasons. Again, the nuts and bolts storage is a literal nuts and bolts storage. Just some maybe 200 metal crates with metal nuts and bolts in there, with a roof on top. It was shut down after we built it. "Fire hazard". And we're not talking hot stuff just off the production line or something, no. Just ambient-temperature nuts and bolts in metal crates with a metal roof on top.
The stories that I've heard or sometimes even was somehow involved in would take many hours to write down and have the reader shake their head in disbelief. And, again, I'm not even anywhere near any new innovation. Just regular boring stuff.
We also had a facility for sorting nuts and bots shut down because the original building permit was for a CNC shop or something, "metal works" or whatever the technical term is in English.
You see, sorting nuts and bolts is not "metal work" because you're not altering the metal. So the permit was revoked, they wouldn't issue a new one, and we had to move shop. That alone almost cost that little sorting spin-off it's live.
There is always something worse. We should focus on making things better, not on "at we are not North Korea."
I have no doubt that Germany is insane, but that doesn't retract from fact that current environment is bad. We want it to be "good".
Ah, ja, this wasn't so much a comment about that guy but mostly a comment about Germany. Could have done without the "that guy" sentence, my bad.
Sounds like the show extra3 might be interested in your story :)
More regulations need phase in clauses. If you build <100 vehicles a year almost no regulation should apply. Give people room to demonstrate the case for change.
Same for if you fill < 100 old oil wells with toxic waste? (not implying that anyone is doing that). How to prevent that if you want to build 200 vehicles, you just found a new company? Or 50.
No, the harm needs to be considered. Usually courts dont take kindly to people obviously skirting the rules. It's not really a different company if it uses the same design and factory/tooling.
The goal is to create more competition and not entrench existing players through burdensome regulation that treats kit cars the same as GM.
Sequestering CO2 is not toxic waste dumping. And as I understand, creating dummy companies to skirt regulations or taxes is already a known tactic with known antidotes.
Peter Reinhardt is specifically talking about pumping massive amounts of a synthetic liquid into the ground.
The history of the 20th century is full of people insisting that some industrial product is perfectly safe to dump into the environment in massive amounts, and then it turns out years later that it's not safe at all. I can't imagine the process for injecting some new synthetic into the ground taking less than four years in any situation. It's going to take more time than that just to do basic studies.
The specific kinds of regulations he's arguing about have been written in blood and tumors, and they exist for good reasons.
Over-regulation is without a doubt one of the top, if not the top, reasons for many of our woes. Propagandists will continue to say they are necessary for our safety or environment, but the negative repercussions are obvious and abundant. The only true beneficiaries will always be a handful of potential victims and the monopolists.
>at the end of the day, it leaves us all worse off
I don't know, I like having meds that are radioactive be clearly labeled, for example. It's hard to draw the line as to what is overregulation and what is really needed, but it'd reather have too much than not enough.
everyone wants to live in a dog eat dog world until they are being consumed themselves
Is part of the problem the federal system itself? Did I read that you have different regulations in different states?
Everyone is against regulation, until their tap water is catching on fire.
I estimate the fraction of carbon removal cost wasted to regulation at 100% rather than 50%. Regulation must be truly insane if producing synthetic oil and pumping it underground is somehow more appealing than not extracting the equivalent amount of fossil oil in the first place.
In the same way that people struggle to comprehend exponential growth, they seem to also struggle to comprehend the cost of inaction, compounded over time.
Imagine if the steam engine had not been allowed by regulators during the time of the Industrial Revolution.
If that happened and we were all still working on farms today, I bet half the people would be telling us how much safer the government was making us with all its regulations. In blissful ignorance.
People often say this kind of argument is in opposition to regulation and in favor to deregulation, but lemme play devil's advocate and say, why is it not an argument in favor of stronger, centralized, simplified regulation, aka what they got going on over in the PRC? Sure it's nice having the ability for a blue city in a red state in a blue federal government all keeping each other from getting anything done, but on the other hand, seems there's something to be said for a government that can say "there should be a train here. We will cut a hole through your building now to make that happen."
While I am firmly in the “de-regulation is bad, because every single one of those is written in blood” camp, I also sympathize with startups and businesses desperately trying to innovate in a regulated market and being stymied by said bureaucracy.
What I’ve come around to is the exact opposite of most de-regulation stans: bigger government. The tradeoff for regulations from the government is having said government shoulder the burden of helping new businesses successfully navigate said regulations quickly and efficiently. It shouldn’t be on the small business owner or startup founder to trawl through thousands of pages of texts and attempt to figure out where their business sits within them, the government should instead have an ombudsman or agent - paid with by tax dollars from successful businesses - work full-time with that business to figure things out.
Want to start a bar? Here’s the application for a liquor license, here’s the plain-language requirements for accessibility and hygiene, here’s a taxpayer-supported payroll system to ensure labor law compliance, and here’s the map of areas where you can setup shop without requiring a separate permit process.
Of course, the problem with said approach is that it requires funding, which requires more tax revenue, which means higher taxes. Under the current neoliberal, laissez-faire Capitalism system in the USA, that simply isn’t happening at present, if for no other reason than established players have captured regulatory agencies and government officials to deliberately hamstring new businesses.
Selling deregulation in business, especially “hardtech”, is exactly what those ghouls want. Don’t take the bait. Be better, even if it’s harder.
The reality is that many, many regulations are not in fact written in blood.
And many, many of them are written in Lawful Good/Neutral/Evil people trying to enact their will in the system; however,
in all cases, Chesterton's Fence is a good reminder.
Liquor licenses shouldn't exist, and private payroll systems are perfectly functional, so I have no interest in paying for it.
Private payroll systems are expensive, and all the risk remains with the purchaser. Why are they expensive? There is limited competition (often through acquisition) and the product is sold just below the price that the majority of companies would find an alternative. What results is no development and improvement of payroll, but instead companies incentivised to create complexity moats through regulation.
If the government is forced to provide at least one working payroll system for free or reasonable cost then private companies compete with specific verticals and ease of use. And when the government wants to change how payroll works for some third benefit... they just can.
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If the accessibility and hygiene laws can be explained in plain language, why not just write them in plain language?
If labor laws can be automated by software why not just make them simpler?
If you can make a map to explain the permitting process why not just simplify the process?
If you made the regulations less complex and excessive you wouldn’t need to add another layer of bureaucracy to explain them.
It's a stopgap measure until such time that an entire country's bureaucracy can be rewritten to meet the needs of its populace, rather than its legislators and elites.
Aside from laws being written the way they are (because the legal system is highly verbose and incredibly specific, which necessitates said language), I'm generally in agreement with you! Maps should be publicly available and kept up-to-date so citizens can quickly glance at them to identify potential business locations that have lower permitting requirements, and said permitting processes should be handled by the government rather than forcing new business owners to shell out for expensive attorneys and compliance officers right off the bat.
It's about balancing the needs of small business for flexibility and adaptability with limited resources, with the regulations needed to keep larger business interests from exploiting and monopolizing markets to the point of harming third-parties (consumers, small businesses, governments, the environment, etc). Striking that balance is hard, and maintaining it over time harder still, but it can be done without resorting to either extreme.
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> We need a ...
Here's were he loses me. The problem statement is detailed, but proposed solutions need more work. There must be ways to improve the system without abandoning the original intent. There may be way to account for costs, simplify reviews, and so on. Often changing regulations to have specific goals and sunset provisions changes enforcement for the better. Sometimes basic changes like the amount of time allowed for any given step can make a huge difference.
Solving regulatory problems is as real as the engineering and marketing that make products in the first place.
Logical approach i think here, is to develop and first deploy tech in a less regulated country, just pick based on where regulation is the weakest and/or corruption works better in overcoming it. Use VC dollars to buy the officials to fast-track everything. Then if it works and brings benefit, it will be the nations' problems themselves on who will be ahead of others to adapt their regulations for faster deployment.
This was the lesson on the software side of things, seems that it has not been learnt.
Everyone should read or at least be familiar with Joseph Tainter and his research on societal collapse.
> “It is suggested that the increased costs of sociopolitical evolution frequently reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. This is to say that the benefit/investment ratio of sociopolitical complexity follows the marginal product curve… After a certain point, increased investments in complexity fail to yield proportionately increasing returns. Marginal returns decline and marginal costs rise. Complexity as a strategy becomes increasingly costly, and yields decreasing marginal benefits.”
Government regulation and intervention are one such contributor to complexity, and as Michael Huemer demonstrates in his paper In Praise of Passivity we are akin to medieval doctors administering medical procedures on society that are more likely to cause harm than create benefits.
It's fairly clear to me that our civilization is in decline, and it pains me to no end to see people push for more regulation and government intervention. "The patient is getting sicker, we need to let more blood! Fetch me more leaches!"
The good news is that collapse, as Tainter puts it, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a return to less complexity, and it often brings great benefits to large swathes of people. For example, the collapse of the Roman Empire was beneficial to serfs who would actually welcome raiding parties into their villages.
>It's fairly clear to me that our civilization is in decline
Because of deregulation, if anything.
What data do you have to suggest that our societies are becoming less regulated? Because what I can tell, regulation is increasing throughout the western world and has been for at least the past five decades. In the US for example:
> From 1970 to 1981, restrictions were added at an average rate of about 24,000 per year. From 1981 to 1985, that pace slowed to an average of 620 restrictions per year, before accelerating back to 18,000 restrictions per year from 1985 to 1995. A decrease of 27,000 restrictions occurred from 1995 to 1996—3.2 percent of the 1995 total—and in the 20 years since then, regulation has grown steadily by about 13,000 restrictions per year. These periods do not match up neatly with any president or party; rather, regulatory accumulation seems to be a bipartisan trend—or perhaps a bureaucratic trend independent of elected officials’ ideologies.
https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/regula...
No. Such laissez-faire economic gaslighting and accelerationist mob terrorism-condoning sophistry. Read Chalmers Johnson and Edward Gibbon instead.
Good lord the tone of this article is insufferable. "We're saving the world! It's so unreasonable anyone ask us to verify these claims because we're saving the world!"
Especially when combined with the fact that the company is deeply involved in carbon credits "business"
So true — this thing is designed to go on our streets; I expect an attitude of maximum compliance. This shit can literally kill you if something goes wrong?
The testing is solely about emissions, it's an electric powertrain dolly and they want it to be proven it doesn't increase emissions rather than decrease them. It has nothing to do with safety as far as on road safety is concerned.
The weird thing is they want to test it against all the different trucks it can be towed behind, which doesn't make any sense. If it works it works, doesn't matter which specific truck it's behind so long as the already verified specifications of the truck engine and electric dolly align.
They should verify the electric dolly does what it says it does, compare that to the configurations of trucks they already have on file. Do the math. Does that cost $100,000 per configuration?
There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written in blood.
Now sure, you may be the one "good corporation" out there, who will do things the right way and (edit: not) sell a cheap product or mislead anyone. But if the regulations aren't super stringent, others will undercut you by skimping on safety/emissions and selling a similar product for way less.
It becomes too tempting to cheat otherwise - see Dieselgate / VW, for example. Make it possible to easily profit by cheating (via relaxed regulations) and people will. Again, not you specifically (maybe), but people in general.
Since we can't tell what kind of person you are, REALLY - SBF also told people to trust him, for example - onerous regulations are required.
Plus, I love how on the main page advertising to companies, Revoy advertises 3x-to-5x better fuel efficiency - I'm guessing this one is the one they'll need to back up and officially achieve or companies will dump them / sue.
In the blog post, he claims 94% less fuel and 7 mpg to 120 mpg. I don't see how 7 mpg to 120 mpg is "only" 3x-5x better fuel efficiency - it seems like it's more 17x. Sounds to me like he's exaggerating the effect in the blog to try to get sympathy.
Very few regulations are written in blood. In fact, the ones you mention in your comment were not.
Most regulations are written for reasons that have nothing to do with that:
1. Genuine public interest, but not safety related
2. To appease a loud interest group whose political influence greatly exceeds their numbers
3. As quid pro quo for support for a campaign contribution
4. To prevent unwanted competition to a politically powerful industry or union
5. Because it is in the interest of government employees who write the regulations, but not he general public
6. It is a particular pet issue of a powerful politician
7. As a flailing and arbitrary "we have to do something, and this is something" response to a moral panic
More parking minimums!
Or maybe we can stop these silly attempts to bundle every regulation into a monolithic category?
The OP provided an opportunity to engage with a specific set of regulations. Instead you took it as an opportunity to make a political statement about abstract "regulations", divorced from every detail in the article.
> see Dieselgate / VW
Oh man this is the one that sets me off every time. Not that I condone VW's cheating, but have you ever looked at how many diesel passenger cars are sold in the USA? It's effectively zero, and has been for a long, long time. Americans don't like diesel cars. They could be totally uncontrolled from an emissions standpoint and it would not make any difference at all.
It makes no sense to regulate emissions on diesel passenger cars in the USA.
I don't want to breathe that shit. Should we pipe it into your house?
The attitude that we can just throw it into the atmosphere and it won't hurt anything is exactly why we regulate emissions in the first place.
I'd be in favor of making diesel vehicles have to pass the exact same emissions requirements as gasoline vehicles.
> Americans don't like diesel cars... It makes no sense to regulate emissions on diesel passenger cars in the USA.
That doesn't follow. Americans don't like diesel cars because emissions-compliant diesel cars are a massive pain in the ass. Diesel emissions treatment systems are a maintenance pain, as indicated by how many people with diesel trucks perform illegal emissions "deletes". The "magic" of VW's cheating was that it minimized or eliminated this pain, so all the owner was left with was the increased MPG, and this was pretty popular. It wasn't more popular because (1) plenty of people who would have considered a diesel with this ease-of-use would not have considered a VW, and (2) none of the other automakers could compete, because, you know, the cheating.
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> There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written in blood.
Sure, but it's a balancing act, right?
My favorite example is that hairdryers sold in the US are required to have ground fault interrupters in the plug. This is touted as an important safety feature and it appears to prevent something like 2-4 deaths a year. Or at least, it used to when it first rolled out, because now you have GFCI outlets in the bathroom in any new or remodeled homes, so maybe it's redundant.
The hairdryers sold in the EU don't have that.
So yeah, it's a regulation written in blood, but it's a pretty good example of a gray area. Once you get into the business of preventing single-digit deaths, things get really weird. You probably should also ban pointy scissors (people trip), frankfurters (choking risk), only allow the sale of pre-peeled bananas, etc.
Most European electrical codes don't allow electrical outlets in the bathroom at all.
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If there were no cost to inaction, you would be right, but there is, so the abuses from lack of speed bumps to action does not automatically mean those speed bumps are a net good.
> There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written in blood.
There are thousands of pages of regulations, by volume they're written by rather than opposed to the incumbents, and only a small minority are actually safety-critical, but those are the ones everyone retreats into when it comes time to defend all of the ones that aren't. Most regulations are written in crayon.
> It becomes too tempting to cheat otherwise - see Dieselgate / VW, for example.
Dieselgate wasn't an instance of someone causing harm by satisfying a regulation that was too relaxed. They regulation was stringent and they were committing intentional fraud in order to violate it.
> Since we can't tell what kind of person you are, REALLY - SBF also told people to trust him, for example - onerous regulations are required.
So because liars lie, that justifies the government taking months or years to answer a question? Or requiring millions of dollars worth of certifications to test whether a device that customers only buy because it actually significantly improves fuel efficiency isn't reducing fuel efficiency?
That's exactly the thing you don't need the government to test ahead of time because the customer is going to notice immediately and have a false advertising claim if it doesn't actually work.
> Plus, I love how on the main page advertising to companies, Revoy advertises 3x-to-5x better fuel efficiency - I'm guessing this one is the one they'll need to back up and officially achieve or companies will dump them / sue.
> In the blog post, he claims 94% less fuel and 7 mpg to 120 mpg. I don't see how 7 mpg to 120 mpg is "only" 3x-5x better fuel efficiency - it seems like it's more 17x. Sounds to me like he's exaggerating the effect in the blog to try to get sympathy.
The post linked in the article explains that the first version of their product resulted in a 78% reduction in fuel consumption (this is the 3x-5x) and the newer version is 94%.
That the "onerous regulations" are demanded by people willing to condemn others when they themselves haven't done the reading is rather one of the issues.
>There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written in blood.
Excellent thought terminating cliche. There might be a reason (cause) but there's rarely an available justification.
Regulations dont exist on a spectrum between Hard (good) and Easy (COMPANIES ARE CHEATING NOW). Regulations compel specific actions and block specific actions. Its impossible to fit every regulation into your head to form an opinion on all of them. Taking a stand at "All regulations are good" or "all regulations are bad" is just signalling that you have never dealt with them.
Having worked with multiple companies in multiple legal jurisdictions I can tell you that I have a vast VAST preference for Canada. They talk a big game, but in my honest opinion they have a lower regulatory overhead in certain areas (the ones that affect me) than Australia or the USA.
Heres an excerpt from a canadian government website regarding building a telco tower.
"The Government of Canada is not involved in the specifics of tower installations, but we do set the law; it's called the Radiocommunication Act. Providing technical requirements are met, we only get involved when there is an impasse between the municipality and the company. In these rare cases, we look at the facts and provide a decision."
A Tower build that costs 5 - 10k in rural canada, can cost 100k+ in Australia.
So rural canadian internet providers build more, and service more people. Cause : Effect.
The last time I looked at a tower build for a customer in Australia, we lost interest trying to get a quote for the environmental impact statement required by the state it was to be built in.
Towers, are not 10x more destructive or dangerous in australia than canada. Actually with snow season knocking so many down, the reverse is true. But providers and local governments have the flexibility to make arrangements to service customers.
You need to drop this weird, reflexive defense of regulations, and consider that regulations prevent services, and regulations really do require justification. The Regulator owes you a justification. You are probably poorer for some regulations and those regulations may not be justified.
Another semi relevant example. Gold Coast cops have unlimited search and seizure powers. The "Cause" they display on posters everywhere. A child got stabbed, the parents pushed to change the law to invade everyones privacy on their deceased childs behalf. They tell you the blood cause of the law, but there's no justification for the invasion of privacy or ongoing justification in lives supposedly saved. Just police getting the ability to ruin more peoples lives.
> But if the regulations aren't super stringent, others will undercut you by skimping on safety/emissions and selling a similar product for way less.
Yup. For example: this is why the US automakers have shoved all the Brodozers down everybody's throats; it let them duck efficiency requirements.
As a former full-time farmer, and current part-time farmer I wish people would go back to driving cars instead of trucks.
At best you can find a four door truck with a 6.5' bed and a tiny 2.7 V6 nowadays. If you want anything with enough power to actually haul something and have an 8' bed, they're 90k+ King Ranch Fords or whatever. Because people want short bed trucks with 4 doors to drive around the fucking suburbs so they can haul boards once a year for home improvement projects.
Rant over. Subsequently, I've been shopping for a new farm truck this week. It's not gone well.
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Great comment on HN recently put it this way paraphrasing a comment they liked on Usenet (yes the degree of separation is growing haha):
>of course they shit on the floor, it’s a corporation, it’s what they do, the job of government is to be the rolled up newspaper applied to their nose when they do
Whether you’re a good company or a bad company, a large percentage of companies will always go up right to the limits that are set, and then another significant percentage will go past it until they are caught. That’s just how it works in capitalism. You’re constantly fighting a group of people’s ravenous desire for more money as well as the (often significant) resources they will bring to bear to defend their revenue stream.
You simply can’t expect them to do the right thing without adequate consequences for failing to do the right thing. We have literally centuries of evidence.
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> You don't get Dieselgsate without convoluted regulation and compliance industries. You can't game a complex text without a complex test to be gamed.
No you do not. You get smokes of diesel fumes without dieselgate.
Yes, some regulations are going too far and yes, it's hard to rewind it back, but that is mostly because any time something was under-regulated, companies abused it far harder.
I do think the regulations should get review period some time after enactment (whether the desired affect was met, the cost, whether it was worth it, could it be done other, easier way etc.) but it is still probably preferable than under-regulation.
And one rarely considered (by rule-makers) context is how much more they affect smaller players, making competing with established industry giants that much harder
And if you eliminate inspections entirely you just get Sinclair's Jungle instead.
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> If we had a regulatory system that could move fast to experiment with creative new technologies, we’d live in a world where our environment gets cleaned up faster, where awesome new hardware was constantly improving our lives by making things better and cheaper, and where large-scale hardtech innovation happened here at home in the USA, not in China.
This is such a shortsighted, self-serving, and hypocritical mindset.
"Move fast and break things" has been the motto of Big Tech for decades, even though they're slowly distancing themselves from the "break things" part. We know what this approach brings, and it's not something that inherently benefits the general population. It benefits corporations first and foremost, who when faced with little to no regulation as is the case with Big Tech, will take every opportunity they get to lie, cheat, and exploit their way into making themselves and their shareholders rich. The idea that removing the regulatory burden on companies will make "our world" better is a fantasy sold primarily by corporations themselves. It's no wonder the author is a CEO.
I'm sure regulations are a major pain in the ass for companies. I experience similar frustrations as a citizen, and I can only imagine what large companies whose main product is innovative technology have to go through. I'm also sure that the regulatory system can be made more efficient, as most government systems can. But the answer isn't to allow companies to "move fast". Moving slow is precisely the correct approach for introducing new technology, regardless of how benevolent their CEO makes it sound to be. Governments need time to understand the impact of the technology, and plan accordingly. Companies need time to address any potential issues. Society needs time to adapt to it. All of these are good things. The only reason we would need to "move fast" is so that executives can get richer quicker. There are very few cases when moving faster is paramount, such as when there's a pandemic and people's lives are in immediate risk, but in all other situations it is the wrong approach.
The claimed political tech race where nations must ensure that innovation happens within their borders is also a red herring. Companies have been offloading manufacturing to China for decades so that they can sell us cheaply made garbage while they skim off the margins, and now when the politics are shifting, they're all about keeping innovation home? Give me a break.
It ain't regulation holding back america, it's profit. Our investors have failed us in every way imaginable, and our inability to consider any other manner of funding means we're dead in the water.
Huh? The US has the largest private investment pool in the world.
Why would investors invest their money in things that have no chance of recouping that investment?
Exactly! It's an absolutely foolish thing to build a society around, and the benefits are largely squandered on the private lives of private investors.
Nd they’re all concerned with next quarters results, not the next hundred years.
"Incredibly brave post from Peter about the insane regulatory friction our society must endure and which is directly responsible for the premature deaths of the startups attempting to build wealth for our future, as well as millions of people whose emancipation from (inter alia) air pollution is delayed for decades by the same regulations that were intended to drive improvement of the environment.
Peter is brave because, descriptively, the regulatory state functions collectively as a cartel with a monopoly on the veto and can apply it essentially at will with no real accountability. If one of the thousands of officials Peter's companies work with takes a dim view of this post, they could quietly and anonymously kill the company by shadow banning progression of any of hundreds of strands of regulatory approvals needed to obtain permission to operate.
What are Peter's companies trying to do? Crush babies into gold? No, they're finding economic ways to fix air pollution. He's going to spend the better part of a decade of his life fighting some avatar of "the department of improving the environment" for the right to spend his own money improving the environment.
I too have heard, and experienced, insane horror stories.
The US is currently rapidly losing an energy production war with China. We have all the money and natural resources anyone could ever want, and China - a communist dictatorship - is deploying more electricity generation capacity in months than the US has deployed, ever, since the invention of electricity.
Why?
Solar photovoltaic power, which is approximately free and works best in uninhabitable deserts that are otherwise so economically useless that they remain federal land and are used for such things as atomic bomb testing, must go through the same environmental impact assessments, which take many years, as an oil refinery or explosives plant. Solar energy, which has a lower impact than practically any other land use and is by far the best per dollar spend for improving the environment. We should be granting 99 year solar leases on BLM land and inviting the top 10 deployers to an annual dinner at the White House!
This is not a market failure. This is a regulatory failure, and it is actively killing us. More Americans die every month than on 9/11 from the impacts of air pollution that would have been addressed a decade ago if builders were allowed to build. This is not some academic niche issue. Thousands of people are actively killed by our neglect of this problem.
Two years ago I wrote this: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/permitt...
The situation, expressed in real world time-to-deployment, has not materially improved. The regulatory state is a bizarre hydra where, somehow, painstaking reforms to speed up review often end up taking longer. Such is the case for California's fire hazard reduction burn process, which takes so long that the forests often burn up in the mean time. (https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/01/17/the-los-angele...) Earlier this year, the fires took 10,000 houses and nearly 100 people with them, and now, nearly a year later, almost none have been rebuilt, while the city council's response to housing scarcity is ... rent control. Elon, I'm ready to go to Mars!
My radical view is that if McMaster-Carr can fit 500,000 SKUs into its 4000 page catalog, the federal government should be able to fit all its laws and regulations into the same space. The constitution can be on page 1. In 1875, the federal code was less than 2000 pages. Today it is over 12 million. At the current rate we are generating new law faster than anyone could ever read it.
The law of the land should be portable."
https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1991589814865654084?s=20
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TLDR: "I drive an ambulance and I could save more people if I could drive faster, so speed limits are bad!"
I was just reading an NYT article about lead battery recyclers in Africa and how their operations are basically unregulated and are poisoning entire towns.
Things going a little slow or costing a little more is very often preferable to the alternative where you begin operations recklessly and negatively impact neighbors, sometimes irreparably.
When someone says being overweight is bad, do you think they are saying they shouldn't exist at all?
Of course not, they want to be a normal weight. That's the discussion reasonable people hope to have about regulation. Your strawman isn't welcome here -- I've never seen anyone seriously argue that ALL regulations should be removed.
> I've never seen anyone seriously argue that ALL regulations should be removed.
I've been seeing it in real time this entire year in my country.
And yes, on certain topics I see it here quite a bit. Maybe not "ALL" regulation, but some members of the community have an extremely libertarian take on conducting business.
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I think part of the story here is that as we regulate things at home we also out source activity that wouldn't fly here to those African regions?
That may keep it out of sight but if it's still happening it might have been better to do it in a managed way at home.
Its exactly this. And the majority of persons in powerful regulatory roles completely don’t get or comprehend this effect.
When regulatory efforts depart from reality,and fail to find the correct middle ground, this happens:
The reality still exists, and will always find its expression in one of the following:
- people circumvent rules and go criminal
- undesired behaviours move elsewhere where the regulation doesn’t exist
- sections of an economy die
- issues remain unaddressed with the over regulated issues becoming too taboo to even discuss in a sane way.
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The US can't do much about other countries. We can definitely control how and who we outsource to, but the past 30 years of US government doesn't make me confident that we'll do that anytime soon.
But that's a tiny bit tangential from regulations.
“All outsourced, vendor, and subcontractor companies down the entire production/waste chain to the raw material must meet US environmental regulations.”
Done, fixed the loophole.
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Meanwhile the established players with connections can break all the laws they want, and pay zero taxes to boot.
I think the problem isn't regulation (which the current admin is aggressively destroying, e.g. with the EPA) so much as corruption - which manifests partly as critical government functions being deliberately starved of resources. Regulatory bodies should get more funding to study and approve new technologies, and there should be more subsidies available for smaller innovators to offset the R&D investments and application waiting periods. That wouldn't be in the interest of big polluters and their captive politicians though.
No they can't. Dieselgate cost VW over $33 billion.
That was 10 years ago, when we still had a mostly functioning government. The EPA has since had its teeth removed by the Trump administration.
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It takes a brave businessman to speak out about how government regulations are killing their business. Thank you for your service.