Comment by protocolture
13 hours ago
>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.
> The people who object are the people trying to start a new business, because nobody is paying them to do things that don't make sense and all they want is to get on with what they're actually trying to accomplish instead of paying one fee after another or waiting on unaccountable regulators who have no reason to say no to something but still take excruciatingly long to say yes.
This is an extremely disingenuous opinion, which causally omits the whole reason regulations are necessary and exist to start with.
The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.
Regulation is absolutely necessary because these orgs either don't care or are oblivious to the harm they are causing, and either way have absolutely no motivation to right their wrongs.
Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too much of an inconvenience?
It's perfectly fine to expect regulators to streamline their processes. What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical rentism from bureaucrats. They are accountability mechanisms designed to proactively prevent bad actors from causing harm to society as a whole, and they work by requiring that organizations proactively demonstrate they aren't causing said harm.
Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations already have a long track record of causing that very harm to society. Why is this fact ignored?
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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.
> I know a few local people who have only been impacted for the first time by regulations preventing the sale of vapes, and local regulations preventing the resale of used tyres to motorsport enthusiasts. Its the first spark for a lot of people.
Please point out what regulations you speak of, and why they are in place.
For example, vape pen regulation imposes requirements such as maximum nicotine concentration and minimum acceptable purity, and must be child-resistant. Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and will pose a health risk. What spark does this fire in you?
Or would you prefer to blindly resell things that harm the people around you without being bothered about consequences?
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