Comment by endymion-light
17 hours ago
As someone who has looked at things like Renewable energy deployments within the UK, this is a pattern that seems to be quite pervasive across all industries. The byzantine web of planning approvals, goose counting, public outcry that you have to deal with to deploy essentially a relatively small solar farm is monstrous.
What that results with is that the only people capable of creating & managing these processes have the legal teams & resources necessary, stifling growth. Even once you get an approval, it may be years in order to get a grid connection.
This risk averse attitude pervades into all walks of life, including medical beurocracy. This essentially locks out a ton of real innovation, as it's too expensive to square up against a mass of beurocracy attempting to stifle you at all turns.
>As someone who has looked at things like Renewable energy deployments within the UK, this is a pattern that seems to be quite pervasive across all industries. The byzantine web of planning approvals, goose counting, public outcry that you have to deal with to deploy essentially a relatively small solar farm is monstrous.
That's the point. They don't want upstarts or any entity not rich enough to hold the bag doing anything. The actual stuff you're getting approvals for ("I pinky promise I won't poison the endangered frogs along the way" and whatnot is over blown because you need to make a big deal of all that stuff to dilute the actual racket that's going on so that it's not obvious to the average citizen/voter. Sure, some endangered frogs get protected along the way, but that's not the core purpose of the system, that's just the overhead task it has to engage in to exist.
Frogs being metaphorical, but sometimes also literal in specific cases.
UK planning law is not the same as medical research regulations.
UK planning law is the physical manifestation of legal tech debt. It will not be tackled until the daily mail and their readers are dead, and not replaced.
To make changes it requires lots of will from the government, and the consent of a bunch of people who are unlikely to give it.
medical regulation is fucking trivial by comparison. Most of it is arms length and technical. it can be changed according to evidence, rather than gut feeling. Its only in a few cases are there actual legal hard lines (like embryo research, and vivisection)
Its a double edged sword. yes, it stifles renewable energy innovation, but those rules are usually put in place in a more general sense, and you would really want them in place if next door was suddenly announced to be a landfill, or chemical plant, or a chicken farm, or an xAI datacenter....
The UK is begging for people to build datacenters: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/09/revealed-...
National governments maybe. Local ones aren’t, and it’s those that fill with nimbys and maintain the majority of control over planning
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That's what a lot of people seemingly struggle to understand.
Inaction is not a safe action. Inaction has a price. And sometimes a death toll too.
It depends on your point of view. For the person deciding on giving permission they will not be thanked for allowing it, but might well be blamed if something goes horribly wrong.
That's kind of the issue with a lot of bureaucratic oversight. It often produces systems that aren't at all interested in being streamlined, in letting things that should happen happen. It produces systems where compliance is a drag on the one doing things, and the default state is "forbidden".
Yes, but this is a clasical agent-principal problem.
Theoretically, the bureaucracy works on your behalf, but only approximately so. If it makes a mistake that kills you, the decision maker does not pay any price.
Maybe one solution for this issue would be some kind of “developer’s ombudsman” that is an affordable public service to 1) help people navigate the bureaucracy and 2) produce a report recommending streamlining of rules where possible.
This avoids “cutting down all the laws to punish the devil”. Some regulations are necessary.
> Some regulations are necessary.
Genuine question — is there a common factor across the regulations you'd keep? Because if there is, you could encode that directly instead of maintaining the specific rules. And if there isn't, "some regulations are necessary" isn't really a position yet.
“Tear it down and see what breaks” is one strategy. I would suggest another based on the principle of Chesterton’s fence:
https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
The point of the ombudsman I suggested is that it’s hard to encode a simple rule in a sentence or two. You need to be familiar with the process so you’re not relearning the same lessons over and over.
Another bureaucracy to help people navigate the existing bureaucracy? Are you missing a "/s"?
No. The companies that hire lawyers to navigate government bureaucracy have their own internal bureaucracies. So the status quo is not “no bureaucracy”.
It seems that in any sufficiently complex thing there will be some irreducible amount of bureaucracy. So it’s reasonable to make that irreducible set of rules more accessible.
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To play the devils advocate, in places with low bureaucracy most of the risk taken is not innovation. It's just risk that leads to the death of others. Buildings with shitty concrete with too little rebar in it. Electrical wiring that will kill you. Improper foundations and such.
At the end of the day there is no simple answer here. It's no different than the talks about AI that dominate HN these days. You can build good things with AI, but the vast majority of it is crap, so we put up filters and hoops to ensure we don't get flooded with that crap.
The devil doesn't need any more advocates.
Evidently the construct of the devil does because humanity can help but setup complex situations that require a balanced approach rather than only looking at things one way.
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Have you tried the "forgiveness is easier than permission" approach? What would happen if you just installed the solar panels? I know that in some countries they'd come by with a bulldozer and tear them down again - is your country one of those?
I am not sure about a bulldozer, but in the UK you will be forced to demolish it yourself. I am not sure what the penalty is for failing to do so when ordered to, but it seems to be usually effective.
Likely the same as in most other countries: fines, further orders and eventually criminal prosecution.
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"Forgiveness is easier than permission" only makes sense when you know what you're doing and understand the consequences. (IE, paying taxes a little late in the US is okay because the fine is roughly the same as the interest of holding the money in the bank.)
In the case of solar panels, I'm going to assume the OP is talking about something like a grid-scale solar farm instead of rooftop solar production:
1: You need an agreement with "the grid" to get payment for the electricity you generate.
2: Feeding electricity into a power grid is a very dangerous thing, at a minimum the grid operator needs to make sure you aren't going to cause a fire or otherwise break their equipment.
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That being said: If you're a homeowner trying to set up a small solar installation, you can pair the panels with batteries and skip feeding into the grid.
This might work in parts of the US, but the UK will put you in jail for tweets, I would not risk this.
Troll post. Adds nothing to the conversation, just wants to inject a tired meme.
What is the relevance of law and law enforcement around online messaging to renewable energy legislation?
Load of bollocks, this meme is tiresome. It's the USA that fires people and jails people for a month for social media posts
https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-meme-tennessee-arres...
Or if you want some actual context rather than twitter outrage bait
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB3WVygAM8I
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I'd say the underlying problem is our capital-first regulatory environments. For the topic of the original article, anyone can see that it would be reasonable for a guy who loves his dog to make what appears to be a prudent medical decision in her interest, trying out an unknown vaccine without any sort of government involvement - and a government that prevents this is unjust. But with the way the system is set up, if this were legally sound it would then automatically imply that a corpo scaling up the situation to thousands of dogs that it (the corpo) doesn't care about would also be okay. The fundamental problem is that there is no recognition of scale (because small scale operators don't have the pull with the government to fix the regulations).
The same government that writes these regulations also has a department that rounds up and kills stray dogs so this regulation is stupid at any scale.
In general outright killing is considered a completely different thing than medical experiments.