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.
I think you may be misinterpreting the point. It's not that we never need less regulation, this may be the case. We should never make 'less regulation' the target. The right regulation may be less in some cases.
> 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.
Nope. I don't live in a country covered by GDPR. They used to come enabled before. OneTrust's banners also show a little green text reading "Your signal to opt-out has been honored".
> 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.
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.
Apple is ahead of the curve[1]. You get a system-level popup asking you for consent to be tracked. Actual, not implied consent - only "yes" means "yes".
So you say "no" and it means "no". Apps are blocked from all basic forms of tracking (like device ID), and the App Store rules state that apps that try to circumvent that will be kicked out. Apple doesn't fuck around - they've kicked Meta and Epic without blinking an eye.
EU's response? Kick Apple, because EU companies can no longer do targeted advertising on Apple's platform. Our regulators are full of shit.
[1]: Well Apple still tracks you in their first-party apps, but that's a different story.
Good rules will have their intent followed by bad lawyers. Bad rules will have their letter followed but their intent missed.
Most lawyers aren’t bad, they’re just risk averse. I’ve had very few outright “no” answers from legal, even when pushing the boundaries in the grey areas, but the result of that is the PM doesn’t get a straight yes from legal so they decide to take the most complicit option. In the cookie banners case, that’s show by default especially if you don’t understand.
I can see two problems causing the pain described here, which I will discuss shortly. But the article seems to stretch that experience too much into the 'regulation is bad' territory. Regulations exist for a reason. They aren't created for the power trip of government officials. This is the same US where companies dump PFAS into drinking water sources with impunity, has some of the highest fees for the worst quality interest access, where insulin is unaffordable and corporate house renting is a thing. There are many such areas where regulation and oversight is woefully inadequate, much less any 'overregulation'. Regulations are practically the only thing standing between the rich and the powerful and their incessant attempt to drive even more wealth into their own pockets at the expense ordinary people's health, wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc.
Now let's look at the specific problems here with a much narrower scope than 'regulations'. The first problem is the type of regulations. Some regulations are too arcane and don't reflect the current state of technology. Others affect the unprivileged people disproportionately. The solution for that is to amend these regulations fast enough - not deregulation. It's also important to assess the negative impacts of loosening these regulations - something I don't see discussed in this article.
The other important requirement is to increase the staffing of the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload doesn't become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a scientific method to assess the staffing requirements of public service institutions. According to that, a significant number of government departments all over the world are understaffed. Regulatory agencies and police departments top that list. Increased workload on their officials lead to poor experience for the citizens availing their services (this is very evident in policing). Yet those same experiences are misconstrued and misrepresented to call for deregulation and defunding of these institutions - the opposite of what's actually needed. (PDs need more staff and more training in empathy. Not defunding, nor militarization.) This is exactly what I see in this article. An attempt to target regulations as a whole using a sob anecdote.
In large part due to regulation. Reflexively adding more regulations to deal with the negative effects of existing regulations is like "fixing" a bug by adding special-case logic for inputs which trigger the bug, without understanding why the bug actually occurred. Just like code, regulations should ideally be simple and elegant with a minimum of special cases.
The EU also has regulations, but somehow it does not make insulin as expensive as in the US. Maybe the existence of a regulation is not the issue here.
Existence of specific bad US regulation and overregulation caused this.
Bad EU regulations and overregulation caused other problems. For example it is illegal for me to throw old socks full of holes into trash, I am supposed to take it to recycling centre on other side of the city.
Oh yeah, because in the absence of regulation, the insulin producer would sell it at negligible margins, sure!
As for the socks - my city has like ~5 locations where old textiles can be recycled, the closest one in slightly less than 1km from where I live. I see no problem with going there twice a year :)
Yeah but EU regulation makes other things expensive and inefficient (like the labour market, housing, building new companies because incumbents protect their interests trhough regulation).
The fact is that with insulin the regulation issues comes from the patchwork system of healthcare the US developped through political concesssionns and lobbying from private firms, which makes the developpment and the subsequent commercialization expensive relative to Europe where centralized national bodies negotiate with the pharma companies.
Regulation can be good or bad, in our era it is ineffective because politicians are boomers disconnected from the issues or in the EU a pseudo-technocratic (not really listening to technocrats recommendations) body far from reality
> EU regulation makes other things expensive and inefficient (like the labour market, housing,
Unlike the US, where federal minimal wage remained flat since 2009 or where Black Rock is buying all available housing to keep the prices as high as possible.
The bug occurs because of the power discrepancy of those who have the demand and those of who can supply. For some reason, the problem if insulin prices and absurd health costs only exist in the US. I wonder why.
The barrier for entry is primarily capital these days: have a moat, prevent competition, extract money, cease R&D. And if a competitor does come up, just buy them outright. This is the current economic model, as it is practiced by Private Equity.
Power has become infectious and capitalism has changed. The game is about power and extracting more and more money from the productive economy, making it less competitive. Who wins? Those who already have excessive capital.
The only one who would have enough legal power is exclusively the state. It’s no surprise the state is under attack from so many fronts.
We don’t need competition in insulin production. It is a know quantity with fixed and closed quality parameters. Fix the price and let suppliers compete on cost.
The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so regulated that setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.
Note that if you cause by regulation or stupid laws something to be expensive to produce/import and then make it illegal to sell above that price - then you will get shortages.
As noone will want to produce insuline if required paperwork costs more than it's selling price.
Note that even if currently adding more regulation to solve problems caused by more regulation will not cause it, it may happen in future.
US healthcare regulations are on Nth round of that.
We will have to wait see where it goes, but California is trying to make their own insulin, so starting January 1st, 2025 you can buy a pack for $55 a as a resident.
> setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.
This is what I meant by compete on cost. The manufacturers that are best at cutting these costs will make the most profit. That’s where competition should be focused on such generic items.
There are many kinds of insulin variants on the market. The easy way to differentiate them is by release rate and duration. Gone in an hour for some and 24hours for others. There are other factors as well that make them incompatible with each other.
> The power to charge what you want comes from lack of competition
Competition alone is never good enough to make price down, because companies and shareholders hate competition and will happily “consolidate” competitive markets into much more profitable oligopolies (when it's not straight monopolies).
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.
Maybe because people don't have unlimited amount of time to keep up-to-date on all data and research on toxicity, negative health effects, safety, etc on tens of thousands of products from a couple hundred countries.
Because people don't look at country of origin. They are mostly price sensitive.
If you allow imports from countries with looser regulations, you are basically putting your own sectors at a competitive disavantage in your own market. It's akin to killing it basically.
It's obviously extremely stupid but in the case of the Mercosur agreement, predictably Germany doesn't care because the agribusiness is in France and they themselves will be able to export their cars.
Generally speaking, Germany never cares about deeply shafting the rest of the union when it gives them a small advantage. See also how their economy is deeply unbalanced, they have under invested for decades and they only survive because they are part of a monetary union devoid of a fiscal union giving them the tremendous advantage of an undervalued currency at the expense of basically every southern members. See also how they made joining the currency union mandatory for entering the common market and are pushing for adding more poor eastern countries to exploit which also conveniently vote for the EPP and dillute any chance the southern countries could ally to oppose them.
Obviously, the currency union has no clear path to exit it.
The EU already has country of origin requirements. They still had to specify things like "X% of the product has to be made in country Y to be qualified for the 'made in Y' label". And even that can and does get muddy.
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.
> Regulations are practically the only thing standing between the rich and the powerful and their incessant attempt to drive even more wealth into their own pockets at the expense ordinary people's health, wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc.
Try to rethink how money is created and how money gets its value and how and by whom that wealth is distributed. Regulation as in "make rules" does not enforce rules, which is the definition of (political) power.
> The other important requirement is to increase the staffing of the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload doesn't become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a scientific method to assess the staffing requirements of public service institutions. According to that, a significant number of government departments all over the world are understaffed.
Why are you claiming "There is a scientific method" and do not provide it? Governments do (risk) management by 1 rules, 2 checks and 3 punishment and we already know from software that complexity in system is only bounded by system working with eventual necessary (ideally partial) resets.
Ideally governments would be structured like that, but that goes against governments interest of extending power/control.
Also, "system working" is decided by the current ruling class/group. Besides markets and physical constrains.
Money is created and distributed via 1 banking system and 2 government.
Are 1 rules, 2 checks and 3 punishment enforced against the banking system and government or only to stabilize and extend those systems?
I'd argue the introduction of (arbitrary) rules are often just the excuses to amass power, but enforcement of checks and punishments decides who holds (political) power.
Money is printed out of thin air by the FED and then loaned out to the government for them to spend, so it enters the economy. Something along those lines.
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.
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.
> How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years?
Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so. Mind that the process that created these holes have also created tremendously large biohazards very consistently, yet are normalized by society. We must accelerate the pace we’re on.
> What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me? I absolutely think businesses which are working to save millions of lives should receive regulatory support, instead of the oil companies which are still to this day benefiting from price subsidies?
The key point contested is stated like this in the OP:
> A regulatory system that structurally insists on legalistic, ultra-extreme caution is bound to generate a massive negative return for society.
The OP mostly sees the downsides and disregards how hard earned any of those regulatory requirements are. Each requirement is usually the outcome of people being substantially impacted by industry before regulation. For instance the Thalidomide scandal with 10000 children born with deformities.
If OP doesn't grasp the origin and rationale behind regulations, it doesn't mean there aren't any.
And now that we have these strict safety regulations after the Thalidomide fuck up, drugs are more expensive than ever due to the extreme cost of going through the approval process, but at least they're safer. Except, of course, that whole episode where people somehow forgot that opiates were addictive. What are we paying for again?
The oil companies are generally working on carbon capture that produces CO2 that can be sequestered with the equipment and know-how they already have (i.e. pumping pressurised CO2 back into underground reservoirs). Growing crops is one of their focuses (and it's not a very good form of carbon capture, anyhow).
To be honest they should be forced to actually work on it. The rule should be, if you want to be allowed to sell X amount of carbon as fuel on a given market, you have to capture k*X amount of CO2.
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.
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.
The US and Canada (and to some extent elsewhere) have been experiencing a lot of homelessness and open air drug use due to fentanyl, housing unaffordability, and "community" mental health treatment rather than "mental hospitals."
In rural Gabon, presumably I wouldn't be renting but would own my own unsafe shanty. It's really tempting. But living in Libreville has more of a ring to it.
> Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.
That doesn't seem like a fair take. You're implying that the sympathetic people who outlawed poor houses are the very same people who won't build anything new. That's not true.
What? It's literally the same regulatory agency in this case, and more broadly it's the same ideological strain of banning doing X without also doing undesirable thing Y and not caring about whether that reduces the rate of X. Unless you are talking about the housing developers themselves, in which case you are falling for the same thing yourself.
"Ideological strains" arent people, nor are "agencies".
Democratic politics will always be about compromise. Compromise means you don't get do all your Y's. It's the purpose of the system. We will never (I hope) live in either the libertarian nor the socialist utopia, not just because neither of those places really exist, but also because democracy doesn't lead to that.
If you every find yourself thinking that "this problem would be solved if only we were closer to my utopia" then you're the ideological one.
I didn't say 'utopia'. I can name exactly the things I want changed, and exactly what the proximate effects will be of doing so, good and bad.
Yes, agencies are people. If you think that it's dishonest to castigate the SFHA for taking one action and not taking another because the one action was a little while ago and therefore there's been some personnel churn since, you are being unserious. Have you ever complained about past and present actions of e.g. Microsoft?
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.
Anti regulation of a sort is still a popular position. It’s just the libertarian hands of regulation that has fallen out of favor. I don’t think it will return.
At first I wasn’t sure it would stick, the name isn’t very catchy, but I’ve heard some politicians mention abundance. There is and will be more calls for corrected regulation to improve building pipelines. From the left it will be for faster procurement of public housing. It’ll look different on the right.
You are surely not saying that because HN talks about it, it must be well-known and well-respected.
Other political positions related to libertarianism, as you name it, have the exact same fate: some states respect them, others don't, and the parts of the national government lower on the totem pole than the cabinet think it's some sort of skin disease.
You've never heard any mainstream pundit like John Oliver or Rachel Maddow ranting about overregulation; you've never heard anyone important in Democratic politics taking it seriously. The word 'abundance' in TFA was selected to deliberately refer to a book arguing for it, which nobody with establishment credentials had done until this year, and which is treated by the party as a brash bold unexpected controversial statement that should be treated with extreme suspicion.
Any word that conflates parking minimums with food safety regulation is counter-productive. These two things are so vastly different that they should never be discussed in the same breath.
I think a commonality is none of the agencies in the way feel an existential risk from failing to execute.
You could imagine a system where a permit and planning department finds it's functions taken over by a minimal state agency when not enough housing is built in its area. The state of California is slowly moving that direction because it's so bad.
Typical structures in the villages are bungalows built by people you know. Sounds like the crisis in the link you shared is from corrupt approvals and poor construction of commercial properties sold to people. People build houses they will live in in the villages and for me this is a big enough incentive to build it properly. You will have no one to blame when your own roof falls on your head. The builders are also known and it would be a business ending move to build a rubbish house for your neighbour. Word would get out pretty quick. One thing people do in the village is talk as they have plenty time. I think all these other factors make up for the lack of regulation.
I think the point is to avoid roofs to fall at all: that's what anti-seismic regulations are for. They saved countless lives in places like Japan. They may not prevent all deaths, but can be an effective damage containment strategy. When an earthquake devastated the Italian city of L'Aquila, the majority of the survived buildings were those following regulations. Many houses built in the Middle Ages are gone.
One of the earliest known laws humans created (almost 4000 years ago) state that if a homeowner is killed by his house caving in, the builder must be put to death. We have known since forever that you can't just let people build shitty structures.
Letting the free market take care of it isn't natural or neutral. It's literally never been how human society does things.
Probably wasn't a list of real laws? So says Wikipedia: "Rather than a code of laws, then, it may be a scholarly treatise."
There's zero equality in it. Killing a commoner is cheaper than killing a noble. If the badly built house falls on a slave, the builder owes the owner a slave. So if the free market is an innovation like equality, and is not natural, well, fair point I guess, and natural isn't necessarily good. But was Babylon natural, anyway, or just old?
The notion that the free market is natural means something. I suppose organic is the real idea there, and that makes it just another appeal for using local knowledge as opposed to insensitive central management.
Actually building in Turkey is strongly regulated - it’s just that corruption in government allows bad players to easily ignore it.
Just another way regulation fails to do what is supposed to, while its downsides (diminished competition, deterring startups and supporting incumbents) still apply.
This is why blindly relying on regulation and ignoring its trade offs is just foolish.
But they do exist. Their downsides still apply. They will keep intimidating and burdening the honest players and deterring prospective startups while completely failing to stop bad players.
They will even encourage corruption: obey heavy regulations and controls or simply pay a tribute to the ruler.
Read more in depth into this catastrophe. There were for all intents and purposes NO honest players. In some towns 90%+ of buildings collapsed, when code compliant ones would not have - it wasn’t even that strong an earthquake.
FTA: “ According to numbers published by the environment and urbanisation ministry in 2018, more than half of the buildings in Turkey – equivalent to almost 13m buildings – violate construction and safety regulations.”
In my village there is no regulation for building residential property. You don't have title deeds either. You get allocated a piece of land by the local chief or headman/woman and you decide where and what you can build. The only regulation is you must have a toilet. Which tends to be a no brainer and one of the first things most people build. A simple Blair toilet.
This is same that i meant myself. Local gang so established, it is seen as a government itself, runs the place and national laws do not apply, resulting properties being from perspective of law, illegal - can't be officially sold or mortgaged, have no title deeds, and would have been razed if government had access there, except if a city official with a bulldozer appears, the local gang will meet them with machetes and pitchforks, and sending in tanks and helicopters is not worth it. It's not "deregulation", it's "lawlessness".
This company's business is regulatory arbitrage. Of course they have to deal with regulators. Capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is not a commercial enterprise. It's something done to get some sort of regulatory credit.
The problem is that dealing with regulators takes years and millions of dollars, reducing competition and societal benefit. He's quoting $200m in additional health costs borne mostly by Medicare/Medicaid. Regulations aren't a useful part of the system if they're gunked up.
The thing is, we really don't need people competing at selling carbon credits because it's an industry that literally only exists due to badly written regulations so it's hard to come up with a ton of sympathy.
Saying it exists only due to badly written regulations is rather bold assertion. It exists, because companies damage what isn't theirs. It is a regulation to protect property rights.
Companies are polluting shared resources. Classic tradegy of commons.
Credits is one of things we have come up that does work.
Sure, we could just ban it outright and say goodbye to industrial civilization. Most people don't agree with that.
>I’ve been shocked to find that the single biggest barrier—by far—is over-regulation from the massive depth of bureaucracy.
Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are immediately have this thought.
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.
> The people who object are the people trying to start a new business, because nobody is paying them to do things that don't make sense and all they want is to get on with what they're actually trying to accomplish instead of paying one fee after another or waiting on unaccountable regulators who have no reason to say no to something but still take excruciatingly long to say yes.
This is an extremely disingenuous opinion, which causally omits the whole reason regulations are necessary and exist to start with.
The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.
Regulation is absolutely necessary because these orgs either don't care or are oblivious to the harm they are causing, and either way have absolutely no motivation to right their wrongs.
Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too much of an inconvenience?
It's perfectly fine to expect regulators to streamline their processes. What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical rentism from bureaucrats. They are accountability mechanisms designed to proactively prevent bad actors from causing harm to society as a whole, and they work by requiring that organizations proactively demonstrate they aren't causing said harm.
Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations already have a long track record of causing that very harm to society. Why is this fact ignored?
>The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.
The problem with blind government maximalism is that it ignores the fact that what these governments claim to actually be trying to accomplish can actually be harmful and have considerable negative impact on society in general.
Sure, but the fundamental premise is that good corporations are seeking to generate profits, and good governments are seeking to provide for their constituents.
A corporation that doesn't prioritize profits isn't a good corporation. You wouldn't buy stock in it. A government that isn't prioritizing its constituents is a bad one, you wouldn't vote for it.
Everything else is implementation detail but it's obvious that governments need to check corporate power because otherwise the inevitable end game is a corpotocracy ruling over factory towns of debt slaves.
Corporations exist to do whatever their directors or shareholders want them to do. For publicly-traded corporations that's typically to generate profits, but not all corporations are listed on a stock exchange and even the public ones could in principle have their shareholders vote to do something else. If a corporation wants to build electric cars to fight climate change or build housing to reduce housing scarcity, that doesn't make it "bad" -- it's good, and you don't want the government impeding that when somebody wants to do it. Or even when they want to do the same thing to make money, because it can be both things at once.
And just because a government that doesn't prioritize its constituents is bad doesn't mean that the government we have is good, or that every existing regulation is benefiting constituents rather than harming them.
> If a corporation wants to build electric cars to fight climate change or build housing to reduce housing scarcity, that doesn't make it "bad" -- it's good, and you don't want the government impeding that when somebody wants to do it.
It's good so long as it's profitable and grows. The market determines good and bad, nothing else. Companies must grow indefinitely or their stock price drops, any earnings announcement makes this obvious, even positive growth earnings might cause a stock price drop if the earnings growth wasn't large enough. Flat earnings, with a margin increase? Stock price devaluation, see Microsoft / Xbox. The word is right there, value. The value of a company is determined by its market price (or theoretical market price if it's still private), and nothing else. The market value of its shares are the final word.
Sure, companies might occasionally do good things, but that core definition of value under capitalism doesn't change.
You're still stuck on publicly-traded corporations.
Try one of these. A non-profit gets a million dollars in donations to build new housing with the model of selling it into the market and using the proceeds to build even more. They still have to comply with all the laws, so you don't want the laws to adversarially impede its humanitarian mission to improve housing affordability and reduce homelessness, right?
> They still have to comply with all the laws, so you don't want the laws to adversarially impede its humanitarian mission to improve housing affordability and reduce homelessness, right?
I do want the laws to ensure that the buildings have fire escapes and no asbestos...
Non profits can, apparently, convert to for-profit ones, or be bought, or be corrupt funnels of government contract money to for-profit corporations.
These are arguments for improving and simplifying regulations, but not arguments against the idea that there should be an entity the represents nothing other than the needs of the constituents (the government) that will enforce rules on entities that wish to extract value from constituents (corporations). Non profit corps are attempts to exist within that system while playing by the rules but it doesn't change the fact that we still need the rules to control the hyperfauna wandering around.
In the situation that the personnel and legal code of the government depend very little on the outcome of elections in practice, would you say that the incentives for a government would be rather different?
> The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.
The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids. What actual harm and considerable negative impact on society in general are you referring to in this context?
> Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too much of an inconvenience?
Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill considered or poorly drafted and require things that are not aligned with their ostensible purpose.
> What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical rentism from bureaucrats.
How about whimsical rentism from incumbents who want to exclude competitors or avaricious middlemen who want their services to be expensive and mandatory, and capture the regulators to make that happen?
> Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations already have a long track record of causing that very harm to society. Why is this fact ignored?
The subset of the rules that aren't actually necessary aren't actually necessary. Why is this fact ignored?
> The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids. What actual harm and considerable negative impact on society in general are you referring to in this context?
For almost any regulation, no matter how important it is and how much good it does, there will be some things it does not allow that it should. A regulation will either need to let the bad stuff through, not let the good stuff through, or some mixture of the two.
Now consider that many individual regulations get added; the vast majority of them for good reasons. But since each one has some cases it fails for, the combination of them has a combination (generally larger than the sum of it's parts) that it fails for.
But that mean that regulations are bad in general. It means that making rules to protect society is HARD. Like REALLY hard, staggeringly so. And even doing the best you possibly can (which is a stretch for most government), you're still going to wind up with things that can't be done... but should be able to.
The solution isn't to get rid of (all) regulations... it's to try to figure out how to make them better.
The claim that something is hard to do properly is an argument for doing it less often, i.e. limiting it to the cases when the benefit is unambiguously large and staying away from borderline cases where overhead and collateral damage will leave you underwater.
It's also an argument for requiring the government to internalize the costs it imposes, e.g. if it wants testing done then it should pay for it from general revenue so that the cost of it is accounted for in the government budget instead of imposing an unfunded mandate. Then if the cost is reasonable this isn't a problem and if the cost is unreasonable the government is causing a problem for itself instead of innocent third parties, which puts the incentive to fix it in the right place.
> The claim that something is hard to do properly is an argument for doing it less often
I don't even believe that you believe this.
> the benefit is unambiguously large and staying away from borderline cases
If this was easy, don't you think maybe that's what people would be doing?
> if it wants testing done then it should pay for it from general revenue
???
So if I build a car, screw it up, have to test it 500 times just to pass and be allowed to sell it, that's the governments problem? If I open a bank and take peoples money, its up to the government to take initiative on making sure I'm not screwing them over?
> instead of imposing an unfunded mandate
What? So now any test the government mandates is an unfunded mandate? Like food tests?
This is obviously getting way to political because none of the arguments are making any sense, and are completely disconnected from reality.
I don't even consider myself pro regulation but this is just the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting LALALALALALA.
Is your position that when something is intractably easy to screw up we should do it as much as possible?
> If this was easy, don't you think maybe that's what people would be doing?
Which people? The ones with a structural incentive to not do that?
> So if I build a car, screw it up, have to test it 500 times just to pass and be allowed to sell it, that's the governments problem?
It seems like it's still your problem because you want to sell the car and therefore want it to pass.
Whereas if the test is unreasonably expensive then the government has a problem, but the problem is of its own making and it now has the incentive to fix the problem instead of burdening someone else with it.
> If I open a bank and take peoples money, its up to the government to take initiative on making sure I'm not screwing them over?
It is indeed the role of law enforcement to enforce the laws.
> What? So now any test the government mandates is an unfunded mandate? Like food tests?
Is your argument that it isn't an unfunded mandate supposed to be that the test isn't mandated or that the government is actually funding it?
What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion. Just as you can come up with a few examples of things you think should be less regulated (and many people may agree), others can come up with a few examples of things they think should be more regulated (and many people may also agree).
> What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion.
The blog post clearly tries to frame their problems complying with existing regulation as stumbling upon road blocks which just so happen to comprise only of unnecessary rules.
It's quite the coincidence how each and every single restriction that isn't met ends up being unnecessary.
> What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion.
To begin with, no it isn't. There are a lot of existing regulations that serve no legitimate purpose. Some exist solely at the behest of incumbents and are enacted under a false pretext by corrupt government officials; no one supports them who isn't being disingenuous. Others aren't even wanted by anyone and are simply regulatory errors that failed to account for something that actually happens, but the people impacted don't have the political influence to correct it.
Moreover, what if there are some regulations that people differ on? Should we keep the ones only a minority of people think are a good idea, just because they already exist?
> To begin with, no it isn't. There are a lot of existing regulations that serve no legitimate purpose.
Citation needed. Specially referring to TFA.
You know what there is a lot of? Organizations trying to push onto the public hazardous and subpar products. Those are the ones mostly affected by regulation, because that's precisely what regulation is designed to shield society from.
So it comes as no surprise that there are companies complaining that regulation prevents them from doing business. That's by design, and represents a much needed market pressure to prevent bad actors from screwing everything and everyone around them.
Explain the legitimate purpose of requiring a device that runs on batteries to be tested for emissions, not just once but for every subspecies of truck you want to use it with.
> You know what there is a lot of? Organizations trying to push onto the public hazardous and subpar products. Those are the ones mostly affected by regulation, because that's precisely what regulation is designed to shield society from.
You're confusing the nominal intention of the regulations with their actual effect. The map is not the territory.
> The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids.
No. The article is about someone who is whining about having to comply with regulation. But not all regulation, only the one they feel they are having trouble complying with.
There is a difference. And a nuance.
You'd be naive if you were hoping to get objective statements from what reads clearly as a promotion piece.
> Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill considered or poorly drafted and require things that are not aligned with their ostensible purpose.
You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish. We need to discuss objectively verifiable facts if you want to attack specific regulations, though. I don't see fact-based arguments being made, and that reads like a desperate straw man.
> No. The article is about someone who is whining about having to comply with regulation. But not all regulation, only the one they feel they are having trouble complying with.
Which brings us to the question of whether the regulation they're complaining about is actually objectionable. And it appears that they rather have a point. Why should they have to spend millions of dollars testing for something that makes no sense in this context? Why is the government even testing for this at all, when fuel is a semi truck's primary operating cost and buyers are going to be highly sensitive to fuel efficiency independent of any government regulations?
> You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish.
This is not a hypothetical unless your contention is that all existing regulations are entirely without flaws or inefficiencies.
> We need to discuss objectively verifiable facts if you want to attack specific regulations, though.
Do you want to try to defend the rule requiring them to spend millions of dollars on certifications for no apparent benefit to anyone?
> The claim, even if implicit, is "does not increase emissions beyond particular threshold within particular operational domain".
So the government wants data to validate a claim the company never explicitly made, but the government doesn't want to pay for the data, and the nature of the product is such that data showing higher emissions would be baffling and implausible. We're back to, how does this make any sense?
> Further, the article makes a claim that there are more emissions testing groups to test on than there are individual members, which cannot be true.
Consider the possibility that an "engine family" could be an engine configured in a given way rather than a set of distinct engines.
> So the government wants data to validate a claim
The claim is "our contraption is roadworthy", which implicitly includes claims regarding roadworthiness requirements, including emissions. This is literally how market availability works.
> Consider the possibility that an "engine family" could be an engine configured in a given way rather than a set of distinct engines.
"Engine family" is a set of particular engine configurations/codes, specifically to reduce re-test burden. Group validation automatically validates all group members, therefore there are at most number of engines groups to test. I suspect the testing requirements are not for the engines, though, but why would an article by a startup struggling to follow regulations misrepresent the regulations?
Theres a lot of that. Its just people need a first exposure to the thing to realise its terrible. Like the other commenter says, most people are completely shielded.
I know a few local people who have only been impacted for the first time by regulations preventing the sale of vapes, and local regulations preventing the resale of used tyres to motorsport enthusiasts. Its the first spark for a lot of people.
> I know a few local people who have only been impacted for the first time by regulations preventing the sale of vapes, and local regulations preventing the resale of used tyres to motorsport enthusiasts. Its the first spark for a lot of people.
Please point out what regulations you speak of, and why they are in place.
For example, vape pen regulation imposes requirements such as maximum nicotine concentration and minimum acceptable purity, and must be child-resistant. Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and will pose a health risk. What spark does this fire in you?
Or would you prefer to blindly resell things that harm the people around you without being bothered about consequences?
>For example, vape pen regulation imposes requirements such as maximum nicotine concentration and minimum acceptable purity, and must be child-resistant. Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and will pose a health risk. What spark does this fire in you?
Over a period of ~8 months, they were subjected to like 4 different levels of restriction over here, culminating in them only being provided by pharmacies to prescription holders. An entire cottage industry of compliant vape selling businesses were forced to close, and significant numbers of users have been deprived access to the commodity. Honestly its been a goldmine for discussing law/regulation with the up and coming generation.
>Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and will pose a health risk.
Regulation forces the non prescription having user to the black market where no safety or quality checks are conducted. And they did this on the basis that the health risk is unknown, having already banned the vape juices that we know can in a small number of cases cause complications.
>Or would you prefer to blindly resell things that harm the people around you without being bothered about consequences?
I think you internalise the standard fallacy. I explain in another post that all regulations need to justify themselves, not simply have a stated cause. You seem to believe as most people who are unimpacted, that one can simply write law like code, and the execution proceeds flawlessly. There need be no thought given to the negative case, to the behaviour changes outside of your scope. Its quite a suffocating arrogance.
Not to mention you also immediately fall into "OH YOU ARE AGAINST X, WELL YOU MUST LOVE Y", which is telling.
> Over a period of ~8 months, they were subjected to like 4 different levels of restriction over here, culminating in them only being provided by pharmacies to prescription holders.
Can you explain what do you think is wrong with that?
> An entire cottage industry of compliant vape selling businesses were forced to close, and significant numbers of users have been deprived access to the commodity.
What a questionable assertion. Your whole argument is that businesses that were not compliant had to close, but somehow you chose to frame them as compliant?
And exactly what "commodities" do you think the public is being deprived of? Hazardous noncompliant vape pens that pose a health risk? That's hardly something anyone would complain about.
> Regulation forces the non prescription having user to the black market where no safety or quality checks are conducted.
No, not really. Anyone can stroll into any store that sells them and buy a compliant vape pen.
Your argument is even comical, in the way that you opted to complain about regulation somehow causing the problem of people selling hazardous products that don't comply with regulation. I mean, do you expect all products to magically comply with regulation after that ceases to be enforced? Schrodinger's regulation!
The main problem with laissez-faire fundamentalists is their incoherence driven by despair.
company> These regulations are preventing us from selling our product
government> We have a set of standards that your type of product must meet; because we believe not meeting them is dangerous to society.
company> But, our products don't meet those standards, and we can't sell them... and since selling them is what our business plan is, we're going to go out of business
government> And? I'm not seeing the problem here.
It is part of government's job to decide what is safe for society and, where something isn't safe, decide if the harm in preventing it outweighs the good in doing so.
>It is part of government's job to decide what is safe for society and, where something isn't safe, decide if the harm in preventing it outweighs the good in doing so.
And they are quite often very wrong, trying to be seen to be acting rather than making considered changes.
That's a pretty disingenuous interpretation. It's a lot more like:
Company > we are selling something that's legal.
Government > well now you have to do X. (Testing? Certification? Reporting?)
Company > why? X industry doesn't have this reg. Europe/ the next state over doesn't have this reg?
Government> because I'm the government and its my job
Company > fine
Repeat 4x.
> Company, um we did they last 4 things you asked us to and if we have to do the next we are going to go out of business.
> Gov: get fucked, I'm just doing my job: read [I have an ideological problem with your business, my buddy is in the business and I'm giving him an exception, and/or I've got a special interest group to please].
>Public: cheers
>Public: Why is their a housing shortage? Why is our manufacturing less competitive than China? Why do we need to import rare earths?
>Your whole argument is that businesses that were not compliant had to close, but somehow you chose to frame them as compliant?
Businesses that were compliant with rounds 1, 2 and 3 of regulation still got kicked out with number 4, because the regulation denoted them as businesses that aren't allowed to sell vapes. They did nothing morally wrong and harmed no one, and invested time and money in compliance with earlier regulation.
>On 1 July 2024, the Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Act
2024 (Commonwealth vaping reforms) came into effect. Therapeutic vapes (which include
nicotine and zero-nicotine vapes) are only available in pharmacies for the purposes of
smoking cessation or managing nicotine dependence. It is illegal for any other retailer—
including tobacconists, vape shops and convenience stores—to sell any type of vaping goods
I wont bore you with the details of the restrictions pharmacies impose for access to vapes, but rest assured, the effect is a prescription is required for 0 tobacco vapes.
And its worth mentioning, this was the compromise position, where the government was pushing for a total ban.
>And exactly what "commodities" do you think the public is being deprived of?
Previously compliant vapes that are now only permitted via prescription.
>Hazardous noncompliant vape pens that pose a health risk? That's hardly something anyone would complain about.
Dubious risk that is so far completely unsubstantiated. We regulate tobacco cigarettes to a lower degree. You can enjoy aerosolised burning tar in your lungs far easier than a simple vape. There is no justification for restricting something less harmful, to a greater degree. None.
>No, not really. Anyone can stroll into any store that sells them and buy a compliant vape pen.
You really dont engage with anyone in good faith do you.
>Your argument is even comical, in the way that you opted to complain about regulation somehow causing the problem of people selling hazardous products that don't comply with regulation. I mean, do you expect all products to magically comply with regulation after that ceases to be enforced? Schrodinger's regulation!
You make the same logical fallacy, that something is hazardous because it is regulated. When they specifically did not have any evidence to base their later rounds of regulation on. Its based on an assumption, that vaping might be harmful, after having already removed products from shelves that were shown to be (ever so slightly) harmful. That is, they removed the bad stuff, then removed the unknown without justification. My point again is that you need more than a reason, you need continual ongoing justification.
We have literally had an increase in violent crime associated with the vape ban. Black market vapes are completely unregulated (often including the banned juices that were largely complied with). I dont see why you have a problem with that. This is not a binary. You arent being asked to believe in a 100% regulation free utopia. Just to abandon your weird, and completely unsubstantiated starting position that there cannot be negative impacts from regulation. If I wanted to be an a*hole I would have started with the war on drugs. Not a weird little street level mirror of it that's part of my lived experience.
>Australia’s ‘de facto’ prohibition of vapes has helped create a thriving and highly
profitable black market controlled by the same criminal networks that import
illicit tobacco. These criminal gangs are engaged in an escalating turf war to
gain market share, with firebombing of tobacco shops and public executions.
Will just point out that firebombing and public executions are also banned. I am not trying to get them unbanned. But they occur anyway.
>The main problem with laissez-faire fundamentalists is their incoherence driven by despair.
What a weird thing to say, that unfounded smothering arrogance again.
There are some laws prohibiting the sale of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread. In some motorsports you want tires with no tread (slicks). Moreover, they're being used in a different context (a vehicle on a track rather than public roads). But the law prohibits the sale because it takes no account of the context.
> There are some laws prohibiting the sale of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread.
I think you're confused. I'll explain why.
Some contries enforce regulations on what tyres are deemed road-legal, due to requirements on safety and minimum grip. It's also why it's illegal to drive around with bald tyres.
However, said countries also allow the sale of tyres for track and competitive use, as long as they are clearly sold as not road-legal and for competitive use only.
So, no. You can buy track tyres. You just can't expect to drive with them when you're dropping off your kids at school and not get a fine.
Also, it should be noted that some motorsport competition ban or restrict the use of slick tyres.
Some jurisdictions ban the sale whatsoever of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread. It's not that you can't put them on a car to drive on public roads, it's that no one can sell them to you. They prohibited the sale rather than the use, thereby interfering with the people wanting to make the purchase for a different purpose.
> Some jurisdictions ban the sale whatsoever of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread.
No, not really. This appears to be the source of your confusion. In Europe+US, thread restrictions are enforced on standard road tyres marketed for use in public roads. You can buy slicks if they are marked for track use, but it's illegal to drive around with them.
But feel free to cite exactly what jurisdiction and regulation prevents you from buying tyres. I'm sure you'll eventually stumble upon the source of your confusion once you start to look up your sources.
That depends whether regulators interpret “intended for use on motor vehicles” as “for road use”. The bill’s sponsors seem to think so:
USTMA research shows that more than 30 million used tires are available for sale nationally each year. The legislation does not ban all used tire sales. It targets used tires that have specific, well-established, unsafe conditions. “This is a common-sense, pro-safety, pro-consumer bill,” said Anne Forristall Luke, USTMA president and CEO. “Preventing these unsafe used tires from operating on New Jersey roads will reduce the risk of crashes and save lives. It’s that simple.” [1]
Seems clear to me this is intended to affect road use, although the bill could use an amendment to that effect. I could not find jurisprudence implying resale of racing slicks is illegal under this law.
> That depends whether regulators interpret “intended for use on motor vehicles” as “for road use”. The bill’s sponsors seem to think so:
That was their intention, but the effect of a law is not always the same thing -- that's the point. If you go to the local tire place and want to pay them to fit your track car with used tires that have minimal tread on them, is the clerk going to read the legislative history and take the risk that the judge takes that interpretation despite the law saying something else, or are they going to fob you off because corporate says they're not allowed to sell tires like that?
You're not thinking like a corporation. What happens if you crash your car after they broke the law to sell you the tires? Corporations will throw away epic amounts of money in the interests of not getting sued.
> A person shall not sell at retail, or offer for sale at retail, to the general public any tire intended for use on a motor vehicle if the tire:
The law you cite literally applies only to general public sales, i.e. where the the intention is to use on public roads. I cannot see where this regulation would apply to solely used tires in the first place and if we slip down the slope you have put in this thread, this regulation would forbid sales of track-only tires altogether.
Which is just not the case. I am 99% certain one can sell tires, new or used, to any registered motorsport organization, for track-only use. That's the case in first world countries anyway.
> The law you cite literally applies only to general public sales, i.e. where the the intention is to use on public roads.
If you sell key chains to the general public, that implies the key chains are intended only to be used on public roads? I don't think that's right.
> I cannot see where this regulation would apply to solely used tires in the first place and if we slip down the slope you have put in this thread, this regulation would forbid sales of track-only tires altogether.
It forbids the sale if it "has a tread depth of less than 1/16 inch measurable in any groove" which ostensibly wouldn't apply to new tires with more tread than that nor new slicks that come from the factory with no grooves to measure.
But then you're buying a new tire, when what they want is the used one with negligible tread left and therefore a much more attractive price.
A better example might be mattresses. There are states (Kansas) where it is illegal to sell a used mattress, under any circumstances. Even if, for your specific circumstances, the "it's unsanitary" reasoning isn't valid. You, as an individual, cannot sell your "I slept in it a few times and realized I don't like it" mattress to your friend.
Do you have a link to an actual Kansas statute which makes it illegal to sell a used mattress? I searched for it without success. Various sites claim that Kansas makes this illegal without citing a statute (often in the context of hokey stories about people finding silly loopholes in this purported law), but I'm suspicious that it's an urban legend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure why you think I can't read Chinese, but Xi has been in power for 12 years and as far as I am aware cannot be removed by anyone other than the CCP. Please correct me if I'm wrong. If the people whom he governs can remove him by some kind of democratic process, then perhaps your points are valid. My understanding is that they cannot.
> Socialist democracy must, therefore, be seen as a historic, multi-generational and dialectical process by which conditions that enable increasing parts of society to play an active role in governance are created, nurtured, and defended. China has advanced on this path further than most societies in modern history. From early experiments in village-level organization to building a nationwide process for 1.4 billion people from 56 ethnic groups across a country spanning over nine million square kilometers, this process has come to be contained in a concept called “whole-process people’s democracy” — a practice of democratic governance built on over a century of organizational experience.
This (and the rest of this article) is nonsense propaganda if the above is correct.
There are 100 million members of the party, and these people vote directly for their local representatives, who then go onto vote for the village, town, city, province, etc representatives, all the way up to the Standing Committee which includes Xi. There are 3000 members of the National People's Congress that directly selects the Standing Committee. In rural areas or special administrative provinces, often anyone can vote, including union members who aren't officially party members. Comparatively, in the 2024 US election, 150 million people voted. So there's roughly the same amount of votes happening.
Maybe you don't agree that not being able to pick the head of state is not a valid definition of democracy. In that case I'd argue that having a twice-indicted convicted felon is not valid democracy either. In any case, feel free to keep your version.
Yes, democracy includes the right for the people to elect a convicted felon. We do not agree on a definition of the democracy. Your usage continues to undermine your original valid point.
These statements about numbers are meaningless to make the case that democracy exists in the PRC. There's 1 billion people there, comparison of vote counts to smaller countries doesn't make sense.
Party membership comes with 關係. It's not really about having the right to vote. Some people just join during school.
The PRC gets many things right but we should be honest about its flaws. The truth is the CPC, and especially now Xi (you HAVE seen the updated textbooks about father/brother xi, right?), are single points of failure and unchallengeable authority. What happened to the left communists in the PRC? What happened to the smaller unions that didn't toe the party line, and not in the direction of capitalism but deeper into leftism? Where are the Chinese anarchists? Hell, where are the Chinese communists?
The only path forward to a communist PRC is a split into province level states or better yet smaller entities. It's only a matter of time before Xi goes senile or has a big birthday he wants to celebrate by escalating imperialism into military intervention and tanks the entire PRC economy in doing so, or simply dies and kicks off a shitstorm power struggle that cripples the CPC and the country along with it.
Given all the videos I've seen on YouTube of bridge and building collapses in China, I think you're glossing over all their shortcomings. Maybe they do have a tight regulatory loop - I don't know - but their aggressive timelines and poor materials seem to have bitten them in the butt a number of times.
Unless, wait, is criticism of the CPC racist? Well, that would only be true if the PRC was an ethnostate, after all, that's what makes criticism of Israel anti-Semitic, right? So, is the PRC an ethnostate?
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're talking about investments that range well in the tens of million of dollars. It's an insignificant drop in the bucket. The design team's salaries alone eclipse that value. On top of that, a single engine alone sells for thousands. Is this hypothetical regulatory cost that high if it can be covered by selling a few dozen units?
I think you missed the context here. Revey, the company being asked to do these certifications, doesn't make diesel engines for semi-trucks. The company makes an electric "powered converter dolly" which puts a mini trailer between the semi truck and trailer that uses batteries and electric motors to reduce the amount of diesel burnt per mile.
It's clever solution, there are externalities to consider (increased truck weight and length, changes to turning behavior, etc) but expensive certification per motor to prove that giving a truck an extra electric push doesn't increase the emissions doesn't strike me as making sense.
We need more information. How does this work for internal combustion truck engines?
Is the regulation well intentioned poorly designed? Is it anti-competitive gatekeeping drafted by lobbyists? Is the author misrepresenting something? All of the above? Hard to say.
I imagine that the variation is in the internal combustion engines the system is being paired with. In that scenario, it can be that the regulator is treating the combined units as a new drivetrain and requiring certification of each combination as if it were a new engine.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of what larger operators have in their fleets. It could be that a few certifications go a long ways. They are going to be at least somewhat inclined to avoid variation.
You cannot separate the idea of regulation from their harm because they are inherent to the concept. A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical effects. Rent control is a fantastic if trivial example of such.
We know central planning doesn't work, yet we are inclined to do it anyway under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
> A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical effects.
This isn't quite right. There are some regulations that have such obviously enormous benefits that even if our estimates are imperfect, they'd have to be off by a thousand miles to not be the right thing. Examples like banning leaded gasoline or asbestos, or having antitrust laws that kick in if a market gets too consolidated for any reason.
The problem is then people start making a bunch of other rules that on paper would improve things by a couple of percent, but in practice because they're not accounting for overhead or their numbers aren't perfect they're actually making things slightly worse, and then multiply that by thousands of such individual rules and you've got a huge mess.
I agree with this. When Michael Huemer talks about political knowledge he lists several requirements:
1. Simple. For example, “Demand curves slope downward.” The more complicated a theory is, the more ways there are for it to go wrong.
2. Accepted by experts. For example, there is a broad consensus in economics that protectionism is undesirable. If a theory is well-justified, then the great majority of reasonable and intelligent people will usually come to accept the theory, once they understand the arguments for it.
3. Non-ideological. Theories that have an ideological flavor and that call forth strong emotions tend to be pseudo-knowledge–for example, the theory that behavioral differences between men and women are entirely due to socialization. Reality is unlikely to conform to ideology.
4. Weak. For instance, we do not know that free markets are always perfectly efficient. We can say only that free markets are usually approximately efficient.
5. Specific and concrete. We can be much more confident in a concrete claim such as “Ted Bundy’s murders were wrong” than in an abstract theory such as “It is always wrong to initiate violence against another person.”
6. Supported by appropriate evidence. For example, the claim “violent entertainment increases violent crime” cannot be known without empirical evidence. In this case, a study based on a large, random sample would be appropriate, rather than, say, a few anecdotes.
7. Undefeated by counter-evidence. If there is a large quantity of evidence against P, or if one does not know whether there is such counter-evidence, then one does not know that P. For example, if one has read several studies supporting gun control while having read none of the literature on the other side, then one cannot claim to know whether gun control is desirable.
The claim "Leaded gasoline should be banned" reasonably fits most of these requirements, thus it's probably a relatively safe intervention with upside.
>Rent control is a fantastic if trivial example of such.
No it isn't. Rent control is made to provide short term relief. Regulations tend to be long term requriements. Of course making a short term temporary solution long term does not work.
>we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes
For policy, I think it is important to be risk averse. Regulations are extremely risk averse. Slowing down reckless actions so that people don't die should be considered a good thing. Of course, that can be anathema to businesses who rush to be first to market.
I don't see regulations being a problem here, but the cost of the regulations. Instead of focusing on de-regulations we look into what that 100k certification is going to? Hopefully not yet another for-profit middleman with incentives to bog the process down.
> Rent control is made to provide short term relief.
Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the market value diverge further with each lease renewal. There are people in NY who have been in their apartments 50 years and pay 10% of the market rate.
> Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the
You're assuming a form of rent control where new tenants pay market rate. That's not the only form, e.g., Berkeley's rent control used to continue "forever", until California forbade that (Costa Hawkins act in 1995).
I'm talking about the policy, not the tenants. Enacting 50 years of rent control is no different from Japan's economy the last 30 years.
Of course after multiple generations you scare off housing investment. But not after 5. And that should be the goal of rent control. Short term relief while doing the long term plan of building more housing.
Politicians not doing it this way is like blaming your duct tape for falling apart after a few weeks of adhesive duty.That doesn't mean duct tape is bad. It means no one bothered to fix the underlying issue.
They're right. Rent control is useful as a short term measure to keep rents from spiking, but it does long term damage to supplies and you need completely different methods to fix the supplies.
If central planning didn't work, why does every corporation under the sun use it internally? Why don't they just let everyone do what they want, and then sue eachother when it doesn't result in great outcomes?
Central planning does work at small scales. Everyone "centrally plans" their own life. Can you imagine doing it any other way?
The issue is that as the context expands, we lose the ability to make accurate predictions. To some extent we can't even predict our own lives although we try our best. When you expand that to the size of a corporation it's mostly just guessing. Corporations fail all of the time. When we expand that to a society, we are just guessing for everything but the most simple of predictions.
Clarify that, please? Maybe you mean "most corporations are short-lived due to excess central planning", or then again "most corporations are full of crusty old dudes who love the tradition of central planning", or ..?
I may believe both of those things, but no that's not actually what I meant. I simply meant look at the stats for how long corporations actually live. Are we sure that's how we want to structure our government?
Without comparing the management styles of different corporations it's difficult to say if it's related or not. For example, it's possible that long-lived corporations are run in a more laissez-faire style compared to ones that fail.
> In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes.
This doesn’t follow from your premise.
> We know central planning doesn't work
Europe conquered the world using central planning. Every society on earth with any measure of security, order, and cleanliness to speak of is dominated by a central bureaucracy. It works.
> under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
Doing nothing is precisely why anarcho-capitalists failed to change anything. Everyone smart associated with that movement studied power dynamics and moved onto other projects.
And you cannot separate the idea of lack of regulation from the harm inherent to the concept.
This kind of lazy ideological posturing is thought-terminating and incredibly tiring.
Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction materials, safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes. It would be truly baffling if of all conceivable points on the axis it was a global optimum.
I sympathise with your fatigue, I get tired of repeated arguments too, but I suppose the tiredness itself isn't a sign of being right. I wonder whether oh no not this again contains useful information. Perhaps not. Misconceptions are popular, but good ideas are also popular.
The earliest regulations were about the purity of bread and beer, and I tend to think of them as a good thing. But concepts like gypsum doesn't go in bread are simple enough for a king to understand, so perhaps those early regulations were more suitable for central administration. This was before there were brand names or consumer organizations. I suppose a non-central form of regulation would have to be along those lines, adversarial but symbiotic with the specific industry. Restaurant rating stars. IDK. Some stuff isn't consumer-facing though.
When unmonitored, people aren't motivated to behave, and they make a mess. When monitored, the people comply, but the monitors aren't motivated to be wise or understanding, only to enforce. Sometimes you get situations where an entire culture of people are spontaneously careful and good, or where they are regulated by regulators who are wise and perceptive and flexible. This state of affairs comes about, so far as I can tell, at random, or by voodoo.
I think this specific thing is more an effect of human brains trying to stereotype complicated things.
"all regulations are bad" is a much simpler premise than "rule #3.70.66.345 should be adjusted to consider multiple drive trains with the same engine to pass the same tests".
Like, if you found a specific regulation that was badly designed and advocated for it to change, no one would argue against it, but you wouldn't get any internet engagement either.
Here's a simple and elegant theory - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure. If you'd like it to be even simpler, "Measure twice, cut once."
Trying to squeeze blood out of a rock from people who cut corners and hurt others after-the-fact is a fuckin' nightmare and leads to globally bad outcomes.
> Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction materials, safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes.
You're gonna complain about "lazy ideological posturing" and then in the same breath construct a tired, boring straw man? Was this on purpose to prove a point or something?
Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. Regulating lead in petrol is simple, uncontroversial, and very reasonably likely to do more good than harm. It's an example of an intervention on society that is relatively safe and easy to predict the outcome. And it's also an outlier, because most political action is neither uncontroversial, simple, or likely to do more good than harm.
Regulating lead in petrol was very much not uncontroversial when it was regulated. Same with asbestos - the industries involved fought really hard against it.
Central planning is why our cities are no longer choked by smog. It is extremely difficult to predict outcomes in complex human system, but that cuts both ways: it’s hard to know if some intervention is good or bad, and it’s hard to know if leaving things alone is good or bad.
If you leave things alone, you get the light bulb and the airplane, but also leaded gasoline and radioactive tonics. The notion that it’s always better to do nothing rather than something is as fallacious as the opposite.
Most corporations and dictatorships seem to be centrally planned. Communism didn't work out for the Soviets, but they also didn't have smartphones and ChatGPT.
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.
> 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?
Why's that? Because a guy who's apparently friends with the owner of the company that produces these things told you that it saves emissions? Doesn't it seem reasonable to verify these claims?
No that doesn't seem reasonable at all if it's been proven to work _really well_ in several configurations and there's no particular reason to expect that the results would be drastically different in other very similar configurations.
That's what regulatory exemption procedures exist for, and it would be the logical next step if you had convincing hard data.
Every single regulatory process has them, so the fact that this very ranty article omits any mention of an attempt to use them is highly suspect.
I've worked with plenty of systems where for all sorts of reasons exemptions are granted for the express purpose of promoting innovation or recognizing a special circumstance.
How many types of truck engine do you reasonably need to test with? The number should fit on one hand. And really you should only need to do the full test with one model and limited verifications with others. That'll get it down from $27M to $200k, which would be a far more reasonable requirement.
Yeah why does the certification process cost so much is one question I have. Would this be a conversation if the cost of the test were more reasonable?
Seems somewhat reasonable. I don’t know why the company is supporting all 270 engine families.
This company wants to put a bunch of stuff on the road going 70mph that could crash into you and kill you and is complaining about a measly $27 million of regulatory cost.
They are making up a bunch of scary numbers about the cost of the status quo and the tone of the article is basically holding us all hostage. Speed out special snowflake startup company through the regulatory process (written in blood) or else you’ll lose bajillions of dollars in suffering and pain from the “status quo.”
$27 million is basically a rounding error for automotive companies. Maybe do better at raising funds next time, bro.
I assume that out of 270 entire families that some are more popular than others? Why not pick the 20-30 most popular ones?
The tone of this article is that OP’s company has a savior complex. If they aren’t given expedient special treatment regulatory approval, the status quo is causing a bunch of fake make up dollar values of damage. It’s kind of a gross tone.
>As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks.
Where in this sentence is asbestos mentioned? As for the families, if they know their product works in 270 engine families why would they chose to only sell to 20-30?
I don't know enough about it to know whether it's a waste or not. It's certainly not surprising that the company that has to pay for it thinks it's a waste.
Presumably they have so many families to serve their customers well. If they were to consolidate their engine families in such a way to avoid paying as much money to regulatory processes, that seems like a bit of a perverse incentive and outcome.
In my view though the goal of the regulation isn't bad, but the cost of the process is prohibitive. Why is it so expensive to measure engine emissions?
If you want to argue that adding an electric engine to existing trucks is going to make them go out of control and kill people in some completely common sense defying manner, then the burden of proof is on you and not on the company to prove a negative.
> one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks and that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item.
Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough". And then "if we come to an understanding, we might be able to look the other way".
> Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough".
This is often fully formalized, i.e. you're not bribing a specific government official, instead you're paying a huge certification fee hundreds of times because it's a source of revenue generation for the government and whoever passed the bill gave zero fucks that it's a heavily regressive tax on new and small businesses.
It's gonna be California (but I'm guessing, not sure). Other states just defer to federal regulation.
That they don't put the state on blast sort of points to the big cost not being entirely real (where they either think they can induce regulatory change or the number of tests that is needed to sell the systems is quite a lot less than the number of tests that would be needed to allow 100% of the market to use their system).
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.
In the same way that people struggle to comprehend exponential growth, they seem to also struggle to comprehend the cost of inaction, compounded over time.
Imagine if the steam engine had not been allowed by regulators during the time of the Industrial Revolution.
If that happened and we were all still working on farms today, I bet half the people would be telling us how much safer the government was making us with all its regulations. In blissful ignorance.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sure and if this article actually brought up specific regulations and made a case against them... it probably wouldn't have made the front page and be full of flamewars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
There is no meaningful improvement to be made in payroll systems. They just have to get it right, and they almost always do. And they aren't expensive. When I ran a business the payroll system wasn't even expensive enough to even be on the radar for ways to cut costs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zone 0 is inside the bathtub. Damn, so I can't put an outlet there? Zone 1 is over it, and zone 2 is 2 feet around it, and allows 12-volt outlets for small gadgets. Beyond that you can have ordinary outlets with the right circuit breakers (aka RCDs, GFCIs) integrated into them.
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.
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.
Even the anti-government types don't want big companies pouring cyanide in the river they fish in.
I think you're continuing to mischaracterize the other position in order to feel like there's some daylight between you and the "anarcho-capitalists". If you stop erecting strawmen, you might find you agree on more than you think.
Sure people want regulation until it affects their business. Then suddenly there's studies to talk about how trace amounts of cyanide won't affect the ecosystem anyway.
> If you stop erecting strawmen, you might find you agree on more than you think.
Try to give an argument and we can talk about it. All I've gotten so far is "no they aren't". Not very convincing.
Meanwhile, the actions have shown companies will do all they can to tear down regulations but provide nothing in return. It's just greed and hypocrisy.
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.
I think you may be misinterpreting the point. It's not that we never need less regulation, this may be the case. We should never make 'less regulation' the target. The right regulation may be less in some cases.
https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-complexity I think this section on complexity sums it up really well whether you’re talking about code or laws
> On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
While I agree that cookie banners are bad, they are not the result of bad regulation. They work perfectly for what they are. They signal that the web page is tracking you and has tracking cookies. Essential cookies are allowed and do not trigger a cookie banner requirement.
On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases.
Even this is a win.
The problem with this is that DNT header is used by such a tiny minority of people that it’s basically a walking unique identifier for all of the side channels. Arguably it’s as identifying as the cookie you’re asking them not to store in the first place.
I believe Firefox ships it enabled. So, it's already evident from my browser of choice.
Like security, it's a matter of tradeoff and reducing the surface area.
> On the other hand, my browser's GPC is enabled. It sends the new "do not track" signal. As a result, when I open "show preferences" on a cookie banner, all of them come disabled by default in most cases.
They come as disabled because that is required by GDPR. All settings that are not strictly necessary, consent must be opt-in. Not because you enabled DNT. That's just a flag companies don't care about because they are not legally required to care.
And thise settings originally were all toggled on because ads industry doesn't care
Nope. I don't live in a country covered by GDPR. They used to come enabled before. OneTrust's banners also show a little green text reading "Your signal to opt-out has been honored".
> 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.
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.
Yep, bad law, I'd also say bad intent.
Apple is ahead of the curve[1]. You get a system-level popup asking you for consent to be tracked. Actual, not implied consent - only "yes" means "yes".
So you say "no" and it means "no". Apps are blocked from all basic forms of tracking (like device ID), and the App Store rules state that apps that try to circumvent that will be kicked out. Apple doesn't fuck around - they've kicked Meta and Epic without blinking an eye.
EU's response? Kick Apple, because EU companies can no longer do targeted advertising on Apple's platform. Our regulators are full of shit.
[1]: Well Apple still tracks you in their first-party apps, but that's a different story.
Isn't that bad lawyers rather than bad rules?
That’s the “you’re holding it wrong” defense.
Good rules will have their intent followed by bad lawyers. Bad rules will have their letter followed but their intent missed.
Most lawyers aren’t bad, they’re just risk averse. I’ve had very few outright “no” answers from legal, even when pushing the boundaries in the grey areas, but the result of that is the PM doesn’t get a straight yes from legal so they decide to take the most complicit option. In the cookie banners case, that’s show by default especially if you don’t understand.
A good point. Regulation is worth nothing if not enforced. There are new right to repair laws but nothing has been enforced.
I can see two problems causing the pain described here, which I will discuss shortly. But the article seems to stretch that experience too much into the 'regulation is bad' territory. Regulations exist for a reason. They aren't created for the power trip of government officials. This is the same US where companies dump PFAS into drinking water sources with impunity, has some of the highest fees for the worst quality interest access, where insulin is unaffordable and corporate house renting is a thing. There are many such areas where regulation and oversight is woefully inadequate, much less any 'overregulation'. Regulations are practically the only thing standing between the rich and the powerful and their incessant attempt to drive even more wealth into their own pockets at the expense ordinary people's health, wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc.
Now let's look at the specific problems here with a much narrower scope than 'regulations'. The first problem is the type of regulations. Some regulations are too arcane and don't reflect the current state of technology. Others affect the unprivileged people disproportionately. The solution for that is to amend these regulations fast enough - not deregulation. It's also important to assess the negative impacts of loosening these regulations - something I don't see discussed in this article.
The other important requirement is to increase the staffing of the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload doesn't become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a scientific method to assess the staffing requirements of public service institutions. According to that, a significant number of government departments all over the world are understaffed. Regulatory agencies and police departments top that list. Increased workload on their officials lead to poor experience for the citizens availing their services (this is very evident in policing). Yet those same experiences are misconstrued and misrepresented to call for deregulation and defunding of these institutions - the opposite of what's actually needed. (PDs need more staff and more training in empathy. Not defunding, nor militarization.) This is exactly what I see in this article. An attempt to target regulations as a whole using a sob anecdote.
>insulin is unaffordable
In large part due to regulation. Reflexively adding more regulations to deal with the negative effects of existing regulations is like "fixing" a bug by adding special-case logic for inputs which trigger the bug, without understanding why the bug actually occurred. Just like code, regulations should ideally be simple and elegant with a minimum of special cases.
The EU also has regulations, but somehow it does not make insulin as expensive as in the US. Maybe the existence of a regulation is not the issue here.
Existence of specific bad US regulation and overregulation caused this.
Bad EU regulations and overregulation caused other problems. For example it is illegal for me to throw old socks full of holes into trash, I am supposed to take it to recycling centre on other side of the city.
Oh yeah, because in the absence of regulation, the insulin producer would sell it at negligible margins, sure!
As for the socks - my city has like ~5 locations where old textiles can be recycled, the closest one in slightly less than 1km from where I live. I see no problem with going there twice a year :)
I'm not against the existence of regulation, nor is the OP. I'm against bad regulation. The US healthcare system is a gigantic regulatory morass.
Yeah but EU regulation makes other things expensive and inefficient (like the labour market, housing, building new companies because incumbents protect their interests trhough regulation).
The fact is that with insulin the regulation issues comes from the patchwork system of healthcare the US developped through political concesssionns and lobbying from private firms, which makes the developpment and the subsequent commercialization expensive relative to Europe where centralized national bodies negotiate with the pharma companies.
Regulation can be good or bad, in our era it is ineffective because politicians are boomers disconnected from the issues or in the EU a pseudo-technocratic (not really listening to technocrats recommendations) body far from reality
This series of posts is a nice forray into managerialism (the source of many regulation issues) https://baazaa.github.io/2024/10/16/managers_p1.html
> EU regulation makes other things expensive and inefficient (like the labour market, housing,
Unlike the US, where federal minimal wage remained flat since 2009 or where Black Rock is buying all available housing to keep the prices as high as possible.
The bug occurs because of the power discrepancy of those who have the demand and those of who can supply. For some reason, the problem if insulin prices and absurd health costs only exist in the US. I wonder why.
The power to charge what you want comes from lack of competition. Regulation can make entry into a market too high, especially for small start ups.
Ensuring that regulation is necessary and as straight forward as possible to comply with is good for consumers.
The barrier for entry is primarily capital these days: have a moat, prevent competition, extract money, cease R&D. And if a competitor does come up, just buy them outright. This is the current economic model, as it is practiced by Private Equity.
Power has become infectious and capitalism has changed. The game is about power and extracting more and more money from the productive economy, making it less competitive. Who wins? Those who already have excessive capital.
The only one who would have enough legal power is exclusively the state. It’s no surprise the state is under attack from so many fronts.
> competition
We don’t need competition in insulin production. It is a know quantity with fixed and closed quality parameters. Fix the price and let suppliers compete on cost.
The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so regulated that setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.
Note that if you cause by regulation or stupid laws something to be expensive to produce/import and then make it illegal to sell above that price - then you will get shortages.
As noone will want to produce insuline if required paperwork costs more than it's selling price.
Note that even if currently adding more regulation to solve problems caused by more regulation will not cause it, it may happen in future.
US healthcare regulations are on Nth round of that.
We will have to wait see where it goes, but California is trying to make their own insulin, so starting January 1st, 2025 you can buy a pack for $55 a as a resident.
> setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.
This is what I meant by compete on cost. The manufacturers that are best at cutting these costs will make the most profit. That’s where competition should be focused on such generic items.
There are many kinds of insulin variants on the market. The easy way to differentiate them is by release rate and duration. Gone in an hour for some and 24hours for others. There are other factors as well that make them incompatible with each other.
All clearly categorised and regulated. Fill the boxes and ship em and STFU
> The power to charge what you want comes from lack of competition
Competition alone is never good enough to make price down, because companies and shareholders hate competition and will happily “consolidate” competitive markets into much more profitable oligopolies (when it's not straight monopolies).
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.
Why not just have a single regulation, that products must be clearly labeled by their country of origin, and let consumers decide the rest?
Maybe because people don't have unlimited amount of time to keep up-to-date on all data and research on toxicity, negative health effects, safety, etc on tens of thousands of products from a couple hundred countries.
Because people don't look at country of origin. They are mostly price sensitive.
If you allow imports from countries with looser regulations, you are basically putting your own sectors at a competitive disavantage in your own market. It's akin to killing it basically.
It's obviously extremely stupid but in the case of the Mercosur agreement, predictably Germany doesn't care because the agribusiness is in France and they themselves will be able to export their cars.
Generally speaking, Germany never cares about deeply shafting the rest of the union when it gives them a small advantage. See also how their economy is deeply unbalanced, they have under invested for decades and they only survive because they are part of a monetary union devoid of a fiscal union giving them the tremendous advantage of an undervalued currency at the expense of basically every southern members. See also how they made joining the currency union mandatory for entering the common market and are pushing for adding more poor eastern countries to exploit which also conveniently vote for the EPP and dillute any chance the southern countries could ally to oppose them.
Obviously, the currency union has no clear path to exit it.
The EU already has country of origin requirements. They still had to specify things like "X% of the product has to be made in country Y to be qualified for the 'made in Y' label". And even that can and does get muddy.
> 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.
> Regulations are practically the only thing standing between the rich and the powerful and their incessant attempt to drive even more wealth into their own pockets at the expense ordinary people's health, wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc.
Try to rethink how money is created and how money gets its value and how and by whom that wealth is distributed. Regulation as in "make rules" does not enforce rules, which is the definition of (political) power.
> The other important requirement is to increase the staffing of the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload doesn't become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a scientific method to assess the staffing requirements of public service institutions. According to that, a significant number of government departments all over the world are understaffed.
Why are you claiming "There is a scientific method" and do not provide it? Governments do (risk) management by 1 rules, 2 checks and 3 punishment and we already know from software that complexity in system is only bounded by system working with eventual necessary (ideally partial) resets. Ideally governments would be structured like that, but that goes against governments interest of extending power/control. Also, "system working" is decided by the current ruling class/group. Besides markets and physical constrains.
> Try to rethink how money is created and how money gets its value and how and by whom that wealth is distributed.
Please elaborate.
Money is created and distributed via 1 banking system and 2 government. Are 1 rules, 2 checks and 3 punishment enforced against the banking system and government or only to stabilize and extend those systems? I'd argue the introduction of (arbitrary) rules are often just the excuses to amass power, but enforcement of checks and punishments decides who holds (political) power.
Money is printed out of thin air by the FED and then loaned out to the government for them to spend, so it enters the economy. Something along those lines.
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.
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.
> How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years?
Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so. Mind that the process that created these holes have also created tremendously large biohazards very consistently, yet are normalized by society. We must accelerate the pace we’re on.
> What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me? I absolutely think businesses which are working to save millions of lives should receive regulatory support, instead of the oil companies which are still to this day benefiting from price subsidies?
The key point contested is stated like this in the OP:
> A regulatory system that structurally insists on legalistic, ultra-extreme caution is bound to generate a massive negative return for society.
The OP mostly sees the downsides and disregards how hard earned any of those regulatory requirements are. Each requirement is usually the outcome of people being substantially impacted by industry before regulation. For instance the Thalidomide scandal with 10000 children born with deformities.
If OP doesn't grasp the origin and rationale behind regulations, it doesn't mean there aren't any.
And now that we have these strict safety regulations after the Thalidomide fuck up, drugs are more expensive than ever due to the extreme cost of going through the approval process, but at least they're safer. Except, of course, that whole episode where people somehow forgot that opiates were addictive. What are we paying for again?
Aren't the oil companies "working" on carbon capture?
The oil companies are generally working on carbon capture that produces CO2 that can be sequestered with the equipment and know-how they already have (i.e. pumping pressurised CO2 back into underground reservoirs). Growing crops is one of their focuses (and it's not a very good form of carbon capture, anyhow).
To be honest they should be forced to actually work on it. The rule should be, if you want to be allowed to sell X amount of carbon as fuel on a given market, you have to capture k*X amount of CO2.
>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.
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?
This is primarily an anglophone board so they are (perhaps inaccurately) referring to the Anglosphere which has far worse housing performance than elsewhere https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f...
Global, I guess. It has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_crisis
There's specific pages for some individual countries, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_crisis_in_the_United_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing_in_Canada#A...
This one is about housing crisis, not "western homeless crisis".
At least in Europe it is not (yet?) causing very large scale of homelessness problem.
The US and Canada (and to some extent elsewhere) have been experiencing a lot of homelessness and open air drug use due to fentanyl, housing unaffordability, and "community" mental health treatment rather than "mental hospitals."
Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm all have it.
In rural Gabon, presumably I wouldn't be renting but would own my own unsafe shanty. It's really tempting. But living in Libreville has more of a ring to it.
> Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.
That doesn't seem like a fair take. You're implying that the sympathetic people who outlawed poor houses are the very same people who won't build anything new. That's not true.
What? It's literally the same regulatory agency in this case, and more broadly it's the same ideological strain of banning doing X without also doing undesirable thing Y and not caring about whether that reduces the rate of X. Unless you are talking about the housing developers themselves, in which case you are falling for the same thing yourself.
"Ideological strains" arent people, nor are "agencies".
Democratic politics will always be about compromise. Compromise means you don't get do all your Y's. It's the purpose of the system. We will never (I hope) live in either the libertarian nor the socialist utopia, not just because neither of those places really exist, but also because democracy doesn't lead to that.
If you every find yourself thinking that "this problem would be solved if only we were closer to my utopia" then you're the ideological one.
I didn't say 'utopia'. I can name exactly the things I want changed, and exactly what the proximate effects will be of doing so, good and bad.
Yes, agencies are people. If you think that it's dishonest to castigate the SFHA for taking one action and not taking another because the one action was a little while ago and therefore there's been some personnel churn since, you are being unserious. Have you ever complained about past and present actions of e.g. Microsoft?
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.
Anti regulation of a sort is still a popular position. It’s just the libertarian hands of regulation that has fallen out of favor. I don’t think it will return.
At first I wasn’t sure it would stick, the name isn’t very catchy, but I’ve heard some politicians mention abundance. There is and will be more calls for corrected regulation to improve building pipelines. From the left it will be for faster procurement of public housing. It’ll look different on the right.
You are surely not saying that because HN talks about it, it must be well-known and well-respected.
Other political positions related to libertarianism, as you name it, have the exact same fate: some states respect them, others don't, and the parts of the national government lower on the totem pole than the cabinet think it's some sort of skin disease.
You've never heard any mainstream pundit like John Oliver or Rachel Maddow ranting about overregulation; you've never heard anyone important in Democratic politics taking it seriously. The word 'abundance' in TFA was selected to deliberately refer to a book arguing for it, which nobody with establishment credentials had done until this year, and which is treated by the party as a brash bold unexpected controversial statement that should be treated with extreme suspicion.
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.
> deregulation
Any word that conflates parking minimums with food safety regulation is counter-productive. These two things are so vastly different that they should never be discussed in the same breath.
> The last 30 years have been dominated by deregulation
Maybe in USA, and not everywhere. From what I heard deregulation had not happened in USA healthcare.
And describing last 30 years in EU as dominated by deregulation is clearly wrong.
I think a commonality is none of the agencies in the way feel an existential risk from failing to execute.
You could imagine a system where a permit and planning department finds it's functions taken over by a minimal state agency when not enough housing is built in its area. The state of California is slowly moving that direction because it's so bad.
Which just leads to things like this
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/earthq...
Typical structures in the villages are bungalows built by people you know. Sounds like the crisis in the link you shared is from corrupt approvals and poor construction of commercial properties sold to people. People build houses they will live in in the villages and for me this is a big enough incentive to build it properly. You will have no one to blame when your own roof falls on your head. The builders are also known and it would be a business ending move to build a rubbish house for your neighbour. Word would get out pretty quick. One thing people do in the village is talk as they have plenty time. I think all these other factors make up for the lack of regulation.
I think the point is to avoid roofs to fall at all: that's what anti-seismic regulations are for. They saved countless lives in places like Japan. They may not prevent all deaths, but can be an effective damage containment strategy. When an earthquake devastated the Italian city of L'Aquila, the majority of the survived buildings were those following regulations. Many houses built in the Middle Ages are gone.
One of the earliest known laws humans created (almost 4000 years ago) state that if a homeowner is killed by his house caving in, the builder must be put to death. We have known since forever that you can't just let people build shitty structures.
Letting the free market take care of it isn't natural or neutral. It's literally never been how human society does things.
The Code of Hammurabi. https://archive.org/details/hiddenrichessour0000hays/page/13...
Probably wasn't a list of real laws? So says Wikipedia: "Rather than a code of laws, then, it may be a scholarly treatise."
There's zero equality in it. Killing a commoner is cheaper than killing a noble. If the badly built house falls on a slave, the builder owes the owner a slave. So if the free market is an innovation like equality, and is not natural, well, fair point I guess, and natural isn't necessarily good. But was Babylon natural, anyway, or just old?
The notion that the free market is natural means something. I suppose organic is the real idea there, and that makes it just another appeal for using local knowledge as opposed to insensitive central management.
Actually building in Turkey is strongly regulated - it’s just that corruption in government allows bad players to easily ignore it.
Just another way regulation fails to do what is supposed to, while its downsides (diminished competition, deterring startups and supporting incumbents) still apply.
This is why blindly relying on regulation and ignoring its trade offs is just foolish.
When the officials are nearly universally corrupt, the regulations de facto do not exist.
> the regulations de facto do not exist
But they do exist. Their downsides still apply. They will keep intimidating and burdening the honest players and deterring prospective startups while completely failing to stop bad players.
They will even encourage corruption: obey heavy regulations and controls or simply pay a tribute to the ruler.
Read more in depth into this catastrophe. There were for all intents and purposes NO honest players. In some towns 90%+ of buildings collapsed, when code compliant ones would not have - it wasn’t even that strong an earthquake.
FTA: “ According to numbers published by the environment and urbanisation ministry in 2018, more than half of the buildings in Turkey – equivalent to almost 13m buildings – violate construction and safety regulations.”
It's regulated everywhere it's just that corruption networks are so dense in the countryside, no one gives a damn about things being done legally.
In my village there is no regulation for building residential property. You don't have title deeds either. You get allocated a piece of land by the local chief or headman/woman and you decide where and what you can build. The only regulation is you must have a toilet. Which tends to be a no brainer and one of the first things most people build. A simple Blair toilet.
This is same that i meant myself. Local gang so established, it is seen as a government itself, runs the place and national laws do not apply, resulting properties being from perspective of law, illegal - can't be officially sold or mortgaged, have no title deeds, and would have been razed if government had access there, except if a city official with a bulldozer appears, the local gang will meet them with machetes and pitchforks, and sending in tanks and helicopters is not worth it. It's not "deregulation", it's "lawlessness".
This company's business is regulatory arbitrage. Of course they have to deal with regulators. Capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is not a commercial enterprise. It's something done to get some sort of regulatory credit.
> Capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is not a commercial enterprise. It's something done to get some sort of regulatory credit.
I would have said that it's something done to improve the health of the planet, but sure.
Business doesn't have goals beyond money. Any good it does is completely incidental.
That's a wild oversimplification
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.
Saying it exists only due to badly written regulations is rather bold assertion. It exists, because companies damage what isn't theirs. It is a regulation to protect property rights.
Companies are polluting shared resources. Classic tradegy of commons.
Credits is one of things we have come up that does work.
Sure, we could just ban it outright and say goodbye to industrial civilization. Most people don't agree with that.
> company's business is regulatory arbitrage
This isn't arbitrage any more than selling warships is military arbitrage.
>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.
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?
>The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.
The problem with blind government maximalism is that it ignores the fact that what these governments claim to actually be trying to accomplish can actually be harmful and have considerable negative impact on society in general.
Sure, but the fundamental premise is that good corporations are seeking to generate profits, and good governments are seeking to provide for their constituents.
A corporation that doesn't prioritize profits isn't a good corporation. You wouldn't buy stock in it. A government that isn't prioritizing its constituents is a bad one, you wouldn't vote for it.
Everything else is implementation detail but it's obvious that governments need to check corporate power because otherwise the inevitable end game is a corpotocracy ruling over factory towns of debt slaves.
I would challenge both of those.
Corporations exist to do whatever their directors or shareholders want them to do. For publicly-traded corporations that's typically to generate profits, but not all corporations are listed on a stock exchange and even the public ones could in principle have their shareholders vote to do something else. If a corporation wants to build electric cars to fight climate change or build housing to reduce housing scarcity, that doesn't make it "bad" -- it's good, and you don't want the government impeding that when somebody wants to do it. Or even when they want to do the same thing to make money, because it can be both things at once.
And just because a government that doesn't prioritize its constituents is bad doesn't mean that the government we have is good, or that every existing regulation is benefiting constituents rather than harming them.
> Everything else is implementation detail
Which is kind of the part that matters.
> If a corporation wants to build electric cars to fight climate change or build housing to reduce housing scarcity, that doesn't make it "bad" -- it's good, and you don't want the government impeding that when somebody wants to do it.
It's good so long as it's profitable and grows. The market determines good and bad, nothing else. Companies must grow indefinitely or their stock price drops, any earnings announcement makes this obvious, even positive growth earnings might cause a stock price drop if the earnings growth wasn't large enough. Flat earnings, with a margin increase? Stock price devaluation, see Microsoft / Xbox. The word is right there, value. The value of a company is determined by its market price (or theoretical market price if it's still private), and nothing else. The market value of its shares are the final word.
Sure, companies might occasionally do good things, but that core definition of value under capitalism doesn't change.
You're still stuck on publicly-traded corporations.
Try one of these. A non-profit gets a million dollars in donations to build new housing with the model of selling it into the market and using the proceeds to build even more. They still have to comply with all the laws, so you don't want the laws to adversarially impede its humanitarian mission to improve housing affordability and reduce homelessness, right?
> They still have to comply with all the laws, so you don't want the laws to adversarially impede its humanitarian mission to improve housing affordability and reduce homelessness, right?
I do want the laws to ensure that the buildings have fire escapes and no asbestos...
Non profits can, apparently, convert to for-profit ones, or be bought, or be corrupt funnels of government contract money to for-profit corporations.
These are arguments for improving and simplifying regulations, but not arguments against the idea that there should be an entity the represents nothing other than the needs of the constituents (the government) that will enforce rules on entities that wish to extract value from constituents (corporations). Non profit corps are attempts to exist within that system while playing by the rules but it doesn't change the fact that we still need the rules to control the hyperfauna wandering around.
In the situation that the personnel and legal code of the government depend very little on the outcome of elections in practice, would you say that the incentives for a government would be rather different?
> The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.
The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids. What actual harm and considerable negative impact on society in general are you referring to in this context?
> Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too much of an inconvenience?
Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill considered or poorly drafted and require things that are not aligned with their ostensible purpose.
> What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical rentism from bureaucrats.
How about whimsical rentism from incumbents who want to exclude competitors or avaricious middlemen who want their services to be expensive and mandatory, and capture the regulators to make that happen?
> Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations already have a long track record of causing that very harm to society. Why is this fact ignored?
The subset of the rules that aren't actually necessary aren't actually necessary. Why is this fact ignored?
> The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids. What actual harm and considerable negative impact on society in general are you referring to in this context?
For almost any regulation, no matter how important it is and how much good it does, there will be some things it does not allow that it should. A regulation will either need to let the bad stuff through, not let the good stuff through, or some mixture of the two.
Now consider that many individual regulations get added; the vast majority of them for good reasons. But since each one has some cases it fails for, the combination of them has a combination (generally larger than the sum of it's parts) that it fails for.
But that mean that regulations are bad in general. It means that making rules to protect society is HARD. Like REALLY hard, staggeringly so. And even doing the best you possibly can (which is a stretch for most government), you're still going to wind up with things that can't be done... but should be able to.
The solution isn't to get rid of (all) regulations... it's to try to figure out how to make them better.
The claim that something is hard to do properly is an argument for doing it less often, i.e. limiting it to the cases when the benefit is unambiguously large and staying away from borderline cases where overhead and collateral damage will leave you underwater.
It's also an argument for requiring the government to internalize the costs it imposes, e.g. if it wants testing done then it should pay for it from general revenue so that the cost of it is accounted for in the government budget instead of imposing an unfunded mandate. Then if the cost is reasonable this isn't a problem and if the cost is unreasonable the government is causing a problem for itself instead of innocent third parties, which puts the incentive to fix it in the right place.
> The claim that something is hard to do properly is an argument for doing it less often
I don't even believe that you believe this.
> the benefit is unambiguously large and staying away from borderline cases
If this was easy, don't you think maybe that's what people would be doing?
> if it wants testing done then it should pay for it from general revenue
???
So if I build a car, screw it up, have to test it 500 times just to pass and be allowed to sell it, that's the governments problem? If I open a bank and take peoples money, its up to the government to take initiative on making sure I'm not screwing them over?
> instead of imposing an unfunded mandate
What? So now any test the government mandates is an unfunded mandate? Like food tests?
This is obviously getting way to political because none of the arguments are making any sense, and are completely disconnected from reality.
I don't even consider myself pro regulation but this is just the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting LALALALALALA.
> I don't even believe that you believe this.
Is your position that when something is intractably easy to screw up we should do it as much as possible?
> If this was easy, don't you think maybe that's what people would be doing?
Which people? The ones with a structural incentive to not do that?
> So if I build a car, screw it up, have to test it 500 times just to pass and be allowed to sell it, that's the governments problem?
It seems like it's still your problem because you want to sell the car and therefore want it to pass.
Whereas if the test is unreasonably expensive then the government has a problem, but the problem is of its own making and it now has the incentive to fix the problem instead of burdening someone else with it.
> If I open a bank and take peoples money, its up to the government to take initiative on making sure I'm not screwing them over?
It is indeed the role of law enforcement to enforce the laws.
> What? So now any test the government mandates is an unfunded mandate? Like food tests?
Is your argument that it isn't an unfunded mandate supposed to be that the test isn't mandated or that the government is actually funding it?
you'll be more at home over on https://www.reddit.com
What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion. Just as you can come up with a few examples of things you think should be less regulated (and many people may agree), others can come up with a few examples of things they think should be more regulated (and many people may also agree).
> What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion.
The blog post clearly tries to frame their problems complying with existing regulation as stumbling upon road blocks which just so happen to comprise only of unnecessary rules.
It's quite the coincidence how each and every single restriction that isn't met ends up being unnecessary.
> What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion.
To begin with, no it isn't. There are a lot of existing regulations that serve no legitimate purpose. Some exist solely at the behest of incumbents and are enacted under a false pretext by corrupt government officials; no one supports them who isn't being disingenuous. Others aren't even wanted by anyone and are simply regulatory errors that failed to account for something that actually happens, but the people impacted don't have the political influence to correct it.
Moreover, what if there are some regulations that people differ on? Should we keep the ones only a minority of people think are a good idea, just because they already exist?
> To begin with, no it isn't. There are a lot of existing regulations that serve no legitimate purpose.
Citation needed. Specially referring to TFA.
You know what there is a lot of? Organizations trying to push onto the public hazardous and subpar products. Those are the ones mostly affected by regulation, because that's precisely what regulation is designed to shield society from.
So it comes as no surprise that there are companies complaining that regulation prevents them from doing business. That's by design, and represents a much needed market pressure to prevent bad actors from screwing everything and everyone around them.
> Citation needed. Specially referring to TFA.
Explain the legitimate purpose of requiring a device that runs on batteries to be tested for emissions, not just once but for every subspecies of truck you want to use it with.
> You know what there is a lot of? Organizations trying to push onto the public hazardous and subpar products. Those are the ones mostly affected by regulation, because that's precisely what regulation is designed to shield society from.
You're confusing the nominal intention of the regulations with their actual effect. The map is not the territory.
> The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids.
No. The article is about someone who is whining about having to comply with regulation. But not all regulation, only the one they feel they are having trouble complying with.
There is a difference. And a nuance.
You'd be naive if you were hoping to get objective statements from what reads clearly as a promotion piece.
> Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill considered or poorly drafted and require things that are not aligned with their ostensible purpose.
You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish. We need to discuss objectively verifiable facts if you want to attack specific regulations, though. I don't see fact-based arguments being made, and that reads like a desperate straw man.
> No. The article is about someone who is whining about having to comply with regulation. But not all regulation, only the one they feel they are having trouble complying with.
Which brings us to the question of whether the regulation they're complaining about is actually objectionable. And it appears that they rather have a point. Why should they have to spend millions of dollars testing for something that makes no sense in this context? Why is the government even testing for this at all, when fuel is a semi truck's primary operating cost and buyers are going to be highly sensitive to fuel efficiency independent of any government regulations?
> You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish.
This is not a hypothetical unless your contention is that all existing regulations are entirely without flaws or inefficiencies.
> We need to discuss objectively verifiable facts if you want to attack specific regulations, though.
Do you want to try to defend the rule requiring them to spend millions of dollars on certifications for no apparent benefit to anyone?
> Why should they have to spend millions of dollars testing for something that makes no sense in this context?
To have data to back the claims being made.
The requirement doesn't depend on the company having made any particular claims.
False. The claim, even if implicit, is "does not increase emissions beyond particular threshold within particular operational domain".
Further, the article makes a claim that there are more emissions testing groups to test on than there are individual members, which cannot be true.
It's an electric motor with no emissions and therefore can't possibly increase emissions. There's your data. No regulations needed.
> The claim, even if implicit, is "does not increase emissions beyond particular threshold within particular operational domain".
So the government wants data to validate a claim the company never explicitly made, but the government doesn't want to pay for the data, and the nature of the product is such that data showing higher emissions would be baffling and implausible. We're back to, how does this make any sense?
> Further, the article makes a claim that there are more emissions testing groups to test on than there are individual members, which cannot be true.
Consider the possibility that an "engine family" could be an engine configured in a given way rather than a set of distinct engines.
> So the government wants data to validate a claim
The claim is "our contraption is roadworthy", which implicitly includes claims regarding roadworthiness requirements, including emissions. This is literally how market availability works.
> Consider the possibility that an "engine family" could be an engine configured in a given way rather than a set of distinct engines.
"Engine family" is a set of particular engine configurations/codes, specifically to reduce re-test burden. Group validation automatically validates all group members, therefore there are at most number of engines groups to test. I suspect the testing requirements are not for the engines, though, but why would an article by a startup struggling to follow regulations misrepresent the regulations?
Theres a lot of that. Its just people need a first exposure to the thing to realise its terrible. Like the other commenter says, most people are completely shielded.
I know a few local people who have only been impacted for the first time by regulations preventing the sale of vapes, and local regulations preventing the resale of used tyres to motorsport enthusiasts. Its the first spark for a lot of people.
> I know a few local people who have only been impacted for the first time by regulations preventing the sale of vapes, and local regulations preventing the resale of used tyres to motorsport enthusiasts. Its the first spark for a lot of people.
Please point out what regulations you speak of, and why they are in place.
For example, vape pen regulation imposes requirements such as maximum nicotine concentration and minimum acceptable purity, and must be child-resistant. Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and will pose a health risk. What spark does this fire in you?
Or would you prefer to blindly resell things that harm the people around you without being bothered about consequences?
>For example, vape pen regulation imposes requirements such as maximum nicotine concentration and minimum acceptable purity, and must be child-resistant. Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and will pose a health risk. What spark does this fire in you?
Over a period of ~8 months, they were subjected to like 4 different levels of restriction over here, culminating in them only being provided by pharmacies to prescription holders. An entire cottage industry of compliant vape selling businesses were forced to close, and significant numbers of users have been deprived access to the commodity. Honestly its been a goldmine for discussing law/regulation with the up and coming generation.
>Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and will pose a health risk.
Regulation forces the non prescription having user to the black market where no safety or quality checks are conducted. And they did this on the basis that the health risk is unknown, having already banned the vape juices that we know can in a small number of cases cause complications.
>Or would you prefer to blindly resell things that harm the people around you without being bothered about consequences?
I think you internalise the standard fallacy. I explain in another post that all regulations need to justify themselves, not simply have a stated cause. You seem to believe as most people who are unimpacted, that one can simply write law like code, and the execution proceeds flawlessly. There need be no thought given to the negative case, to the behaviour changes outside of your scope. Its quite a suffocating arrogance.
Not to mention you also immediately fall into "OH YOU ARE AGAINST X, WELL YOU MUST LOVE Y", which is telling.
> Over a period of ~8 months, they were subjected to like 4 different levels of restriction over here, culminating in them only being provided by pharmacies to prescription holders.
Can you explain what do you think is wrong with that?
> An entire cottage industry of compliant vape selling businesses were forced to close, and significant numbers of users have been deprived access to the commodity.
What a questionable assertion. Your whole argument is that businesses that were not compliant had to close, but somehow you chose to frame them as compliant?
And exactly what "commodities" do you think the public is being deprived of? Hazardous noncompliant vape pens that pose a health risk? That's hardly something anyone would complain about.
> Regulation forces the non prescription having user to the black market where no safety or quality checks are conducted.
No, not really. Anyone can stroll into any store that sells them and buy a compliant vape pen.
Your argument is even comical, in the way that you opted to complain about regulation somehow causing the problem of people selling hazardous products that don't comply with regulation. I mean, do you expect all products to magically comply with regulation after that ceases to be enforced? Schrodinger's regulation!
The main problem with laissez-faire fundamentalists is their incoherence driven by despair.
Yeah, this whole argument sounds a lot like
company> These regulations are preventing us from selling our product
government> We have a set of standards that your type of product must meet; because we believe not meeting them is dangerous to society.
company> But, our products don't meet those standards, and we can't sell them... and since selling them is what our business plan is, we're going to go out of business
government> And? I'm not seeing the problem here.
It is part of government's job to decide what is safe for society and, where something isn't safe, decide if the harm in preventing it outweighs the good in doing so.
>It is part of government's job to decide what is safe for society and, where something isn't safe, decide if the harm in preventing it outweighs the good in doing so.
And they are quite often very wrong, trying to be seen to be acting rather than making considered changes.
That's a pretty disingenuous interpretation. It's a lot more like:
Company > we are selling something that's legal.
Government > well now you have to do X. (Testing? Certification? Reporting?)
Company > why? X industry doesn't have this reg. Europe/ the next state over doesn't have this reg?
Government> because I'm the government and its my job
Company > fine
Repeat 4x.
> Company, um we did they last 4 things you asked us to and if we have to do the next we are going to go out of business.
> Gov: get fucked, I'm just doing my job: read [I have an ideological problem with your business, my buddy is in the business and I'm giving him an exception, and/or I've got a special interest group to please].
>Public: cheers
>Public: Why is their a housing shortage? Why is our manufacturing less competitive than China? Why do we need to import rare earths?
>Your whole argument is that businesses that were not compliant had to close, but somehow you chose to frame them as compliant?
Businesses that were compliant with rounds 1, 2 and 3 of regulation still got kicked out with number 4, because the regulation denoted them as businesses that aren't allowed to sell vapes. They did nothing morally wrong and harmed no one, and invested time and money in compliance with earlier regulation.
>On 1 July 2024, the Therapeutic Goods and Other Legislation Amendment (Vaping Reforms) Act 2024 (Commonwealth vaping reforms) came into effect. Therapeutic vapes (which include nicotine and zero-nicotine vapes) are only available in pharmacies for the purposes of smoking cessation or managing nicotine dependence. It is illegal for any other retailer— including tobacconists, vape shops and convenience stores—to sell any type of vaping goods
I wont bore you with the details of the restrictions pharmacies impose for access to vapes, but rest assured, the effect is a prescription is required for 0 tobacco vapes.
And its worth mentioning, this was the compromise position, where the government was pushing for a total ban.
>And exactly what "commodities" do you think the public is being deprived of?
Previously compliant vapes that are now only permitted via prescription.
>Hazardous noncompliant vape pens that pose a health risk? That's hardly something anyone would complain about.
Dubious risk that is so far completely unsubstantiated. We regulate tobacco cigarettes to a lower degree. You can enjoy aerosolised burning tar in your lungs far easier than a simple vape. There is no justification for restricting something less harmful, to a greater degree. None.
>No, not really. Anyone can stroll into any store that sells them and buy a compliant vape pen.
You really dont engage with anyone in good faith do you.
>Your argument is even comical, in the way that you opted to complain about regulation somehow causing the problem of people selling hazardous products that don't comply with regulation. I mean, do you expect all products to magically comply with regulation after that ceases to be enforced? Schrodinger's regulation!
You make the same logical fallacy, that something is hazardous because it is regulated. When they specifically did not have any evidence to base their later rounds of regulation on. Its based on an assumption, that vaping might be harmful, after having already removed products from shelves that were shown to be (ever so slightly) harmful. That is, they removed the bad stuff, then removed the unknown without justification. My point again is that you need more than a reason, you need continual ongoing justification.
We have literally had an increase in violent crime associated with the vape ban. Black market vapes are completely unregulated (often including the banned juices that were largely complied with). I dont see why you have a problem with that. This is not a binary. You arent being asked to believe in a 100% regulation free utopia. Just to abandon your weird, and completely unsubstantiated starting position that there cannot be negative impacts from regulation. If I wanted to be an a*hole I would have started with the war on drugs. Not a weird little street level mirror of it that's part of my lived experience.
>https://colinmendelsohn.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Th...
>Australia’s ‘de facto’ prohibition of vapes has helped create a thriving and highly profitable black market controlled by the same criminal networks that import illicit tobacco. These criminal gangs are engaged in an escalating turf war to gain market share, with firebombing of tobacco shops and public executions.
Will just point out that firebombing and public executions are also banned. I am not trying to get them unbanned. But they occur anyway.
>The main problem with laissez-faire fundamentalists is their incoherence driven by despair.
What a weird thing to say, that unfounded smothering arrogance again.
The second one is the better one.
There are some laws prohibiting the sale of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread. In some motorsports you want tires with no tread (slicks). Moreover, they're being used in a different context (a vehicle on a track rather than public roads). But the law prohibits the sale because it takes no account of the context.
> There are some laws prohibiting the sale of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread.
I think you're confused. I'll explain why.
Some contries enforce regulations on what tyres are deemed road-legal, due to requirements on safety and minimum grip. It's also why it's illegal to drive around with bald tyres.
However, said countries also allow the sale of tyres for track and competitive use, as long as they are clearly sold as not road-legal and for competitive use only.
So, no. You can buy track tyres. You just can't expect to drive with them when you're dropping off your kids at school and not get a fine.
Also, it should be noted that some motorsport competition ban or restrict the use of slick tyres.
Now I'll explain why I think you're confused.
Some jurisdictions ban the sale whatsoever of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread. It's not that you can't put them on a car to drive on public roads, it's that no one can sell them to you. They prohibited the sale rather than the use, thereby interfering with the people wanting to make the purchase for a different purpose.
> Some jurisdictions ban the sale whatsoever of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread.
No, not really. This appears to be the source of your confusion. In Europe+US, thread restrictions are enforced on standard road tyres marketed for use in public roads. You can buy slicks if they are marked for track use, but it's illegal to drive around with them.
But feel free to cite exactly what jurisdiction and regulation prevents you from buying tyres. I'm sure you'll eventually stumble upon the source of your confusion once you start to look up your sources.
Let's try this one:
https://law.justia.com/codes/new-jersey/title-56/section-56-...
Do you see anything in it restricting the ban to motor vehicles used on public roads?
That depends whether regulators interpret “intended for use on motor vehicles” as “for road use”. The bill’s sponsors seem to think so:
USTMA research shows that more than 30 million used tires are available for sale nationally each year. The legislation does not ban all used tire sales. It targets used tires that have specific, well-established, unsafe conditions. “This is a common-sense, pro-safety, pro-consumer bill,” said Anne Forristall Luke, USTMA president and CEO. “Preventing these unsafe used tires from operating on New Jersey roads will reduce the risk of crashes and save lives. It’s that simple.” [1]
Seems clear to me this is intended to affect road use, although the bill could use an amendment to that effect. I could not find jurisprudence implying resale of racing slicks is illegal under this law.
[1] https://www.ustires.org/newsroom/new-jersey-assembly-advance...
> That depends whether regulators interpret “intended for use on motor vehicles” as “for road use”. The bill’s sponsors seem to think so:
That was their intention, but the effect of a law is not always the same thing -- that's the point. If you go to the local tire place and want to pay them to fit your track car with used tires that have minimal tread on them, is the clerk going to read the legislative history and take the risk that the judge takes that interpretation despite the law saying something else, or are they going to fob you off because corporate says they're not allowed to sell tires like that?
In my experience companies tend to err on the side of making money, so they'd probably just fit them and take the risk of a 500 dollar fine.
You're not thinking like a corporation. What happens if you crash your car after they broke the law to sell you the tires? Corporations will throw away epic amounts of money in the interests of not getting sued.
> A person shall not sell at retail, or offer for sale at retail, to the general public any tire intended for use on a motor vehicle if the tire:
The law you cite literally applies only to general public sales, i.e. where the the intention is to use on public roads. I cannot see where this regulation would apply to solely used tires in the first place and if we slip down the slope you have put in this thread, this regulation would forbid sales of track-only tires altogether.
Which is just not the case. I am 99% certain one can sell tires, new or used, to any registered motorsport organization, for track-only use. That's the case in first world countries anyway.
> The law you cite literally applies only to general public sales, i.e. where the the intention is to use on public roads.
If you sell key chains to the general public, that implies the key chains are intended only to be used on public roads? I don't think that's right.
> I cannot see where this regulation would apply to solely used tires in the first place and if we slip down the slope you have put in this thread, this regulation would forbid sales of track-only tires altogether.
It forbids the sale if it "has a tread depth of less than 1/16 inch measurable in any groove" which ostensibly wouldn't apply to new tires with more tread than that nor new slicks that come from the factory with no grooves to measure.
But then you're buying a new tire, when what they want is the used one with negligible tread left and therefore a much more attractive price.
A better example might be mattresses. There are states (Kansas) where it is illegal to sell a used mattress, under any circumstances. Even if, for your specific circumstances, the "it's unsanitary" reasoning isn't valid. You, as an individual, cannot sell your "I slept in it a few times and realized I don't like it" mattress to your friend.
Do you have a link to an actual Kansas statute which makes it illegal to sell a used mattress? I searched for it without success. Various sites claim that Kansas makes this illegal without citing a statute (often in the context of hokey stories about people finding silly loopholes in this purported law), but I'm suspicious that it's an urban legend.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I'm not sure why you think I can't read Chinese, but Xi has been in power for 12 years and as far as I am aware cannot be removed by anyone other than the CCP. Please correct me if I'm wrong. If the people whom he governs can remove him by some kind of democratic process, then perhaps your points are valid. My understanding is that they cannot.
> Socialist democracy must, therefore, be seen as a historic, multi-generational and dialectical process by which conditions that enable increasing parts of society to play an active role in governance are created, nurtured, and defended. China has advanced on this path further than most societies in modern history. From early experiments in village-level organization to building a nationwide process for 1.4 billion people from 56 ethnic groups across a country spanning over nine million square kilometers, this process has come to be contained in a concept called “whole-process people’s democracy” — a practice of democratic governance built on over a century of organizational experience.
This (and the rest of this article) is nonsense propaganda if the above is correct.
There are 100 million members of the party, and these people vote directly for their local representatives, who then go onto vote for the village, town, city, province, etc representatives, all the way up to the Standing Committee which includes Xi. There are 3000 members of the National People's Congress that directly selects the Standing Committee. In rural areas or special administrative provinces, often anyone can vote, including union members who aren't officially party members. Comparatively, in the 2024 US election, 150 million people voted. So there's roughly the same amount of votes happening.
Maybe you don't agree that not being able to pick the head of state is not a valid definition of democracy. In that case I'd argue that having a twice-indicted convicted felon is not valid democracy either. In any case, feel free to keep your version.
Yes, democracy includes the right for the people to elect a convicted felon. We do not agree on a definition of the democracy. Your usage continues to undermine your original valid point.
Existence of elections does not mean a democratic process. Soviet Union had elections as well.
Existence of elections does not mean a democratic process. United States of America has elections as well.
I.e. existence of elections is necessary, but not sufficient.
These statements about numbers are meaningless to make the case that democracy exists in the PRC. There's 1 billion people there, comparison of vote counts to smaller countries doesn't make sense.
Party membership comes with 關係. It's not really about having the right to vote. Some people just join during school.
The PRC gets many things right but we should be honest about its flaws. The truth is the CPC, and especially now Xi (you HAVE seen the updated textbooks about father/brother xi, right?), are single points of failure and unchallengeable authority. What happened to the left communists in the PRC? What happened to the smaller unions that didn't toe the party line, and not in the direction of capitalism but deeper into leftism? Where are the Chinese anarchists? Hell, where are the Chinese communists?
The only path forward to a communist PRC is a split into province level states or better yet smaller entities. It's only a matter of time before Xi goes senile or has a big birthday he wants to celebrate by escalating imperialism into military intervention and tanks the entire PRC economy in doing so, or simply dies and kicks off a shitstorm power struggle that cripples the CPC and the country along with it.
Given all the videos I've seen on YouTube of bridge and building collapses in China, I think you're glossing over all their shortcomings. Maybe they do have a tight regulatory loop - I don't know - but their aggressive timelines and poor materials seem to have bitten them in the butt a number of times.
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?
Please clarify what racist thing was said.
Unless, wait, is criticism of the CPC racist? Well, that would only be true if the PRC was an ethnostate, after all, that's what makes criticism of Israel anti-Semitic, right? So, is the PRC an ethnostate?
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?
> We're talking about investments that range well in the tens of million of dollars. It's an insignificant drop in the bucket. The design team's salaries alone eclipse that value. On top of that, a single engine alone sells for thousands. Is this hypothetical regulatory cost that high if it can be covered by selling a few dozen units?
I think you missed the context here. Revey, the company being asked to do these certifications, doesn't make diesel engines for semi-trucks. The company makes an electric "powered converter dolly" which puts a mini trailer between the semi truck and trailer that uses batteries and electric motors to reduce the amount of diesel burnt per mile.
It's clever solution, there are externalities to consider (increased truck weight and length, changes to turning behavior, etc) but expensive certification per motor to prove that giving a truck an extra electric push doesn't increase the emissions doesn't strike me as making sense.
We need more information. How does this work for internal combustion truck engines?
Is the regulation well intentioned poorly designed? Is it anti-competitive gatekeeping drafted by lobbyists? Is the author misrepresenting something? All of the above? Hard to say.
I imagine that the variation is in the internal combustion engines the system is being paired with. In that scenario, it can be that the regulator is treating the combined units as a new drivetrain and requiring certification of each combination as if it were a new engine.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of what larger operators have in their fleets. It could be that a few certifications go a long ways. They are going to be at least somewhat inclined to avoid variation.
You cannot separate the idea of regulation from their harm because they are inherent to the concept. A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical effects. Rent control is a fantastic if trivial example of such.
We know central planning doesn't work, yet we are inclined to do it anyway under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
> A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical effects.
This isn't quite right. There are some regulations that have such obviously enormous benefits that even if our estimates are imperfect, they'd have to be off by a thousand miles to not be the right thing. Examples like banning leaded gasoline or asbestos, or having antitrust laws that kick in if a market gets too consolidated for any reason.
The problem is then people start making a bunch of other rules that on paper would improve things by a couple of percent, but in practice because they're not accounting for overhead or their numbers aren't perfect they're actually making things slightly worse, and then multiply that by thousands of such individual rules and you've got a huge mess.
I agree with this. When Michael Huemer talks about political knowledge he lists several requirements:
1. Simple. For example, “Demand curves slope downward.” The more complicated a theory is, the more ways there are for it to go wrong.
2. Accepted by experts. For example, there is a broad consensus in economics that protectionism is undesirable. If a theory is well-justified, then the great majority of reasonable and intelligent people will usually come to accept the theory, once they understand the arguments for it.
3. Non-ideological. Theories that have an ideological flavor and that call forth strong emotions tend to be pseudo-knowledge–for example, the theory that behavioral differences between men and women are entirely due to socialization. Reality is unlikely to conform to ideology.
4. Weak. For instance, we do not know that free markets are always perfectly efficient. We can say only that free markets are usually approximately efficient.
5. Specific and concrete. We can be much more confident in a concrete claim such as “Ted Bundy’s murders were wrong” than in an abstract theory such as “It is always wrong to initiate violence against another person.”
6. Supported by appropriate evidence. For example, the claim “violent entertainment increases violent crime” cannot be known without empirical evidence. In this case, a study based on a large, random sample would be appropriate, rather than, say, a few anecdotes.
7. Undefeated by counter-evidence. If there is a large quantity of evidence against P, or if one does not know whether there is such counter-evidence, then one does not know that P. For example, if one has read several studies supporting gun control while having read none of the literature on the other side, then one cannot claim to know whether gun control is desirable.
The claim "Leaded gasoline should be banned" reasonably fits most of these requirements, thus it's probably a relatively safe intervention with upside.
>Rent control is a fantastic if trivial example of such.
No it isn't. Rent control is made to provide short term relief. Regulations tend to be long term requriements. Of course making a short term temporary solution long term does not work.
>we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes
For policy, I think it is important to be risk averse. Regulations are extremely risk averse. Slowing down reckless actions so that people don't die should be considered a good thing. Of course, that can be anathema to businesses who rush to be first to market.
I don't see regulations being a problem here, but the cost of the regulations. Instead of focusing on de-regulations we look into what that 100k certification is going to? Hopefully not yet another for-profit middleman with incentives to bog the process down.
> Rent control is made to provide short term relief.
Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the market value diverge further with each lease renewal. There are people in NY who have been in their apartments 50 years and pay 10% of the market rate.
> Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the
You're assuming a form of rent control where new tenants pay market rate. That's not the only form, e.g., Berkeley's rent control used to continue "forever", until California forbade that (Costa Hawkins act in 1995).
I'm talking about the policy, not the tenants. Enacting 50 years of rent control is no different from Japan's economy the last 30 years.
Of course after multiple generations you scare off housing investment. But not after 5. And that should be the goal of rent control. Short term relief while doing the long term plan of building more housing.
Politicians not doing it this way is like blaming your duct tape for falling apart after a few weeks of adhesive duty.That doesn't mean duct tape is bad. It means no one bothered to fix the underlying issue.
> And that should be the goal of rent control. Short term relief while doing the long term plan of building more housing.
Even when there's a plan in place, it's unpopular to remove handouts like that. Any politician up for re-election isn't going to let that expire.
And that person can never ever move.
They're right. Rent control is useful as a short term measure to keep rents from spiking, but it does long term damage to supplies and you need completely different methods to fix the supplies.
The "we" that knows central planning doesn't work and the "we" inclined toward central planning are the same?
If so, I've not met this group of people, but I'd like to share your first point with them because I tend to agree.
If central planning didn't work, why does every corporation under the sun use it internally? Why don't they just let everyone do what they want, and then sue eachother when it doesn't result in great outcomes?
Central planning does work at small scales. Everyone "centrally plans" their own life. Can you imagine doing it any other way?
The issue is that as the context expands, we lose the ability to make accurate predictions. To some extent we can't even predict our own lives although we try our best. When you expand that to the size of a corporation it's mostly just guessing. Corporations fail all of the time. When we expand that to a society, we are just guessing for everything but the most simple of predictions.
What is the average age of a corporation?
I say that as someone who actually thinks a little central planning is good.
Clarify that, please? Maybe you mean "most corporations are short-lived due to excess central planning", or then again "most corporations are full of crusty old dudes who love the tradition of central planning", or ..?
I may believe both of those things, but no that's not actually what I meant. I simply meant look at the stats for how long corporations actually live. Are we sure that's how we want to structure our government?
Some corps live 1 year and others have been around for 150+ and they all use central planning. This seems unrelated.
Without comparing the management styles of different corporations it's difficult to say if it's related or not. For example, it's possible that long-lived corporations are run in a more laissez-faire style compared to ones that fail.
> In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes.
This doesn’t follow from your premise.
> We know central planning doesn't work
Europe conquered the world using central planning. Every society on earth with any measure of security, order, and cleanliness to speak of is dominated by a central bureaucracy. It works.
> under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
Doing nothing is precisely why anarcho-capitalists failed to change anything. Everyone smart associated with that movement studied power dynamics and moved onto other projects.
You mean the British Empire, that committed all sorts of atrocities? Thats what you call "works"?
> Europe conquered the world using central planning.
Ah yes, I remember when the country of Europe conquered the world.
And you cannot separate the idea of lack of regulation from the harm inherent to the concept.
This kind of lazy ideological posturing is thought-terminating and incredibly tiring.
Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction materials, safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes. It would be truly baffling if of all conceivable points on the axis it was a global optimum.
I sympathise with your fatigue, I get tired of repeated arguments too, but I suppose the tiredness itself isn't a sign of being right. I wonder whether oh no not this again contains useful information. Perhaps not. Misconceptions are popular, but good ideas are also popular.
The earliest regulations were about the purity of bread and beer, and I tend to think of them as a good thing. But concepts like gypsum doesn't go in bread are simple enough for a king to understand, so perhaps those early regulations were more suitable for central administration. This was before there were brand names or consumer organizations. I suppose a non-central form of regulation would have to be along those lines, adversarial but symbiotic with the specific industry. Restaurant rating stars. IDK. Some stuff isn't consumer-facing though.
When unmonitored, people aren't motivated to behave, and they make a mess. When monitored, the people comply, but the monitors aren't motivated to be wise or understanding, only to enforce. Sometimes you get situations where an entire culture of people are spontaneously careful and good, or where they are regulated by regulators who are wise and perceptive and flexible. This state of affairs comes about, so far as I can tell, at random, or by voodoo.
I think this specific thing is more an effect of human brains trying to stereotype complicated things.
"all regulations are bad" is a much simpler premise than "rule #3.70.66.345 should be adjusted to consider multiple drive trains with the same engine to pass the same tests".
Like, if you found a specific regulation that was badly designed and advocated for it to change, no one would argue against it, but you wouldn't get any internet engagement either.
"All blanket statements are wrong" (is a blanket statement).
There's wide agreement that reality is complicated and that simple elegant theories are valuable.
Here's a simple and elegant theory - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure. If you'd like it to be even simpler, "Measure twice, cut once."
Trying to squeeze blood out of a rock from people who cut corners and hurt others after-the-fact is a fuckin' nightmare and leads to globally bad outcomes.
Yes, contradictory ones abound. Look before you leap, seize the day.
> Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction materials, safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes.
You're gonna complain about "lazy ideological posturing" and then in the same breath construct a tired, boring straw man? Was this on purpose to prove a point or something?
Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. Regulating lead in petrol is simple, uncontroversial, and very reasonably likely to do more good than harm. It's an example of an intervention on society that is relatively safe and easy to predict the outcome. And it's also an outlier, because most political action is neither uncontroversial, simple, or likely to do more good than harm.
Regulating lead in petrol was very much not uncontroversial when it was regulated. Same with asbestos - the industries involved fought really hard against it.
Central planning is why our cities are no longer choked by smog. It is extremely difficult to predict outcomes in complex human system, but that cuts both ways: it’s hard to know if some intervention is good or bad, and it’s hard to know if leaving things alone is good or bad.
If you leave things alone, you get the light bulb and the airplane, but also leaded gasoline and radioactive tonics. The notion that it’s always better to do nothing rather than something is as fallacious as the opposite.
> We know central planning doesn't work
Most corporations and dictatorships seem to be centrally planned. Communism didn't work out for the Soviets, but they also didn't have smartphones and ChatGPT.
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.
> 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?
>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?
Of course we should verify such claims.
Just as we should also verify claims that every regulation that has ever been written into law is by definition Good (tm) and can never be questioned.
It's possible for the friend of the company owner to astroturf an online form to get a good regulation eliminated, just because it didn't benefit him.
It's also possible for the such wealthy individuals to astrotruf in favour of bad regulations, just because it would benefit him.
The null hypothesis is that interventions are just as if not more likely to cause harm than do good.
Aren't regulations a form of intervention?
Yeah thats my point.
No that doesn't seem reasonable at all if it's been proven to work _really well_ in several configurations and there's no particular reason to expect that the results would be drastically different in other very similar configurations.
Who proved it works really well in several configurations?
And how do you codify the threshold for what "very similar" configurations don't need to be tested and those that do?
That's what regulatory exemption procedures exist for, and it would be the logical next step if you had convincing hard data.
Every single regulatory process has them, so the fact that this very ranty article omits any mention of an attempt to use them is highly suspect.
I've worked with plenty of systems where for all sorts of reasons exemptions are granted for the express purpose of promoting innovation or recognizing a special circumstance.
Verifying is great!
How many types of truck engine do you reasonably need to test with? The number should fit on one hand. And really you should only need to do the full test with one model and limited verifications with others. That'll get it down from $27M to $200k, which would be a far more reasonable requirement.
Some kind of testing should be required but 27mil seems egregious
Yeah why does the certification process cost so much is one question I have. Would this be a conversation if the cost of the test were more reasonable?
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.
Its not usually one person, but many well meaning committees.
It's not like anyone ever added a device to an engine to deliberately defeat these tests.
lol
state and federal bureaucrats do not lose jobs
Seems somewhat reasonable. I don’t know why the company is supporting all 270 engine families.
This company wants to put a bunch of stuff on the road going 70mph that could crash into you and kill you and is complaining about a measly $27 million of regulatory cost.
They are making up a bunch of scary numbers about the cost of the status quo and the tone of the article is basically holding us all hostage. Speed out special snowflake startup company through the regulatory process (written in blood) or else you’ll lose bajillions of dollars in suffering and pain from the “status quo.”
$27 million is basically a rounding error for automotive companies. Maybe do better at raising funds next time, bro.
Why wouldn't they try to support a large number of engines, the testing was about emissions not safety, and they're not a huge automotive company.
Emissions = safety.
I assume that out of 270 entire families that some are more popular than others? Why not pick the 20-30 most popular ones?
The tone of this article is that OP’s company has a savior complex. If they aren’t given expedient special treatment regulatory approval, the status quo is causing a bunch of fake make up dollar values of damage. It’s kind of a gross tone.
>As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks.
Where in this sentence is asbestos mentioned? As for the families, if they know their product works in 270 engine families why would they chose to only sell to 20-30?
Because they can't afford the required testing for all of them?
The testing that is clearly theater and a waste of money for all involved?
I don't know enough about it to know whether it's a waste or not. It's certainly not surprising that the company that has to pay for it thinks it's a waste.
It's not wasting the money of the testing people who's job it is to get paid to do work.
Like a civil engineer preparing an existing conditions plan of a flat field...
Presumably they have so many families to serve their customers well. If they were to consolidate their engine families in such a way to avoid paying as much money to regulatory processes, that seems like a bit of a perverse incentive and outcome.
In my view though the goal of the regulation isn't bad, but the cost of the process is prohibitive. Why is it so expensive to measure engine emissions?
If you want to argue that adding an electric engine to existing trucks is going to make them go out of control and kill people in some completely common sense defying manner, then the burden of proof is on you and not on the company to prove a negative.
I don't think this is even what they're testing, but come on, it takes very little going wrong for a multiton truck going 80+ to kill someone.
Spoken like someone who has no idea how hard it is to actually get anything done in real life vs your armchair.
> one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks and that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item.
Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough". And then "if we come to an understanding, we might be able to look the other way".
Wonder what state that is? Anyone want to guess?
> Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough".
This is often fully formalized, i.e. you're not bribing a specific government official, instead you're paying a huge certification fee hundreds of times because it's a source of revenue generation for the government and whoever passed the bill gave zero fucks that it's a heavily regressive tax on new and small businesses.
Mississippi? I bet it's a flyover state with a tiny sliver of road that sees massive trucking volume.
It's gonna be California (but I'm guessing, not sure). Other states just defer to federal regulation.
That they don't put the state on blast sort of points to the big cost not being entirely real (where they either think they can induce regulatory change or the number of tests that is needed to sell the systems is quite a lot less than the number of tests that would be needed to allow 100% of the market to use their system).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Sounds like the show extra3 might be interested in your story :)
Your "over-regulation" is my "safety first".
Yep. My reaction to this line:
> the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is the deathbed of thousands of hardtech companies that could be drastically improving our lives. We must unleash them.
was "the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is also the deathbed of tens of thousands of hardtech companies who have no concern about destroying our communities in the interests of making a dollar", and that's what the regulations are there for.
would be nice to extend the deathbed to include some of the soft-tech companies too
> some of the soft-tech companies
Some? Let's be more generous than that..
(Not that it matters anymore in the grand scheme of things, seeing the size of the tsunami wave of destruction building up in the current AI bubble..)
What an intellectually bankrupt way to approach a question that has both downsides and upsides, and where those downsides and upsides vary depending on the specific regulation in question.
As the article points out, there is a safety cost from over-regulation. The impact on air quality from not allowing the new technology quickly enough is very real.
> every regulation is written in blood
It doesn't mean everything is exactly right but it is a good reminder of what keeps happening when there are no rules there.
That's for safety regulations, and is somewhat true. That's not really what's being discussed here.
There are many regulations that are drafted, and paid for, by monopolies. There's also just outright stupidity put into place, because lawmakers get paid to make laws, so they make laws that sound good, without considering the consequences.
Sure and if this article actually brought up specific regulations and made a case against them... it probably wouldn't have made the front page and be full of flamewars.
Regulatory capture and corruption are certainly horrible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
There is no meaningful improvement to be made in payroll systems. They just have to get it right, and they almost always do. And they aren't expensive. When I ran a business the payroll system wasn't even expensive enough to even be on the radar for ways to cut costs.
If the accessibility and hygiene laws can be explained in plain language, why not just write them in plain language?
If labor laws can be automated by software why not just make them simpler?
If you can make a map to explain the permitting process why not just simplify the process?
If you made the regulations less complex and excessive you wouldn’t need to add another layer of bureaucracy to explain them.
It's a stopgap measure until such time that an entire country's bureaucracy can be rewritten to meet the needs of its populace, rather than its legislators and elites.
Aside from laws being written the way they are (because the legal system is highly verbose and incredibly specific, which necessitates said language), I'm generally in agreement with you! Maps should be publicly available and kept up-to-date so citizens can quickly glance at them to identify potential business locations that have lower permitting requirements, and said permitting processes should be handled by the government rather than forcing new business owners to shell out for expensive attorneys and compliance officers right off the bat.
It's about balancing the needs of small business for flexibility and adaptability with limited resources, with the regulations needed to keep larger business interests from exploiting and monopolizing markets to the point of harming third-parties (consumers, small businesses, governments, the environment, etc). Striking that balance is hard, and maintaining it over time harder still, but it can be done without resorting to either extreme.
How do any of the examples you gave keep larger business interests from exploiting and monopolizing markets?
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.
> 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.
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.
Diesel cars became popular in Europe because the tax regime changed to favour them, their economy was incidental.
> There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written in blood.
Sure, but it's a balancing act, right?
My favorite example is that hairdryers sold in the US are required to have ground fault interrupters in the plug. This is touted as an important safety feature and it appears to prevent something like 2-4 deaths a year. Or at least, it used to when it first rolled out, because now you have GFCI outlets in the bathroom in any new or remodeled homes, so maybe it's redundant.
The hairdryers sold in the EU don't have that.
So yeah, it's a regulation written in blood, but it's a pretty good example of a gray area. Once you get into the business of preventing single-digit deaths, things get really weird. You probably should also ban pointy scissors (people trip), frankfurters (choking risk), only allow the sale of pre-peeled bananas, etc.
Most European electrical codes don't allow electrical outlets in the bathroom at all.
That's just not true. Electric toothbrushes, shavers, it's also not uncommon to have a washing machine in the bathroom.
Maybe the UK is doing something weird here, but bathroom outlets are very much common in the EU.
British standards are all BS. The electrical wiring one is BS7671. It divides the bathroom into zones: https://flameport.com/wiring_regulations/BS7671_selected_sub...
Zone 0 is inside the bathtub. Damn, so I can't put an outlet there? Zone 1 is over it, and zone 2 is 2 feet around it, and allows 12-volt outlets for small gadgets. Beyond that you can have ordinary outlets with the right circuit breakers (aka RCDs, GFCIs) integrated into them.
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.
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.
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
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.
Even the anti-government types don't want big companies pouring cyanide in the river they fish in.
I think you're continuing to mischaracterize the other position in order to feel like there's some daylight between you and the "anarcho-capitalists". If you stop erecting strawmen, you might find you agree on more than you think.
Sure people want regulation until it affects their business. Then suddenly there's studies to talk about how trace amounts of cyanide won't affect the ecosystem anyway.
> If you stop erecting strawmen, you might find you agree on more than you think.
Try to give an argument and we can talk about it. All I've gotten so far is "no they aren't". Not very convincing.
Meanwhile, the actions have shown companies will do all they can to tear down regulations but provide nothing in return. It's just greed and hypocrisy.
I think part of the story here is that as we regulate things at home we also out source activity that wouldn't fly here to those African regions?
That may keep it out of sight but if it's still happening it might have been better to do it in a managed way at home.
Its exactly this. And the majority of persons in powerful regulatory roles completely don’t get or comprehend this effect.
When regulatory efforts depart from reality,and fail to find the correct middle ground, this happens:
The reality still exists, and will always find its expression in one of the following:
- people circumvent rules and go criminal
- undesired behaviours move elsewhere where the regulation doesn’t exist
- sections of an economy die
- issues remain unaddressed with the over regulated issues becoming too taboo to even discuss in a sane way.
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.
Oh of course, just identify your entire supply chain in both directions and make sure they're compliant. What an obviously easy thing to do.
If the chain is all onshore then it must all be compliant ... right?
The world is so simple when you can just assert that your intervention will have positive effects eh.
Congratulations! Now just wait until next election when you get the boot in a landslide because of how much you raised prices for consumers.
Meanwhile the established players with connections can break all the laws they want, and pay zero taxes to boot.
I think the problem isn't regulation (which the current admin is aggressively destroying, e.g. with the EPA) so much as corruption - which manifests partly as critical government functions being deliberately starved of resources. Regulatory bodies should get more funding to study and approve new technologies, and there should be more subsidies available for smaller innovators to offset the R&D investments and application waiting periods. That wouldn't be in the interest of big polluters and their captive politicians though.
No they can't. Dieselgate cost VW over $33 billion.
That was 10 years ago, when we still had a mostly functioning government. The EPA has since had its teeth removed by the Trump administration.
Sounds like regulations work, then. We just need to get a functioning government back to enforce it.
It takes a brave businessman to speak out about how government regulations are killing their business. Thank you for your service.