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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

Gotta love when regulations are why we can't have nice things.

If by "nice things" you mean salmonella and grease fires, then sure.

Not to defend Boulder, specifically, but when thinking about regulations it's really easy to tally up "all" of the costs and benefits without crediting them for the nonexistent costs of the bad things that didn't happen.

It’s just as easy easy to justify regulation by adding up all the imaginary costs that will be avoided.

Kitchen Fires and food poisoning are not imaginary.

How exactly does preparing food in the truck lead to food poisoning? Why doesn't your backyard grill need a fire suppression system?

1) If cooked food comes in contact with a surface that raw meat was prepped on, the cooked food can become tainted.

2) Most cities fire code say that your backyard grill is required to be a certain distance from the building structure (my local ordinance says 15ft), it just so happens that most people ignore the local ordinances. Those codes are b/c of grill fires.

Large portions of the world don't have these regulations and seems to be doing just fine. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore to name a few are full of food stands preparing food at the stand.

Funny you should mention Singapore, as the government moved all of the street hawkers to "hawker complexes" and there is a lot of regulation around food hygiene[1].

[1]: http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1637_201...

So, it's still easier to sell street food there than in Michigan?

So instead of having each food truck pay for a monthly health inspection fee and having random health inspections every X time ( so that the cost of the health inspections is completely paid for by the food trucks), we simply outlaw them.

I'm not against regulation, I'm against broad, overbearing, and dumb regulation.

Asking for fire suppression systems in what is essentially a commercial kitchen on wheels is not unreasonable. Grease fires are really bad.

This reads like a complaint about vaccines because nobody has seen Polio in like a lifetime...

Just as a reminder: Up until the early 20th century, any large city that wasn't home to a Molasses-based catastrophe had at some point burned more or less completely down, usually killing thousands: Chicago, SF, London are well known.

Not sure if you were alluding to this with your comment but people DO complain about vaccines because they haven't seen the widespread ill effects of their not existing

It's highly probable that the commenter to which you have responded chose their wording precisely because of how correct your point is.

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