Hacker News Reader

Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting commentary on Andreesen’s piece, but it doesn’t really change or contradict anything.

At the end of the day, the US is a litigious society covered in Byzantine regulation that most people aren’t even aware of. This covers the most basic things: would you like to build a townhouse for your family with just one parking space? Illegal in the vast majority of the United States, where 2+ parking spaces per home are required by law. Want to build an apartment building in San Francisco to capitalize on the incredible demand for housing? You’ll spend at least 6 years getting a building permit, and what you’re actually allowed to build will be mostly the result of ugly haggling with special interest groups along the way. These are just a few examples I happen to be familiar with.

We’ve chosen for things to be like this by the way we allow our government at every level to be captured by lobbyists, special interests, and partisanship. Realistically, to change things, we need reform that fixes the way the government itself operates, and while there are many ideas that sound good, everything has unexpected side effects. That is a very, very hard problem, to solve.

View on HN

The music was new, black polished chrome / And came over the summer like liquid night

The DJ's took pills to stay awake / And play for seven days

Andreesen's 'Software Eats The World,' Mosaic & associated perspectives emerged from the fresh green fields of internet-enabled personal computing in the 90s and 2000s. Everything was young and novel. The software itself. The business models. The cultural impact. The companies and personas. Everything was a disruption.

There was a time when the record industry was fresh & jukeboxes were a disruptive new "channel." With it came new business models, genres of music. Music became imbued with new cultural & artistic significance.

There was a time when gentleman scientists were inventing the institution of science at home. A time before "publish-or-perish," tenure-tracks and grant applications.

Everything was young once. Mechanised farming. Production line manufacturing. The Americas. Nothing stays young, however.

Pondering why & how institutions go from new to old is something we've been doing forever. Ibn Khaldun, father of social science, had his barbarians-vs-civilisations theories in the 1300s.

These theories tend to get ideological. Marxism was a (Khaldun-ish) theory that "late-stage capitalism" was upon us(them). Ayn Rand thought everything had gotten infested with parasitic "looters." Both fantasised about revolutionary moments, where the old world dies and is reborn new & fresh. Today, we like terms like regulatory capture/burden, incumbent effects, path dependencies, low hanging fruit depletion or somesuch. All characterisations of "corruption" infesting mature institutions.

There are lots of examples. NASA's achievements in early decades vs the 90s. How a 3 person startup with 1 month of code can add featureX to their product orders of magnitude more easily than an established company with a mature code base. Twitter once served their product to the whole world with 50 people. It was a similar twitter, but doing it with just 1,000 people today would be a massive challenge.

Everything starts young. Everything gets old.

> It was a similar twitter, but doing it with just 1,000 people today would be a massive challenge.

Is that true though? We know that instagram had less than 100 people running it before Facebook bought it for $19B.

There's a tendency for successful companies to add headcounts and grow - and it's very hard to convince yourself not to - maybe just maybe they would be able to serve the whole world with about 50 people, on a smaller revenue but huge revenue/headcount.

part of the way investors create valuation for companies is based on employees. Thats why its not a wild west of software contractors everywhere.

That's like counting lines of code to create the valuation for software.

Instagram and WhatsApp are anomalies. To try and find general tendencies, we should try and cite the typical story, not a three sigma exception case.

Secondly, headcount is a darling of many HR systems. You might cite exceptions with Google or Stripe but your typical corporate environment will not put much effort into fairly evaluating career advancement (e.g., measuring impacts, outcomes, risk) for anyone.

If you are sales or profit focused, lucky you. But outside of that, most HR systems will use simple metrics like "how many people report to you" or "how much budget do you control" to evaluate your promotions and pay. Some will even have literal formulas (e.g., you need 6 reports to go to Director; you need 6 Director reports to go to Executive Director; etc.)

It is done because it is easy and convenient for HR. Unfortunately, obviously, people then try to game the system and over-hire.

You might have to produce an "impacts report" at EOY but that is often HR-theater. Get down to "why" and you will find it came down to how many direct reports you had. Or how much budget you burned.

If your incentive system rewards hiring over results, expect headcount to grow I urge those in governance positions to ensure their organizations have a real impacts assessment system to evaluate employee progress. There is no better way to kill motivation among workers than tell them that impact has no effect.

Exactly, the typical story is one where politics invariably results in headcounts and not maintaining a small and clear cut vision.

But the question is, can they do it without the bloat? My understanding is yes - and I can probably even tell you how.

>> But the question is, can they do it without the bloat? My understanding is yes - and I can probably even tell you how.

I dont mean to be snarky, but isn't the "how" sort of obvious (though hard to achieve)? You'd have to align reward with value generated per unit of risk and nothing else. The more value you generate (on a risk adjusted basis), the greater your reward and promotion. When companies grow larger, it becomes difficult for them to measure value generated, or too tedious, or politics overpowers governance.

I'd be curious to hear your proposal on a fix.

I'm actually not talking about how to change the politics, but rather the technical aspect of so.

I have no idea how to change the politics of hiring more, I can only hope if I was to ever start a company that I can try to make my own firm so.

> Instagram and WhatsApp are anomalies. To try and find general tendencies, we should try and cite the typical story, not a three sigma exception case.

The Instagram and WhatsApp example keeps coming up like clockwork in various contexts. A recent discussion that I recall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22471355

> If your incentive system rewards hiring over results, expect headcount to grow...

Goodhart's Law in action? "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320640

In what company does HR have that kind of power to have any voice in who becomes director or executive director?

In practically every big company. It isn't as much power or voice as much as litmus tests that serve to veto good stewardship.

This doesnt mean big company Directors and Executive Directors are not deserving of their promotions, it just means that they usually have an added hoop to jump thru -- increasing headcount.

I've been in senior ranks of big companies, and spoke to plenty of counterparts at other companies, and it is almost always the story.

Any company that allows HR to veto any promotions is royally screwed.

Instagram was bought for $2B.

You're thinking of WhatsApp.

$1B, but it landed at about $750M because of the FB shares that took a tumble just after.

Yeah but how much did those shares reach before hitting maturity?

Dealing with people you discover that all the weird rules are there because somebody or a situation made them necessary.

For every well meaning well behaving individual there is another that will park his car in your freaking back yard if you don't fence your property.

Would you raise a building while taking into account the surrounding people and context? Well, perhaps. But many others will absolutely destroy the location in all concerns and just maximise square footage.

This problem has no solution! Whatever set of rules you agree upon, somebody will find a creative way to mess with them and a new rule or clarification will need to be added. Then people will complain why so many rules.

> somebody will find a creative way to mess with them and a new rule or clarification will need to be added.

Rules can be rewritten in a cohesive way or rules can be written as just an endless series of if statements which may contradict with other if statements.

It would be useful for laws to have an automated test suite so that known good uses cases wouldn't be broken down the road.

I agree that laws could / should approach software.

But we've been having bugs and exploits in software since the beginning. And law has to cover an even wider field of situations.

No way. Software works for predictable inputs producing well-defined desired outputs. Reality is nothing like this.

Actually good rule systems are ambiguous or weak enough that when someone tries to abuse edge cases, people can turn round and say "no" and the rules don't get in the way.

(mostly) Everyone likes this flexibility.

The question is some people find the cost too much.

Maybe it is better to have a law that is explicitly dumb, in exchange for fast, cheap and predictable (kinda like computers, if you think about it)

Humans are not machines, language is not code, and the real world is not binary.

An automated test suite for laws is NP-hard.

> Dealing with people you discover that all the weird rules are there because somebody or a situation made them necessary.

Some are.

But many rules are there because someone with power benefits from them.

Perhaps the parent is too critical of the rule makers, but you are far too forgiving.

Laws in the US happen like this: someone has trouble parking one day and decides that the solution is to make more parking a legal requirement, giving little or no thought to the second or third order effects of those laws.

I'm not a big fan of philosopher Michael Huemer, but he makes an interesting metaphor regarding laws. He compares society with the human body and laws with medicine. For a long time medicine wasn't based on empirical evidence, but on logic and "common sense." Most medical advice from before the scientific method was more harmful than helpful. The human body is such a complex and delicate system that almost all interventions are more harmful than helpful. Even in the presence of a medical issue, unless there is evidence that a given medical intervention is more helpful than harmful, no medical intervention is probably better than an unproven one.

Just because a societal ill exists, doesn't mean that the first legal remedy that pops into someone's head is a good idea. Even if that idea solves the problem (a big if), will its second and third order effects cause more damage than the original problem?

American political discourse is dominated by a desire to "take action." But unless lawmakers are willing to start consulting economists and domain experts, no action at all is probably better.

You seem to think that endless sets rules is a necessary evil, but my intuition is the opposite: for every US law that makes for a better society, there are ten which are holding us back.

someone has trouble parking one day and decides that the solution is to make more parking a legal requirement, giving little or no thought to the second or third order effects of those laws.

Or, "someone owns a small house and one or two cars and finds they can't park because the neighbors have six roommates with one car each", or "developer builds 50 units without parking expecting the neighborhood to absorb the cars".

Which should also lead to a broader consideration of “why do so many people need cars in the first place?”

Well, yes, but until we fix something at a societal level which takes decades some poor people on a given street struggle because all the new buildings increase people and car density but not parking space. Which means, it makes sense to apply the rule first, and then fix society and then we can turn that excess parking space in gardens if need be.

Sure, the first order effect of minimum parking requirements is that there is more parking, which is nice in a situation like the one you describe. I don’t dispute that.

What are the second and third order effects and how do those effects compare with doing nothing? Will these laws be revisited as modes of transportation and the urban environment changes? (Spoiler alert, no). Without these laws would everyone just be permanently unable to park? Or would tenants, knowing how hard it is to park in public spots, pay a premium for private parking? Wouldn't those premiums incentivize developers to add private parking? But unlike the legal remedy, when those incentives go away, we don’t have to keep building parking spots.

More tenants would forgo owning a car and walk, bike, use public transportation, or call an Uber.

   "developer builds 50 units without parking expecting the neighborhood to absorb the cars"

That's exactly what's happening in downtown San Jose right now. One specific example::the city is approving a big new hotel on a tiny lot next to the De Anza Hotel with absolutely no parking provided, externalizing that mess onto the already parking-deprived neighborhood. SAP Center event nights will get really interesting.

It's more like, a bunch of apartment buildings were built before cars were big. Now cars are everywhere, and there is insufficient parking for existing residents, let alone new residents. Therefore, new or substantially renovated residential construction is required to have X parking spots per bedroom.

If you actually go to city council meetings they will explain why all of these rules and regulations exist. Just because random Joe on the internet can't see the problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I’m not arguing that laws are made without basis. A lack of parking is a problem, and a legal remedy isn’t on its face absurd.

I’m arguing that lawmakers don’t give enough consideration to the second and third order effects of laws. Minimum parking requirements solve one problem, but they create many others. I have attended many city council meetings and my impression of city councilors by and large is that they don’t rely enough on the work of economists, urban planners, and other domain experts.

On the other side of this all I see is that there are very powerful entities that do not want to be constrained. Blood was shed for the rule of law. I don't want to return to feudalism

I agree that doing something just so something is done about it is not a solution and it generally produces a worse outcome.

Ultimately I started questioning a lot of these rules and discovered in time what I said in the original post: a lot of people need to be forced with (new) rules because they will not think of anybody else or even actively try to workaround the rules.

And I'm not forgiving of rule makers: I think they are really bad at what they do, both in how they reach consensus and how they codify it in law, but I understand the general need they fill, so to say.

This is so very, very wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

"Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."

What you've written is an all-too typical complaint of people who don't bother to understand the history of our existing legal, political and social structures. It's easy to hand wave and vent about "regulatory capture" (I do it all the time).

But go and dig down and find out why that 2+ parking space rule exists. You will find a massively more complex, and much more pro-public, pro-people, pro-progress agenda in play than anything you just wrote suggests.

I remember an example of this sort of thing that I came across in eastern WA about 20+ years ago. A small town there was facing protests because it was about to put down ("execute") several wild horses that were hanging about the town. The law was very clear about what had to be done, but the public, both in town and elsewhere in the state were aghast. The horses were healthy, beautiful and there seemed to be no good justification for killing the as the law required. People complained about the law being an ass (no pun intended) and said that this was the perfect example of government inflexibility and law making by people with selfish interests.

But all it took was a little history detour to go back and find out why the law(s) in question had come into being. It had indeed been the case that in the not too distant past (by global standards, not necessarily those of the western US), wild horses had indeed been a problem in town, and that the towns people had tried several approaches to dealing with and/or fixing the problems. None of them had been very successful, and some 80 years earlier, the town had reluctantly adopted a law where an unowned horse, if not claimed by anyone within a reasonable period of notice, must be put down.

This wasn't government inflexibility, or stupid law, or selfish interests: it was a community improvising to deal with a tricky situation, and doing so imperfectly. Improving this particular law, and others like it (such as your 2+ parking space case) isn't going to happen by assuming that the existing legal framework exists because of malintent. It's going to happen by carefully understanding the context and motivations and knowledge that led to the current laws, and only then setting out change them, hopefully for the better.

> It's going to happen by carefully understanding the context and motivations and knowledge that led to the current laws, and only then setting out change them, hopefully for the better.

If you go case by case through all the nonsensical things in the american legal system, you'll find most of the time that the reason they were put in place originally was racism. Zoning is a prime example.

Zoning for single family housing is definitely (at least in substantial part) rooted in racism (although I think you can make a case for it to be more expansively classism ... but sure, whatever).

However, racism doesn't require 2+ parking spaces, just single family dwellings that cost more than poor people can afford.

> This wasn't government inflexibility, or stupid law, or selfish interests: it was a community improvising to deal with a tricky situation, and doing so imperfectly.

Improvising law and doing so imperfectly seems like a textbook recipe for "stupid law". That particular stupid law was worth complaining about "the law being an ass" (because it obviously was) and "the perfect example of government inflexibility" (local gov goes forward with putting down blameless horses based on an obscure law enacted 80 years ago in response to a situation that is nowhere near prevalent nor relevant today)

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but in light of this I'm curious how that specific example helps your argument?

So your proposal is that the government can just choose in the moment which laws to enforce and not enforce, based on current conditions and the leanings/predilictions of its current members?

The right thing to do do in the horse case would have been to repeal the law, since for sure, it no longer really applied. By contrast, the call from the public was "this is just another example of excessive government regulation", which is an entirely different claim.

But do you really want to argue for "oh, no problem, the police/courts can just ignore that statute because its clear to everyone that the original conditions that led to it no longer apply?" Really?

Marx based a lot of his theories on classical economics. Ibn Khaldun was arguably the founder of modern economic theory. One of his observations of late stage societies is that they are riddled with large government expenditure and high taxation stifling the economic activity of society.

https://qz.com/1008371/an-arab-thinker-invented-economic-the...

https://evonomics.com/amazing-north-african-scholar-beat-ada...

Ronald Reagan quoting Ibn Khaldun on his views on tax rates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KETIOgYu5uc

> * But go and dig down and find out why that 2+ parking space rule exists. You will find...*

It's easy to find what arguments people gave for instituting a rule.

That is often different from the real reason it was enacted or is kept around.

There is always a nice sounding argument for even the most blatantly unfair rule. Normally, due to Motivated Reasoning, the people benefitting from them even honestly believes the arguments!

Chesterton's Fence doesn't require that you perform a merely superficial analysis of why things are as they are, and indeed it would be doing the idea a disservice to do so.

As I noted in another reply below, I think it's fine to make the argument that the 2+ parking place rule comes from zoning policies that are ultimately racist, and that if you can show that this is really the sole origin of the rule, you've cleared "the fence" and can start to meangingully propose alternatives.

But such a historically-aware analysis is a far cry from "too much government regulation ... regulatory capture ... wah!"

There is clearly too much government and there is regulatory capture - are you saying these aren't true? Just because some regulation is deemed good doens't mean the majority is.

There is a bias that the present and recent history is how things are and should be and that any changes require superior proof than the initial experiment in passing the legislation.

I understand that you might think there is too much government, but it's far from clear that this is so.

I think the USA could benefit from "more government", but even saying that is woefully ambiguous. What does "less government" or "more government" even mean? Less laws? More government workers? Too much spending?

Regulatory capture is indeed a problem, but it's not unique to the USA and there's no point pretending that it's unsolvable.

Thinking of the issue as "too much" vs "too little" presumes government quality is a one dimensional thing.

Reality is far, far more complex and interesting than that!

>There is clearly too much government

and you're just declaring those based on feelings? or something you saw on fox news?

The parking space rule exists so black people can't move into cheap apartments that would exist without it.

Assuming this to be true (though see my reply about zoning below - I think this is an incomplete answer), then that's great, you have now cleared Chesterton's Fence, and are in a position to propose a replacement.

But notice how utterly different your argument is to the OP, who talked about excessive government regulation, regulatory capture and so on.

(and yes, one can make a case that codification of racism in law statutes is a kind of regulatory capture, but it's really not what most people mean when they use that term)

As large apartment buildings pre-date zoning regulations, parking space requirements, and in older East Coast cities even cars, that assertion is clearly false...

The 2 parking space rule is because we allow people to park on the street overnight. It's very simple to just not allow that or if it's allowed, then charge a market rate for the space. If people want parking then the house can have it, or there can be a garage. The problem is that they're getting a public good for free - free on street overnight parking.

  we allow people to park on the street overnight. It's very simple to just not allow that

You can limit parking hours, but you generally can't limit residents from parking more restrictively than visitors.

Completely agree, you just say parking is only for 4 hours or 8 hours, hell 12 hours.

> At the end of the day, the US is a litigious society covered in Byzantine regulation that most people aren’t even aware of.

I dunno, maybe? In some ways yes, in many ways no.

> this covers the most basic things: would you like to build a townhouse...apartment building in San Francisco...

That seems awfully specific.

I think it's clear to any outside observer that Bay Area residential real estate policy is literally insane. That doesn't really have all that much to do with this essay or the Andreesen one that precedes it though.

Real estate policy is insane everywhere - San Francisco is one place where the market pressure is exposing the insanity.

Yes, and far from the only one. When you adjust for local wages and higher property taxes, things in Seattle and Austin are almost just as bad.

> We’ve chosen for things to be like this by the way we allow our government at every level to be captured by lobbyists, special interests, and partisanship.

No.

This is an outcome of having democracy operable at a local level; the entire outcome of localism is "your local special interests control the system". What that means, in practice, is the people who have time to burn control the system. That is either (1) retired people (2) semi-employed activists or (3) paid lawyers/lobbyists. 3 is often paid by the local big fish.

Add/subtract as your locality changes, but the principle is the same. Kill the hyperdecentralization, and you kill the balkanization.

If you want real change in the US, you have to gut the localism principle comprehensively.

edit: get involved in local politics, even on the margins, and you start seeing that change is very possible, and there are a lot of people passionately invested in not changing. This has nothing - ZERO - to do with US political alignment, BTW.

Hm, I was actually thinking that local authorities should be strengthened. But the perspective I'm coming from is being European and seeing all major EU countries have unpopular governments that are seen as ineffective, and contrasting with Switzerland, which has very powerful local government (a president/prime minister/chancellor doesn't even exist, federal government is only in charge of defense and energy), and is extremely successful by every measure you could think of.

Note that Switzerland is ~10x smaller than Texas.

State and federal governments are even worse than local with regards to endless regulations.

I've done some thinking about the problem of regulation bloat (setting aside regulatory capture for now).

Good regulation, like good code, would express ideals and objectives in the simplest way possible that can still implement the solution. But if we follow this analogy, our country's body of law and regulation is like a centuries-old codebase that has never been revised or refactored for the sake of consolidation and simplification. It only gets added to, and obviously can't be rebuilt from scratch. This means we have a monotonically-growing level of complexity for entities that want to adhere to the law, which is a recipe for grinding to a halt.

I feel like the common argument by conservatives against regulation because it stifles innovation has some truth, but it doesn't have to.

What would it look like, I wonder, to implement reforms that are purely concerned with simplifying the existing rules and stripping out cruft? Has anybody ever considered the problem from this angle?

Years ago I worked on a project to do exactly that for local development ordinances. Try to boil down the intent to the simplest version of rules that would encompass that intent, while stripping out all the rest. It got some local interest, but there were too many local interests that each wanted everything simplified except for the couple rules they specifically benefitted from in some way. So it didn’t go anywhere.

  would you like to build a townhouse for your family with just one parking space? Illegal in the vast majority of the United States, where 2+ parking spaces per home are required by law.

That's a very specific and authoritative claim that is utterly false.

First of all, most of the U.S. doesn't even have zoning limitations regarding parking specific to townhomes. Nowhere outside cities (private developments can have CC&Rs to this effect, but that's not "zoning"), to my knowledge.

Where I live in SV, our entire development is townhomes with single parking spaces (plus a small pool of guest spots on the outer fringes of the complex).

Next to us is a large apartment complex with one space per unit. Next to that is a duplex development with one-car garages and just street parking otherwise. Can't even park in the driveways.

My last condo in Mountain View had exactly one parking space per unit (even the three bedroom units) plus a small pool of guest spaces outside the "secure" garage level. (Feel free to look it up: 1033 Crestview Drive, 90 condos in the complex, all with just 1 space).

YIMBYs love to claim "but zoning" yet almost never quote any specific codes from any specific cities, let alone anything at a county or statewide level.

So, by all means, please educate us all and give your references identifying this "vast majority".

I also wanted to write my own response to that article from Anderson.

I worked within OEM electronics industry since my first job 13 years. During those years I was fortunate to have experience living many different countries, with very different "systems."

I spent my childhood in early nineties Russia, where my parents had a business. My late teens were spent in Singapore, as an exchange student, and an interpreter in a trade company. Later I spent 6 years studying, working, and living in Vancouver, Canada, and Seattle, US. My career however only took off when I was forced to leave Canada by a paperwork mishap on behalf of my employer, and go to China for no better option.

SanderJD below has a very good point I wanted to talk about:

> I'm amused by these morality screeds from rich tech thought leaders. "Why don't the talented sacrifice easy money in software by getting into [insert super regulated, low-margin business]?" says profit-maximizing tech capitalists who ignored said businesses for a decade.

My own reason deciding not to return to the West was that I feel I simply can't do my job there, and an honest business as a way of making money doesn't work here.

I wrote many times here before how helpless I felt when I simply tried to "make money the normal way," and the normal way doesn't work. I feel the whole business culture in the West goes against the notion that a "normal, honest work" is the way to do things.

I saw many of those SV "mentors," "VC" guys, buffoon fund managers, and trendy hipstrepreneurs. All and every one of them is obsessed with NOT doing things the proper way. They all hellbent on the notion that the business IS to be done by some "special sauce," "a cheat," or "a secret trick" that is nearly equates to money out of thin air for them.

These people are wrong. They are so wrong. This is why you can not run manufacturing in America.

Maybe these guys can "make money out of thin air" by tricking banks, pension funds, clients, or the legal system, but there is no "trick" they think of to making physical things.

I'm not American, but surely there must be millions (tens of millions?) of small, owner-operated businesses in the US?

There was before government shut down the economy...

How do you feel about the future of Russia (where do you live these days)?

I'm an American living in Russia. While there are many problems (politics and others), it actually "feels" freer than the West in a sense and the cities offer a higher quality of life than the USA. They are actually walkable with many affordable transit options). In my city, there is new construction of condo towers everywhere.

Taxes are lower, costs are lower and people can afford their own apartments, there's a ton of untapped human potential (highly educated intelligent people). My Russian is elementary, but from the business owners I talk to, while they complain about regulations and taxes, it seems they have fewer than the USA. Or do you think it's a lost cause?

I haven't been living in Russia since 2007. I only went back twice since then

I was robbed three times in my life, two times in 2007 just months before my departure, and the third time in 2016, just a week after my first visit there after 9 years abroad.

You can understand, I can't bare carrying that passport now.

When your business gets big enough the mafia government will step in and take it from you

This sounds pretty baseless, tbh.

I wonder how many Silicon Valley luminaries assume that government is one of those industries that's going to be disrupted and replaced by software, but don't say it out loud because suggesting you're going to replace the government isn't really the wisest move.

> Illegal in the vast majority of the United States, where 2+ parking spaces per home are required by law

What does that mean? Do people need to build homes with at least 2 parking spaces per home, inside the area of their property? Does it generalize to apartments?

I'm sure the parking space thing exists because of all the people who thought they only needed 1 space, but it turned out they needed at least 2. And then they parked in other spaces or in the way of everyone else because they were short-sighted.

And so it's just required now.

Counter-point: The "everyone needs ridiculous amount of driveway space" rule existed in a suburb I lived in. We had exceptionally wide streets, but parking any car in the street for any amount of time was strictly forbidden. All of my neighbors complained about how "ghetto" our street looked when my parents visited and parked in the street. People really actually hated the idea of anyone parking in the street, even for a weekend, and so we needed driveways that were large enough to handle the 3 days of the year when we had a couple extra cars around.

That rule was dumb and unnecessary, but was also not a "pointless regulation", it was not "regulatory capture" by the Big Driveway Cartel, and it definitely wasn't a response to a legitimate need for more parking (again, super wide streets that sat empty). It was just a reflection of the deeply held convictions of an extraordinarily parochial population.

Counter-counter-point: Sometimes it is about the level at which the policy is applied. It may be easier to apply it at a county level or state level, etc. It might not make sense for every single street in the county, but since many policies are enforced at a certain level (county, city, state, country) you need to match the policy to the level at which it would be enforced. Otherwise you'd have a gerrymandered law that applies on some streets and not others, which would create yet other problems.

> thought they only needed 1 space, but it turned out they needed at least 2.

It has a lot more to do with historical post WW2 urban planning models which were designed to make room for increasing household car ownership, which did happen over the decades as public transportation systems were either dismantled or never built in the first place.

Consumers of the time readily bought into that model. We are only reevaluating it today in light of its failure modes.

The problem is that if you do not build for that potential need, you then need someone with the ability to say "no." It might be a condo manager, a city parking enforcement worker, etc.

Problem is, that person doesn't exist in most places where required.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com