Repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906 | Hacker News Reader

Repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906

thezvi.wordpress.com

36 pointsAmorymeltzer23 comments

"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Chesterton’s Fence, in case anyone is wondering.

Chesterton's Fence should be held in disrepute in this day and age, at least among people familiar with software. The majority of said software being bloated because of an instinctive application of Chesterton's Fence.

Have you never suffered an ill-advised redesign that takes away all the features you needed because "it's cleaner"? Lucky you

80% of migrations out there (warning: made up statistic) happen because the system became too complex to maintain, and most of that complexity comes from people implicitly invoking Chesterton’s fence in one way or another, many, many times.

Yes, there are cases where it’s wise to follow Chesterton’s advice. But many more cases where that’s just lazyness disguised as wisdom.

That doesn't make sense to me.

Chesterton's fence is about explicitly removing something. You can't implicitly invoke it.

What you're describing is a lack of explicitly removing things. Chesterton's fence does not apply here.

Be it your way.

Still, I think we should sometimes be bold enough to call out when we think that the Emperor has no clothes. In this case, Chesterton's fence is much less deep than it's made out to be.

The guy who wants to take it down, that's at least a valuable proposition. He's trying to decrease entropy. He's at least trying to put up a fight with the natural state of affairs that things become more disordered, more cluttered, more messy.

The guy who shuts him down, he's lazy. He's not willing to put in the work himself to see why the fence is useful. He's putting the burden of proof on the guy who at least is trying to do the good thing.

And many times guy nb 1 will just say, "well then, I tried, but there's opposition, and I don't have the time and energy to fight this battle".

And the fence will stay there.

And for each 1 useful fence that should stay there, there are 100 rotten ones that shouldn't.

The thing is, this is so entrenched, that people don't even try anymore. Maybe it's Pavlovian.

I'm saying this: we should at least admire those who even contemplate taking down a fence. And those who take the risk to speak out that the fence should be taken down.

Instead, we admire Chesterton. Which happens to be quite convenient too. Because we are lazy.

Oh, don't worry, I'm lazy too. How many times in my life didn't I say "this is a need to have thing and this is a nice to have thing. Considering the urgency, I'll deliver the need to have one, and leave the nice to have for another day".

In other words, how many fences didn't I leave the fence in the road? I'm guilty. But at least, I don't feel proud and wise about it.

Can you tell me why the fence, known as Chesterton's Fence, was ever constructed?

It’s a good idea inasmuch as the ideas you encounter have thought behind them more often than people think. In a local environment with thoughtless decisions, sure, don’t apply that heuristic. I think in general most people under-invest in understanding why the “fence” is there, and so I disagree that it’s a bad heuristic.

I also disagree with the specific claim that software bloat is due to repeated application of Chesterton’s fence; I think bloat is caused by a lack of thought about what is needed and laziness around pruning dead code, rather than thinking about justifications for past decisions and then deferring to them.

I mean, the "use of it" is obvious, it's another protectionist tariff in a long, long line of protectionist tariffs. It heralds from an age where that was much more common, and is an artifact of a long-discredited view of international trade.

> the "use of it" is obvious, it's another protectionist tariff in a long, long line of protectionist tariffs

I’d be curious for contemporaneous accounts over someone a century later guessing what may or may not be obvious. Maybe a cabal of industrialists conspired. The Foreign Dredging Act does predate trustbusting. Or maybe there were military concerns. Not an issue in this particular case, but one can imagine outrage if e.g. China controlled the world’s dredging fleet and threatened to isolate America’s ports in retaliation for some Senator’s mean tweets about Xi.

Bingo.

From my readings, the reason certain parts of shipping are mandated to be constructed in USA is that we Americans don't want to lose the ability to construct war ships. Tariffs may not be maximally efficient from a theoretical free trade perspective, but the cost premium of a tariff forcing local production may well be worth it compared to losing your ability to protect yourself on the seas.

Now, whether you agree with that sentiment or not is orthogonal. Chesterton's Fence says that if you don't understand why this law exists, then you don't get to tear it down until you do understand why it was ever thought to be a good idea.

Chesterton's Fence...

This act is important, we need to keep our ports working with Americans. Dubai's already tried to replace longshoremen with cheap foreign labor.

...but how would repealing this act remove US longshoremen?

Foreign owned ports would like to remove all American workers.

How does allowing Dutch companies to dredge US ports remove longshoremen in the US?

If anything this should help them by opening up more ports to deeper draught shipping vessels that currently cannot dock because of the backlog/expense of dredging projects, thus adding more work on the docks.

It's not just longshoremen they wish to remove. So far that hasn't worked but it demonstrates a trend, foreign owned ports really want to eliminate the US worker / vessel requirement. It shows that their aim isn't just to remove some Americans from working these ports, but any and all. That's all. It just illustrates my point, which is that over time these foreign owned ports want to entirely take over the operations and maintenance and staffing of the ports.

Sure, but again, how would a Dutch dredging company coming in for a dredging project impact longshoremen?

I'm assuming that dredging isn't needed that often in US ports.

Foot in the door to replace them.

...foot in the door how? You've yet to describe a single mechanism.

Dubai replacing locals with foreigners is specific to Dubai and Dubai law, and what the government of Dubai is aiming to do. Unless you can show why and how it can be extrapolated to every other port in every other jurisdiction.

In my country, cargo shipping lines owned here are long obsolete, as coastal shipping was replaced by railway and road, and for international freight, overseas shipping lines had the capital to float the larger ships that were the result of containerisation, and the existing port contracts with ports that are dispatching to us. For large scale dredging operations, we bring in the big specialist vessels. (We have smaller dredges for the smaller ports that are based around a river mouth, as they need to dredge far more often, but at a far smaller scale). Likewise, when it's time to move an offshore natural gas platform, we bring in the specialised vessels from overseas.

But, all of our port workers are still from our country - just because the ships are foreign owned doesn't mean we have to change all of our employment laws to allow foreign companies to operate our ports. If Dubai did that, then that's because Dubai chose to. Likewise, the USA could choose to do that also, whether or not a dredge was run by the Dutch.

You're afraid of globalisation, and that's fine, it's had positives in some areas, but definite negatives in others, but you're focused on the wrong thing here - it's not foreign dredges, it's American lawmakers who are drinking deep of the neoliberal KoolAid.

Mechanism is illustrated in the link I originally replied to at the top of this page. Foot in the door mechanism, slippery slope, one thing leads to another. And while I’m not afraid of globalism, I do scorn and denigrate it. Bully it.

If we were in the Netherlands or in the Persian Gulf, there would be several nations close enough that one's dredges could practically dredge in another's waters without being being too far from home. The Chesapeake Bay is a considerable distance from any foreign country. What is the transit time of a dredge coming from Nova Scotia or Jamaica to the Chesapeake Bay?

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