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Comment by 1dry | Hacker News Reader

Unspoken and underlying the author's entire worldview seems to be, "the more new things, the better," a not uncommon tunnel view in the engineering world. The purpose of regulation, ideally, is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people. Defining those terms and making that decision is precisely the job of regulators, who are ideally accountable to a democratic base. In the worldview where all that matters is "growth," people suffer. Running water is a huge quality of life win for EVERYONE. If you ask most people what would really help make their lives better, it's not gonna be colonizing mars, building tunnels under LA, whatever, it's gonna be access to resources we already have. Healthcare, clean water, clean air...perhaps we should think more about engineering as it can be applied to expanding access, and not so much to "making new things," which most people don't need or care at all about.

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Not to mention that giving healthcare, clean water and clean air to people who don’t have it will increase “growth” in long term, probably more than anything new.

Is access to these resources really an engineering problem, rather than a matter of political fact? The people with the power to expand access, politicians, don't have any real incentive to.

It's definitely a political problem more than any other, yes. What would give politicians more incentive to operate this way would be real campaign finance reform. Check out represent.us

Underlying the political will to do something would be the implementation of that thing. To continue the running water example, you can imagine many technical challenges to distributing fresh water to the parts of the world that don’t already have it.

This undoubtedly needs talented engineers across the disciplines, definitely not just software.

I would argue that its an engineering/technology problem at heart. If access to those things was easy and cheap politicians would have no/less incentive to hold it back. It's probably not the same if it's a limited and restricted resource.

If we had more people trying to optimize food production, water distribution, Healthcare scaling and management etc, those things would become materially better, fast.

But we are more concerned with optimizing ads so we can buy shit we don't need so..

>>> it's not gonna be colonizing mars, building tunnels under LA, whatever, it's gonna be access to resources we already have. Healthcare, clean water, clean air...

This exactly ... incremental improvements on existing infrastructure, increasing access etc would benefit more people than big bang, sexy stuff like hyperloop.

Let's be clear about one thing: The hyperloop was intended to cast suspicion on infrastructure investments, primary rail. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe low pressure tubing will rule and no one will use rail? Then your investment will be for naught!

It's an age old method, the same as used in telecom to justify not spending on fiber infrastructure. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe wireless? Look at this idea what a future wireless service might bring!

(Completely ignoring the fact that fiber is what drives economy and innovation. Wireless is just a question of capex, if the fiber is already in place. Quite similar to how low pressure tubes have physical limitations that makes it unrealistic to replace rail.)

This is not only an obvious observation by now, as Musk has been pretty clear about what risks he saw with rail investments, particularly in California but also across the country.

> It's an age old method, the same as used in telecom to justify not spending on fiber infrastructure. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe wireless? Look at this idea what a future wireless service might bring!

With SpaceX's immediate success in becoming a global ISP, this turned out to be true.

Not really…?

Starlink is twice as expensive for a tenth the bandwidth as when I had fiber in a modern apartment.

That kind of 20x factor is presumably what the other person meant.

New was good because humans needed many things (that were new at this point). Now that we got almost everything we need, "New" is no longer good on its own.

There are old things we need that are now threatened: water and food.

Part of why they're threatened is due to lackluster planning and future mugging economics.

Add energy there, as the root of the coming scarcity of both. Almost criminal how we have let ourselves become in the verge of energy poor.

Are you telling me I can't eat tweets??

Humans did not “need” things they lacked, and live to tell about it. Every age could see itself as complete. We’re fortunate that it took until the mid 20th century to freeze everything in amber. Unfortunately, the mid 20th century left us some really problematic stuff that wouldn't pass regulatory scrutiny today - like car dependence - and now we can't get rid of it.

> Every age could see itself as complete.

I remember the thing with women voting rights differently.

Except in practice regulation increases cost and reduces access, particularly of anything new. Regulation has made building so difficult in the UK that oligopolies have formed and 90% of the young will never be able to buy a house unless they inherit.

Which regulation do you think is responsible?

Personally I blame Right to Buy for the collapse in building new homes, as this graph [1] neatly illustrates; Local authority building collapses, Housing association building is a trickle by comparison. Private housebuilding has remained relatively stable since 1955 by comparison.

The financial crisis also has a notable effect, but it's small by comparison.

The cost of housing is fuelled mainly by lack of social rented supply, and the high cost of land with planning permission. It's also to some extent a consequence of political service to the baby boomer generation, who got high house building when they needed it, had the heyday of BTL and have constrained house building since to preserve the value of their investments. The size of houses is decreasing [2] and I can't find a source for it, but certainly anecdotally plot size is decreasing too. The young are paying more for less.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_the_United_Kingdom#... /File:Dwellings_completed_in_England_1946-2015.png 2: https://www.labc.co.uk/news/what-average-house-size-uk

House size decreasing makes sense as people become more urban.

Everything else you said is exactly spot on though.

It was regulations intentionally written to make the rich richer and keep the poor poor that caused the issue. It wasn't a mistake, or an unintended effect of the nanny state going too far, quite the opposite.

The reason I mentioned it as such is that it's not really regulation, as much as the effects of the right to buy policy causing the public sector to stop building houses; reversing this wouldn't really be 'deregulating' but would actually be involving government to address a market failure.

The original idea of right to buy, as discussed by Labour, in the late 70s was to reinvest the money from sales in building new council houses.

The Tory policy implementation sold them off cheap and slowly ratcheted down the amount of the sales price going to that purpose and the building dramatically slowed. Again, not an accident or unintended effect.

Basically bribing the better off council house owners into voting conservative (and for policies that cause the housing crisis) at the expense of the poor.

> Regulation has made building so difficult in the UK

Lack of appropriate regulation allowed Grenfell tower to burn down. 72 people died. (1) The case for "deregulation" of UK housing is a grotesque joke.

1) How lax building rules contributed to Grenfell disaster https://www.ft.com/content/bf6bcbd0-5b35-11e7-9bc8-8055f264a...

It sounds callous, but even if those 72 deaths could be attributed to regulation on houses (they can't, that's apartment blocks), it would still be an acceptable price to pay. It costs less than a million to save a marginal life, housing regulations have cost north of a trillion (comparing total cost of housing stock then to now adjusted for inflation), so unless those regulations have saved a million lives? They aren't worth it.

Humans are really bad at thinking at scale, but this is essential for good pubkic policy.

So you are splitting hairs by, after the fact, by distinguishing between "houses" and "housing"; making up numbers of what regulations cost (not the same as the total cost of housing, right?) and insisting that fireproof cladding just isn't worth it in purely monetary terms.

You're right though, it does sound callous.

> is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people

Ideally yes but in reality it ends up being a way for trolls to hang out under bridges and take their cut or to block new things to protect existing interests.

Is more housing in the best interest of the majority of people? Public transit? High speed rail? Better energy systems?

Totally agree. I think the issue here though is not with regulation itself, but with corrupting influence that we as constituents allow to infiltrate our regulatory bodies. I'd hope campaign finance would help solve this issue too – harder to pull a " Greg and Co. gave me $x so I'll appoint Greg jr. to this sweet regulatory position where he will inevitably act in his self-interest" kind of thing if the public has full view of Greg and Co.'s campaign contributions in the first place...

Did you miss the part where exactly these things suffer the most from regulation? How long until we mostly cannot afford healthcare for the middle class? Aren't we already somewhat there?

We can always go back to letting insurers deny health care based on “pre-existing conditions.” I’d rather regulators deciding people shouldn’t be priced out of the healthcare market for having asthma or diabetes.

Or go back before the (unfunded) EMTALA bill where uninsured people were told to just die in the hospital parking lot.

Perhaps the primary goal shouldn't be regulation or de-regulation, but ensuring affordable access?

Whatever mechanism the government uses to “ensure affordable access” would be a regulation. We’ve seen what fully unregulated healthcare looks like and it’s people dying in the streets.

Agree that it would be a regulation. I'm suggesting that this be the goal of regulation, though. Instead, many regulations seem to be focused on improving quality without regard as to how that affects access.

That is the goal on the Dem side though. Universal healthcare isn’t picky on the how but on the outcome. That was a core theme of the failed “Hillary Care” bill in the 90s.

The Republican EMTALA bill solved access. Every ER is required to treat everyone regardless of their ability to pay. The republicans didn’t fund this particular bit of regulation so the costs flow into the outsized bills hospitals charge.

As you talk about the affordability of healthcare, I assume that you're talking about the US system. Consider this: is US healthcare more or less regulated than that of the rest of the developed world?

A more suitable comparison would be whether the US's (or Germany's) healthcare system is more or less regulated compared to 50 years ago. Now also look at the pricing.

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