I think fisherman know how to be safe without bureaucrats in DC that have never been in a fishing boat butting in.
You just need coast guard for emergencies.
They got along just fine before 2018 when this committee was created.
You just need coast guard for emergencies.
They got along just fine before 2018 when this committee was created.
This is a classic Chesterton's Fence. Those who don't understand the origin of the regulations will continue to have strong, uninformed opinions about them.
Many crew working on boats have safety gear only because USCG requires it. The owners of those boats would not expend the money without the regulation.
The USCG, NMFS, NIOSH, and OSHA regulations are still there.
When you were growing up, was it earlier than 2018?
This committee didn't exist before then.
But yeah, maybe we should add 20 more agencies just to be safe...
This is way off the original topic of course…but you can do a quick search of the federal register they you can see the agenda of meetings and such. A recent one reviewed structural failures that led to boats sinking.
Fields learn as new things happen. There’s a reason aerospace industries talk about rules having body counts. Freezing regulations rarely makes work easier or faster, it just makes knowledge sharing worse.
There this large assumption across HN that if one doesn’t understand something l, that must meant it doesn’t make sense. It’s a bad way to operate in the world…independently of ideology…lack of understanding is not unique insight.
It boils down to whether or not this committee was beneficial or not.
I have not seen any data backing up that it helped at all since it's inception in 2018.
I did not argue for this specific committee. I replied to your incorrect, uninformed assertions.
> I think fisherman know how to be safe
You have obviously not worked with commercial fishermen. Maybe you have never worked with any complicated industrial process. Safety regulations do not propagate by osmosis. It requires an agency verifying them.
> without bureaucrats in DC that have never been in a fishing boat butting in.
In my experience, the USCG inspectors who execute inspections and inform regulations served on boats. You are making an armchair assumption about how the process works.
> You just need coast guard for emergencies.
This is also ridiculously incorrect. USCG safety inspections have prevented many emergencies.
> They got along just fine before 2018 when this committee was created.
2018 is when we started implementing 46 CFR Subchapter M, which adds many overdue safety improvements and still does not bring us up to the standards of more developed flags.
> But yeah, maybe we should add 20 more agencies just to be safe...
This is strawman nonsense. I get frustrated with regulation as much as anyone. I had to allocate capital to upgrades to be compliant with regulation. I have opinions about which regulations were important and necessary and which were not. Those who want to burn it all down have no real world experience in this domain.
If we take the birth of the federal government or the USCG as our start point, it is these type of committees that actually moved Chesterton's Fence
The fence could have been put up yesterday but if you never even bother to learn why the fence was put up before trying to remove it, that's still Chesterton's Fence.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that there is bloat and over-regulation, but most of the laws and regulations on the books are in response to a bad thing happening. It's kind of like a legacy code base - just deleting the repo and starting over from scratch is usually not the best idea, it takes some careful refactoring and judicious tests to move in the right direction.
It's sort of an interesting idea - what are "tests" in the context of the legal/regulatory framework? The constitution? The judiciary?
We are now removing Fence #2 back to Fence #1, which is more Chesterton-y by virtue of being there first.
Getting rid of a fence doesn't mean there's magically an older fence you've moved to. It's only when you replace a set of rules with a different set of rules to serve the same purpose that you've moved the fence.
Removing the fence is exactly that, getting rid of the fence. There is no before fence. You've just removed the fence.
Fence #1: the existing set of rules defining a more limited US Federal Government and a more limited USCG and a more limited DHS
Fence #2: removed limits on Feds, expanded those organizations, placed limits on [insert economic activity]
Whatever your opinion on the wisdom/value of this, this move by the DHS is an attempt to replace Fence #2 with the original Fence #1.
Put in your terminology, they are replacing a set of rules (expansive gov) with a different set of rules (limited gov).
Put in my terminology, this is correcting the original violation of Chesterton's Fence.
Fence 1 is that we have the NCFSAC that serves to ensure the safety of commercial fishing.
Fence 2 is no fence because we don't want to limit economic activity.
That's by definition removing the fence, not moving it.
Safety policy is written in blood. By getting rid of the committee that writes that policy you aren't moving the fence, you are just getting rid of it and letting the blood that chesterton's fence once stopped to flow again.
It's simply returning to the status quo of 6 years ago.
The committee should be producing results.
We have data of incidents: https://uscgboating.org/statistics/accident_statistics.php
There's virtually no change since 2018 (various incidents go up and down but stay similar from 2018-2023).
Those are recreational boating accidents. They are completely unrelated to the discussion at hand (which is commercial fishing accidents).
> Now do before 2018 when the NCFSAC didn't exist...
> It's simply returning to the status quo of 6 years ago.
It's not though. Before it was called the NCFSAC, it was the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Advisory Committee (CFIVSAC). That committee existed back to 2010 at least.
If you are interested in what they actually do, you probably want to go here: https://www.dco.uscg.mil/NCFSAC/
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And I'm not sure exactly what argument you are trying to make. It's not Chesterton's fence to do something new. It is Chesterton's fence to get rid of something without planning for something to replace it's role. It's not a complicated concept. Chesterton's fence is about removing something without understanding why it was there and planning properly for after it's gone.
"Limiting government" ≠ "no fence". It is a fence on government regulation. A "meta-regulation" if you will.
They do different things. The electric fence is for keeping animals in/out and the retaining wall is for keeping soil from moving. Sure you may add the retaining wall but you've still removed the electric fence so the foxes can now get into your chicken coops or your cows are running free. That's chesterton's fence. Even if well meaning, making a change that fails to replicate/fulfil the original purpose of the original fence causes the issues to return.
Applied to this scenario, I am saying that the status quo is the result of prior people ignoring this advice and changing a complex system. So the actions in the article are more about correcting this bad change and reimplementing the original fence.
Original fence = smaller, limited Fed gov
New, Bad fence = expansive gov
So the timeline is
Fence #1 exists
Someone removes Fence #1 and builds Fence #2
Someone removes Fence #2, re-builds Fence #1 <--This is where we are today
I understand your interpretation, and I agree with the first part of it. (Don't change an existing system without first understanding the implications of that change.') I think that's the core of the metaphore, as taken by most people.
I don't think the point is that you should never make changes to complex systems at all, though. I don't think its means that more primitive, or unaltered, states of a system are necessarily prefential to more altered states, which I infer from your comment.
If unalterated states were better, we would have to tear Chesterton's fence down — right? Fences don't occur naturally.
Some owners would not, most would. Humans are generally social, intelligent and caring animals. The regulations are helpful guidelines to save lives, not to be seen as mandatory rules that would be flaunted at every chance.
Regulations level the playing field.
Just to be clear, I was not talking about operators who are physically on the boats when I wrote about owners. There are three classes of people involved: owners, captains, and deckhands/engineers. Often the owners are never on the boat and are not subject to the same risks.
I know far too many people who are missing a finger or worse. It is a terrible industry in some ways.
“No problem, as a non-employee you are hereby confined to your cabin except to use the head, and you can eat in the galley but you have to pay for your meals, they cost $100 and will be deducted from your final paycheck. If you have a negative balance when we dock at a port in around 3 months, you must pay immediately or we will send the debt to collections. Have a nice day”
Maybe you want to read up on how things work at sea?
You don't need a special fishing committee to make sure workers have good working conditions and proper pay. That's universal to any job.
This is wildly untrue. The less skilled your labor, the more exploitative the available jobs are. This is why we have labor regulations, to protect these people.
I already noted that there are agencies that handle labor regulations. You left that out.
This committee had nothing to do with labor regulations...
There's already OSHA, NIOSH, and NOAA that cover these things, so imo it's probably redundant at the least, harmful and wasteful at the worst.
That's kind of the point: they're doing no such thing.
All of the talk from Trump, Musk, the now-departed Ramaswamy, etc. hasn't been about sober analysis and careful evaluation, it's endless mockery and dumb jokes ("look at this agency name or person's title, what does that even mean LOL"), or "government bad" as the parent put it.
The pushback this gets isn't because people love bureaucracy or hate efficiency but because it's obvious this isn't an actual effort to improve anything, just mindlessly slashing things businesses/the powerful don't like and stunts to make the base clap.
From an outsider perspective this committee in particular seems redundant as there are other agencies that handle this scope.
If you want to boil it down to "government bad" sure, but I view it more as "over-regulation is bad".
Or do you view the government as a well oiled machine that couldn't have any bloat and we should never evaluate and cull feature creep in it?
Sure we do because, again, the people put in charge of these initiatives spend endless time just making jokes about agency names that they clearly (sometimes explicitly!) have no idea about or mindless promises to cut the government in half.
>Or do you view the government as a well oiled machine that couldn't have any bloat and we should never evaluate and cull feature creep in it?
Since you missed it the first time I'll copy the part of my comment that addresses exactly this again:
>The pushback this gets isn't because people love bureaucracy or hate efficiency but because it's obvious this isn't an actual effort to improve anything, just mindlessly slashing things businesses/the powerful don't like and stunts to make the base clap.
The problem is you're assuming good faith when there has been ample demonstration that there isn't any here.
I voted in Trump to do this and more, I trust the evaluations were made properly and I support the decision.
There's obvious bias in your tone (which is okay, which is why I stated my position) so it makes sense you don't like this move because you don't trust this administration.
We're similar in that regard in that I don't trust the government implicitly, which is why I support culling bloat.
Decisions should be made based on facts and numbers and your side (you, Trump and Elon included) have provided none of these.
It's pure ideology without basis in objectivity.
The Coast Guard has and still does work with related agencies (NOAA/NMFS, Fish and Wildlife, EPA, etc.) in this regard.
This committee in question didn't even exist before 2018.
There's 1000 years of people killing themselves needlessly that says they don't.
Other agencies may do the same thing, but the NCFSAC changed the sea game (when created in 2018)
Before 2018, sea blood bath.
What matters are the data which nobody has dug up. Was there a significant reduction in fatalities following this committee's creation? Did it have a significant and likely causal relationship on those declines? And finally - assuming there was a decline d the committee was responsible for it, are they still meaningfully necessary or are the prior established rules sufficient to maintain the improvements moving forward?