Beaver-engineered dam in the Czech Republic
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
It's fairly old, but I watched it in college, and it was great.
"Authorities anticipate no significant conflicts with the beaver colony for at least the next decade."
A painter will always tell you you need paint.
A roofer will always try and sell you a roof.
A tire shop will always try and sell you tires.
But we can take these people at face value?
https://play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_320_cc65818c-232c-49cb-a8...
I'm increasingly of the opinion that permission-based economies don't work. Go after people who harm, don't impose paperwork to preemptively prevent harm.
For example: statistical deaths can be compensated for by fines using the statistical value of a human life (about $12 M). Nuclear power regulation could be based on this principle.
[0] Except for reckless gamblers.
But more charitably: they did say "statistical death" so I presume the implication is "unintentional and non-targeted". Deliberately setting up deathtraps or ensuring a specific person will die but not others would probably be exempt. Of course that could be extremely difficult to prove if gross negligence became so easily affordable.
You "statistical death" is of course 100% correct. These kind of tradeoffs are done all the time when designing safety features, and using a monetary value per human life is the right way to do it.
Some people can't deal with that kind of rationality though.
Pay $12m in litigation to prove in litigation why your business thing is fine and legal
Pay $12m to off whoever's the driving force behind your harassment preventing them from doing it to the next guy who's pockets might not be deep enough to fend it off.
It's the pro-social thing to do really.
Because that would be completely impractical. It would cause the economy to cease functioning. Statistical deaths and individual murders are fundamentally different things.
There's a fuzzy boundary between the two (as effects are concentrated on smaller and smaller numbers of people) but that doesn't mean there's no difference.
Even with individual murders, there are gradations depending on intention and mental state. Manslaughter and first degree murder are different crimes, even if the number of dead bodies is the same.
There are just too many situations today where somebody is paying the fine with a smile on their face, if not settling for some trivial amount with no acknowledgement of wrongdoing.
Willful harms and even reckless harms by corporations need to be penalized aggressively and punitively. When a corporation worth $30 billion gains $1.3 billion in material benefit over 10 years by doing some activity that victimizes or risks people, it's fucking stupid to try and penalize them $10M with no jail time for anybody. "Cost of doing business" should never be a viable option, because the law needs a subjective bent, some small tyranny of justice, some adversarial person that corporations are structurally encouraged to be terrified of pissing off. If that means forcibly diluting their stock, or seizing the company, or terminating their charter, or throwing their executives down a hole for five years, that's evidently a necessary component of regulation. Deterrence is the name of the game, not just "seeking compliance".
We created corporations, and demand their executives, to behave in a psychopathic, amoral, "rational" profit-seeking manner by the legal fiduciary duty. Passively failing to significantly penalize predatory acts is actively encouraging their continuation. It's creating tools meant to do a thing (Hammers) and using them wrong (Juggling) and then acting stunned when they land on your foot, and spending the rest of the day glaring at and shaming the hammers, demanding verbal assurances that they'll never land on your foot again.
Occasionally, we hear about China rewarding corporate executives who commit malfeasance of a sufficiently malignant scale with capital punishment. The buck stops here. It sometimes makes the grass look greener on the other side, even with all the things I object to within that system.
To me, my own life is invaluable. I would assume most people feel similarly.
Since that harm is invisible, it is very hard to factor in, and is almost always ignored.
The permiting process for a normal residential block of flats in Prague takes several years, because every NIMBY can have their say repeatedly.
Everything can be overdone and we as a civilization might have overdone it with safetyism. On a similar note, look at the "free range kid" movement, which is fighting hard to give children at least some freedom which, 40 years ago, was considered absolutely natural.
I suspect that I would feel the same as you do about flats in Prague.
An argument against codes (and licensing) is they are one size fits all. Maybe someone with different preferences would trade off quality and price differently than you do. I think this especially shows up in licensing: a rich person wants their doctor to be extremely good, even if that greatly elevates the cost; a poor person would be better off at lesser quality medical care they could actually afford.
Most other developed nations do not mandate this, one staircase being considered enough. And they don't have an epidemics of fire deaths either. In general, frequency of fires in domestic settings is a fraction of those 100 years ago.
If Switzerland or Czechia can live with one staircase per building, so can the US. This alone would reduce costs of construction somewhat, and make some currently illegal construction projects legal.
Add up all the people who benefit from this. The regulatory bureaucracy, the engineering firms, every tradesman who holds a license protecting him from market competition, etc, etc. That's a hell of a lot of people. So the racket goes on.
This seems like the sensible course of action?
Also, any "value" from those things not being built is also invisible and very hard to factor in.
However the occupant was still harmed.
Individuals must have a complete context for the environment in which they operate in order to build "correctly." Permit reviews, building codes etc. codify that context so that builders don't need to carry the entire system context, even if they could, which often they can't. And as a result, buildings don't randomly fall over or catch fire with nearly the same frequency as they used to
What a backwards explanation. I've seen straighter shooting logic from politicians.
If not for the complex "system" these people would not have all this complex context to track. The system literally makes work that would not exist by being complex.
> And as a result, buildings don't randomly fall over or catch fire with nearly the same frequency as they used to
And we are just supposed to believe that this is the regulatory system and nothing to do with technological advances in materials and methods.
It's not like there's a control group. For all we know if one existed it may have done better and the system is slowing advancement rather than mandating it.
The complexity I'm talking about is not bureaucratic in nature, it's the result of complexity in our environment. Let's take a parallel example of a business - a individual contributor generally exists somewhere in a management hierarchy, with each person in the hierarchy having a different context they must stay aware of in order to do their work.
There is extra bureaucratic complexity on top of that, some of which sucks and doesn't need to exist, but I'm not talking about that.
I thinks it speaks volumes about the fact that you choose an IC as an example. Software is the ultimate example of an industry where a few people can get pretty far without the overhead of "checking everything all the time".
Of course due to the power imbalance of individuals against corporations and ordinary folks against billionaires it's usually very difficult to get reimbursed for the harm some will inevitably face and even when it succeeds it requires very expensive lawyers while the other side tries to stall for time - if the harm doesn't outright kill you or make you unable to seek reimbursement.
But yes, from a purely entrpreneurial point of view I can understand this desire. But at the end of the day the economy (and that includes the very concept of corporations, private ownership, public works, etc) exists to serve the people, not the other way around. People can exist without an economy. An economy can not exist without people (unless you consider simulations equivalent to the real thing). So in a way, increasing the potential for harm in the economy runs directly counter to the justification of the economy.
They tend to civil, rather than criminal, offenses, at least up until a certain level of severity or until they actually cause harm.
The tricky bit with the corporations you mention is that responsibility becomes diffuse, unless there is concrete evidence of a direct order to violate the law. What you're basically asking for is to make people into scapegoats because it feels good, not because there's actual justice involved.
Fixed.
The paces in the US that HN characterizes as backwards still for the most part do "seems reasonable, have fun" based permitting.
As another commenter explained, the need for permission is there to prevent harm before it can occur, rather than punishing it after it occurs, because the harm can be of the sort which cannot be undone.
If I want to build and sell houses, I should be able to do it, but it shouldn't take going to 10 government offices, filling out 50 forms and waiting a year for someone to give me a permit. And then, once I have built it, it shouldn't take another year for someone to check I did it correctly.
Certain checks just need time. A lack of qualified experts who are able to evaluation the situation for a permission is in such a case more likely than excessive bureaucracy.
> If I want to build and sell houses, I should be able to do it, but it shouldn't take going to 10 government offices, filling out 50 forms and waiting a year for someone to give me a permit. And then, once I have built it, it shouldn't take another year for someone to check I did it correctly.
That's how you end up with deathtraps who are poisoning their resident and folding down in themselves on the next earthquake or some strong wind.
Not sure how it requires 50 forms and 10 different physical offices to avoid deathtraps, that's kind of the situation in Poland (my home country) and the UK (where I live) has equivalent build quality with a lot less bureaucracy.
Why do we need experts? Because the bureaucracy demands it.
One should, in a novel situation, be able to just get a local university professor with relevant experience and an engineer to say "here's how we're gonna build it and in our professional experience we think it'll be fine.
Why does the bureaucracy even demand it? Lord f-ing knows if someone tries to sue them over a harm it'll be deflected because "we're government, you can't sue us over that".
- You create invariably numerous cases where culprits can't pay (post harm) because they are bankrupt at that point or possibly already dead themselves. This is unsatisfactory.
- You reward reckless behavior as long as nothing happens. I think that "recklessness", specifically, should be punished regardless of actual outcome (same for industry/corporations).
"Czech conservation authorities praised the beavers for their unexpected yet effective environmental work. Bohumil Fišer, head of the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, stated that the beavers "built the dams without any project documentation and for free", and achieved the desired ecological outcomes "practically overnight"."
For my last birthday I got a fantastic German beaver book by some Bavarian family visiting their local beaver family for several years.
>The largest beaver dam on Earth was discovered via satellite imagery in 2007, and since then only one person has trekked into the Canadian wild to see it. It’s a half-mile long and has created a 17-acre lake in the northern forest — a testament to the beaver’s resilience.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/worlds-largest-beaver-dam (2023)