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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Almost but not quite.

For most people, they never directly interact with government regulations because somebody else does it. They work for a large corporation and then the corporation requires them to do wasteful or nonsensical things which they ascribe to management incompetence, but it's really because the corporation's lawyers made it a requirement.

Then there are the people who are actually doing the compliance paperwork, but they don't object because it's the thing that pays their salary. Moreover, it's their occupation so all the time required to figure out how to do it is now a sunk cost for them and the last thing they want is to get rid of it and make all that time they invested worthless.

The people who object are the people trying to start a new business, because nobody is paying them to do things that don't make sense and all they want is to get on with what they're actually trying to accomplish instead of paying one fee after another or waiting on unaccountable regulators who have no reason to say no to something but still take excruciatingly long to say yes.

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> For most people

I guess I wasn't clear enough that I was referring to people who are directly encountering them, like the author of the post we're discussing.

I've worked directly with them. In my case, to get things approved didn't require any concerted effort or significant cost, it was just time. The government group would sit on the requests for a long time, doing nothing with them, asking no questions about what was submitted, and then approve them.

This wasn't speculation on our part either. We were told that was how it was done by one of the people involved in the approval process who was also frustrated by how long it took, but didn't have the power to change things.

The end result was that we did less work in these areas, even though there would have been significant benefit to the users of our systems and the public in general.

> The people who object are the people trying to start a new business, because nobody is paying them to do things that don't make sense and all they want is to get on with what they're actually trying to accomplish instead of paying one fee after another or waiting on unaccountable regulators who have no reason to say no to something but still take excruciatingly long to say yes.

This is an extremely disingenuous opinion, which causally omits the whole reason regulations are necessary and exist to start with.

The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.

Regulation is absolutely necessary because these orgs either don't care or are oblivious to the harm they are causing, and either way have absolutely no motivation to right their wrongs.

Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too much of an inconvenience?

It's perfectly fine to expect regulators to streamline their processes. What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical rentism from bureaucrats. They are accountability mechanisms designed to proactively prevent bad actors from causing harm to society as a whole, and they work by requiring that organizations proactively demonstrate they aren't causing said harm.

Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations already have a long track record of causing that very harm to society. Why is this fact ignored?

>The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.

The problem with blind government maximalism is that it ignores the fact that what these governments claim to actually be trying to accomplish can actually be harmful and have considerable negative impact on society in general.

Sure, but the fundamental premise is that good corporations are seeking to generate profits, and good governments are seeking to provide for their constituents.

A corporation that doesn't prioritize profits isn't a good corporation. You wouldn't buy stock in it. A government that isn't prioritizing its constituents is a bad one, you wouldn't vote for it.

Everything else is implementation detail but it's obvious that governments need to check corporate power because otherwise the inevitable end game is a corpotocracy ruling over factory towns of debt slaves.

I would challenge both of those.

Corporations exist to do whatever their directors or shareholders want them to do. For publicly-traded corporations that's typically to generate profits, but not all corporations are listed on a stock exchange and even the public ones could in principle have their shareholders vote to do something else. If a corporation wants to build electric cars to fight climate change or build housing to reduce housing scarcity, that doesn't make it "bad" -- it's good, and you don't want the government impeding that when somebody wants to do it. Or even when they want to do the same thing to make money, because it can be both things at once.

And just because a government that doesn't prioritize its constituents is bad doesn't mean that the government we have is good, or that every existing regulation is benefiting constituents rather than harming them.

> Everything else is implementation detail

Which is kind of the part that matters.

> If a corporation wants to build electric cars to fight climate change or build housing to reduce housing scarcity, that doesn't make it "bad" -- it's good, and you don't want the government impeding that when somebody wants to do it.

It's good so long as it's profitable and grows. The market determines good and bad, nothing else. Companies must grow indefinitely or their stock price drops, any earnings announcement makes this obvious, even positive growth earnings might cause a stock price drop if the earnings growth wasn't large enough. Flat earnings, with a margin increase? Stock price devaluation, see Microsoft / Xbox. The word is right there, value. The value of a company is determined by its market price (or theoretical market price if it's still private), and nothing else. The market value of its shares are the final word.

Sure, companies might occasionally do good things, but that core definition of value under capitalism doesn't change.

You're still stuck on publicly-traded corporations.

Try one of these. A non-profit gets a million dollars in donations to build new housing with the model of selling it into the market and using the proceeds to build even more. They still have to comply with all the laws, so you don't want the laws to adversarially impede its humanitarian mission to improve housing affordability and reduce homelessness, right?

> They still have to comply with all the laws, so you don't want the laws to adversarially impede its humanitarian mission to improve housing affordability and reduce homelessness, right?

I do want the laws to ensure that the buildings have fire escapes and no asbestos...

Non profits can, apparently, convert to for-profit ones, or be bought, or be corrupt funnels of government contract money to for-profit corporations.

These are arguments for improving and simplifying regulations, but not arguments against the idea that there should be an entity the represents nothing other than the needs of the constituents (the government) that will enforce rules on entities that wish to extract value from constituents (corporations). Non profit corps are attempts to exist within that system while playing by the rules but it doesn't change the fact that we still need the rules to control the hyperfauna wandering around.

> I do want the laws to ensure that the buildings have fire escapes and no asbestos...

The classic retreat into the subset of the rules that make sense.

But do you also want to ensure that they're no more than two stories tall and supply housing for no more than one family per lot?

> Non profits can, apparently, convert to for-profit ones, or be bought, or be corrupt funnels of government contract money to for-profit corporations.

Which one of these is the concern justifying that a house of a particular size not have a finished basement?

> These are arguments for improving and simplifying regulations, but not arguments against the idea that there should be an entity the represents nothing other than the needs of the constituents (the government) that will enforce rules on entities that wish to extract value from constituents (corporations).

You're back to that assumption that the government represents nothing other than the needs of the constituents. That one's the broken one.

The government has a monopoly on force and anyone who seeks power will work to capture it. It's not a loyal pet and its teeth have blood on them.

> The classic retreat into the subset of the rules that make sense.

Yes, because lasseiz-faire has no allowance for the subset of rules that make sense, so I oppose that mindset, but I don't oppose one that promotes simplified, context aware regulations, such as what the PRC has.

> The government has a monopoly on force and anyone who seeks power will work to capture it. It's not a loyal pet and its teeth have blood on them.

Right, my argument applies only if there's an existent state, and is basically to make the most of it by at least checking the power of corporations, which are more motivated to harm people than governments. If you say there can be bad governments, sure yes, but that's just as much an indictment of lasseiz-faire economics since there can be bad corporations too, and in fact that's far more likely.

Ideally there's no state at all, but the only way to have that without corpotocracy is to also dismantle capitalism and private property, and something tells me you wouldn't be a fan of that either...

In the situation that the personnel and legal code of the government depend very little on the outcome of elections in practice, would you say that the incentives for a government would be rather different?

> The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.

We were trying to make our weather monitoring systems better, at minimal or no cost to our customers and the public.

> What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical rentism from bureaucrats

In our case it was, and we were told that it was from one of the people involved in the approval process.

> The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.

The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids. What actual harm and considerable negative impact on society in general are you referring to in this context?

> Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too much of an inconvenience?

Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill considered or poorly drafted and require things that are not aligned with their ostensible purpose.

> What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical rentism from bureaucrats.

How about whimsical rentism from incumbents who want to exclude competitors or avaricious middlemen who want their services to be expensive and mandatory, and capture the regulators to make that happen?

> Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations already have a long track record of causing that very harm to society. Why is this fact ignored?

The subset of the rules that aren't actually necessary aren't actually necessary. Why is this fact ignored?

> The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids. What actual harm and considerable negative impact on society in general are you referring to in this context?

For almost any regulation, no matter how important it is and how much good it does, there will be some things it does not allow that it should. A regulation will either need to let the bad stuff through, not let the good stuff through, or some mixture of the two.

Now consider that many individual regulations get added; the vast majority of them for good reasons. But since each one has some cases it fails for, the combination of them has a combination (generally larger than the sum of it's parts) that it fails for.

But that mean that regulations are bad in general. It means that making rules to protect society is HARD. Like REALLY hard, staggeringly so. And even doing the best you possibly can (which is a stretch for most government), you're still going to wind up with things that can't be done... but should be able to.

The solution isn't to get rid of (all) regulations... it's to try to figure out how to make them better.

The claim that something is hard to do properly is an argument for doing it less often, i.e. limiting it to the cases when the benefit is unambiguously large and staying away from borderline cases where overhead and collateral damage will leave you underwater.

It's also an argument for requiring the government to internalize the costs it imposes, e.g. if it wants testing done then it should pay for it from general revenue so that the cost of it is accounted for in the government budget instead of imposing an unfunded mandate. Then if the cost is reasonable this isn't a problem and if the cost is unreasonable the government is causing a problem for itself instead of innocent third parties, which puts the incentive to fix it in the right place.

> The claim that something is hard to do properly is an argument for doing it less often

I don't even believe that you believe this.

> the benefit is unambiguously large and staying away from borderline cases

If this was easy, don't you think maybe that's what people would be doing?

> if it wants testing done then it should pay for it from general revenue

???

So if I build a car, screw it up, have to test it 500 times just to pass and be allowed to sell it, that's the governments problem? If I open a bank and take peoples money, its up to the government to take initiative on making sure I'm not screwing them over?

> instead of imposing an unfunded mandate

What? So now any test the government mandates is an unfunded mandate? Like food tests?

This is obviously getting way to political because none of the arguments are making any sense, and are completely disconnected from reality.

I don't even consider myself pro regulation but this is just the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting LALALALALALA.

> I don't even believe that you believe this.

Is your position that when something is intractably easy to screw up we should do it as much as possible?

> If this was easy, don't you think maybe that's what people would be doing?

Which people? The ones with a structural incentive to not do that?

> So if I build a car, screw it up, have to test it 500 times just to pass and be allowed to sell it, that's the governments problem?

It seems like it's still your problem because you want to sell the car and therefore want it to pass.

Whereas if the test is unreasonably expensive then the government has a problem, but the problem is of its own making and it now has the incentive to fix the problem instead of burdening someone else with it.

> If I open a bank and take peoples money, its up to the government to take initiative on making sure I'm not screwing them over?

It is indeed the role of law enforcement to enforce the laws.

> What? So now any test the government mandates is an unfunded mandate? Like food tests?

Is your argument that it isn't an unfunded mandate supposed to be that the test isn't mandated or that the government is actually funding it?

> Is your position that when something is intractably easy to screw up we should do it as much as possible?

No, if that was my position, you would've found out by me saying that was my position.

> Which people? The ones with a structural incentive to not do that?

Why would they have such an incentive? This is all hyperbole.

> but the problem is of its own making

It really isn't. Its expensive to test cars, and its also necessary for safety.

> It is indeed the role of law enforcement to enforce the laws.

Yes, which get codified as regulation.

> Is your argument that it isn't an unfunded mandate

Again, if my argument was something you would find out.

I'm saying what I'm saying: your arguments don't make sense, they are hyperbole, I am not defending or attacking a specific take on regulation, other than the take that, guess what, its hard.

> No, if that was my position, you would've found out by me saying that was my position.

That was the contrary to the thing you were originally incredulous about.

> Why would they have such an incentive?

Why would members of the government have a structural incentive to pass laws at the behest of special interests? Because they get money for it.

> It really isn't. Its expensive to test cars, and its also necessary for safety.

If it's worth more to the public than it costs then the public should pay for it. If it isn't worth more than it costs then it shouldn't be done. Why would either of these be a problem?

> Yes, which get codified as regulation.

If the bank takes your money and loses it at the casino, they're going to be in trouble, and they're supposed to be in trouble.

If the bank takes your money and it's all still in the vault and was never at any risk, but the government wants to punish them for letting you open an account in the name of your dog, or for not filing enough suspicious activity reports even if it requires filing them against innocent people, the government is wrong and the bank should not be in trouble for that.

> Again, if my argument was something you would find out.

Apparently I wouldn't, because there are only three options and you're not revealing which one you believe. Is it:

a) an unfunded mandate

b) not mandated

c) the government is funding it

That is the entire solution space, it has to be at least one of those, so which one is your position?

> That was the contrary to the thing you were originally incredulous about

Indeed, and not everything or everybody in the world consists of completely contrarian opposite opinions :-)

> Why would members of the government have a structural incentive to pass laws at the behest of special interests? Because they get money for it.

Not in a functioning democratic government, i.e most of them.

> If it's worth more to the public than it costs then the public should pay for it.

I think you should write a 10 page book that solves all the worlds problem by just taking surface-level obvious directions on big nuanced topics, I'm sure it will be transformational.

> and they're supposed to be in trouble.

Again simplified, the bank doesn't do this. It does things similar to it, how similar is too similar? That's what regulation tells you.

> because there are only three options

Again, no there aren't. I understand that you feel this way, but things can differ on a case by case basis without being hypocritical. The world is complex, unique circumstances require unique responses. Overly unique responses create bureaucracy and overhead and edge cases. Neither is ideal. Walk the line, balance it out, that's governments' job. Do they always succeed? No. Can the problem be solved by a two paragraph simplified solution on an online board? Also no.

Needlessly polarizing every topic into dogmatic rules is exactly the thing you are accusing governments of, and are yourself now doing. Reality is harder than mathematical or rhetorical logic, because of ethics, because of complex interacting systems, because people don't act rationally, because people don't act in their own interest etc etc etc.

There are plenty of governments that use tools to overstep their bounds, yours included, those same governments are also using tools to protect people from harm. Both tools are the same tools.

> Whereas if the test is unreasonably expensive then the government has a problem

There's a matter of scale here...

A single company doing the test(s) for itself

The government paying for the tests for as many companies has happen to want to try their hand in the field.

Expecting the government to pay for testing for every company is, for most cases, unreasonable.

you'll be more at home over on https://www.reddit.com

This doesn't seem constructive.

Agreed, I'd say it's on par with:

What? So now any test the government mandates is an unfunded mandate? Like food tests?

This is obviously getting way to political because none of the arguments are making any sense, and are completely disconnected from reality.

I don't even consider myself pro regulation but this is just the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and shouting LALALALALALA.

I'd disagree, because at least I'm trying to explain myself.

What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion. Just as you can come up with a few examples of things you think should be less regulated (and many people may agree), others can come up with a few examples of things they think should be more regulated (and many people may also agree).

> What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion.

The blog post clearly tries to frame their problems complying with existing regulation as stumbling upon road blocks which just so happen to comprise only of unnecessary rules.

It's quite the coincidence how each and every single restriction that isn't met ends up being unnecessary.

> What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion.

To begin with, no it isn't. There are a lot of existing regulations that serve no legitimate purpose. Some exist solely at the behest of incumbents and are enacted under a false pretext by corrupt government officials; no one supports them who isn't being disingenuous. Others aren't even wanted by anyone and are simply regulatory errors that failed to account for something that actually happens, but the people impacted don't have the political influence to correct it.

Moreover, what if there are some regulations that people differ on? Should we keep the ones only a minority of people think are a good idea, just because they already exist?

> To begin with, no it isn't. There are a lot of existing regulations that serve no legitimate purpose.

Citation needed. Specially referring to TFA.

You know what there is a lot of? Organizations trying to push onto the public hazardous and subpar products. Those are the ones mostly affected by regulation, because that's precisely what regulation is designed to shield society from.

So it comes as no surprise that there are companies complaining that regulation prevents them from doing business. That's by design, and represents a much needed market pressure to prevent bad actors from screwing everything and everyone around them.

> Citation needed. Specially referring to TFA.

Explain the legitimate purpose of requiring a device that runs on batteries to be tested for emissions, not just once but for every subspecies of truck you want to use it with.

> You know what there is a lot of? Organizations trying to push onto the public hazardous and subpar products. Those are the ones mostly affected by regulation, because that's precisely what regulation is designed to shield society from.

You're confusing the nominal intention of the regulations with their actual effect. The map is not the territory.

> The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids.

No. The article is about someone who is whining about having to comply with regulation. But not all regulation, only the one they feel they are having trouble complying with.

There is a difference. And a nuance.

You'd be naive if you were hoping to get objective statements from what reads clearly as a promotion piece.

> Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill considered or poorly drafted and require things that are not aligned with their ostensible purpose.

You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish. We need to discuss objectively verifiable facts if you want to attack specific regulations, though. I don't see fact-based arguments being made, and that reads like a desperate straw man.

> No. The article is about someone who is whining about having to comply with regulation. But not all regulation, only the one they feel they are having trouble complying with.

Which brings us to the question of whether the regulation they're complaining about is actually objectionable. And it appears that they rather have a point. Why should they have to spend millions of dollars testing for something that makes no sense in this context? Why is the government even testing for this at all, when fuel is a semi truck's primary operating cost and buyers are going to be highly sensitive to fuel efficiency independent of any government regulations?

> You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish.

This is not a hypothetical unless your contention is that all existing regulations are entirely without flaws or inefficiencies.

> We need to discuss objectively verifiable facts if you want to attack specific regulations, though.

Do you want to try to defend the rule requiring them to spend millions of dollars on certifications for no apparent benefit to anyone?

> Why should they have to spend millions of dollars testing for something that makes no sense in this context?

To have data to back the claims being made.

The requirement doesn't depend on the company having made any particular claims.

False. The claim, even if implicit, is "does not increase emissions beyond particular threshold within particular operational domain".

Further, the article makes a claim that there are more emissions testing groups to test on than there are individual members, which cannot be true.

> The claim, even if implicit, is "does not increase emissions beyond particular threshold within particular operational domain".

So the government wants data to validate a claim the company never explicitly made, but the government doesn't want to pay for the data, and the nature of the product is such that data showing higher emissions would be baffling and implausible. We're back to, how does this make any sense?

> Further, the article makes a claim that there are more emissions testing groups to test on than there are individual members, which cannot be true.

Consider the possibility that an "engine family" could be an engine configured in a given way rather than a set of distinct engines.

> So the government wants data to validate a claim

The claim is "our contraption is roadworthy", which implicitly includes claims regarding roadworthiness requirements, including emissions. This is literally how market availability works.

> Consider the possibility that an "engine family" could be an engine configured in a given way rather than a set of distinct engines.

"Engine family" is a set of particular engine configurations/codes, specifically to reduce re-test burden. Group validation automatically validates all group members, therefore there are at most number of engines groups to test. I suspect the testing requirements are not for the engines, though, but why would an article by a startup struggling to follow regulations misrepresent the regulations?

> The claim is "our contraption is roadworthy", which implicitly includes claims regarding roadworthiness requirements, including emissions. This is literally how market availability works.

You can't get around the government demanding that someone else pay an unreasonable amount of money for data that only the government wants. If they think the value to the public of the testing is worth the cost then why aren't they paying for it? If it isn't worth the cost then why are they forcing someone else to pay for it?

> Group validation automatically validates all group members, therefore there are at most number of engines groups to test.

Unless the state requires you to test all 270 engine groups regardless of how many you're actually using.

It's an electric motor with no emissions and therefore can't possibly increase emissions. There's your data. No regulations needed.

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