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Comment by endymion-light | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has looked at things like Renewable energy deployments within the UK, this is a pattern that seems to be quite pervasive across all industries. The byzantine web of planning approvals, goose counting, public outcry that you have to deal with to deploy essentially a relatively small solar farm is monstrous.

What that results with is that the only people capable of creating & managing these processes have the legal teams & resources necessary, stifling growth. Even once you get an approval, it may be years in order to get a grid connection.

This risk averse attitude pervades into all walks of life, including medical beurocracy. This essentially locks out a ton of real innovation, as it's too expensive to square up against a mass of beurocracy attempting to stifle you at all turns.

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Its a double edged sword. yes, it stifles renewable energy innovation, but those rules are usually put in place in a more general sense, and you would really want them in place if next door was suddenly announced to be a landfill, or chemical plant, or a chicken farm, or an xAI datacenter....

The UK is begging for people to build datacenters: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/09/revealed-...

National governments maybe. Local ones aren’t, and it’s those that fill with nimbys and maintain the majority of control over planning

Everyone wants the datacenter somewhere in their country for sovereignty... just not next to them. Quelle surprise. At this point you may as well build supermarkets on top of them just to sell 'em to people.

They're so absurdly capital intensive at this point that they probably ought to be buried at least 50 meters down. If any reasonably capable countries ever face off directly they'll probably be one of the first things to go.

US suburban development followed nuclear war threats. Will history repeat itself by unconcentrating servers?

Given the rapidly increasing power densities I expect it would be far more straightforward to bury them. I believe a single 42u rack of last gen nvidia hardware is already more energy intensive than the HVAC for a mcmansion.

However it occurs to me that the electrical grid becomes a high priority military target in this scenario. Maybe datacenters should go all in on building their own power plants.

I think you've stumbled on the core problem - it's a lot easier if you have the funding to be able to do all of those things.

xAI would have the capital and lawyers necessary to push it through no matter what. You can hire "independent" environmental consultants to allow for these projects to be made with enough capital.

The problem with the UK is that these rules absolutley do not apply to be big players, it's a case of stifling smaller innovators while letting larger ones get off scot free.

I've personally seen the opposite where a government regulator hired an independent environmental consultant to document the decline of wildlife in a specific area. The problem was their findings were that the wildlife were actually doing exceptionally well in that area. The government promptly ignored the results and then stopped providing any further studies on the wildlife population under the logic they were never required to.

That's what a lot of people seemingly struggle to understand.

Inaction is not a safe action. Inaction has a price. And sometimes a death toll too.

It depends on your point of view. For the person deciding on giving permission they will not be thanked for allowing it, but might well be blamed if something goes horribly wrong.

That's kind of the issue with a lot of bureaucratic oversight. It often produces systems that aren't at all interested in being streamlined, in letting things that should happen happen. It produces systems where compliance is a drag on the one doing things, and the default state is "forbidden".

Yes, but this is a clasical agent-principal problem.

Theoretically, the bureaucracy works on your behalf, but only approximately so. If it makes a mistake that kills you, the decision maker does not pay any price.

UK planning law is not the same as medical research regulations.

UK planning law is the physical manifestation of legal tech debt. It will not be tackled until the daily mail and their readers are dead, and not replaced.

To make changes it requires lots of will from the government, and the consent of a bunch of people who are unlikely to give it.

medical regulation is fucking trivial by comparison. Most of it is arms length and technical. it can be changed according to evidence, rather than gut feeling. Its only in a few cases are there actual legal hard lines (like embryo research, and vivisection)

Fully agree - I think there's a core legalism inherent with especially the british political class. The first indication is always to build more guardrails and take fewer risks. It ends up killing innovation

People may not realise how bad uk planning law is unless they are here. Anybody can veto a development for any reason, and there is no disincentive to do so even if it is found to be spurious. They can just do it again. A development isn't just building either, it can be as simple as changing the use of something or making an improvement to it. On top of that are all the actual regulations, newt surveys, listed buildings restrictions, etc, and the many months of associated delays and costs with each one. In London the body set up after Grenfell now has a 10 month backlog and approval rate of 30%, so nothing is built in London except storage centres.

Maybe one solution for this issue would be some kind of “developer’s ombudsman” that is an affordable public service to 1) help people navigate the bureaucracy and 2) produce a report recommending streamlining of rules where possible.

This avoids “cutting down all the laws to punish the devil”. Some regulations are necessary.

Another bureaucracy to help people navigate the existing bureaucracy? Are you missing a "/s"?

No. The companies that hire lawyers to navigate government bureaucracy have their own internal bureaucracies. So the status quo is not “no bureaucracy”.

It seems that in any sufficiently complex thing there will be some irreducible amount of bureaucracy. So it’s reasonable to make that irreducible set of rules more accessible.

That's the great part of getting rid of government bureaucracy. You save a bit on that and a fortune on all the internal company bureaucracies that can be removed in response.

> Some regulations are necessary.

Genuine question — is there a common factor across the regulations you'd keep? Because if there is, you could encode that directly instead of maintaining the specific rules. And if there isn't, "some regulations are necessary" isn't really a position yet.

“Tear it down and see what breaks” is one strategy. I would suggest another based on the principle of Chesterton’s fence:

https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

The point of the ombudsman I suggested is that it’s hard to encode a simple rule in a sentence or two. You need to be familiar with the process so you’re not relearning the same lessons over and over.

To play the devils advocate, in places with low bureaucracy most of the risk taken is not innovation. It's just risk that leads to the death of others. Buildings with shitty concrete with too little rebar in it. Electrical wiring that will kill you. Improper foundations and such.

At the end of the day there is no simple answer here. It's no different than the talks about AI that dominate HN these days. You can build good things with AI, but the vast majority of it is crap, so we put up filters and hoops to ensure we don't get flooded with that crap.

The devil doesn't need any more advocates.

Evidently the construct of the devil does because humanity can help but setup complex situations that require a balanced approach rather than only looking at things one way.

In that case, you can explain the nuance and offer a more balanced viewpoint, without invoking the devil as an accountability sink. Your words should stand on their own merits. (To be fair, you did this! I'm just saying you shouldn't preface your words with a trite phrase that signals you'll be lobbing cheap logic over the wall and disavowing responsibility for your words if the logic proves faulty.)

At least to me it sounds like you just have problems with the incorrect use of the devils advocate by some people in the first place, of which I would actually hope you understand its use in rhetoric.

At least in the common HN discussion you nearly have to use its form when talking in an approving manner of things like regulation or unions because it goes against the Holy Church of Capitalism, lest you be punished by the mighty downvote button for heresy.

That isn't what devil's advocate means. Merely that you don't personally endorse the position you're presenting but are doing so nonetheless for whatever reason.

I'd say the underlying problem is our capital-first regulatory environments. For the topic of the original article, anyone can see that it would be reasonable for a guy who loves his dog to make what appears to be a prudent medical decision in her interest, trying out an unknown vaccine without any sort of government involvement - and a government that prevents this is unjust. But with the way the system is set up, if this were legally sound it would then automatically imply that a corpo scaling up the situation to thousands of dogs that it (the corpo) doesn't care about would also be okay. The fundamental problem is that there is no recognition of scale (because small scale operators don't have the pull with the government to fix the regulations).

The same government that writes these regulations also has a department that rounds up and kills stray dogs so this regulation is stupid at any scale.

In general outright killing is considered a completely different thing than medical experiments.

The same government also allows and profiteers from people murdering animals in the thousands every day, to be dismembered and sold

Speaking as someone from the US, this is by design. If there was a single track for approval, it'd be really easy for a motivated group to get stuff done. By requiring multiple overlapping layers of approvals (often in direct contradiction to one another) it ensures each layer of government can get their hands in the very much real cookie jar.

Have you tried the "forgiveness is easier than permission" approach? What would happen if you just installed the solar panels? I know that in some countries they'd come by with a bulldozer and tear them down again - is your country one of those?

I am not sure about a bulldozer, but in the UK you will be forced to demolish it yourself. I am not sure what the penalty is for failing to do so when ordered to, but it seems to be usually effective.

Likely the same as in most other countries: fines, further orders and eventually criminal prosecution.

when you go before a jury of your peers for having illegal solar panels on your roof, what will they say?

A solar farm isn't a few panels on your roof, it's a large installation in a field.

Also in the UK it would probably be a civil lawsuit, which doesn't have a jury, although if you violate a civil court order you can still get a jail sentence.

"Forgiveness is easier than permission" only makes sense when you know what you're doing and understand the consequences. (IE, paying taxes a little late in the US is okay because the fine is roughly the same as the interest of holding the money in the bank.)

In the case of solar panels, I'm going to assume the OP is talking about something like a grid-scale solar farm instead of rooftop solar production:

1: You need an agreement with "the grid" to get payment for the electricity you generate.

2: Feeding electricity into a power grid is a very dangerous thing, at a minimum the grid operator needs to make sure you aren't going to cause a fire or otherwise break their equipment.

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That being said: If you're a homeowner trying to set up a small solar installation, you can pair the panels with batteries and skip feeding into the grid.

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