There's a reason we don't just "let the builders build". We used to do that (certainly to a massively greater extent than we do now), and the result was that although a few of them managed to construct monuments we can all be proud of, most of them built a pile of crap and/or damaged the places they built in and the people they nominally built for. This is true of literal buildings, but it's also true of a great many other things that we "build".
The author of this delightfully titled but almost content-free piece seems not to consider Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place. For bonus points, a rigorous explanation of why the reasoning no longer applies in the current time period is helpful. TFA provided neither.
I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wound. The photos are amazing and beautiful, but they show how dangerous the working conditions were.
When someone fell off and died, the workers would take the rest of the day off, but be back on the job the next day.
We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US, which obviously drives up construction costs. But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing, and I bet that if you went and talked to the "builders" today, they'd prefer those costs to the ones we paid in the 1930s.
I believe you will not come to an agreement with those that find that the opposite is true (‘let builders build’) because ultimately it boils down to one’s outlook on life and what we deem important (‘our value system’).
By arguing in favour of regulation, you have a set of assumptions and expectations that support your view. For example, in the literal case of buildings, you might be thinking of rent-seekers and greedy fly-by-nights that build low cost housing in high rises that collapse years later (for example).
I could argue, these were never builders to begin with. They are copying something (very unoriginal) which doesn’t count as building, but is rather a very good example of entropy (of an initial good idea perhaps).
Those builders who really build, as in create, they are precious and rare, and only bloom in an environment of less regulation.
It is one of those many contradiction in life where you have to let the failures through to allow for something new and novel to emerge.
I believe that we owe our own existence to this principle, where evolution was a very wasteful process of many dead ends in terms of life forms that emerged from it but could not persist.
If evolution had been “conservative” I guarantee you intelligent life would not have emerged.
Transfer this principle to the evolution of ideas, or rather, creations, we will also stagnate ourselves into a dead end with our civilisation if the “regulators” ever get the upper hand.
(I am not saying they don’t have a purpose or should not exist; merely that they need to be balanced by the ‘chaotic creators’)
There's also a certain irony in looking favourably at the building speed and cost of an era when Depression labour oversupply could get a bridge built quickly and cheaply (with only 11 construction deaths!) but the longstanding invention of running water didn't find its way into grandma's house until well into the second decade of her life. And even people with running water saw it collected straight from the same rivers untreated waste was dumped into until the era of regulation.
In that sense, the history of smartphones looks a bit more impressive than that of running water...
Indeed. As the saying goes, legislation is often written in blood.
Like how the Triangle fire led to a rule that "you can't lock all the exits of a building, even if you're worried your workers will take unauthorized breaks".
> Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place
It's not the individual regulations themselves, it's the mass of regulations that's slowing things down. I'm sure SF has a ton of regulations around building housing. You can point to each rule and give a very good reason for why that rule is there. In fact you can go through the entire list of hoops developers go through the justify every single hoop.
And now you have an apartment building that's built to the standards that everyone agrees on, except there's just one problem, no one can afford it.
And that's the larger issue. All these regulations individually and on the surface to a service to the community by making sure that X or Y edge case never comes up. But they do arguably a massive disservice to the community by driving away affordable housing and business.
> seems not to consider Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place
This should probably be amended to “you should be able to demonstrate that you took reasonable measures to investigate why it came to exist in the first place.” Otherwise you’re likely to select for regulations whose reasons for existing are convoluted or even deliberately obfuscated.
I'll also note that he begins his piece by approvingly quoting Shakespeare's "Dick the Butcher," one of the henchmen of Jack Cade and a symbol of the descent of England into anarchy and mob rule; in the play, Cade is basically a Kentish Pol Pot and Dick his thuggish enforcer, who gleefully executes anyone who can read and write (instead of being illiterate like "an honest, plain-dealing man"). Maybe not the most felicitous opening -- but, then, he does essentially advocate for the overthrow of the regulatory state so we can "fearlessly build" with "permissionless innovation" ... Uber. And sidewalk scooters.
The costs of doing things the slow way as we do now hugely outweigh the benefits. Yes, buildings fall down less but they're so much more expensive that if you detregulated and put that money in healthcare you'd save an order of magnitude more lives than you lose.
A big factor is the costs of regulation and the fragility of innovation are both hugely underestimated. Every little form or permission slip is massively more costly than it would intuitively seem (though those who work improving BtC sales pipelines probably have a good feel for how much a little thing can deter someone from completing a sale).
Clearly there is a middle ground. Japan has this problem too, with real estate. So they reformed their zoning and permitting laws to make building easier, and it worked. Housing prices came down, and the negative effects were minimal.
Once upon a time, during the Lochner era, it was almost impossible to regulate in the US. While that environment had advantages, it clearly had many downsides. Since then, we have overcorrected, and made it too easy to regulate. We need to pull things back a little.
Regulation operates like a ratchet - it's easy to add, but hard to remove, both due to the lobbying/entrenched interests that benefit from it, and the optics of one obscure accident blown out of proportion after some safety rule is removed. Not even getting to the PR and corruption aspects when it's first introduced - I mean, look at congress under either party.
I think that should be the default assumption; that a given regulation was added because of corruption and PR. There needs to be rigorous explanation on why it's needed; frankly if I could go back in time and magically change the Constitution in some way I'd try to engineer a practical sunset rule that would require all laws and regulations on all levels to expire in a few years and be re-voted-upon (the part where re-voting on many laws might prevent adding more laws is by design).
I feel like there's some sort of a trade-off bias involved here - like when people mistakenly assume that if someone is smart they are not sociable or if someone is beautiful they must be dumb. Most countries are capable of building stuff cheaper, with less rules and far less workers (the latter even applies in Europe). "Oh well but it's less safe". But is it? Does anyone measure that? The buildings and bridges in China don't appear to fall down any more often than in the USA.
Arguendo, just look at the inflated costs of infrastructure he mentions. Well above inflation, well above even our European counterparts who have good unionization benefits, environmental concerns, and still manage to decently respect archeology and work within centuries old city plans. Why can't America build anymore? We weren't a toxic wasteland of robber barons and immigrant 16 hour a day labor 30 years ago. Not even 40 or 50.
It's telling that one of the examples given supporting the case was Marc Andreessen who, along with his wife, recently led a NIMBY revolt against a housing project in their posh town. Let them build, indeed.
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.
The same Marc Andreesen who complained that there shouldn't be housing built near him because it would lower his property prices?
How can someone who has read Why Nations Fail miss the point? We don't build for the same reasons that we didn't from the year -2000 to the Enlightenment. Because it's now better and easier in so many cases to just rent seek. Why bother constructing housing when you can just have other people's labour increase your land values? Why should I increase the supply of residency spots when constraining that supply increases my salary by $100k? Why bother with bold bets when you have net work effect monopolies? It's not talkers standing in the way of builders, it's leeches.
> Former head of the US patent office Charles Duell agreed: “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” he yelled from a hole in the mud in 1899.
Duell did not say that[0,1]; in fact, he said rather the opposite[2]:
"In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold."
The dictatorship of the articulate? So the author is clearly saying, "people" should not be in the room, or if in the room, be unable to speak, or if able to speak, be ignorant of their rights-- unless they support whatever he values. And then where will these people be? In which room? And what ability to speak should they have? And what about their rights should they know?
"In the old days, it was so cheap and easy and quick to steal indigenous lands. But now? What a fuss those guys make!" said the author, in my imagination as I hypothesize about how he thinks.
I guess the most charitable thing I can say is that maybe the author truly believes that once it's too late to stop the destruction of a historical building, or neighborhood, or wetland habitat, people will just shrug and learn to enjoy their new... Amazon distribution center or whatever he is so passionate to build for the world.
Essentially the more people have veto power or require consultation the harder it is to get anything done. The more policies and rules there are (particularly once uncertainty about what the rules are creeps in), the harder it is to build.
If you've worked in a large corporation and a 10 man startup this should be obvious. In the latter you can spin up a new service in a couple of hours. In the former a couple of months is a blistering pace.
This is what I consider the modern face of Fascism.
I know you're not supposed to use that word, because it really upsets Fascists.
But really, long passionately argued essays about how democratic governance is stopping us from returning to the good old days and we should let the powerful do whatever they want.
Using dubious emotional arguments like laundromats can't be historic buildings? Calling things dictatorships, run by the articulate? Warning that nations fail if everyone gets a seat at the table?
After playing around with GPT-3 a bit, I've started to suspect a lot of humans are actually very good at manipulating semantic sentences, without necessarily understanding their content.
It would explain why so many "smart" people will often speak long sentences that sound right, but have zero information content in them.
Maybe it's just not that hard to construct grammatically and semantically correct, but zero information gain sentences, paragraphs, speeches (as in, very hard, but much much easier than thinking new novel thoughts).
As a former technical writer for a major health insurance company, I can attest to this. After writing hundreds of massive documents, guides, tutorials, call scripts, policies and the like, I still had only a tenuous understanding of all the complex bullshit I was writing about.
For that specific industry, the convoluted and needlessly complex garbage is absolutely by design, but it’s a similar concept, I think.
According to the PIAAC, 54% of Americans are illiterate. That is, they are able to read simple things like menus, but they are not capable of synthesizing new information from multiple texts, or understanding the nuance of an authors argument. If I recall correctly, Americans scored an average of around 275/500, while the best scoring country, Finland, scored an average of 300/500. (This is a statistically significant jump, and causes a huge portion of those in Finland to not be considered illiterate, but they just begs the question of why the literacy cutoff is where it is.)
It’s not just easier than constructing novel thoughts - it’s safer, too. You get to leave the impression of being an eloquent, persuasive intellectual without any of the risk that comes with actually expressing something that people might then dislike.
It’s a funny coincidence that the field where we’re seeing the most innovation happens to be the one we regulated least, and that the fields that got worse are the most regulated ones.
---------
As Marc Andreessen remarks, in every case, the culprit is regulation.
Ho hum. And the 5 year old AEI chart that's been bumping around awhile.
IIRC TVs are so low because they use a trick called 'hedonic averaging' where a 27 inch TV at the same cost of a 19 inch TV actually costs 1/2 as much, since you get twice as many square inches. Even though, you know, you still are only watching 1 TV at a time and looking at 100% of the screen on both. Whatevs.
Whilst it's true that there are a lot more rules, there are areas that have been largely without them (crypto comes to mind), and outcomes are still often not so good. With as many people as there are on this Earth, packed as densely as they are, there are increasing amounts of commons, and also increasing numbers of tragedies occurring in these myriad commons as well.
I'm not sure getting things done for the sake of it is desirable if it means we have an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong, or unprofitable bullet trains running empty like China, or asbestos products or other things. The notion that we must “move fast and break hearts" on failed ideas is kind of fanciful, because in practice in society we don't often have a clear figure elected to do that; we don't live in a dictatorship where a flick of a finger can end a project after all. Councils and groups of talkers coming together are presumably trying to perform this actual function, and I think we don't necessarily give them credit for that.
Fundamentally, some of that articulate class is trying to preserve some kind of life style that they perceive is rapidly evaporating in the face of cheaply built things built purely for profit.
> we don't live in a dictatorship where a flick of a finger can end a project after all.
Sure we do: they're called planning, zoning, or environmental review boards. And process by which they operate has been engineered to make it increasingly easier to stop projects. In some states like California, any random person (they don't even need to live in the community!) has the power to stop projects for months, if not years, all but guaranteeing either failure or massive budget expenditures.
Your argument is basically a Slippery Slope argument. The flaws in Slippery Slope are well known, but the mentality is so very attractive to the way humans think. See, e.g., Prospect Theory. As a community becomes wealthier, more people have more to lose, and they will predictably become ever more cautious about change--any kind of change, even change that on its face is positive and enriching. In the back of their minds they're thinking, "But what if this, or what if that, later on down the road, causes the loss of what I already have." Everything begins to look like a zero-sum game.
Perhaps the only thing worse than this state of affairs is the complete opposite state of affairs, where most people are desperately poor. They have nothing to lose so they're happy to leap from radical project to radical project chasing a parade of cheap promises made by snake oil men. See, e.g., most any poor country.
"an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong"
That's an incredible way to frame place for people to live. You may find that aesthetically disgusting, that's your right, but I find the legally mandated suburbs of an expensive city to be morally disgusting given the impacts on the environment and poor people.
I think we can all agree that we would like less regulation on us when we are trying to do something, but I wonder how much less regulation we would accept on others who are trying to do something we don't like? I don't think many want to live in a world with no regulation, because some idiot would dumping old cars in the river by our house. I don't know if we're over-regulated or that the world has become more complicated. Sunshine rights over buildings is a good example of an issue that didn't exist years ago. You could make the case that we're under-regulated in an area such as crypto finance.
The chart in the article is nice fuel for the little conspiracy theory I've been internalizing for most of my adult life.
Isn't it suspicious, this hard divide between our wants and our needs?
Our wants (optional goods, luxuries) have gotten dramatically cheaper over time, an explosion of choice, high speed of innovation, accessible and affordable to a growing amount of people, etc.
Our needs (housing, healthcare, education, etc) that for most people in this world add up to the vast majority of their expenses, seem to do the exact opposite.
Imagine that your bills would be 10 times lower in the way a TV got 10 times cheaper. There's very little reason as to why this couldn't happen, but it seems zero or even negative progress has been the trend for decades in a row now.
We got toys and apps, but no true socio-economic progress (at least not in the developed world), in fact the opposite. Per household we work more, not less. Economic security is non-existent as you need to compete with the entire world now and every field is constantly disrupted. Achieving and persisting a basic middle class existence is starting to require a super human effort now. A few decades ago, all it required was a pulse.
The vested interest to at least keep things the same has an existential background. It's people latching on to economic survival. So no, they aren't going to "get out of your way" so you can "build".
This is not really the case everywhere. Healthcare and education are not drastically more expensive everywhere in the Western world. In Europe, these things have not increased in price to the same degree as the US and they are definitely more regulated than in the USA.
Housing is probably a special case because it's an investment, and house owners vote and make decisions based on this.
the article is certainly "Articulate", and i'm sure its content and message is agreeable to many in the community (myself included). no doubt that it speaks to the day-to-day chafes of working engineers and other technical folks in a corporate environment.
taking a look at the author's startup[1] is interesting. it seems clear that he's trying to collapse employees' personal slack afforded by remote/async work. that makes sense in terms of boosting butts-in-seats accountability, and i guess by some draconian measure that could translate to "productivity" (read: answering random interruptions to deep work). but i worry that the very dynamic he's espousing would itself kill builder culture. you can't think deeply about a problem when you have people bombarding your attention based on their own whims. from the company's landing page:
> Actually talk with your coworkers. Walk over to your teammate for a quick question. 10x faster than sending a zoom link.
also, i guess this is more aesthetic, but the skeuomorphism is super weird. i would be super suspicious of a work environment that requires this sort of SIMS-like virtual environment. it seems like a half-assed, 2D version of VR workplaces that are crawling their way out of R&D departments at certain advertising companies (looking at you Meta(verse)).
Weird how during the one tiny era in human history where we've had explosive exponential growth in {technological progress,wealth,etc} we destroyed both human cultures and biodiversity on a scale unprecedented except for the rare natural disasters our paleontologists call "mass extinction events", and created like arguably 2-4 looming existential risks to our species we have yet to figure out how to solve. Sometimes a bias for slower, more considered decisions might be... warranted? Just spitballin' here
Moving fast and building whatever you want on a small scale is probably more feasible than it ever has been. You can go get a 3D printer, use super advanced tools you can get relatively cheap on amazon to build physical things, and even write really crazy complex computer programs on consumer-grade machines that are considered "cheap and dinky". If you own some land that's not around a whole bunch of other people, you can probably build all sorts of fun structures and get away with it. Once that stuff starts scaling such that it affects other people, said other people are bound to care about and try to impose limitations on what you can build. That's called civilization, and it's done a lot more to help large-scale stuff get done eventually than it's done to impede it overall
Yes! I propose we start with the aviation industry which is in dire need of innovation. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a new type of airplane with pointy nose or funky looking wings. We need more new stuff and we need it now. We should regulate it less. Or better, let the manufacturers do it themselves. They build the thing and they know better after all. What could possibly go wrong?
This in my opinion was an anti-regulation tirade masked as a call to action to makers. I’ve worked now for a while with physical product development, and had worked before with web development. The main difference is that physical products have an ability to kill/maim/hurt you if not properly designed. I welcome regulations on electrical, mechanical and anything that will hurt you if improperly used. Most websites or consumer software in general won’t hurt you much.
I would appreciate more discussion on the nuances of design and working with limitations; from the brief, from the target, from the regulatory and compliance landscape. The great innovations come in satisfying all those constrains , and end up with a great product at a great price
Running water, and sewer pipes, of course were and are provided by government. So, too, electricity. It’s fun for the author to highlight all the progress of the 1930s.
When you’re a billionaire, every year you can keep government regulators and trustbusters at bay, whether in the 1870s (a lot of historical parallels) or today, the annual returns are material. They at least know their history, and know that sooner or later the jig will be up, but with a bit more time, maybe their names will go along with Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Frick, Mellon, Huntington, etc. In the meantime, for a few million, you can get the founders of portfolio companies to carry water for you about the importance of keeping regulation away from innovation.
Meanwhile, about that Triangle Shirtwaist factory…
There is a deep irony in writing an over-worded essay that effectively says 'I don't like it when people outside my profession regulate my actions'. Keep It Simple, Stooge.
This article is an interesting example of the cognitive difficulty of apprehending a complex society.
The bridges perfectly illustrate it. It is not uncommon that renovating a bridge costs more than the initial construction. However, it seems surprising, as the engineering challenges are more difficult to understand, and little additional value is created.
Urban planning complexity increases with a city's maturity. Imagine Paris or Rome. Every building is historical, owned by a combination of individuals and corporations, with water, gas, electricity, wastewater systems span centuries, and an underground with cavities for the subway, ancient mines, and WWII bunkers.
Sure, an app to hail taxis is a nice idea. As the article says, it's not running water, but it is nice. And sure, if committees had discussed it, it would probably never have existed. But a monopoly that takes a 20% cut on precarious workers is not a desirable outcome. So the articulate have stepped in.
Most citizens don't know how to spell CPU. They still have the right to choose their future.
I do have some sympathy with the general idea that we should be able to build a whole lot more than we are. The article takes some odd inspiration though. Marc "build but don't dare build near me" Andreessen. And Uber, which is a bonfire of money and has an infamously wasteful eng culture. Perhaps there's a meta-point being made that this is the best we can show in today's world. I hope not though. Surely there are better examples?
I also like the general idea, but there seems to be a weird underlying motivation. For me Uber is the prime example for bullshit (in the technical sense of the word) innovation. Stuff like Uber should be considered infrastructure so that the profits can go to the drivers. Perhaps the actual reason for lack of 'real' innovation is that it's not what's the most profitable? After all, nobody became a billionaire because the writer's grandma's town/village got running water and a sewage system.
The best example he could come up with in support of his position was Uber? Uber is certainly convenient, but it built its business by moving capital risk to its contractors and by heavily subsidizing fares for years, neither of which is sustainable. And despite that, it has changed very little about the world, other than to devastate taxi companies and further increase traffic in large cities.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|3 years ago|reply
The author of this delightfully titled but almost content-free piece seems not to consider Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place. For bonus points, a rigorous explanation of why the reasoning no longer applies in the current time period is helpful. TFA provided neither.
[+] [-] rwl|3 years ago|reply
I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wound. The photos are amazing and beautiful, but they show how dangerous the working conditions were.
When someone fell off and died, the workers would take the rest of the day off, but be back on the job the next day.
We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US, which obviously drives up construction costs. But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing, and I bet that if you went and talked to the "builders" today, they'd prefer those costs to the ones we paid in the 1930s.
[1]: https://museumca.org/exhibit/peter-stackpole-bridging-bay
[+] [-] shswkna|3 years ago|reply
By arguing in favour of regulation, you have a set of assumptions and expectations that support your view. For example, in the literal case of buildings, you might be thinking of rent-seekers and greedy fly-by-nights that build low cost housing in high rises that collapse years later (for example).
I could argue, these were never builders to begin with. They are copying something (very unoriginal) which doesn’t count as building, but is rather a very good example of entropy (of an initial good idea perhaps).
Those builders who really build, as in create, they are precious and rare, and only bloom in an environment of less regulation.
It is one of those many contradiction in life where you have to let the failures through to allow for something new and novel to emerge.
I believe that we owe our own existence to this principle, where evolution was a very wasteful process of many dead ends in terms of life forms that emerged from it but could not persist.
If evolution had been “conservative” I guarantee you intelligent life would not have emerged.
Transfer this principle to the evolution of ideas, or rather, creations, we will also stagnate ourselves into a dead end with our civilisation if the “regulators” ever get the upper hand.
(I am not saying they don’t have a purpose or should not exist; merely that they need to be balanced by the ‘chaotic creators’)
[+] [-] notahacker|3 years ago|reply
In that sense, the history of smartphones looks a bit more impressive than that of running water...
[+] [-] EdwardDiego|3 years ago|reply
Like how the Triangle fire led to a rule that "you can't lock all the exits of a building, even if you're worried your workers will take unauthorized breaks".
[+] [-] _fat_santa|3 years ago|reply
It's not the individual regulations themselves, it's the mass of regulations that's slowing things down. I'm sure SF has a ton of regulations around building housing. You can point to each rule and give a very good reason for why that rule is there. In fact you can go through the entire list of hoops developers go through the justify every single hoop.
And now you have an apartment building that's built to the standards that everyone agrees on, except there's just one problem, no one can afford it.
And that's the larger issue. All these regulations individually and on the surface to a service to the community by making sure that X or Y edge case never comes up. But they do arguably a massive disservice to the community by driving away affordable housing and business.
[+] [-] tshaddox|3 years ago|reply
This should probably be amended to “you should be able to demonstrate that you took reasonable measures to investigate why it came to exist in the first place.” Otherwise you’re likely to select for regulations whose reasons for existing are convoluted or even deliberately obfuscated.
[+] [-] HillRat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] concordDance|3 years ago|reply
A big factor is the costs of regulation and the fragility of innovation are both hugely underestimated. Every little form or permission slip is massively more costly than it would intuitively seem (though those who work improving BtC sales pipelines probably have a good feel for how much a little thing can deter someone from completing a sale).
[+] [-] namlem|3 years ago|reply
Once upon a time, during the Lochner era, it was almost impossible to regulate in the US. While that environment had advantages, it clearly had many downsides. Since then, we have overcorrected, and made it too easy to regulate. We need to pull things back a little.
[+] [-] sershe|3 years ago|reply
I think that should be the default assumption; that a given regulation was added because of corruption and PR. There needs to be rigorous explanation on why it's needed; frankly if I could go back in time and magically change the Constitution in some way I'd try to engineer a practical sunset rule that would require all laws and regulations on all levels to expire in a few years and be re-voted-upon (the part where re-voting on many laws might prevent adding more laws is by design).
I feel like there's some sort of a trade-off bias involved here - like when people mistakenly assume that if someone is smart they are not sociable or if someone is beautiful they must be dumb. Most countries are capable of building stuff cheaper, with less rules and far less workers (the latter even applies in Europe). "Oh well but it's less safe". But is it? Does anyone measure that? The buildings and bridges in China don't appear to fall down any more often than in the USA.
[+] [-] TremendousJudge|3 years ago|reply
Some examples from that time period: leaded gasoline, CFCs, shock therapy, suburban sprawl
[+] [-] lr4444lr|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] V_9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hahaxdxd123|3 years ago|reply
How can someone who has read Why Nations Fail miss the point? We don't build for the same reasons that we didn't from the year -2000 to the Enlightenment. Because it's now better and easier in so many cases to just rent seek. Why bother constructing housing when you can just have other people's labour increase your land values? Why should I increase the supply of residency spots when constraining that supply increases my salary by $100k? Why bother with bold bets when you have net work effect monopolies? It's not talkers standing in the way of builders, it's leeches.
[+] [-] miles|3 years ago|reply
Duell did not say that[0,1]; in fact, he said rather the opposite[2]:
"In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell#Everythi...
[1] https://gizmodo.com/7-famous-quotes-about-the-future-that-ar...
[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=VMcpAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA29#v=one...
[+] [-] satisfice|3 years ago|reply
"In the old days, it was so cheap and easy and quick to steal indigenous lands. But now? What a fuss those guys make!" said the author, in my imagination as I hypothesize about how he thinks.
I guess the most charitable thing I can say is that maybe the author truly believes that once it's too late to stop the destruction of a historical building, or neighborhood, or wetland habitat, people will just shrug and learn to enjoy their new... Amazon distribution center or whatever he is so passionate to build for the world.
[+] [-] concordDance|3 years ago|reply
If you've worked in a large corporation and a 10 man startup this should be obvious. In the latter you can spin up a new service in a couple of hours. In the former a couple of months is a blistering pace.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
I know you're not supposed to use that word, because it really upsets Fascists.
But really, long passionately argued essays about how democratic governance is stopping us from returning to the good old days and we should let the powerful do whatever they want.
Using dubious emotional arguments like laundromats can't be historic buildings? Calling things dictatorships, run by the articulate? Warning that nations fail if everyone gets a seat at the table?
This is not a good thing.
[+] [-] obblekk|3 years ago|reply
It would explain why so many "smart" people will often speak long sentences that sound right, but have zero information content in them.
Maybe it's just not that hard to construct grammatically and semantically correct, but zero information gain sentences, paragraphs, speeches (as in, very hard, but much much easier than thinking new novel thoughts).
[+] [-] coreyisthename|3 years ago|reply
For that specific industry, the convoluted and needlessly complex garbage is absolutely by design, but it’s a similar concept, I think.
[+] [-] throw149102|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _hcuq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharpneli|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zomglings|3 years ago|reply
"I have to listen carefully to <m> out of every <n> words they say."
I particularly admire people for whom n is small and m/n is close to 1.
[+] [-] crotho|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] BMc2020|3 years ago|reply
---------
As Marc Andreessen remarks, in every case, the culprit is regulation.
Ho hum. And the 5 year old AEI chart that's been bumping around awhile.
IIRC TVs are so low because they use a trick called 'hedonic averaging' where a 27 inch TV at the same cost of a 19 inch TV actually costs 1/2 as much, since you get twice as many square inches. Even though, you know, you still are only watching 1 TV at a time and looking at 100% of the screen on both. Whatevs.
Fresher info here https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_08102022.htm#c...
[+] [-] superchroma|3 years ago|reply
I'm not sure getting things done for the sake of it is desirable if it means we have an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong, or unprofitable bullet trains running empty like China, or asbestos products or other things. The notion that we must “move fast and break hearts" on failed ideas is kind of fanciful, because in practice in society we don't often have a clear figure elected to do that; we don't live in a dictatorship where a flick of a finger can end a project after all. Councils and groups of talkers coming together are presumably trying to perform this actual function, and I think we don't necessarily give them credit for that.
Fundamentally, some of that articulate class is trying to preserve some kind of life style that they perceive is rapidly evaporating in the face of cheaply built things built purely for profit.
[+] [-] wahern|3 years ago|reply
Sure we do: they're called planning, zoning, or environmental review boards. And process by which they operate has been engineered to make it increasingly easier to stop projects. In some states like California, any random person (they don't even need to live in the community!) has the power to stop projects for months, if not years, all but guaranteeing either failure or massive budget expenditures.
Your argument is basically a Slippery Slope argument. The flaws in Slippery Slope are well known, but the mentality is so very attractive to the way humans think. See, e.g., Prospect Theory. As a community becomes wealthier, more people have more to lose, and they will predictably become ever more cautious about change--any kind of change, even change that on its face is positive and enriching. In the back of their minds they're thinking, "But what if this, or what if that, later on down the road, causes the loss of what I already have." Everything begins to look like a zero-sum game.
Perhaps the only thing worse than this state of affairs is the complete opposite state of affairs, where most people are desperately poor. They have nothing to lose so they're happy to leap from radical project to radical project chasing a parade of cheap promises made by snake oil men. See, e.g., most any poor country.
[+] [-] hackerlight|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelwww|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleddr|3 years ago|reply
The chart in the article is nice fuel for the little conspiracy theory I've been internalizing for most of my adult life.
Isn't it suspicious, this hard divide between our wants and our needs?
Our wants (optional goods, luxuries) have gotten dramatically cheaper over time, an explosion of choice, high speed of innovation, accessible and affordable to a growing amount of people, etc.
Our needs (housing, healthcare, education, etc) that for most people in this world add up to the vast majority of their expenses, seem to do the exact opposite.
Imagine that your bills would be 10 times lower in the way a TV got 10 times cheaper. There's very little reason as to why this couldn't happen, but it seems zero or even negative progress has been the trend for decades in a row now.
We got toys and apps, but no true socio-economic progress (at least not in the developed world), in fact the opposite. Per household we work more, not less. Economic security is non-existent as you need to compete with the entire world now and every field is constantly disrupted. Achieving and persisting a basic middle class existence is starting to require a super human effort now. A few decades ago, all it required was a pulse.
The vested interest to at least keep things the same has an existential background. It's people latching on to economic survival. So no, they aren't going to "get out of your way" so you can "build".
[+] [-] rocgf|3 years ago|reply
Housing is probably a special case because it's an investment, and house owners vote and make decisions based on this.
[+] [-] ttldr|3 years ago|reply
taking a look at the author's startup[1] is interesting. it seems clear that he's trying to collapse employees' personal slack afforded by remote/async work. that makes sense in terms of boosting butts-in-seats accountability, and i guess by some draconian measure that could translate to "productivity" (read: answering random interruptions to deep work). but i worry that the very dynamic he's espousing would itself kill builder culture. you can't think deeply about a problem when you have people bombarding your attention based on their own whims. from the company's landing page:
> Actually talk with your coworkers. Walk over to your teammate for a quick question. 10x faster than sending a zoom link.
also, i guess this is more aesthetic, but the skeuomorphism is super weird. i would be super suspicious of a work environment that requires this sort of SIMS-like virtual environment. it seems like a half-assed, 2D version of VR workplaces that are crawling their way out of R&D departments at certain advertising companies (looking at you Meta(verse)).
[1] https://www.teamflowhq.com/
[+] [-] jstanley|3 years ago|reply
It's possible for a person to be wrong on one thing (though I'm not taking a view on whether they are) and right on another thing.
[+] [-] advael|3 years ago|reply
Moving fast and building whatever you want on a small scale is probably more feasible than it ever has been. You can go get a 3D printer, use super advanced tools you can get relatively cheap on amazon to build physical things, and even write really crazy complex computer programs on consumer-grade machines that are considered "cheap and dinky". If you own some land that's not around a whole bunch of other people, you can probably build all sorts of fun structures and get away with it. Once that stuff starts scaling such that it affects other people, said other people are bound to care about and try to impose limitations on what you can build. That's called civilization, and it's done a lot more to help large-scale stuff get done eventually than it's done to impede it overall
[+] [-] geraneum|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alpinemeadow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonstewart|3 years ago|reply
When you’re a billionaire, every year you can keep government regulators and trustbusters at bay, whether in the 1870s (a lot of historical parallels) or today, the annual returns are material. They at least know their history, and know that sooner or later the jig will be up, but with a bit more time, maybe their names will go along with Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Frick, Mellon, Huntington, etc. In the meantime, for a few million, you can get the founders of portfolio companies to carry water for you about the importance of keeping regulation away from innovation.
Meanwhile, about that Triangle Shirtwaist factory…
[+] [-] plaguepilled|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xalava|3 years ago|reply
The bridges perfectly illustrate it. It is not uncommon that renovating a bridge costs more than the initial construction. However, it seems surprising, as the engineering challenges are more difficult to understand, and little additional value is created.
Urban planning complexity increases with a city's maturity. Imagine Paris or Rome. Every building is historical, owned by a combination of individuals and corporations, with water, gas, electricity, wastewater systems span centuries, and an underground with cavities for the subway, ancient mines, and WWII bunkers.
Sure, an app to hail taxis is a nice idea. As the article says, it's not running water, but it is nice. And sure, if committees had discussed it, it would probably never have existed. But a monopoly that takes a 20% cut on precarious workers is not a desirable outcome. So the articulate have stepped in.
Most citizens don't know how to spell CPU. They still have the right to choose their future.
[+] [-] mrwh|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] skywhopper|3 years ago|reply