[ghastmaster]

> There was also a cost in human life.

The article's first sentence, reads, "A few years ago, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the reverberations of Marc Andreessen’s epic essay, It’s Time To Build."

Here's the main point of "It’s Time to Build" regarding the failures in response to the covid pandemic: "Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t do in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to build."

The direct premise of this article is that our failure to build in the past is costing lives now and in the future. Im my opinion, many many more lives.

Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time. I think history shows that as technology advances and people's standard of living increases, people become more risk averse. General knowledge also increases over time, decreasing the proclivity for humans to put themselves in risky situations.

[hef19898]

That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are. But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains. And that line if thought is just selfish, entitled and short sighted. And quite prevelant in certain, especially rich and powerfull circles, unfortunately. But after those lives risked now aren't the rich and powerful ones.

[ghastmaster]

> Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are.

The point of regulation(in this context) is to preserve future lives. If future lives saved is impossible to quantify and that somehow invalidates the idea of less regulation, would it not therefore invalidate the idea of regualtion as well?

> But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains.

There is a concept called "Regulatory Capture". The idea is that businesses argue for regulation of their own industry in order to increase the cost for their competitors. This ensures their own survival. Many regulations in fact, serve merely to increase the personal gains of corporate shareholders. I certainly am not arguing for my current personal gain, but for the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. I do not own any stock or business.

[ImPostingOnHN]

>If future lives saved is impossible to quantify and that somehow invalidates the idea of less regulation, would it not therefore invalidate the idea of regualtion as well?

no, since the causality of regulation saving lives is more direct, obvious, and convincing than the causality of less regulation saving lives

the people holding the latter view would need to come up with a convincing argument explaining how less regulation saves more lives than more regulation, ideally specifying the regulation they wish to eliminate

[pas]

Zoning regulations mostly hurt the poor, even if lifting them would directly make profit for real estate developers.

That said there is a big difference between zoning and EPA regulations.

The only interesting thing in this article/blogpost is the 30 day limit of prop H.

It's a good thing. Every kind of bureaucracy should have cost-benefit analysis integrated into it. It's ridiculous that government agencies can decide critical things about people's lives but the decision framework is totally arbitrary.

[wizofaus]

> It's ridiculous that government agencies can decide critical things about people's lives but the decision framework is totally arbitrary.

Arguably that's what we elect governments to do. And if they're doing a bad job of it, they get voted out. Obviously it's not a very fine grained system and there's an argument for a constitutional requirement for legislation to be reviewed periodically but that carries the risk of even more bureaucracy and effective regulation being repealed for ideological/partisan reasons rather than any sort of evidence based analysis.

[pas]

I was sloppy in my phrasing, I mean building approval/permitting. A bunch of local delegates are required to meet to have a new simple building (whatever the neighborhood a bit bigger denser is simple) erected? And we are surprised that housing costs are outpacing inflation?

"urbanization" is ongoing for decades and density is not the default? and people are surprised that suburban sprawl is the result?

[wizofaus]

But areas with higher densities tend to have more regulation than those without, so I'm not sure what your argument is? I totally agree suburban sprawl is the really of poor government policy but I'm less convinced it's an issue of building permits being overly restrictive. It's not hard to envisage high levels of regulation that are designed to make sprawl unprofitable - e.g. a maximum distance between residences and retail/industrial developments or PT facilities, or even regulation that prevents provision of ground-level parking etc.

[pas]

My argument is that those areas would be even denser, more walkable, would support more people, better infrastructure (thanks to more people bearing the costs, plus economies of scale). Would be even more engines of wealth generation, would benefit more people overall.

Regulations are obviously necessary to coordinate large populations with some decent throughput, but they need to be optimized for legibility, efficiency. (Eg. self-service portals, understandable - easily human computable - conditions, the less need for domain experts for regular business as usual things, the more transparent and standardized the decision making of bureaucracy is, the less waste there is in the coordination system.)

Therefore for housing, which is as basic a function as it gets, ought to be as easy to add more as it can be. Eg. copy paste an existing building.

[coldtea]

>That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are.

Actually both are "future lives" (we're not saving someone we already know is about to die) and both are as easy or hard to quantify.

We can quantify average cost of lives in a big building project given X regulations applied (based on past experience with similar projects), and we can also quantify the impact of a project in first (and sometimes second) order effects (e.g. "building this highway bypass means X less traffic and congestion in that populated area, and thus X man-years spared, plus X less pollution").

[zaphar]

They are in no way equivalent in relative ease to quantify. Safety Regulations exist to protect from "known" harms. It is the result of learning from our past and applying that knowledge to our present and future. But anything in the unknown harms category is fundamentally unquantifiable. We know there are unknown harms out there. But we don't know

1) What they are

2) When they can happen

3) How many they could affect

You can't make decisions that help you avoid harms in that category. But you can make decisions in the other category. There is an argument that failing to build is for example in a category of known harms now. But so are a whole host of harms that we encountered to get where we are now. The trick is to make it easier to build while not also engaging in the rest of the known harms out there.

[coldtea]

>But anything in the unknown harms category is fundamentally unquantifiable

The "unknown harms" exist in workplace deaths. In fact many of them come from such factors. It's not just things like "asbestos is bad to work with, you need a face mask and other protection" or "construction debris might fall, workers need to wear a hard hat" and such, but also things like materials breaking under unforseen circumstances, unforseen disasters like earthquakes and fires while on the job, and more...

[brazzy]

> Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time.

You couldn't be more wrong.

> I think history shows that as technology advances and people's standard of living increases, people become more risk averse. General knowledge also increases over time, decreasing the proclivity for humans to put themselves in risky situations.

Except complexity increases faster than knowledge. It's flat out impossible for everyone to have full knowledge of all the risks that might be generated by people trying to make a buck by cutting corners on safety, and what you'd have to do to avoid those risks. And that's not even mentioning how risks can affect other people who never made a choice about them.

[ghastmaster]

Complexity increasing faster than general knowledge may be true, however, it is much easier for me to do assess safety with a search online for "death rate of copper vs coal miners" than it was in less complex times.

General knowledge has made people aware of complexities that warrant some investigation or questioning, before participating.

[ImPostingOnHN]

it is easier for you to assess safety with a search online than it was decades ago, it may be true, but complexity increases faster than general knowledge (much less specific knowledge), thus outweighing that

imagine having to become an absolute expert in cars and mechanics before buying a car, so you know of every possible corner that can be cut manufacturing a car and can check on it

or the same for construction when dealing with contractors you hired: now you need to know everything about construction to not get screwed

[bumby]

>Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time.

Doesn't this neglect the deaths in the short term? If we remove all speed limits and safety regulations on cars, there will likely be a spike in deaths. Maybe there will be enough public sentiment to change that, but there will be a lag that creates an awful lot of death in the near term.

(I'd also argue that regulation is one of the main mechanisms the public exerts such demands, because there is a natural asymmetry in market power between a manufacturer and a collection of individuals)

[ImPostingOnHN]

yes, it's a very cynical argument along the lines of "abolish the FDA and people will learn how to deal with food and drugs that negligently cause death

we did find a way to deal with it, it's regulation. if the regulation is too slow, fund more people doing the work.

[ghastmaster]

There are non government regulatory bodies. Underwriters Laboratories comes to mind.