[wpietri]

Is your contention that the pharmaceutical industry is dying? Or that it has insufficient lobbying power to push back against regulations that don't improve safety in proportion to their costs?

But to answer your direct question, I think the answer is a pretty clear no. Financial companies invest a ton in communications. If there's a buck to be made from improving their tools so that their employees can communicate faster, they'll get around to it eventually. They'll just do it with tools that provide the sort of proper records that they've been obliged to keep since forever.

[ativzzz]

Not that it's dying at all - it just makes it more expensive for them to do literally anything. That cost ultimately trickles down to the consumer. The entire US healthcare industry contributes to this. It's extremely regulated, usually for good reason, but the consequences are that there are tons of middle men, bureaucracy, and inefficiency that makes the end product more expensive

And the safety is probably correct. It's a problem that I'm not sure how to address

[wpietri]

So one, if it's not pharma who's dying, who are you asserting is dying from regulation?

Two, you're ignoring the externalities here. Most regulations exist to account for negative externalities. If I sell big cookies on the street for $5 each and 1 person in 10 dies from eating my cookies, then my $50 in revenue has to be compared against the cost of the death. Food safety regulations have costs to be sure, but we have to measure them against the harm averted.

If a product is more expensive because its makers have to be more careful, then that's not inefficient. It's people having to pay the true costs of the product, which is more efficient overall.

It's also true that regulation can be inefficient, of course. But the solution for that is primarily for producers to be responsible members of society, and secondarily for them to work closely with regulators to find effective regulation at minimal cost.

But if effective regulation that properly places costs kills a company or an industry, I'd argue that industry should not exist in the first place. Something we're seeing rediscovered in real time with people like Sam Bankman-Fried.