[Zufriedenheit]

A story from a german town: We have an 200 year old bridge, which can't be used anymore. It's a small bridge only about 100m long and 5m high i would guess. The state owned railroad wants to replace it. Everybody agrees. Local people are happy. They simple want to build the new one right next to the old one and then take the old one down. But still in spite of everybody agreeing it took 20 years!! to get the permit. They have finally started construction 5 years ago and the costs have doubled multiple times and are now in the hundreds of millions. They say that hopefully in another 5 years from now they might be finished with construction. For all those years the locals have to take a long detour because the bridge can't be used. I have recently read how in china they finished the tallest bridge of the world in a 3 year construction and the cost was less than our little bridge here. After hearing about this i realized how doomed we are. We have regulated our selfs into a total standstill. I can understand if we are maybe 10-30% slower due to better environmental protection, but if me are slower and more expensive by a factor 10, then we are just not competitive at all. This reads like satire but it is actually happening.

[throwaway_20357]

It seems a lot of blame is put on regulation when there is also a lack of a "can do attitude" or a sense or urgency that procedures that might have been okay to take a couple of years in the past have to happen much more quickly nowadays.

[holowoodman]

The lack of can-do-attitude can be explained by regulations, imho. After you've seen the first few trivial things take ages because somebody has yet to stamp form 23b in triplicate and hand in 1k pages of environmental impact assessment, noise studies and socio-economic impact predictions, you loose the belief that you can do anything here. After you've been stonewalled by a few bureaucrats over a missing comma in their particular interpretation of subsection b12 subparagraph d footnote 11, you start going about your days looking for excuses not do to any work as well. After several people have cited "liability" and "legal risk" as arguments against babysitting their neighours cat for a day, you might start fearing that nebulous liability thing yourself.

The whole culture is poisoned by regulations imho.

[ulfw]

Previous poster got a point though. Yes regulations are ridiculous thanks to every German and every EU government piling on more crap. Zero argument there. 100% true.

But its also true that things CAN get through regulations. 1000 pages of environmental impact assessment takes time. But it doesn't take years. Things can be done in parallel if someone actually gave a fuck.

Sadly no one does because by the time anything starts 2-3 new governments/administrators/mayors have been in place. And people don't like to work on things someone else already took credit for.

[holowoodman]

> 1000 pages of environmental impact assessment takes time. But it doesn't take years.

Oh, but it does. For example, if there is a suspected hamster population, you need at least one year of data gathering to assess local population state. And then you need a resettlement plan for the hamsters. This alone takes at least a year because of the data gathering, and of course you need an expensive and busy hamster expert to do the gathering and writing.

German only, but I guess a translation tool can get across the most absurd points ;) https://artenschutz.naturschutzinformationen.nrw.de/artensch...

Oh, and btw, that's just for permitting. After you get your permit, you have to have those hamsters professionally resettled, observed and documented.

You are right that it is theoretically still possible to get stuff done. Prime example is Elon Musks Gigafactory in Brandenburg, where there was enough political and economic pressure to get it done. But that is a rare thing to happen, and lots of those steps you have to do are out of your control and up to some bureaucrat who is of course "very busy" and "cannot at this time give an estimate as to when the permit might be completed". It is just hard to convey how bad it really is...

[silexia]

Regulation is slowly strangling most countries. We need to find ways to stop the continuous cancerous growth of bureaucracy. Currently it is impossible to fire any government employees, meaning they keep adding more and more and the old ones just stop working. No more work gets done overall.