[tialaramex]

However, one of the things you see (if you read enough of them) in accident investigation reports for regulated industries is a recurring pattern

1. Accident happens 2. Investigators conclude Accident would not happen if people did X. Recommend regulator requires that people do X, citing previous such recommendations each iteration 3. Regulator declined this recommendation, arguing it's too expensive to do X, or people already do X, or even (hilariously) both 4. Go to 1.

Too often, what happens is that eventually

5. Extremely Famous Accident Happens, e.g. killing loved celebrity Space Cowboy 6. Investigators conclude Accident would not happen if people did X, remind regulator that they have previously recommended requiring X 7. Press finally reads dozens of previous reports and so News Story says: Regulator killed Space Cowboy! 8. Regulator decides actually they always meant to require X after all

[ethbr1]

As bad as (3) sounds, I'll strongman the argument: it's important to keep the economic cost of any regulation in mind.*

On the one hand, you'd like to prevent the thing the regulation is seeking to prevent.

On the other hand, you'd have costs for the regulation to be implemented (one-time and/or ongoing).

"Is the good worth the costs?" is a question worth asking every time. (Not least because sometimes it lets you downscope/target regulations to get better good ROI)

*Yes, the easy pessimistic take is 'industry fights all regulation on cost grounds', but the fact that the argument is abused doesn't mean it doesn't have some underlying merit

[tialaramex]

I think conventionally the verb is "to steelman" with the intended contrast being to a strawman, an intentionally weak argument by analogy to how straw isn't strong but steel is. I understood what you meant by "strongman" but I think that "steelman" is better here.

There is indeed a good reason regulators aren't just obliged to institute all recommendations - that would be a lot of new rules. The only accident report I remember reading with zero recommendations was a MAIB (Maritime accidents) report here which concluded that a crew member of a fishing boat has died at sea after their vessel capsized because they both they and the skipper (who survived) were on heroin, the rationale for not recommending anything was that heroin is already illegal, operating a fishing boat while on heroin is already illegal, and it's also obviously a bad idea, so, there's nothing to recommend. "Don't do that".

Cost is rarely very persuasive to me, because it's very difficult to correctly estimate what it will actually cost to change something once you decided it's required - based on current reality where it is not. Mass production and clever cost reductions resulting from the normal commercial pressures tend to drive down costs when we require something but not before (and often not after we cease to require it either)

It's also difficult to anticipate all benefits from a good change without trying it. Lobbyists against a regulation will often try hard not to imagine benefits after all they're fighting not to be regulated. But once it's in action, it may be obvious to everyone that this was just a better idea and absurd it wasn't always the case.

Remember when you were allowed to smoke cigarettes on aeroplanes? That seems crazy, but at the time it was normal and I'm sure carriers insisted that not being allowed to do this would cost them money - and perhaps for a short while it did.

[ethbr1]

> it's very difficult to correctly estimate what it will actually cost to change something once you decided it's required - based on current reality where it is not. Mass production and clever cost reductions resulting from the normal commercial pressures tend to drive down costs

Difficult, but not impossible.

What are calculable and do NOT scale down is cost for compliance documentation and processes. Changing from 1 form of documentation to 4 forms of documentation has measurable cost, that will be imposed forever.

> It's also difficult to anticipate all benefits from a good change without trying it.

That's not a great argument, because it can be counterbalanced by the equally true opposite: it's difficult to anticipate all downsides to a change without trying it.

> Remember when you were allowed to smoke cigarettes on aeroplanes?

Remember when you could walk up to a gate 5 minutes before a flight, buy a ticket, and fly?

The current TSA security theater has had some benefits, but it's also made using airports far worse as a traveler.

[tialaramex]

I mean, I'm pretty sure there was a long period where you could walk up 5 minutes before, and fly on a plane where you're not allowed to smoke. It's completely unrelated.

The TSA makes no sense as a safety intervention, it's theatre, it's supposed to look like we're trying hard to solve the problem, not be an attempt to solve the problem, and if there was an accident investigation for 9/11 I can't think why, that's not an accident.

As to your specific claim about enforcement, actually we don't even know whether we'd increase paperwork overhead in many cases. Rationalization driven by new regulation can actually reduce this instead.

For a non-regulatory (at least in the sense that there's no government regulators involved) example consider Let's Encrypt's ACME which was discussed here recently. ACME complies with the "Ten Blessed Methods". But prior to Let's Encrypt the most common processes weren't stricter, or more robust, they were much worse and much more labour intensive. Some of them were prohibited more or less immediately when the "Ten Blessed Methods" were required because they're just obviously unacceptable.

The Proof of Control records from ACME are much better than what had been the usual practice prior yet Let's Encrypt is $0 at point of use and even if we count the actual cost (borne by donations rather than subscribers) it's much cheaper than the prior commercial operators had been for much more value delivered.

[ethbr1]

Smoking and TSA are unrelated.

You provided an example of where arguing against regulation was ill-conceived in hindsight. I offered an obvious example of the opposite (everyone against plane hijacking -> regulation -> air travel is made worse for everyone without much improvement for the primary issue).

> Rationalization driven by new regulation can actually reduce [paperwork] instead.

Ha! Anything is possible, I suppose.

I'd point out that the TBM were not ratified by committee (much less a government) and were rammed through by unilateral Mozilla fiat.

[tialaramex]

The CA/B Forum did in fact ratify these rules, which is why they're in its "Baseline Requirements".

They (I would say deliberately) stalled the process to actually make those rules binding on the CAs and that is where Mozilla used their fiat powers to just require this anyway, knowing that all the other trust stores would come for the ride and actually nobody at CA/B offered a legitimate reason not to do this, they just (again I would say deliberately) allowed it to get procedurally bogged down so that nothing would happen for a period of time.