[msandford]

It allows people to do just barely enough to satisfy the rule and nothing more, which can be a problem if the rule is set too low. And to silence their (potentially legitimate) critics with the line "we comply with X, Y and Z regulations..."

If the rule system can't be gamed and those making the rules aren't allowed to participate in the activities they're ruling on, nor can they take kickbacks from those performing the activities then rules are an absolute good. But all those assumptions and assertions I made rarely hold in the real world. So their usefulness tends to be less of an absolute good and more of a mixed bag.

[jbert]

I still don't see how the claim made of "The only way that Goldman could possibly make more money by artificially delaying shipments would be because of a market-distorting regulation." gibes with "metal must be moved" as the offending regulation.

[msandford]

Because the "metal must be moved" number is way too low.

Imagine that your boss set metrics for you that you could knock out in 30 minutes, but the boss is paying you to be there for a full 8 hours. And imagine that if you worked harder than that, your reward was actually less pay. Also imagine no room for advancement. Someone from outside your company might say that situation is effed up. But to you working for just those 30 minutes and nothing more would be completely logical.

That's the situation facing these metal warehouses. Being efficient and shipping metal faster than absolutely required gets them no short term benefits and does them short term harm: reduced rents.

The problem isn't necessarily the "metal must be moved" rule it's the quantity in the "metal must be moved" rule. So some people say "fix the rule" and others say "abolish the rule" because of substantially different world views. Some people like maintaining and fixing code; others like organizing differently to reduce the amount of code necessary.

[jbert]

> Because the "metal must be moved" number is way too low.

I can see that the regulation might be ineffective because of that.

But I don't see how anyone could claim such a regulation makes it more profitable to make late shipments.

[msandford]

Currently the way the regs stand, people have to keep paying rent until the metal leaves the warehouse. So if the owner/manager of the warehouse drags its feet on every shipment and every shipment takes an extra week, that's a lot of rent.

One of the proposed solutions is that the warehouse isn't allowed to charge rent once the order to distribute the metal has been made, but that's not in the regs yet. It's merely propsed. Right now they do charge and as such have every incentive to delay as long as possible.