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This is an interesting commentary on Andreesen’s piece, but it doesn’t really change or contradict anything. At the end of the day, the US is a litigious socie

• josinalvo 7y ago
  > Illegal in the vast majority of the United States, where 2+ parking spaces per home are required by law What does that mean? Do people need to build homes with at least 2 parking spaces per home, inside the area of their property? Does it generalize to apartments?
• fierarul 7y ago
  Dealing with people you discover that all the weird rules are there because somebody or a situation made them necessary. For every well meaning well behaving individual there is another that will park his car in your freaking back yard if you don't fence your property. Would you raise a building while taking into account the surrounding people and context? Well, perhaps. But many others will absolutely destroy the location in all concerns and just maximise square footage. This problem has no solution! Whatever set of rules you agree upon, somebody will find a creative way to mess with them and a new rule or clarification will need to be added. Then people will complain why so many rules.
  • MattGaiser 7y ago
    > somebody will find a creative way to mess with them and a new rule or clarification will need to be added. Rules can be rewritten in a cohesive way or rules can be written as just an endless series of if statements which may contradict with other if statements. It would be useful for laws to have an automated test suite so that known good uses cases wouldn't be broken down the road.
    • fierarul 7y ago
      I agree that laws could / should approach software. But we've been having bugs and exploits in software since the beginning. And law has to cover an even wider field of situations.
      • dataduck 7y ago
        No way. Software works for predictable inputs producing well-defined desired outputs. Reality is nothing like this. Actually good rule systems are ambiguous or weak enough that when someone tries to abuse edge cases, people can turn round and say "no" and the rules don't get in the way.
        • josinalvo 7y ago
          (mostly) Everyone likes this flexibility. The question is some people find the cost too much. Maybe it is better to have a law that is explicitly dumb, in exchange for fast, cheap and predictable (kinda like computers, if you think about it)
    • gamblor956 7y ago
      Humans are not machines, language is not code, and the real world is not binary. An automated test suite for laws is NP-hard.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • BurningFrog 7y ago
• wccrawford 7y ago
  I'm sure the parking space thing exists because of all the people who thought they only needed 1 space, but it turned out they needed at least 2. And then they parked in other spaces or in the way of everyone else because they were short-sighted. And so it's just required now.
  • covidacct 7y ago
    Counter-point: The "everyone needs ridiculous amount of driveway space" rule existed in a suburb I lived in. We had exceptionally wide streets, but parking any car in the street for any amount of time was strictly forbidden. All of my neighbors complained about how "ghetto" our street looked when my parents visited and parked in the street. People really actually hated the idea of anyone parking in the street, even for a weekend, and so we needed driveways that were large enough to handle the 3 days of the year when we had a couple extra cars around. That rule was dumb and unnecessary, but was also not a "pointless regulation", it was not "regulatory capture" by the Big Driveway Cartel, and it definitely wasn't a response to a legitimate need for more parking (again, super wide streets that sat empty). It was just a reflection of the deeply held convictions of an extraordinarily parochial population.
    • TuringNYC 7y ago
      Counter-counter-point: Sometimes it is about the level at which the policy is applied. It may be easier to apply it at a county level or state level, etc. It might not make sense for every single street in the county, but since many policies are enforced at a certain level (county, city, state, country) you need to match the policy to the level at which it would be enforced. Otherwise you'd have a gerrymandered law that applies on some streets and not others, which would create yet other problems.
  • danans 7y ago
    > thought they only needed 1 space, but it turned out they needed at least 2. It has a lot more to do with historical post WW2 urban planning models which were designed to make room for increasing household car ownership, which did happen over the decades as public transportation systems were either dismantled or never built in the first place. Consumers of the time readily bought into that model. We are only reevaluating it today in light of its failure modes.
• chriswphoto 7y ago
  Join a YIMBY group in SF! We have to fight for equal opportunity. Zoning is the new redlining, and Silicon Valley is the epicenter of the problem.
• CPLX 7y ago
  > At the end of the day, the US is a litigious society covered in Byzantine regulation that most people aren’t even aware of. I dunno, maybe? In some ways yes, in many ways no. > this covers the most basic things: would you like to build a townhouse...apartment building in San Francisco... That seems awfully specific. I think it's clear to any outside observer that Bay Area residential real estate policy is literally insane. That doesn't really have all that much to do with this essay or the Andreesen one that precedes it though.
  • pchristensen 7y ago
    Real estate policy is insane everywhere - San Francisco is one place where the market pressure is exposing the insanity.
    • burlesona 7y ago
      Yes, and far from the only one. When you adjust for local wages and higher property taxes, things in Seattle and Austin are almost just as bad.
• PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
  This is so very, very wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence "Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood." What you've written is an all-too typical complaint of people who don't bother to understand the history of our existing legal, political and social structures. It's easy to hand wave and vent about "regulatory capture" (I do it all the time). But go and dig down and find out why that 2+ parking space rule exists. You will find a massively more complex, and much more pro-public, pro-people, pro-progress agenda in play than anything you just wrote suggests. I remember an example of this sort of thing that I came across in eastern WA about 20+ years ago. A small town there was facing protests because it was about to put down ("execute") several wild horses that were hanging about the town. The law was very clear about what had to be done, but the public, both in town and elsewhere in the state were aghast. The horses were healthy, beautiful and there seemed to be no good justification for killing the as the law required. People complained about the law being an ass (no pun intended) and said that this was the perfect example of government inflexibility and law making by people with selfish interests. But all it took was a little history detour to go back and find out why the law(s) in question had come into being. It had indeed been the case that in the not too distant past (by global standards, not necessarily those of the western US), wild horses had indeed been a problem in town, and that the towns people had tried several approaches to dealing with and/or fixing the problems. None of them had been very successful, and some 80 years earlier, the town had reluctantly adopted a law where an unowned horse, if not claimed by anyone within a reasonable period of notice, must be put down. This wasn't government inflexibility, or stupid law, or selfish interests: it was a community improvising to deal with a tricky situation, and doing so imperfectly. Improving this particular law, and others like it (such as your 2+ parking space case) isn't going to happen by assuming that the existing legal framework exists because of malintent. It's going to happen by carefully understanding the context and motivations and knowledge that led to the current laws, and only then setting out change them, hopefully for the better.
  • moultano 7y ago
    > It's going to happen by carefully understanding the context and motivations and knowledge that led to the current laws, and only then setting out change them, hopefully for the better. If you go case by case through all the nonsensical things in the american legal system, you'll find most of the time that the reason they were put in place originally was racism. Zoning is a prime example.
• netcan 7y ago
  The music was new, black polished chrome / And came over the summer like liquid night The DJ's took pills to stay awake / And play for seven days Andreesen's 'Software Eats The World,' Mosaic & associated perspectives emerged from the fresh green fields of internet-enabled personal computing in the 90s and 2000s. Everything was young and novel. The software itself. The business models. The cultural impact. The companies and personas. Everything was a disruption. There was a time when the record industry was fresh & jukeboxes were a disruptive new "channel." With it came new business models, genres of music. Music became imbued with new cultural & artistic significance. There was a time when gentleman scientists were inventing the institution of science at home. A time before "publish-or-perish," tenure-tracks and grant applications. Everything was young once. Mechanised farming. Production line manufacturing. The Americas. Nothing stays young, however. Pondering why & how institutions go from new to old is something we've been doing forever. Ibn Khaldun, father of social science, had his barbarians-vs-civilisations theories in the 1300s. These theories tend to get ideological. Marxism was a (Khaldun-ish) theory that "late-stage capitalism" was upon us(them). Ayn Rand thought everything had gotten infested with parasitic "looters." Both fantasised about revolutionary moments, where the old world dies and is reborn new & fresh. Today, we like terms like regulatory capture/burden, incumbent effects, path dependencies, low hanging fruit depletion or somesuch. All characterisations of "corruption" infesting mature institutions. There are lots of examples. NASA's achievements in early decades vs the 90s. How a 3 person startup with 1 month of code can add featureX to their product orders of magnitude more easily than an established company with a mature code base. Twitter once served their product to the whole world with 50 people. It was a similar twitter, but doing it with just 1,000 people today would be a massive challenge. Everything starts young. Everything gets old.
  • Aperocky 7y ago
    > It was a similar twitter, but doing it with just 1,000 people today would be a massive challenge. Is that true though? We know that instagram had less than 100 people running it before Facebook bought it for $19B. There's a tendency for successful companies to add headcounts and grow - and it's very hard to convince yourself not to - maybe just maybe they would be able to serve the whole world with about 50 people, on a smaller revenue but huge revenue/headcount.
• baybal2 7y ago
  I also wanted to write my own response to that article from Anderson. I worked within OEM electronics industry since my first job 13 years. During those years I was fortunate to have experience living many different countries, with very different "systems." I spent my childhood in early nineties Russia, where my parents had a business. My late teens were spent in Singapore, as an exchange student, and an interpreter in a trade company. Later I spent 6 years studying, working, and living in Vancouver, Canada, and Seattle, US. My career however only took off when I was forced to leave Canada by a paperwork mishap on behalf of my employer, and go to China for no better option. SanderJD below has a very good point I wanted to talk about: > I'm amused by these morality screeds from rich tech thought leaders. "Why don't the talented sacrifice easy money in software by getting into [insert super regulated, low-margin business]?" says profit-maximizing tech capitalists who ignored said businesses for a decade. My own reason deciding not to return to the West was that I feel I simply can't do my job there, and an honest business as a way of making money doesn't work here. I wrote many times here before how helpless I felt when I simply tried to "make money the normal way," and the normal way doesn't work. I feel the whole business culture in the West goes against the notion that a "normal, honest work" is the way to do things. I saw many of those SV "mentors," "VC" guys, buffoon fund managers, and trendy hipstrepreneurs. All and every one of them is obsessed with NOT doing things the proper way. They all hellbent on the notion that the business IS to be done by some "special sauce," "a cheat," or "a secret trick" that is nearly equates to money out of thin air for them. These people are wrong. They are so wrong. This is why you can not run manufacturing in America. Maybe these guys can "make money out of thin air" by tricking banks, pension funds, clients, or the legal system, but there is no "trick" they think of to making physical things.
  • burntoutfire 7y ago
    I'm not American, but surely there must be millions (tens of millions?) of small, owner-operated businesses in the US?
    • cpursley 7y ago
      There was before government shut down the economy...
• pnathan 7y ago
  > We’ve chosen for things to be like this by the way we allow our government at every level to be captured by lobbyists, special interests, and partisanship. No. This is an outcome of having democracy operable at a local level; the entire outcome of localism is "your local special interests control the system". What that means, in practice, is the people who have time to burn control the system. That is either (1) retired people (2) semi-employed activists or (3) paid lawyers/lobbyists. 3 is often paid by the local big fish. Add/subtract as your locality changes, but the principle is the same. Kill the hyperdecentralization, and you kill the balkanization. If you want real change in the US, you have to gut the localism principle comprehensively. edit: get involved in local politics, even on the margins, and you start seeing that change is very possible, and there are a lot of people passionately invested in not changing. This has nothing - ZERO - to do with US political alignment, BTW.
  • Nimitz14 7y ago
    Hm, I was actually thinking that local authorities should be strengthened. But the perspective I'm coming from is being European and seeing all major EU countries have unpopular governments that are seen as ineffective, and contrasting with Switzerland, which has very powerful local government (a president/prime minister/chancellor doesn't even exist, federal government is only in charge of defense and energy), and is extremely successful by every measure you could think of.
    • capitalsigma 7y ago
      Note that Switzerland is ~10x smaller than Texas.
  • dantheman 7y ago
    State and federal governments are even worse than local with regards to endless regulations.
• nostrademons 7y ago
  I wonder how many Silicon Valley luminaries assume that government is one of those industries that's going to be disrupted and replaced by software, but don't say it out loud because suggesting you're going to replace the government isn't really the wisest move.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  I've done some thinking about the problem of regulation bloat (setting aside regulatory capture for now). Good regulation, like good code, would express ideals and objectives in the simplest way possible that can still implement the solution. But if we follow this analogy, our country's body of law and regulation is like a centuries-old codebase that has never been revised or refactored for the sake of consolidation and simplification. It only gets added to, and obviously can't be rebuilt from scratch. This means we have a monotonically-growing level of complexity for entities that want to adhere to the law, which is a recipe for grinding to a halt. I feel like the common argument by conservatives against regulation because it stifles innovation has some truth, but it doesn't have to. What would it look like, I wonder, to implement reforms that are purely concerned with simplifying the existing rules and stripping out cruft? Has anybody ever considered the problem from this angle?
  • burlesona 7y ago
    Years ago I worked on a project to do exactly that for local development ordinances. Try to boil down the intent to the simplest version of rules that would encompass that intent, while stripping out all the rest. It got some local interest, but there were too many local interests that each wanted everything simplified except for the couple rules they specifically benefitted from in some way. So it didn’t go anywhere.
• masonic 7y ago
  would you like to build a townhouse for your family with just one parking space? Illegal in the vast majority of the United States, where 2+ parking spaces per home are required by law. That's a very specific and authoritative claim that is utterly false. First of all, most of the U.S. doesn't even have zoning limitations regarding parking specific to townhomes. Nowhere outside cities (private developments can have CC&Rs to this effect, but that's not "zoning"), to my knowledge. Where I live in SV, our entire development is townhomes with single parking spaces (plus a small pool of guest spots on the outer fringes of the complex). Next to us is a large apartment complex with one space per unit. Next to that is a duplex development with one-car garages and just street parking otherwise. Can't even park in the driveways. My last condo in Mountain View had exactly one parking space per unit (even the three bedroom units) plus a small pool of guest spaces outside the "secure" garage level. (Feel free to look it up: 1033 Crestview Drive, 90 condos in the complex, all with just 1 space). YIMBYs love to claim "but zoning" yet almost never quote any specific codes from any specific cities, let alone anything at a county or statewide level. So, by all means, please educate us all and give your references identifying this "vast majority".