6 ms·

I don't think this style of regulation is limited to FAA. FDA does not independently test all drugs either. They just review and ensure the drug companies' test

I don't think this style of regulation is limited to FAA. FDA does not independently test all drugs either. They just review and ensure the drug companies' tests are acceptable.

mvc 5y ago
I'm afraid this is the logical consequence of a majority of people falling for the lie that "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector". When people vote for politicians who say "government is wasteful", "there's too much red tape" what did they think was going to happen?
- pgeorgi 5y ago
  When politicians say "government is wasteful" or "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector", what they're saying is that their management style is wasteful. Would somebody asserting that about _their_ _own_ _job_ even make it past the interview in the private sector?
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    What they're actually saying is "If you sponsor us we will make sure government money goes your way." Efficiency - or the lack of it - is absolutely not the point.
  - dash2 5y ago
    Or they could be saying that centralized monopolies are rarely efficient. That is certainly my experience. For example, SpaceX undercut NASA by a factor of about 10, according to this FT report: https://www.ft.com/content/25e2292b-a910-41c8-9c55-09096895f673 https://www.ft.com/content/25e2292b-a910-41c8-9c55-09096895f...
    - galangalalgol 5y ago
      plane-pal aircraft coming soon to a gate near you!
    - Randosaurus 5y ago
      NASA sources their materials from the private sector. The private sector is notoriously "price gougey" when it comes to government money.
      - jkfdrsak 5y ago
        Government actors are responsible for acquiring material at normative costs. Their failure to do so is their own.
        samhw 5y ago
        Normal costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        sdhfjgjh 5y ago
        "Price gougey" implies that the prices are unethical; not in compliance with ethical norms; not normative.
        samhw 5y ago
        'Not normative' doesn't mean 'not in compliance with ethical norms'. It means not pertaining to ethical norms. It's not the correct word, however you twist it. Here's some more info if it helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_statement
        Randosaurus 5y ago
        Exactly! And when all US companies refuse to lower their prices, they should start sourcing from foreign companies to increase competition! Oh hey look, I'm signing yet another contract with an arbitration clause when signing up for a cell phone service. Must be my fault that all of them require the arbitration clause...
- rightbyte 5y ago
  I think the worlds greatest agency couldn't evaluate a so complex system as the Max. They should just have said no. I believe it is foremost a complexity issue, and the MCAS(?) failure is just one of the many things that could go wrong, that actually did. Boing probably have more issues with the plane that is waiting to surface given their culture ...
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    Saying "no" would have been an evaluation. It's a management function. If someone comes to you and says "We want to rewrite everything so it runs on a Raspberry PI powered by a hamster wheel" you don't need to ask about the engineering spec of the hamster wheel. The Max MCAS was only marginally more plausible in overview. Details were never going to rescue it.
- 2rsf 5y ago
  I don't think so, testing like you refer to is not scalable and even more inefficient. Letting an external auditors understand all the small technical details and test them independently will basically halt any progress. It might make this specific change safer but for the long run will slow down innovation and development of better and safer products. This has some similarity to software development- we test much better but prefer to move faster to achieve a better overall quality and be able to fix issues faster and better
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jaycroft 5y ago
And FINRA is made up of brokers and banks but overseen by the SEC. The EPA doesn't directly monitor every factory. The NTSB sets general testing guidelines and standards and seems to have greatly increased auto and aviation safety, but they can't police everything and at least to the public seem to regulate after the fact. The general term, I believe, is self-regulatory-organization. The theory, I guess, is that the government sets the laws and says very generally, "no fraud", and "you have to write your own rules and make sure they're good", but offers little technical guidance otherwise. I think this could work well if there were very heavy penalties for failures to self-police, but in practice the revolving door between government and industry incentivizes slap on the wrist style punishment. It's a hard problem and I don't think we're doing well over the last few decades.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  ... and for most of the agencies, it's not that their budget is small or the agency itself is incompetent: it's what's required by law and they can't override it unless Congress decides to change the laws.
  - thereddaikon 5y ago
    You don't want regulatory agencies creating law on their own though. Not only is that unconstitutional but the reason its unconstitutional is because you would inevitably end up with some busybody who is not accountable to the people massively over stepping their power and creating tyranny.
    - greedo 5y ago
      Regulatory agencies create "laws" all the time. When Congress creates legislation, they rarely spell out all the details and implementations. This is left to the agency to interpret, and they have a wide latitude in both interpretation and enforcement.
      - ynx 5y ago
refurb 5y ago
Indeed. The FDA just has a multi-step process where you need to define how you'll run your trials, what data you'll collect and whether it's enough to get approval. The FDA very carefully reviews the submissions, requires validation of tests and safeguards so data can't easily be manipulated. But the system is built on trust. If a company wants to manipulate, fake or exclude negative data they can. They'll likely get caught, but not always.
josefx 5y ago
Similar for many other things, the report most countries based the safety of roundup on was written by Monsanto itself. Most countries only check these reports for completeness and obvious errors, they don't try to run the studies themselves. However that "error checking" of the report is something where the FAA fucked up, the information on the MCAS provided by Boeing was completely out of date, either the documented testing procedures where incomplete or the FAA did not notice that the MCAS handled cases far outside of its original specification.
LatteLazy 5y ago
Of course the FDA has to regulate 10s of 1000s of companies\drugs\trials. The FAA basically just oversees Boeing and Airbus in the large commercial jet market and either offers 10s of models...
- hef19898 5y ago
  The FAA oversees every flying object in the US. Not just new models, but also config changes to existing models, continued airworthiness, all the design org and production org certification of manufacturers (per site) and suppliers (again, per site). Which is quite a workload, especially in a world as complex as aerospace.
  - Randosaurus 5y ago
    The point remains.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      What point? That the FAA screwed up? That Boeing intentionally lied? Those were nver in question. If it is the point that the FAAs job should be easy because the only oversee Boeing and Airbus, well that point is just ignorant.
      - Randosaurus 5y ago
        If you're unable to understand LattleLazy's point it's probably best to refrain from responding to them until you do.
        HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
        Attacking the poster is not moving the discussion forward!
        Randosaurus 5y ago
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
Yeah, people are are drastically underestimating how enormous the testing apparatus is at a company like Boeing. It's thousands of employees. Expecting the FAA to duplicate those efforts is ridiculous. I don't know much about the FAA, but as someone who works in healthcare, I know the FDA conducts regular audits of medical device manufacturers. They roll in for a week, request access to everything and everywhere, then pick a handful of areas (randomly) to do a full deep-dive. Generally, if a company is cutting corners, discrepancies will exist in many areas and they'll quickly spot one or more of them. I assume the FAA operates similarly.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  And ISTR that just around the time I entered the medical device industry, that this is exactly what happened to Abbott and they were forced to remove some of their products from the market for months until they could bring their quality system back up to FDA satisfaction. Hard to believe that it was so long ago. Man, I'm old :-) https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-11-03-9911030409-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-11-03-991103...

I don't think this style of regulation is limited to FAA. FDA does not independently test all drugs either. They just review and ensure the drug companies' tests are acceptable.

mvc 5y ago

I'm afraid this is the logical consequence of a majority of people falling for the lie that "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector". When people vote for politicians who say "government is wasteful", "there's too much red tape" what did they think was going to happen?

pgeorgi 5y ago
When politicians say "government is wasteful" or "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector", what they're saying is that their management style is wasteful. Would somebody asserting that about _their_ _own_ _job_ even make it past the interview in the private sector?
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  What they're actually saying is "If you sponsor us we will make sure government money goes your way." Efficiency - or the lack of it - is absolutely not the point.
- dash2 5y ago
  Or they could be saying that centralized monopolies are rarely efficient. That is certainly my experience. For example, SpaceX undercut NASA by a factor of about 10, according to this FT report: https://www.ft.com/content/25e2292b-a910-41c8-9c55-09096895f673 https://www.ft.com/content/25e2292b-a910-41c8-9c55-09096895f...
  - galangalalgol 5y ago
    plane-pal aircraft coming soon to a gate near you!
  - Randosaurus 5y ago
    NASA sources their materials from the private sector. The private sector is notoriously "price gougey" when it comes to government money.
    - jkfdrsak 5y ago
      Government actors are responsible for acquiring material at normative costs. Their failure to do so is their own.
      - samhw 5y ago
        Normal costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        sdhfjgjh 5y ago
        "Price gougey" implies that the prices are unethical; not in compliance with ethical norms; not normative.
        samhw 5y ago
        'Not normative' doesn't mean 'not in compliance with ethical norms'. It means not pertaining to ethical norms. It's not the correct word, however you twist it. Here's some more info if it helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_statement
      - Randosaurus 5y ago
        Exactly! And when all US companies refuse to lower their prices, they should start sourcing from foreign companies to increase competition! Oh hey look, I'm signing yet another contract with an arbitration clause when signing up for a cell phone service. Must be my fault that all of them require the arbitration clause...
rightbyte 5y ago
I think the worlds greatest agency couldn't evaluate a so complex system as the Max. They should just have said no. I believe it is foremost a complexity issue, and the MCAS(?) failure is just one of the many things that could go wrong, that actually did. Boing probably have more issues with the plane that is waiting to surface given their culture ...
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Saying "no" would have been an evaluation. It's a management function. If someone comes to you and says "We want to rewrite everything so it runs on a Raspberry PI powered by a hamster wheel" you don't need to ask about the engineering spec of the hamster wheel. The Max MCAS was only marginally more plausible in overview. Details were never going to rescue it.
2rsf 5y ago
I don't think so, testing like you refer to is not scalable and even more inefficient. Letting an external auditors understand all the small technical details and test them independently will basically halt any progress. It might make this specific change safer but for the long run will slow down innovation and development of better and safer products. This has some similarity to software development- we test much better but prefer to move faster to achieve a better overall quality and be able to fix issues faster and better
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

jaycroft 5y ago

And FINRA is made up of brokers and banks but overseen by the SEC. The EPA doesn't directly monitor every factory. The NTSB sets general testing guidelines and standards and seems to have greatly increased auto and aviation safety, but they can't police everything and at least to the public seem to regulate after the fact. The general term, I believe, is self-regulatory-organization. The theory, I guess, is that the government sets the laws and says very generally, "no fraud", and "you have to write your own rules and make sure they're good", but offers little technical guidance otherwise. I think this could work well if there were very heavy penalties for failures to self-police, but in practice the revolving door between government and industry incentivizes slap on the wrist style punishment. It's a hard problem and I don't think we're doing well over the last few decades.

zinekeller 5y ago
... and for most of the agencies, it's not that their budget is small or the agency itself is incompetent: it's what's required by law and they can't override it unless Congress decides to change the laws.
- thereddaikon 5y ago
  You don't want regulatory agencies creating law on their own though. Not only is that unconstitutional but the reason its unconstitutional is because you would inevitably end up with some busybody who is not accountable to the people massively over stepping their power and creating tyranny.
  - greedo 5y ago
    Regulatory agencies create "laws" all the time. When Congress creates legislation, they rarely spell out all the details and implementations. This is left to the agency to interpret, and they have a wide latitude in both interpretation and enforcement.
    - ynx 5y ago

refurb 5y ago

Indeed. The FDA just has a multi-step process where you need to define how you'll run your trials, what data you'll collect and whether it's enough to get approval. The FDA very carefully reviews the submissions, requires validation of tests and safeguards so data can't easily be manipulated. But the system is built on trust. If a company wants to manipulate, fake or exclude negative data they can. They'll likely get caught, but not always.

josefx 5y ago

Similar for many other things, the report most countries based the safety of roundup on was written by Monsanto itself. Most countries only check these reports for completeness and obvious errors, they don't try to run the studies themselves. However that "error checking" of the report is something where the FAA fucked up, the information on the MCAS provided by Boeing was completely out of date, either the documented testing procedures where incomplete or the FAA did not notice that the MCAS handled cases far outside of its original specification.

LatteLazy 5y ago

Of course the FDA has to regulate 10s of 1000s of companies\drugs\trials. The FAA basically just oversees Boeing and Airbus in the large commercial jet market and either offers 10s of models...

hef19898 5y ago
The FAA oversees every flying object in the US. Not just new models, but also config changes to existing models, continued airworthiness, all the design org and production org certification of manufacturers (per site) and suppliers (again, per site). Which is quite a workload, especially in a world as complex as aerospace.
- Randosaurus 5y ago
  The point remains.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    What point? That the FAA screwed up? That Boeing intentionally lied? Those were nver in question. If it is the point that the FAAs job should be easy because the only oversee Boeing and Airbus, well that point is just ignorant.
    - Randosaurus 5y ago
      If you're unable to understand LattleLazy's point it's probably best to refrain from responding to them until you do.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
        Attacking the poster is not moving the discussion forward!
        Randosaurus 5y ago

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago

Yeah, people are are drastically underestimating how enormous the testing apparatus is at a company like Boeing. It's thousands of employees. Expecting the FAA to duplicate those efforts is ridiculous. I don't know much about the FAA, but as someone who works in healthcare, I know the FDA conducts regular audits of medical device manufacturers. They roll in for a week, request access to everything and everywhere, then pick a handful of areas (randomly) to do a full deep-dive. Generally, if a company is cutting corners, discrepancies will exist in many areas and they'll quickly spot one or more of them. I assume the FAA operates similarly.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
And ISTR that just around the time I entered the medical device industry, that this is exactly what happened to Abbott and they were forced to remove some of their products from the market for months until they could bring their quality system back up to FDA satisfaction. Hard to believe that it was so long ago. Man, I'm old :-) https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-11-03-9911030409-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-11-03-991103...