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There's a reason many sidewalks in NYC have sidewalk "sheds" covering them. Balconies usually aren't directly over places where people walk, for a reason. I'm g

• cookiecaper 15y ago
  I'm not sure I like the a priori nature assumed by the regulatory bodies. Why don't we legislate based on actual occurrences instead of just hypotheticals? I'm not sure why a law like this wouldn't work: "Any individual found to negligently operate a drone in a way that caused harm to persons or property will face jail time and fines". Isn't that effectively the same as regulating the machine specifically, but without all of the overhead, corruption, and limitations on creativity, and wouldn't the law actually have the same effect if persons found to operate drones in an unsafe manner were actually prosecuted? Wouldn't the market only accept safe drones due to the possibility of jail time? Just curious. Been kicking that line of thought around a lot as I've been in some creaky elevators recently.
  • asynchronous13 15y ago
    The FAA has always operated more like a white-list rather than a black-list. By default, nothing is allowed to fly in the national airspace. Then, regulations are added to allow a specific vehicle or a specific class of vehicles. At the moment, UAVs have not been white-listed, hence they are not legal.
  • jarek 15y ago
    As I see it, this is similar to food safety or mass-produced vehicle certification processes. Unfortunately, modern markets are empirically fairly poor at optimizing for long-term outcomes with all externalities accounted for (example off the top of my head: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill). When a major malfunction or accident does happen, no penalty or fine is really sufficient to bring about any meaningful sense of justice. (Think again the oil spill, or a tainted staple food poisoning tens of thousands of people, or to use a really cliché example, a malfunctioning UAV crashing into a group of kids playing at recess.) As the accidents are often due to incompetence or attempts at cost-cutting rather than outright malice, the deterrence factor of the penalty doesn't really apply – to those guilty, it just looks like they're taking the good kind of risk optimizing their systems until it's too late. The guilty corporation simply can go bankrupt and out of business, and finding and then charging personally responsible employees isn't always easy.
    • cookiecaper 15y ago
      And yet Deepwater Horizon still happened. If the regulations that all rigs must use equipment bit x, y, and z, certified by industry conglomerate w, weren't in place, then maybe new, much safer technology would have been developed that would have made the spill not happen. If the market needs permission from bureaucrats, who may or may not be corrupt, or needs a new law passed, to adapt or develop better solutions to its problems, then it's no wonder we are stuck on obsolete tech that is 50+ years old and that the revenue in regulated markets is entirely dominated by a small oligopoly that holds everyone by the balls (see also phone companies).
      • jarek 15y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. What is the market motivation for developing and more importantly using technology which is safer on a 50-500 year scale? How high would you like the penalties for criminal negligence, manslaughter, etc, to be? Is it feasible for them to be higher than the potential savings on process optimization or cutting corners? Do you hold corporations or people, or both, responsible? While government regulations might not be the most efficient, they do not cloud a picture of exactly how safe a plant is and will remain that would otherwise be perfectly clear. Short of each investor evaluating safety of each plant, oil rig, and factory themselves, the situation with government regulation removed would boil down to an analogy to the S&P credit rating business. We've seen how for-profit independent third-party rating business has worked out. If you'd like an example from a market with little regulation, look no further than Bhopal. I'm not going to argue that the current regulations we have in place are amazing. They're not and they can certainly be improved. I will, however, argue that they do a better job keeping us safer than the free market, as it has been implemented worldwide over the last century, would.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 15y ago
    Well that works fine until you're the one that's killed because of a failure. People after you are protected by the legislation passed, but you're SOL!
    • cookiecaper 15y ago
      I don't think you understood -- I'm not suggesting we pass specific legislation detailing the cause of each accident after it happens. I suggest that we put in place generally applicable statutes for criminal negligence, manslaughter, etc. that would apply in case of malfunctioning industrial instruments. The law wouldn't change, but the market would automatically adapt and keep safe practices autonomously because the deterrent from the punishment was not worth the risk of cutting a few corners.
      • HeyLaughingBoy 15y ago
        The difference is between being reactive and proactive. Having a law in place is a start, but it has little effect against those who would cut corners. I believe the saying is that "laws only keep the lawful honest." There will be a lot of manufacturers building TacoCopters who will cut corners because it's cheaper, and others who simply don't care because the don't expect to get caught. However, if the FAA mandates (e.g.,) complete engine teardown and rebuild every 200 operating hours along with an annual FAA inspection, they can actually verify that those procedures are being followed. The law will still be in effect, but verifying that it is being followed happens well before someone is killed and will take the vehicles most likely to kill someone out of the air. That's what they're trying to accomplish.