8 ms·

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amaz

by brink 3y ago

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

game_the0ry 3y ago
Finance. As proven by the 2008-2010 Great Financial Crisis, self regulation does not work well.
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  ...in all cases. You've got a great counterexample, but it doesn't invalidate the successful use of self-regulation in other areas.
  - game_the0ry 3y ago
    > ...the successful use of self-regulation in other areas. Where has self-regulation been successful?
moomin 3y ago
Famously, in the UK, Railtrack outsourced basically its whole operation. Including inspections, often to the same firms doing the work. This culminated in the Potters Bar crash. I worked with someone who survived it. He was, by his own estimation "not quite right" afterwards. People don't often make the connection, but at that point the government of the day started pressuring Railtrack to fix the rails. Railtrack's countergambit was to demand money from the government, saying they couldn't afford to do it. This did not have the effect they had hoped for and ended up with Tony Blair, a man who had made a name for himself by changing the Labour party constitution so they no longer were about nationalising industries, having to nationalise a section of the railway industry. And to this date, no-one, even a conservative government in power for the last 14 years, has suggested privatising it again.
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  Alternative explanation is that there is no money to be made by privatization, not because anybody cares if there would be another accident and a lot of people would die
ponty_rick 3y ago
TV channels have self-regulation as well - admittedly it doesn't directly kill people. There's also police departments, I suppose.
bombcar 3y ago
The vast majority of industries are practically self-inspected, even when inspectors exist. For example, take construction engineering; the government doesn't fully inspect every single submitted drawing, they may spot check here and there and make sure the paperwork is filled out, but the final duty rests with the engineer of record. Same with building inspections, they're no where near detailed and long enough to catch everything, it's mainly a spot check to verify that it's not horribly incorrect.
- hn8305823 3y ago
  > For example, take construction engineering; the government doesn't fully inspect every single submitted drawing, they may spot check here and there and make sure the paperwork is filled out, but the final duty rests with the engineer of record. This doesn't always end well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1031_Canal#Partial_collapse_during_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1031_Canal#Partial_collapse_du...
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Nothing always ends up well every time, it's about making the balances and allocating resources where they best serve. This is the perpetual policy problem around things like OSHA and other regulatory bodies. One question might be if the airlines should be able to inspect their own equipment, or be required to pay the government to do the inspections, instead. Way more planes have fallen out of the sky due to bad airline maintenance/inspections than have crashed because of Boeing stupidity.
  - quickthrowman 3y ago
    It would be virtually impossible to fully review every construction drawing for accuracy, there are just too many of them. Nothing would ever get built. Most jurisdictions will do plan review, but it’s not a thorough check of the engineering. I would assume structural drawing sets are checked a bit more closely than say, the interior architectural drawing set, but mistakes still happen. Plus, whoever was the PE of record on the structural drawings for the hard rock parking ramp will never sign another set, they’re done as an engineer, possibly they’ll see prison if they were negligent. That won’t bring any peace to the victims families, but it’s something.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
A lot of industries self-inspect with regulatory oversight. For example, the SpaceX Starship mishap investigation that required 63 corrective actions from SpaceX before they were allowed to fly Starship again was done by SpaceX with FAA oversight. It seems that the oversight was effective; I highly doubt that SpaceX would have imposed 63 corrective actions on itself without effective oversight. It's hard to see how it could be any different. SpaceX engineers are the only ones with enough knowledge of Starship to do an effective investigation.
- burnerthrow008 3y ago
  > I highly doubt that SpaceX would have imposed 63 corrective actions on itself without effective oversight. Eh, I don't know if I agree with that. Most of the actions were very straightforward "stuff we need to fix to make the rocket do what we want it to do and not do what we don't want it to do". Like, one of the actions was "make the launch pad not explode when the engines turn on". That was the root cause of the engine failures that led to the flight termination. Was SpaceX really not going to do that anyway? Besides formalizing the process and writing down a list of 63 bullet points and using the legalese of "corrective actions" for them, I think the result would have been basically the same without the FAA looking over their shoulder. But the main reason for my belief is that the Falcon 9 launch success streak is currently better than any other rocket in history (by a large margin), at 241 launches and counting (and 180 launches since the last landing failure). To put this in context, other launchers with a similar or greater number of launches go 30-50 launches between failures. Unless SpaceX is just incredibly unbelievably lucky, they seem to understand how to do RCA to build reliable rockets.
  - shermantanktop 3y ago
    Rocket launches have to be close to the ideal candidate for COE-driven improvement. Any actual problems are going to be problems that need solving in the short term, and if they aren't solved, there will probably be short term pain. The costs of each launch are high enough that they have to take low-probability/high-severity risks seriously. Other industries have incentives to defer problems into future years, to externalize the costs, or to just plain hide or ignore them based on things like "accepted industry practice" or "within prescribed safety limits". Somebody needs to balance out the short-term incentives by decision makers to get promoted on the back of a press release about a splashy success, because that success may have a metric ton of failure disguised inside.
dmurray 3y ago
Stockbroking, cinema, accountancy, law, life insurance, financial planning, nuclear power, real estate, medicine, advertising, media...[0][1] Self-regulation (especially at the industry level rather than delegating to individual companies) doesn't seem completely broken. Actually it can work quite well. You keep some oversight, and reserve the right for the state regulator to step in if the SRO goes bad. The people who run the SRO have an interest in perpetuating their organization, so they if anything have an incentive to be stricter than the government would. If things do go wrong, the government demands direct oversight. That's what's happening here. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-regulatory_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-regulatory_organization [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sro.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sro.asp
- rkangel 3y ago
  An industry regulating itself is different from an organisation regulating itself. Self regulation of the industry is common as you say. It tends to involve one central body enforcing the standards on the members, and acting as a central point for agreement of the standards. This is not the case with the Aviation regulation. The FAA is the regulator, and has delegated the testing to the people it is meant to be regulating.
  - nerpderp82 3y ago
    Self regulation would mean that the org should face much stiffer penalties for failing in its regulation related duties. The increased agency needs to also come with increased responsibility. Something like notaries, guilds or unions that can speak the truth without retribution ... No, we need independent regulation. We don't have the societal norms to pull off self regulation.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      > Self regulation would mean that the org should face much stiffer penalties for failing in its regulation related duties. Why? How does this incentivize effective self-regulation? > No, we need independent regulation. We don't have the societal norms to pull off self regulation. We do though. This thread even points them out.
newsclues 3y ago
Congress
class3shock 3y ago
This is pretty common in aerospace, defense and, I imagine, alot of other government facing industries. For something like this the inspection procedure is likely approved by the government and verification it's being performed properly is done with lots of submitted and retained paperwork. So maybe less judge and jury and more private vs public attorney filing the same motion. Yes, they could have biases but they both are performing the same task, based on the same laws. Of course that doesn't always stop mistakes/negligence (see this incident) or bad actors (see below): https://news.usni.org/2020/06/19/navy-has-mitigated-risk-of-suspect-steel-from-company-in-federal-fraud-case https://news.usni.org/2020/06/19/navy-has-mitigated-risk-of-... I will also add that just because something is inspected by the government does not insure quality. Usually failures in inspection are due to inexperienced and/or overworked inspectors, higher ups pushing to "get things through" or to reduce costs, or other banal reasons just as possible to occur whether it's Uncle Sam or Boeing writing the inspectors checks.
wnevets 3y ago
> What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? Movies. The ratings you see before a movie starts is assigned by the industry after inspecting the movie [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Not a great example. The 1st Amendment prohibits literally anything more strict.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    Not true. The government could rate movies; what they cannot do is to prevent a movie from being exhibited if it is otherwise legal.
josh_carterPDX 3y ago
The FAA is bad, but I would say the FDA is worse. Any industry in which you have companies actually writing the text of the regulations used to oversee them is a recipe for disaster. Sadly it usually takes a tragedy to highlight these egregious systems that exist in our country. We also need to get lobbyists out of Washington so that the real impactful work can begin to separate the government agencies from the companies they're meant to regulate.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > We also need to get lobbyists out of Washington You can't have (representative) democracy without lobbying. It is not that you need to get the lobbyists out, you need to convince more lobbyists in. It is likely that the average Joe has not talked to their representatives even just once, let alone on the ongoing basis necessary to fulfill the demands of democracy.
  - NickC25 3y ago
    Correct - but you CAN get corporate lobbyists and industry lobbyists out of Washington. Simply mandate that lobbying must be done on behalf of natural citizens and ONLY natural citizens, and limit the lobbying to be done on behalf of citizens with only a $ net worth or under. If a billionaire complains about not being able to buy a couple senators, well, too fucking bad. I'd GLADLY give up my ability to corrupt government officials if you gave me a billion dollars.
- istjohn 3y ago
  We need to get money out of politics.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  How so? The systems I develop are subject to IEC-62304 (https://www.iso.org/standard/38421.html https://www.iso.org/standard/38421.html). What about that is written by companies? Which companies?
throwup238 3y ago
Clinical diagnostics, for example. Any time you take a blood test and send it off somewhere (Quest, LabCorp, etc.) to get assayed, chances are it goes to a self-regulated and self-inspected lab. These labs hire FDA certified "lab managers" as consultants or employees who are then responsible for all QA/QC procedures and certifying that the lab is capable of doing what they claim. They can be held criminally liable and have quite a bit of authority (a bit like professional engineers) but it's still a cozy employer-employee relationship. The FDA steps in when something goes really bad but I've never seen them do official spot checks without cause.
- alasdair_ 3y ago
  Would the Theranos debacle have progressed as far as it did if the FDA inspected at the beginning?
empath-nirvana 3y ago
Well, the theory is that what is being regulated by federal government is the inspection process of the company, rather than the inspections themselves. Mostly the government doesn't want to get involved in checking if bolts are tightened, they want to make sure that the company has a process to check that the bolts are tightened and is following it. It would be extraordinarily expensive and inefficient for government inspectors to do all this work themselves.
AceyMan 3y ago
The FAA / Aircraft Manufacturer relationship has been oft criticized in the past several decades as being a canonical example of 'regulatory capture.'¹ This incident is just more grist for the mill. ¹–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture?wprov=sfla1
thsksbd 3y ago
Pharmaceutical.
halJordan 3y ago
You got a laundry list of responses, the take away is that even with modern technology and abilities it is completely impractical to do the sort of inspecting that people seem to think is common place. Even for just one industry, but people seem to think every industry has regulators inspecting every factory. There just aren't enough people or money and if you did somehow do that the bureaucracy would collapse down onto itself in the same way imperial China repeatedly imploded. Edit: the promise of the blockchain and self executing contracts was to overcome this bureaucracy problem.
- turquoisevar 3y ago
  This seems to excuse poor enforcement of regulations (or worse, lack of the government regulating to begin with) with the premise that it’s impossible to do right. Yes, sure, it’s impossible to inspect and regulate every single thing all the time. But the US is doing a piss poor job where other nations at least have a decent baseline. This is by design by the way, underfund agencies so that politicians keep getting money from their corporate buddies. Even essentials such as food production is abysmally inspected in the US due to too few inspectors being available. Most EU countries don’t have these issues and their “bureaucracy” hasn’t collapsed down onto itself. Your comment is just another “this is an uniquely American issue and if we were to do it right the sky would come falling down” type argument that is trotted around everytime a fundamental issue, that has been solved elsewhere, is exposed.
arrosenberg 3y ago
As others have noted, this is fairly common, and I would argue the correct way to do it. The US government sucks at compliance regulation. I'm sure some countries are better at it, but Americans don't follow rules very well, so trying to police them is a losing affair. What US regulators ARE good at is investigating and prosecuting. The current issue is that they are not doing what they are good at. In the NCAA if a staffer (say Connor Stallions) commits a major rule violation, the head of the program (Jim Harbaugh) serves a punishment for "failure to supervise". We need the Boeing CEO to spend sometime in a concrete cell for "failure to supervise". Maybe threaten to break them up a bit with the Antitrust division. The next CEO will do a better job of self-regulating.
bonton89 3y ago
After Mattel shipped in a bunch of lead painted toys from China a law was passed requiring inspections for everyone except Mattel who were deemed large enough to inspect themselves, even though their negligence was the cause of the law.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Holy cow...if that is true
mrfox321 3y ago
the police in America
asylteltine 3y ago
The ones that pay off the government which is… everyone! Except you, the private citizen.
emarsden 3y ago
There are several good reasons for allowing it. One is that it's difficult for a public inspectorate/regulator to maintain the necessary levels of expertise to assess such complex systems (and increasingly so with technological progress). Furthermore, people working inside the industry have much better access to information about the risks than an outside inspector has. A second reason is simply costs to the public. In 2019, the interim FAA director Dan Elwell testified to the US Senate after the 737 Max disasters that bringing all delegated oversight back into the FAA would require 10000 extra staff and USD 1.8B in costs. There are fairness/democratic arguments to having the costs borne by the industry (and thus indirectly by the privileged portion of the taxpayers who consume air traffic) rather than by all taxpayers.
nashashmi 3y ago
Every industry self inspects. The city inspects its utilities. The construction companies inspect their own work. The only time an outside inspector is used is when the company is doing the work for a client, so the client uses an inspector.. If you screw up inspection repeatedly, then you get replaced. This article is about a weird govt flex.
akira2501 3y ago
> It completely ruins the point of an inspection. What is the point of an inspection?
nielsbot 3y ago
Pretty sure the meat industry is
tomohawk 3y ago
I live in an affluent community, but the last time I had electrical work done, the government inspector missed 5 serious problems that I found, 3 of which were obvious. It's really hard for the government to hire and retain competent people to inspect something as easy as residential wiring, even in an affluent community with plenty of money being spent to operate the government.
turquoisevar 3y ago
Car manufacturers self-certify I learned pretty recently. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/12/23998308/tesla-cybertuck-safety-pedestrian-crash-test-nhtsa-iihs https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/12/23998308/tesla-cybertuck...

by brink 3y ago

What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.

game_the0ry 3y ago

Finance. As proven by the 2008-2010 Great Financial Crisis, self regulation does not work well.

shermantanktop 3y ago
...in all cases. You've got a great counterexample, but it doesn't invalidate the successful use of self-regulation in other areas.
- game_the0ry 3y ago
  > ...the successful use of self-regulation in other areas. Where has self-regulation been successful?

moomin 3y ago

Famously, in the UK, Railtrack outsourced basically its whole operation. Including inspections, often to the same firms doing the work. This culminated in the Potters Bar crash. I worked with someone who survived it. He was, by his own estimation "not quite right" afterwards. People don't often make the connection, but at that point the government of the day started pressuring Railtrack to fix the rails. Railtrack's countergambit was to demand money from the government, saying they couldn't afford to do it. This did not have the effect they had hoped for and ended up with Tony Blair, a man who had made a name for himself by changing the Labour party constitution so they no longer were about nationalising industries, having to nationalise a section of the railway industry. And to this date, no-one, even a conservative government in power for the last 14 years, has suggested privatising it again.

pi-e-sigma 3y ago
Alternative explanation is that there is no money to be made by privatization, not because anybody cares if there would be another accident and a lot of people would die

ponty_rick 3y ago

TV channels have self-regulation as well - admittedly it doesn't directly kill people. There's also police departments, I suppose.

bombcar 3y ago

The vast majority of industries are practically self-inspected, even when inspectors exist. For example, take construction engineering; the government doesn't fully inspect every single submitted drawing, they may spot check here and there and make sure the paperwork is filled out, but the final duty rests with the engineer of record. Same with building inspections, they're no where near detailed and long enough to catch everything, it's mainly a spot check to verify that it's not horribly incorrect.

hn8305823 3y ago
> For example, take construction engineering; the government doesn't fully inspect every single submitted drawing, they may spot check here and there and make sure the paperwork is filled out, but the final duty rests with the engineer of record. This doesn't always end well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1031_Canal#Partial_collapse_during_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1031_Canal#Partial_collapse_du...
- bombcar 3y ago
  Nothing always ends up well every time, it's about making the balances and allocating resources where they best serve. This is the perpetual policy problem around things like OSHA and other regulatory bodies. One question might be if the airlines should be able to inspect their own equipment, or be required to pay the government to do the inspections, instead. Way more planes have fallen out of the sky due to bad airline maintenance/inspections than have crashed because of Boeing stupidity.
- quickthrowman 3y ago
  It would be virtually impossible to fully review every construction drawing for accuracy, there are just too many of them. Nothing would ever get built. Most jurisdictions will do plan review, but it’s not a thorough check of the engineering. I would assume structural drawing sets are checked a bit more closely than say, the interior architectural drawing set, but mistakes still happen. Plus, whoever was the PE of record on the structural drawings for the hard rock parking ramp will never sign another set, they’re done as an engineer, possibly they’ll see prison if they were negligent. That won’t bring any peace to the victims families, but it’s something.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

A lot of industries self-inspect with regulatory oversight. For example, the SpaceX Starship mishap investigation that required 63 corrective actions from SpaceX before they were allowed to fly Starship again was done by SpaceX with FAA oversight. It seems that the oversight was effective; I highly doubt that SpaceX would have imposed 63 corrective actions on itself without effective oversight. It's hard to see how it could be any different. SpaceX engineers are the only ones with enough knowledge of Starship to do an effective investigation.

burnerthrow008 3y ago
> I highly doubt that SpaceX would have imposed 63 corrective actions on itself without effective oversight. Eh, I don't know if I agree with that. Most of the actions were very straightforward "stuff we need to fix to make the rocket do what we want it to do and not do what we don't want it to do". Like, one of the actions was "make the launch pad not explode when the engines turn on". That was the root cause of the engine failures that led to the flight termination. Was SpaceX really not going to do that anyway? Besides formalizing the process and writing down a list of 63 bullet points and using the legalese of "corrective actions" for them, I think the result would have been basically the same without the FAA looking over their shoulder. But the main reason for my belief is that the Falcon 9 launch success streak is currently better than any other rocket in history (by a large margin), at 241 launches and counting (and 180 launches since the last landing failure). To put this in context, other launchers with a similar or greater number of launches go 30-50 launches between failures. Unless SpaceX is just incredibly unbelievably lucky, they seem to understand how to do RCA to build reliable rockets.
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  Rocket launches have to be close to the ideal candidate for COE-driven improvement. Any actual problems are going to be problems that need solving in the short term, and if they aren't solved, there will probably be short term pain. The costs of each launch are high enough that they have to take low-probability/high-severity risks seriously. Other industries have incentives to defer problems into future years, to externalize the costs, or to just plain hide or ignore them based on things like "accepted industry practice" or "within prescribed safety limits". Somebody needs to balance out the short-term incentives by decision makers to get promoted on the back of a press release about a splashy success, because that success may have a metric ton of failure disguised inside.

dmurray 3y ago

Stockbroking, cinema, accountancy, law, life insurance, financial planning, nuclear power, real estate, medicine, advertising, media...[0][1] Self-regulation (especially at the industry level rather than delegating to individual companies) doesn't seem completely broken. Actually it can work quite well. You keep some oversight, and reserve the right for the state regulator to step in if the SRO goes bad. The people who run the SRO have an interest in perpetuating their organization, so they if anything have an incentive to be stricter than the government would. If things do go wrong, the government demands direct oversight. That's what's happening here. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-regulatory_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-regulatory_organization [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sro.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sro.asp

rkangel 3y ago
An industry regulating itself is different from an organisation regulating itself. Self regulation of the industry is common as you say. It tends to involve one central body enforcing the standards on the members, and acting as a central point for agreement of the standards. This is not the case with the Aviation regulation. The FAA is the regulator, and has delegated the testing to the people it is meant to be regulating.
- nerpderp82 3y ago
  Self regulation would mean that the org should face much stiffer penalties for failing in its regulation related duties. The increased agency needs to also come with increased responsibility. Something like notaries, guilds or unions that can speak the truth without retribution ... No, we need independent regulation. We don't have the societal norms to pull off self regulation.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    > Self regulation would mean that the org should face much stiffer penalties for failing in its regulation related duties. Why? How does this incentivize effective self-regulation? > No, we need independent regulation. We don't have the societal norms to pull off self regulation. We do though. This thread even points them out.

newsclues 3y ago

Congress

class3shock 3y ago

This is pretty common in aerospace, defense and, I imagine, alot of other government facing industries. For something like this the inspection procedure is likely approved by the government and verification it's being performed properly is done with lots of submitted and retained paperwork. So maybe less judge and jury and more private vs public attorney filing the same motion. Yes, they could have biases but they both are performing the same task, based on the same laws. Of course that doesn't always stop mistakes/negligence (see this incident) or bad actors (see below): https://news.usni.org/2020/06/19/navy-has-mitigated-risk-of-suspect-steel-from-company-in-federal-fraud-case https://news.usni.org/2020/06/19/navy-has-mitigated-risk-of-... I will also add that just because something is inspected by the government does not insure quality. Usually failures in inspection are due to inexperienced and/or overworked inspectors, higher ups pushing to "get things through" or to reduce costs, or other banal reasons just as possible to occur whether it's Uncle Sam or Boeing writing the inspectors checks.

wnevets 3y ago

> What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? Movies. The ratings you see before a movie starts is assigned by the industry after inspecting the movie [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association

kmeisthax 3y ago
Not a great example. The 1st Amendment prohibits literally anything more strict.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  Not true. The government could rate movies; what they cannot do is to prevent a movie from being exhibited if it is otherwise legal.

josh_carterPDX 3y ago

The FAA is bad, but I would say the FDA is worse. Any industry in which you have companies actually writing the text of the regulations used to oversee them is a recipe for disaster. Sadly it usually takes a tragedy to highlight these egregious systems that exist in our country. We also need to get lobbyists out of Washington so that the real impactful work can begin to separate the government agencies from the companies they're meant to regulate.

randomdata 3y ago
> We also need to get lobbyists out of Washington You can't have (representative) democracy without lobbying. It is not that you need to get the lobbyists out, you need to convince more lobbyists in. It is likely that the average Joe has not talked to their representatives even just once, let alone on the ongoing basis necessary to fulfill the demands of democracy.
- NickC25 3y ago
  Correct - but you CAN get corporate lobbyists and industry lobbyists out of Washington. Simply mandate that lobbying must be done on behalf of natural citizens and ONLY natural citizens, and limit the lobbying to be done on behalf of citizens with only a $ net worth or under. If a billionaire complains about not being able to buy a couple senators, well, too fucking bad. I'd GLADLY give up my ability to corrupt government officials if you gave me a billion dollars.
istjohn 3y ago
We need to get money out of politics.
HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
How so? The systems I develop are subject to IEC-62304 (https://www.iso.org/standard/38421.html https://www.iso.org/standard/38421.html). What about that is written by companies? Which companies?

throwup238 3y ago

Clinical diagnostics, for example. Any time you take a blood test and send it off somewhere (Quest, LabCorp, etc.) to get assayed, chances are it goes to a self-regulated and self-inspected lab. These labs hire FDA certified "lab managers" as consultants or employees who are then responsible for all QA/QC procedures and certifying that the lab is capable of doing what they claim. They can be held criminally liable and have quite a bit of authority (a bit like professional engineers) but it's still a cozy employer-employee relationship. The FDA steps in when something goes really bad but I've never seen them do official spot checks without cause.

alasdair_ 3y ago
Would the Theranos debacle have progressed as far as it did if the FDA inspected at the beginning?

empath-nirvana 3y ago

Well, the theory is that what is being regulated by federal government is the inspection process of the company, rather than the inspections themselves. Mostly the government doesn't want to get involved in checking if bolts are tightened, they want to make sure that the company has a process to check that the bolts are tightened and is following it. It would be extraordinarily expensive and inefficient for government inspectors to do all this work themselves.

AceyMan 3y ago

The FAA / Aircraft Manufacturer relationship has been oft criticized in the past several decades as being a canonical example of 'regulatory capture.'¹ This incident is just more grist for the mill. ¹–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture?wprov=sfla1

thsksbd 3y ago

Pharmaceutical.

halJordan 3y ago

You got a laundry list of responses, the take away is that even with modern technology and abilities it is completely impractical to do the sort of inspecting that people seem to think is common place. Even for just one industry, but people seem to think every industry has regulators inspecting every factory. There just aren't enough people or money and if you did somehow do that the bureaucracy would collapse down onto itself in the same way imperial China repeatedly imploded. Edit: the promise of the blockchain and self executing contracts was to overcome this bureaucracy problem.

turquoisevar 3y ago
This seems to excuse poor enforcement of regulations (or worse, lack of the government regulating to begin with) with the premise that it’s impossible to do right. Yes, sure, it’s impossible to inspect and regulate every single thing all the time. But the US is doing a piss poor job where other nations at least have a decent baseline. This is by design by the way, underfund agencies so that politicians keep getting money from their corporate buddies. Even essentials such as food production is abysmally inspected in the US due to too few inspectors being available. Most EU countries don’t have these issues and their “bureaucracy” hasn’t collapsed down onto itself. Your comment is just another “this is an uniquely American issue and if we were to do it right the sky would come falling down” type argument that is trotted around everytime a fundamental issue, that has been solved elsewhere, is exposed.

arrosenberg 3y ago

As others have noted, this is fairly common, and I would argue the correct way to do it. The US government sucks at compliance regulation. I'm sure some countries are better at it, but Americans don't follow rules very well, so trying to police them is a losing affair. What US regulators ARE good at is investigating and prosecuting. The current issue is that they are not doing what they are good at. In the NCAA if a staffer (say Connor Stallions) commits a major rule violation, the head of the program (Jim Harbaugh) serves a punishment for "failure to supervise". We need the Boeing CEO to spend sometime in a concrete cell for "failure to supervise". Maybe threaten to break them up a bit with the Antitrust division. The next CEO will do a better job of self-regulating.

bonton89 3y ago

After Mattel shipped in a bunch of lead painted toys from China a law was passed requiring inspections for everyone except Mattel who were deemed large enough to inspect themselves, even though their negligence was the cause of the law.

7thaccount 3y ago
Holy cow...if that is true

mrfox321 3y ago

the police in America

asylteltine 3y ago

The ones that pay off the government which is… everyone! Except you, the private citizen.

emarsden 3y ago

There are several good reasons for allowing it. One is that it's difficult for a public inspectorate/regulator to maintain the necessary levels of expertise to assess such complex systems (and increasingly so with technological progress). Furthermore, people working inside the industry have much better access to information about the risks than an outside inspector has. A second reason is simply costs to the public. In 2019, the interim FAA director Dan Elwell testified to the US Senate after the 737 Max disasters that bringing all delegated oversight back into the FAA would require 10000 extra staff and USD 1.8B in costs. There are fairness/democratic arguments to having the costs borne by the industry (and thus indirectly by the privileged portion of the taxpayers who consume air traffic) rather than by all taxpayers.

nashashmi 3y ago

Every industry self inspects. The city inspects its utilities. The construction companies inspect their own work. The only time an outside inspector is used is when the company is doing the work for a client, so the client uses an inspector.. If you screw up inspection repeatedly, then you get replaced. This article is about a weird govt flex.

akira2501 3y ago

> It completely ruins the point of an inspection. What is the point of an inspection?

nielsbot 3y ago

Pretty sure the meat industry is

tomohawk 3y ago

I live in an affluent community, but the last time I had electrical work done, the government inspector missed 5 serious problems that I found, 3 of which were obvious. It's really hard for the government to hire and retain competent people to inspect something as easy as residential wiring, even in an affluent community with plenty of money being spent to operate the government.

turquoisevar 3y ago

Car manufacturers self-certify I learned pretty recently. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/12/23998308/tesla-cybertuck-safety-pedestrian-crash-test-nhtsa-iihs https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/12/23998308/tesla-cybertuck...