8 ms·

Everything is regulated these days and it usually costs a fortune and helps nobody except incumbents. Makes everything feel rigged and makes me not want to part

Everything is regulated these days and it usually costs a fortune and helps nobody except incumbents. Makes everything feel rigged and makes me not want to participate in the economy. I wish we could go back to a time when everyone takes their own risks and has to do their own research. Manufacturers could optionally pay some standards company to add some safety label to it to help boost customer confidence but it should not be compulsory. We're all going to die eventually and this obsession with safety is unhealthy and probably kills more people than it protects (e.g. due to the mental distress they cause and false peace of mind which dumbs down consumers and makes them feel like they don't need to do their own research... Not to mention the social harms caused by the passive 'trust the experts' mindset).

iancmceachern 3y ago
I dont know. They killed hundreds building the Brooklyn Bridge, the hoover dam. So many horror stories of things like that xray shield sizer or lawn darts, or laundry mangles, etc. That world wasn't better for anyone but the robber barrons.
KerrAvon 3y ago
you need to read up on the history of those regulations. Hint: chesterton’s fence
zztop44 3y ago
I love that regulations kill people through both excessive mental distress and false peace of mind. That’s wonderful.
- jongjong 3y ago
  Regulations are anti-competitive as they prevent people from successfully bootstrapping their startups and becoming entrepreneurs. It forces ambitious people without capital to be wage slaves which causes substantial mental distress. False peace of mind harms people because it makes people assume that all products on the shelves are safe by default which isn't always the case and drives harmful behaviors on a massive scale. Take the adoption of Glyphosate for example. Had people not been reassured by the government that it was 100% safe, many people would not have used it. Consumers outsourcing trust to the government instead of the individuals who produce the goods is harmful because it creates an environment which gives untrustworthy people a competitive edge and a certain degree of protection from liability. It shifts some responsibility away from producers who understand the product best and towards government agencies whose interest is to help large private companies maintain market dominance.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    Someone drank the libertarian cool aid. I'll take my toasters certified and regulated, they might not be 100% safe, but they sure as hell will be safer than what most garage entrepreneurs will cobble together. Details matter, standards matter, and regulation is a way to enforce those.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Today having quality standards means that people have some amount of faith in the products sold on shelves. The alternative doesn't mean that the bad products go away, or that everyone would just "be careful" somehow and find ways to guess at how safe things are. We know we can't trust everything sold to us, and we really have no ability to tell what's killing us or our family. If we could all just always look out for ourselves we'd never have kids dying because of heavy metals in their applesauce. It's a weird thing when people are convinced that the solution to snake oil salesmen and serial murderers are making those very things commonplace and perfectly legal. There are times when corporations abuse regulations to add excessive burdens on their would-be competitors, but making sure your toasters don't electrocute you or burn your house down isn't one of those situations. There are also times when our government and their regulations don't protect people as well as they should. That's a sign that we need more regulations and better enforcement/accountability, not an indication that we should give up trying to hold anyone to any kind of standards in the first place. Honestly, we want the responsibility to be on government agencies because when they fail to protect our interests we at least have the option to vote them out and replace them with people who will do their job. You don't get to vote out the CEO or shareholders who decide to become serial killers so that they can make a little extra money on top of the millions/billions they already make in profits. Why would you want to limit your own power so that others can exploit you more easily? Companies have shown time and time again that they will knowingly poison you, kill you even, if they think it will make them more money. They'll spend tons of time and money trying to cover it up too. You'd rather trust them than your own elected representatives? Maybe you've been voting for the wrong people...
  - jIyajbe 3y ago
    "All right; but apart from the sanitation, education, medicine, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
tcmart14 3y ago
Its not there to help incumbents. New companies come up all the time to make these kinds of products. Its a barrier to entry to keep Joe dipshit who learned how to solder together two wires last night thinking he can has an overnight get rich quick scheme shoddily throwing some random components together without knowing or acknowledging what they are really doing and selling that product to some unsuspecting person that is gonna get to experience a (maybe?) fun spark show and electrical fire as soon as they plug in their new device. Its happened enough that these barriers have pretty much become required. But if someone is serious about making a product, they will take the necessary steps for certification.
- wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
  I believe you, but arent you suspicious of the Big Toasta superconglomerate.
  - bigfudge 3y ago
    Although I don’t want random delay incendiary devices either, I do have some sympathy with OP. The net effect of all regulations like this means large classes of business are not feasible unless you have substantial capital. And availability of capital for good ideas is not at all evenly distributed in our society (the UK at least). This is just one more way that we are going to entrench low social mobility. Note also, it’s not just electronics regs that act in this way - our societies have become much more regulated and rule bound in my life time. Often things for good reason, but we should think about the ways in which this entrenches incumbents imo.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > Note also, it’s not just electronics regs that act in this way - our societies have become much more regulated and rule bound in my life time. Often things for good reason. After WW2 we were in a high-trust, low-barrier society state across the Western world [1]. You could leave your door unlocked and no one would come and rob you, your children could roam free as they pleased, you could start what could become a multi-billion dollar enterprise in your garage and neither the IRS nor "HOA enforcers" would raise an eyebrow or keep annoying you with audits, you could afford a home with a garage in the first place even as a blue collar worker. And that worked out pretty well in retrospective - we had a literally booming economy from both large giants as well as small startups, people had lots of children as they actually had money, employees in companies had actual freedom to decide things even on lower levels where the actual work happened, employees entered their company at 16-18 and left at 65-ish, and the focus of upper management was to keep the company healthy. Around / after the fall of the USSR, things took a serious nosedive all at once. A lot of solid blue-collar employment got moved off overseas, poverty shot through the roof (and with it, related crimes like burglaries and robberies), IRS shifted from enforcing the tax code fairly to focusing on small businesses and people (partially because the uber rich and international megacorps now employed sizable amounts of lawyers and tax specialists that created schemes that were way too complex for the IRS to dig through), companies more and more focused on quarterly results, short-term benefits and financial plays instead of sustainability (we're seeing right now with Boeing how a once proud company has fallen to the MBA beancounters), employers completely forgot about responsibility for their workers and hired-and-fired them in response to said quarterly results, the resulting loss of trust led to absurd micromanaging from above, and everyone in general went for "side hustles" and squeezing out some tiny amounts of money for themselves by tricking others because there was no other way. And the combination of all of that is IMHO what created the low-trust society state we are in: we cannot trust our neighbour, our employer, a random hobo on the streets, the government, no one any more. [1] Yes, I know, distrust against non-Whites, LGBT, ... was a (massive) thing but that's not my point here. And yes, I'm painting a rose-colored picture, and realities could vastly differ.
atoav 3y ago
That means you the kind of person that buys an experimental toaster and leaves it plugged through the night in your families kitchen? There might be regulation that is too much, also in the field of electrical engineering (and I am a certified EE), but most of it (especially regarding toasters) is pretty useful if you want to sleep sound. This is not about making a toaster. I could make one using a long piece of wire and a transformer. It is about making a toaster that has a certain standard and does not kill people, burn down houses and/or interferes with radio traffic. All kind of things that would suck. If you can't clear that bar as a manufacturer, you shouldn't be one. You could still build things for yourself – but if you want to sell things to others they should be able to assume you are not out there to kill them without deeply researching your company, aquiring a degree in mechanical and electrical engineering, buying your product and disassembling it. And I say that as a person that would be able to do that, unlike most.
- bigfudge 3y ago
  But the issue isn’t that they couldn’t clear that bar, necessarily. It’s that they may not have the capital to prove it. We have created an uneven playing field against OLLLOO devices, and against large home grown corps which can indirectly inflate the prices for certification because the incumbency means the cost is not an issue for them.
  - atoav 3y ago
    That depends on your area of operations I guess. If you want to go into aviation, medical devices, trains, cars or anything involving big industrial processes, sure. If you want to build a toaster not so much. You could just slap a CE sign on and probably get away with selling it via online platforms. That however means you guarantee for the compliance. You also need a manual in the language of the nation where you want to sell it and a model/serial number and a risk analysis. That is not nothing, but the motivated individual could learn all of that in a few years, if they are somewhat intelligent. Sure depending on what area you are operating in the catch might be even knowing what all those norms are and the fact that we sometimes have to pay to even read the norms is a friggin crime. But it is probably a good thing that there are some requirements one needs to fulfill to e.g. becoming a commercial airplane manufacturer. Regulatory capture (big corps demanding stricter regulation to root out their smaller competition) is a thing. But not with the toaster industry.
nindalf 3y ago
American consumers think that “made in the USA” is a sign of quality. The regulations in the USA that weed out poor quality products are a big part of that. You buy such a product without being afraid that you’re going to injure yourself when you plug it in because the safety regulations are working.
- sgarland 3y ago
  But quixotically, they are rarely willing to pay the premium that American manufacturing brings with it.
greenyoda 3y ago
> I wish we could go back to a time when everyone takes their own risks and has to do their own research. Your risks can impact other people. If your toaster catches fire, it could kill people in the apartment next to yours. If the brakes on your car fail, you could kill anyone who is in your path. These other people didn't choose to take on these risks.
poulpy123 3y ago
I think this is the most insane thing I have read in a year, and I spend too much time on twitter
janalsncm 3y ago
> I wish we could go back to a time when everyone takes their own risks and has to do their own research Apart from all of the other obvious things people have mentioned, what this hyperlibertarian perspective fails to take into account is externalities. I might have done my own toaster research, but did my neighbor? What happens when my neighbor doesn’t do his own toaster research properly and ends up burning down both of our apartments? Insurance can’t cover everything that will be destroyed.
- soco 3y ago
  I guess hyperlibertarian don't see the use of insurance either so this is a moot point. And they wouldn't live close to any neighbor (or rather, nobody would want to live close to them).
plastic_enjoyer 3y ago
>I wish we could go back to a time when everyone takes their own risks and has to do their own research. When was this time?
ssl-3 3y ago
What part of UL testing and certification do you think constitutes false peace of mind? If I sell you a toaster that I built in my own little workshop (USA! USA!), then: Wouldn't you prefer that there be at least some third-party testing to ensure that it is safe enough to not burn your house down? And if you don't care about your own safety (because you know how to Do Your Own Research), then: Wouldn't your kids and neighbors prefer this testing? Maybe if you trust me (because you like the cut of my jib or something) then you'll believe me when I say that I had my engineering-type buddy go over the design and he said it was OK. But caveat emptor: You should not trust me. I, the seller in a hypothetical truly-free market, am here to give you as little as I can get away with for as many dollars as I can take you for. That's what UL helps with, in this context: They're an impartial private company that tests products to ensure that they meet safety standards (most of which they designed themselves, but that's just a positive example of free enterprise at work). They do charge [plenty of] money for this service, but they've got expenses to cover (and profit to make!) just as you or I do. But there is no federal law or national regulation requiring US consumers to use only UL-listed toasters. That's not a thing, and it has never been a thing. Such a requirement may be a thing in some more-local jurisdictions, and/or also an important part of some insurance policies, but the overarching regulatory environment that you seem to be railing against in the context of toasters simply does not exist.
quickthrowman 3y ago
Here’s the thing, electricity will kill you. > I wish we could go back to a time when everyone takes their own risks and has to do their own research. Trust me, you really don’t.
numpad0 3y ago
The Earth's too small for that. One way to solve it is GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR and another is bunches of space habitats. Personally I prefer the latter.

iancmceachern 3y ago

I dont know. They killed hundreds building the Brooklyn Bridge, the hoover dam. So many horror stories of things like that xray shield sizer or lawn darts, or laundry mangles, etc. That world wasn't better for anyone but the robber barrons.

KerrAvon 3y ago

you need to read up on the history of those regulations. Hint: chesterton’s fence

zztop44 3y ago

I love that regulations kill people through both excessive mental distress and false peace of mind. That’s wonderful.

jongjong 3y ago
Regulations are anti-competitive as they prevent people from successfully bootstrapping their startups and becoming entrepreneurs. It forces ambitious people without capital to be wage slaves which causes substantial mental distress. False peace of mind harms people because it makes people assume that all products on the shelves are safe by default which isn't always the case and drives harmful behaviors on a massive scale. Take the adoption of Glyphosate for example. Had people not been reassured by the government that it was 100% safe, many people would not have used it. Consumers outsourcing trust to the government instead of the individuals who produce the goods is harmful because it creates an environment which gives untrustworthy people a competitive edge and a certain degree of protection from liability. It shifts some responsibility away from producers who understand the product best and towards government agencies whose interest is to help large private companies maintain market dominance.
- danielbln 3y ago
  Someone drank the libertarian cool aid. I'll take my toasters certified and regulated, they might not be 100% safe, but they sure as hell will be safer than what most garage entrepreneurs will cobble together. Details matter, standards matter, and regulation is a way to enforce those.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Today having quality standards means that people have some amount of faith in the products sold on shelves. The alternative doesn't mean that the bad products go away, or that everyone would just "be careful" somehow and find ways to guess at how safe things are. We know we can't trust everything sold to us, and we really have no ability to tell what's killing us or our family. If we could all just always look out for ourselves we'd never have kids dying because of heavy metals in their applesauce. It's a weird thing when people are convinced that the solution to snake oil salesmen and serial murderers are making those very things commonplace and perfectly legal. There are times when corporations abuse regulations to add excessive burdens on their would-be competitors, but making sure your toasters don't electrocute you or burn your house down isn't one of those situations. There are also times when our government and their regulations don't protect people as well as they should. That's a sign that we need more regulations and better enforcement/accountability, not an indication that we should give up trying to hold anyone to any kind of standards in the first place. Honestly, we want the responsibility to be on government agencies because when they fail to protect our interests we at least have the option to vote them out and replace them with people who will do their job. You don't get to vote out the CEO or shareholders who decide to become serial killers so that they can make a little extra money on top of the millions/billions they already make in profits. Why would you want to limit your own power so that others can exploit you more easily? Companies have shown time and time again that they will knowingly poison you, kill you even, if they think it will make them more money. They'll spend tons of time and money trying to cover it up too. You'd rather trust them than your own elected representatives? Maybe you've been voting for the wrong people...
- jIyajbe 3y ago
  "All right; but apart from the sanitation, education, medicine, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

tcmart14 3y ago

Its not there to help incumbents. New companies come up all the time to make these kinds of products. Its a barrier to entry to keep Joe dipshit who learned how to solder together two wires last night thinking he can has an overnight get rich quick scheme shoddily throwing some random components together without knowing or acknowledging what they are really doing and selling that product to some unsuspecting person that is gonna get to experience a (maybe?) fun spark show and electrical fire as soon as they plug in their new device. Its happened enough that these barriers have pretty much become required. But if someone is serious about making a product, they will take the necessary steps for certification.

wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
I believe you, but arent you suspicious of the Big Toasta superconglomerate.
- bigfudge 3y ago
  Although I don’t want random delay incendiary devices either, I do have some sympathy with OP. The net effect of all regulations like this means large classes of business are not feasible unless you have substantial capital. And availability of capital for good ideas is not at all evenly distributed in our society (the UK at least). This is just one more way that we are going to entrench low social mobility. Note also, it’s not just electronics regs that act in this way - our societies have become much more regulated and rule bound in my life time. Often things for good reason, but we should think about the ways in which this entrenches incumbents imo.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Note also, it’s not just electronics regs that act in this way - our societies have become much more regulated and rule bound in my life time. Often things for good reason. After WW2 we were in a high-trust, low-barrier society state across the Western world [1]. You could leave your door unlocked and no one would come and rob you, your children could roam free as they pleased, you could start what could become a multi-billion dollar enterprise in your garage and neither the IRS nor "HOA enforcers" would raise an eyebrow or keep annoying you with audits, you could afford a home with a garage in the first place even as a blue collar worker. And that worked out pretty well in retrospective - we had a literally booming economy from both large giants as well as small startups, people had lots of children as they actually had money, employees in companies had actual freedom to decide things even on lower levels where the actual work happened, employees entered their company at 16-18 and left at 65-ish, and the focus of upper management was to keep the company healthy. Around / after the fall of the USSR, things took a serious nosedive all at once. A lot of solid blue-collar employment got moved off overseas, poverty shot through the roof (and with it, related crimes like burglaries and robberies), IRS shifted from enforcing the tax code fairly to focusing on small businesses and people (partially because the uber rich and international megacorps now employed sizable amounts of lawyers and tax specialists that created schemes that were way too complex for the IRS to dig through), companies more and more focused on quarterly results, short-term benefits and financial plays instead of sustainability (we're seeing right now with Boeing how a once proud company has fallen to the MBA beancounters), employers completely forgot about responsibility for their workers and hired-and-fired them in response to said quarterly results, the resulting loss of trust led to absurd micromanaging from above, and everyone in general went for "side hustles" and squeezing out some tiny amounts of money for themselves by tricking others because there was no other way. And the combination of all of that is IMHO what created the low-trust society state we are in: we cannot trust our neighbour, our employer, a random hobo on the streets, the government, no one any more. [1] Yes, I know, distrust against non-Whites, LGBT, ... was a (massive) thing but that's not my point here. And yes, I'm painting a rose-colored picture, and realities could vastly differ.

atoav 3y ago

That means you the kind of person that buys an experimental toaster and leaves it plugged through the night in your families kitchen? There might be regulation that is too much, also in the field of electrical engineering (and I am a certified EE), but most of it (especially regarding toasters) is pretty useful if you want to sleep sound. This is not about making a toaster. I could make one using a long piece of wire and a transformer. It is about making a toaster that has a certain standard and does not kill people, burn down houses and/or interferes with radio traffic. All kind of things that would suck. If you can't clear that bar as a manufacturer, you shouldn't be one. You could still build things for yourself – but if you want to sell things to others they should be able to assume you are not out there to kill them without deeply researching your company, aquiring a degree in mechanical and electrical engineering, buying your product and disassembling it. And I say that as a person that would be able to do that, unlike most.

bigfudge 3y ago
But the issue isn’t that they couldn’t clear that bar, necessarily. It’s that they may not have the capital to prove it. We have created an uneven playing field against OLLLOO devices, and against large home grown corps which can indirectly inflate the prices for certification because the incumbency means the cost is not an issue for them.
- atoav 3y ago
  That depends on your area of operations I guess. If you want to go into aviation, medical devices, trains, cars or anything involving big industrial processes, sure. If you want to build a toaster not so much. You could just slap a CE sign on and probably get away with selling it via online platforms. That however means you guarantee for the compliance. You also need a manual in the language of the nation where you want to sell it and a model/serial number and a risk analysis. That is not nothing, but the motivated individual could learn all of that in a few years, if they are somewhat intelligent. Sure depending on what area you are operating in the catch might be even knowing what all those norms are and the fact that we sometimes have to pay to even read the norms is a friggin crime. But it is probably a good thing that there are some requirements one needs to fulfill to e.g. becoming a commercial airplane manufacturer. Regulatory capture (big corps demanding stricter regulation to root out their smaller competition) is a thing. But not with the toaster industry.

nindalf 3y ago

American consumers think that “made in the USA” is a sign of quality. The regulations in the USA that weed out poor quality products are a big part of that. You buy such a product without being afraid that you’re going to injure yourself when you plug it in because the safety regulations are working.

sgarland 3y ago
But quixotically, they are rarely willing to pay the premium that American manufacturing brings with it.

greenyoda 3y ago

> I wish we could go back to a time when everyone takes their own risks and has to do their own research. Your risks can impact other people. If your toaster catches fire, it could kill people in the apartment next to yours. If the brakes on your car fail, you could kill anyone who is in your path. These other people didn't choose to take on these risks.

poulpy123 3y ago

I think this is the most insane thing I have read in a year, and I spend too much time on twitter

janalsncm 3y ago

> I wish we could go back to a time when everyone takes their own risks and has to do their own research Apart from all of the other obvious things people have mentioned, what this hyperlibertarian perspective fails to take into account is externalities. I might have done my own toaster research, but did my neighbor? What happens when my neighbor doesn’t do his own toaster research properly and ends up burning down both of our apartments? Insurance can’t cover everything that will be destroyed.

soco 3y ago
I guess hyperlibertarian don't see the use of insurance either so this is a moot point. And they wouldn't live close to any neighbor (or rather, nobody would want to live close to them).

plastic_enjoyer 3y ago

>I wish we could go back to a time when everyone takes their own risks and has to do their own research. When was this time?

ssl-3 3y ago

What part of UL testing and certification do you think constitutes false peace of mind? If I sell you a toaster that I built in my own little workshop (USA! USA!), then: Wouldn't you prefer that there be at least some third-party testing to ensure that it is safe enough to not burn your house down? And if you don't care about your own safety (because you know how to Do Your Own Research), then: Wouldn't your kids and neighbors prefer this testing? Maybe if you trust me (because you like the cut of my jib or something) then you'll believe me when I say that I had my engineering-type buddy go over the design and he said it was OK. But caveat emptor: You should not trust me. I, the seller in a hypothetical truly-free market, am here to give you as little as I can get away with for as many dollars as I can take you for. That's what UL helps with, in this context: They're an impartial private company that tests products to ensure that they meet safety standards (most of which they designed themselves, but that's just a positive example of free enterprise at work). They do charge [plenty of] money for this service, but they've got expenses to cover (and profit to make!) just as you or I do. But there is no federal law or national regulation requiring US consumers to use only UL-listed toasters. That's not a thing, and it has never been a thing. Such a requirement may be a thing in some more-local jurisdictions, and/or also an important part of some insurance policies, but the overarching regulatory environment that you seem to be railing against in the context of toasters simply does not exist.

quickthrowman 3y ago

Here’s the thing, electricity will kill you. > I wish we could go back to a time when everyone takes their own risks and has to do their own research. Trust me, you really don’t.

numpad0 3y ago

The Earth's too small for that. One way to solve it is GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR and another is bunches of space habitats. Personally I prefer the latter.