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As someone who has looked at things like Renewable energy deployments within the UK, this is a pattern that seems to be quite pervasive across all industries. T
by endymion-light 7mo ago
As someone who has looked at things like Renewable energy deployments within the UK, this is a pattern that seems to be quite pervasive across all industries. The byzantine web of planning approvals, goose counting, public outcry that you have to deal with to deploy essentially a relatively small solar farm is monstrous.
What that results with is that the only people capable of creating & managing these processes have the legal teams & resources necessary, stifling growth. Even once you get an approval, it may be years in order to get a grid connection.
This risk averse attitude pervades into all walks of life, including medical beurocracy. This essentially locks out a ton of real innovation, as it's too expensive to square up against a mass of beurocracy attempting to stifle you at all turns.
- ACCount37 7mo agoThat's what a lot of people seemingly struggle to understand. Inaction is not a safe action. Inaction has a price. And sometimes a death toll too.
- graemep 7mo agoIt depends on your point of view. For the person deciding on giving permission they will not be thanked for allowing it, but might well be blamed if something goes horribly wrong.
- ACCount37 7mo agoThat's kind of the issue with a lot of bureaucratic oversight. It often produces systems that aren't at all interested in being streamlined, in letting things that should happen happen. It produces systems where compliance is a drag on the one doing things, and the default state is "forbidden".
- inglor_cz 7mo agoYes, but this is a clasical agent-principal problem. Theoretically, the bureaucracy works on your behalf, but only approximately so. If it makes a mistake that kills you, the decision maker does not pay any price.
- gzread 7mo agoHave you tried the "forgiveness is easier than permission" approach? What would happen if you just installed the solar panels? I know that in some countries they'd come by with a bulldozer and tear them down again - is your country one of those?
- bpodgursky 7mo ago[flagged]
- iso1631 7mo agoLoad of bollocks, this meme is tiresome. It's the USA that fires people and jails people for a month for social media posts https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-meme-tennessee-arrest-larry-bushart-02b445f454bcfb657a48e8fa7e8ddfc9 https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-meme-tennessee-arres... Or if you want some actual context rather than twitter outrage bait https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB3WVygAM8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB3WVygAM8I
- bpodgursky 7mo agoThere are literally people in the UK in jail for tweets deemed to be incitement to violence. Maybe you think it's a good thing! I don't care! But it's ridiculous to argue over the facts on the ground.
- gzread 7mo agoWhat were the tweets?
- like_any_other 7mo agoI don't have examples of tweets handy, but here are stickers that get you 2 years in UK jail: They reportedly contained slogans such as “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066”, “Mass immigration is white genocide”, “intolerance is a virtue” and “they seek conquest not asylum.” Sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867 (does not quote a single sticker that he was jailed for) https://www.gbnews.com/news/sam-melia-free-speech-activists-outraged-jailed-far-right-stickers https://www.gbnews.com/news/sam-melia-free-speech-activists-...
- pixl97 7mo agoTo play the devils advocate, in places with low bureaucracy most of the risk taken is not innovation. It's just risk that leads to the death of others. Buildings with shitty concrete with too little rebar in it. Electrical wiring that will kill you. Improper foundations and such. At the end of the day there is no simple answer here. It's no different than the talks about AI that dominate HN these days. You can build good things with AI, but the vast majority of it is crap, so we put up filters and hoops to ensure we don't get flooded with that crap.
- saulpw 7mo agoThe devil doesn't need any more advocates.
- pixl97 7mo agoEvidently the construct of the devil does because humanity can help but setup complex situations that require a balanced approach rather than only looking at things one way.
- saulpw 7mo agoIn that case, you can explain the nuance and offer a more balanced viewpoint, without invoking the devil as an accountability sink. Your words should stand on their own merits. (To be fair, you did this! I'm just saying you shouldn't preface your words with a trite phrase that signals you'll be lobbing cheap logic over the wall and disavowing responsibility for your words if the logic proves faulty.)
- pixl97 7mo agoAt least to me it sounds like you just have problems with the incorrect use of the devils advocate by some people in the first place, of which I would actually hope you understand its use in rhetoric. At least in the common HN discussion you nearly have to use its form when talking in an approving manner of things like regulation or unions because it goes against the Holy Church of Capitalism, lest you be punished by the mighty downvote button for heresy.
- briffle 7mo agoIts a double edged sword. yes, it stifles renewable energy innovation, but those rules are usually put in place in a more general sense, and you would really want them in place if next door was suddenly announced to be a landfill, or chemical plant, or a chicken farm, or an xAI datacenter....
- ntonozzi 7mo agoThe UK is begging for people to build datacenters: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/09/revealed-uks-multibillion-ai-drive-is-built-on-phantom-investments https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/09/revealed-...
- hdgvhicv 7mo agoNational governments maybe. Local ones aren’t, and it’s those that fill with nimbys and maintain the majority of control over planning
- nxobject 7mo agoEveryone wants the datacenter somewhere in their country for sovereignty... just not next to them. Quelle surprise. At this point you may as well build supermarkets on top of them just to sell 'em to people.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoThey're so absurdly capital intensive at this point that they probably ought to be buried at least 50 meters down. If any reasonably capable countries ever face off directly they'll probably be one of the first things to go.
- aitchnyu 7mo agoUS suburban development followed nuclear war threats. Will history repeat itself by unconcentrating servers?
- janalsncm 7mo agoMaybe one solution for this issue would be some kind of “developer’s ombudsman” that is an affordable public service to 1) help people navigate the bureaucracy and 2) produce a report recommending streamlining of rules where possible. This avoids “cutting down all the laws to punish the devil”. Some regulations are necessary.
- terminalshort 7mo agoAnother bureaucracy to help people navigate the existing bureaucracy? Are you missing a "/s"?
- janalsncm 7mo agoNo. The companies that hire lawyers to navigate government bureaucracy have their own internal bureaucracies. So the status quo is not “no bureaucracy”. It seems that in any sufficiently complex thing there will be some irreducible amount of bureaucracy. So it’s reasonable to make that irreducible set of rules more accessible.
- terminalshort 7mo agoThat's the great part of getting rid of government bureaucracy. You save a bit on that and a fortune on all the internal company bureaucracies that can be removed in response.
- ctoth 7mo ago> Some regulations are necessary. Genuine question — is there a common factor across the regulations you'd keep? Because if there is, you could encode that directly instead of maintaining the specific rules. And if there isn't, "some regulations are necessary" isn't really a position yet.
- janalsncm 7mo ago“Tear it down and see what breaks” is one strategy. I would suggest another based on the principle of Chesterton’s fence: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ The point of the ombudsman I suggested is that it’s hard to encode a simple rule in a sentence or two. You need to be familiar with the process so you’re not relearning the same lessons over and over.
- mindslight 7mo agoI'd say the underlying problem is our capital-first regulatory environments. For the topic of the original article, anyone can see that it would be reasonable for a guy who loves his dog to make what appears to be a prudent medical decision in her interest, trying out an unknown vaccine without any sort of government involvement - and a government that prevents this is unjust. But with the way the system is set up, if this were legally sound it would then automatically imply that a corpo scaling up the situation to thousands of dogs that it (the corpo) doesn't care about would also be okay. The fundamental problem is that there is no recognition of scale (because small scale operators don't have the pull with the government to fix the regulations).
- terminalshort 7mo agoThe same government that writes these regulations also has a department that rounds up and kills stray dogs so this regulation is stupid at any scale.
- mindslight 7mo agoIn general outright killing is considered a completely different thing than medical experiments.
- blks 7mo agoThe same government also allows and profiteers from people murdering animals in the thousands every day, to be dismembered and sold
- KaiserPro 7mo agoUK planning law is not the same as medical research regulations. UK planning law is the physical manifestation of legal tech debt. It will not be tackled until the daily mail and their readers are dead, and not replaced. To make changes it requires lots of will from the government, and the consent of a bunch of people who are unlikely to give it. medical regulation is fucking trivial by comparison. Most of it is arms length and technical. it can be changed according to evidence, rather than gut feeling. Its only in a few cases are there actual legal hard lines (like embryo research, and vivisection)
- endymion-light 7mo agoFully agree - I think there's a core legalism inherent with especially the british political class. The first indication is always to build more guardrails and take fewer risks. It ends up killing innovation
- adammarples 7mo agoPeople may not realise how bad uk planning law is unless they are here. Anybody can veto a development for any reason, and there is no disincentive to do so even if it is found to be spurious. They can just do it again. A development isn't just building either, it can be as simple as changing the use of something or making an improvement to it. On top of that are all the actual regulations, newt surveys, listed buildings restrictions, etc, and the many months of associated delays and costs with each one. In London the body set up after Grenfell now has a 10 month backlog and approval rate of 30%, so nothing is built in London except storage centres.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- sidewndr46 7mo agoSpeaking as someone from the US, this is by design. If there was a single track for approval, it'd be really easy for a motivated group to get stuff done. By requiring multiple overlapping layers of approvals (often in direct contradiction to one another) it ensures each layer of government can get their hands in the very much real cookie jar.