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It’s Time to Build

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Re: It’s Time to Build

#401

Post by BurningFrog »

3ygun wrote: post #323
oxymoron wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may not have expressed that point very well, but it seems like the common law system would encourage less explicit regulation rather than more, so that seems like a bit of a contradiction. Does the need for more litigation drive a desire to be more explicit in how statues are written?

As the parent notes. The issue is if you have a simple law say "Do not dump harmful chemicals into waterways used for drinking, shipping, etc." this leads to a lot of litigation regarding what is a "harmful chemical". If instead you have it all spelled out "harmful chemicals being one of coal ash, hydrochloric acid, asbestos, ..." (don't quote me on these). Business's know what the variables/costs effecting operation…

I think the modern US version is different:

A federal 3 letter agency unilaterally writes detailed regulations, that are for practical purposes law.

One problem is that the regulatory agency gets captured by the industry, which means the regulation ends up being a way for the established industries and companies to make competition unfeasible.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#402

Post by Gormisdomai »

Regulatory capture seems like a red herring that everyone is fixating on here. Marc is right to mention it, but it's part of a bunch of other things and the most important part is the will of people to actually build and try new stuff, and run through walls to make it happen.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#403

Post by Jommi »

freeone3000 wrote: post #168
MattGaiser wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't think you can just ask a court to answer a hypothetical in a binding way. You basically need to get into the legal problem first.

This is an American doctrine, that there must be an "actual case or controversy" - Canadian courts can and do issue advisory opinions to interpret regulation.

Which are still usually advisory and not legally binding advice.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#404

Post by djcapelis »

Vomzor wrote: post #350
djcapelis wrote: post #238

> But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared This is silly. There are clear differences in response. Here’s just one example: 21 Jan - The city department of public health activates its operations center to prepare for a potential outbreak. 28 Jan - The city activates its emergency operations center. 25 Feb - The city formally declares a state of emergency to prep…

The first official case was in March. The actual first case was at the beginning of January. The shelter in place order means the city failed to anticipate and acted when it was too late. Like the rest of the Western world.

> The actual first case was at the beginning of January.

Receipts please.

You are claiming that the timeline of SF matched other countries where deaths started much earlier and went much higher. Are you really making the claim that our hospitals were overlooking a couple hundred people drowning in their own lungs and unable to breath during the month of February?

Because that would basically have to have been true if we had community spread in early January.

> The shelter in place order means the city failed to anticipate and acted when it was too late. Like the rest of the Western world.

Your assumption is that the death rate being substantially lower in SF and California is luck and not preparation?

That stance doesn’t seem supported by the evidence.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#405

Post by buss »

tekdude wrote: post #388

Regulatory capture is indeed a major underlying cause of a lot of the issues, but who will actually do the political work to fight against it? Someone spent money to capture the regulations in the first place, through lobbying and campaign donations. Who will spend the money to lobby and donate for the cause of undoing that? The "builders"? No, their focus and limited capital is spent on whatever it is they are worki…

In San Francisco, at least, YIMBY is the organization that is organized around ending regulatory capture in housing, and The Neoliberal Project (in SF YIMBY Neoliberal) is organized around broader dismantling of regulatory capture.

We mobilize people in support of reform-focused politicians and have even started running our own (Sonja Trauss in 2018 and myself in 2020).

Happy to talk more about it -- steven.buss@gmail.com Happy to talk more about it

Re: It’s Time to Build

#406

Post by Animats »

You see it in education. We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18 year olds in the U.S. each year, or the 120 million new 18 year olds in the world each year. Why not educate every 18 year old?

Because the US has too much college education now. About 45% of the people with college degrees are working in jobs that don't require them. The payoff for a college education is often negative now.[1]

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/there-really-arent-many-ba...

Re: It’s Time to Build

#407

Post by solidasparagus »

pmarca wrote: post #382
solidasparagus wrote: post #203

Well Marc, one problem is the world of VC-driven innovation. Building truly revolutionary work takes time and commitment, while the VC ecosystem and entrepreneurial culture actively works against this. - Telling founders to be underpaid and commit their entire finances to the success of their startups forces startups to spend more time finding product-market fit than building what the world needs long-term. - Hiring…

Fortunately, VCs have no regulatory protection whatsoever. Build a better way to finance innovation!

Brb in a couple decades. But I was kind of hoping that the domain experts would have thoughts on the topic. I would very much like to build long-term solutions to our biggest problems, but I haven't found a whole lot of mechanisms to do so.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#408

Post by Animats »

baryphonic wrote: post #303
tlb wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting an answer from a court (is X legal?) takes a long time: at least a few years and several hundred thousand dollars. Far too long to wait before building a business around X. Asking people to build the business first and then find out if it's legal isn't how a society of laws is supposed to work. Fast courts would be a huge benefit to society.

This is also a failure to build. We just accept it as a given that courts take too long, judges are too lazy to get their opinions out in a timely manner and the legal profession too often gets fat fees for slow-walking legal proceedings when technology exists to make expeditious dispute resolution much faster. For example, I can think of no reason why we can't mandate that discovery must use electronic format unless…

Read "Why Courts Don't Work" by Richard Neeley, who used to be chief justice of the West Virginia supreme court. Courts don't work because a lot of people don't want them to work. If you could get a judgement in a week in a minor labor case, employers would have to obey labor law, for example.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#410

Post by Jommi »

deanCommie wrote: post #341
oxymoron wrote: post #70

I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position. It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks o…

I feel like all the replies comparing legal system differences between the US and the EU miss a crucial element - the difference in the characters of the people participating in each society. I'm now going to make a couple of broad generalizations. Note, that I'm aware they do not apply to every person, or even state in the US, or member nation of the EU. However having lived in both for a number of years, I do have…

I think trying to put all of Europe into one EU in your argument is already where it breaks down.

Europeans don't live in a cohesive society. Italians, Germans, Swedes live in a cohesive society in their small california-sized countries.

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