Welcome to 2018 [LWN.net]

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 3, 2018 22:44 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
In reply to: Welcome to 2018 by Cyberax
Parent article: Welcome to 2018

Car ads at least back to the 1950s bragged about safety improvements. Do you remember when Volvo got caught cheating in their ads bragging about how tough their cars were? They stacked seven high, I think, but had wood supports inside. This demonstrates that safety matters to both consumers and producers, and that there is more accountability in markets than in government.

Have you kept track of how many times the US nutritional guidelines have changed at the whim of crony industries? Ever see any heads roll for changing opinions on eggs, red meat, dairy, coffee, chocolate? Remember Saccharin, falsely labeled a carcinogen against all evidence, until the government finally admitted 30 years later they had been wrong from the start? How many heads rolled over that?

Banks before the Fed used to advertise who their directors were, how much reserves they had, and the general safety of their business.

There were many financial panics in the US, including the 1929 crash, and including the curious 1920 recession which was as bad as the 1929 crash but never escalated because Woodrow Wilson had had a stroke and no one was in charge; it was over in 18 months. Several of these panics affected Canada too, but not a single bank collapsed in Canada while thousands dis in the US. This was because regulations tied the banks hands and prevented branch banking, whereby funds could be transferred at will to cover short-term market demands.

History is full of such examples. I make no claims that private enterprise is less prone to greed and mistakes than government, only that competitive markets provide accountability that simply does not exist in government. Even if bad CEOs get golden parachutes, they don't remain in power and they seldom get hired again. How many government bureaucrats lose their jobs over malfeasance, ineptitude, or corruption?

That's all I'm arguing. You and others may want to label me a soul destroying libertarian or conservative or republican, but that only shows how limited your imagination is and how blind you are to the world you are accustomed to. Corporate accountability may not be as much as you like, but government accountability is as rare as unicorn farts, and expecting them to regulate honestly is about as jokey as Springtime for Hitler.

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Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 3, 2018 22:52 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

> Car ads at least back to the 1950s bragged about safety improvements.
Not really. While there was some showmanship, the cars were mass-produced without obvious safety measures like deformable steering wheel or even seatbelts.

> Have you kept track of how many times the US nutritional guidelines have changed at the whim of crony industries?
Like, mandating nitrites in sausages that almost totally eliminated botulism?

> History is full of such examples.
It really isn't. History is full of anecdotes that can be twisted by citing them randomly in a short post without any context.

For example, do you know that hard currency and deflation have caused Hitler? True story, btw.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 4, 2018 0:02 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (4 responses)

So you discount the car ads that did exist by saying not all ads bragged on safety, and they didn't advertise the safety features you think they should have? I suppose that's one way to admit they did brag on safety sometimes.

You point out one good nutritional guideline as if to hide all the flip flopping they did.

You Godwin things to pretend that historical examples of government malfeasance and incompetence don't exist.

I guess I must be doing better than I expected.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 4, 2018 7:42 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

I prefer to get my facts from actual Congressional inquiries, not from anecdotes of random TV ads. The "Unsafe at Any Speed" inquiry found that automakers made a campaign to systematically hide the unsafety of their cars.

And it was fixed by mandating certain safety standards. Only then car makers started to compete on safety, instead of stupid bling.

The same applies for catalytic convertors. They would have never happened without regulation.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 4, 2018 14:30 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (1 responses)

Your honesty in trusting the House Unamerican Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy is refreshing.

Oh wait, you mean only the Congressional hearings you like?

Wow. Never would have thought there'd be bad government actors.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 4, 2018 20:35 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Your argument is that because McCarthy existed, government can never ever be trusted?

Safety and CARB regulations in the 70s and 80s have produced completely quantifiable benefits. There have been grievous missteps like MTBE but, on the whole, their progress has been impressive.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 4, 2018 15:29 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I've noticed a couple of general themes that seem to interact to result in American distrust of "regulation" as compared to other countries:

Regulation that mandates outcomes, but leaves the route to the desired outcomes unspecified, tends to be better at coping with attempts to ignore regulations than regulations that mandate process but not outcomes. E.g. regulation that says that you must notify all vehicle owners of a failure to meet certain safety levels within 30 days of discovering that you did not meet those standards tends to do better than regulation that says that you must go through a mandated process of notifying an agency and performing a recall when you don't meet standards.
The USA prefers regulations where the mechanism to comply is obvious from the regulation, which tends to result in regulations that mandate process, but that don't mandate outcomes. This is argued as limiting the "red-tape" burden on business, by ensuring that if you've followed the letter of the regulations, a judge can't penalise you for not getting the desired outcome (the "spirit" of the regulations).

I speculate that the reason for (1) is that companies work out how to game a prescribed process - if you have to report something in a fixed form, they'll find ways to "accidentally" get it wrong and have it sent back, adding delay, and they'll find ways to report exactly what the process asks for, even if the next step involves asking them to clarify before you get useful outcomes. In contrast, outcome based regulations leave a lot of room for arguing on the degree of blame when the outcome doesn't happen, but they tend to force desired outcomes (because you're only arguing about degrees of liability if you don't meet the outcome, not about whether you're at fault at all); the result is that the risk-averse bits of the company tend to dump on anyone trying to avoid meeting the outcome required by law, because the argument will be about whether $1 or $100,000,000 is the correct penalty for breach, not about whether you broke the rules at all.

Put that together with the preference for regulations that mandate process, and you see that most regulation is broken - the outcomes are bad, even though the regulation is followed. It's not hard to combine that with genuinely bad regulations (and bad laws) to conclude that government is unfixable.

And I personally appreciate the irony of people saying that courts will enforce contract regulations against a company while simultaneously arguing that regulation is bad :D