alt Hacker NewsAs 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.
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That'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.
Maybe 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.
I'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).
To 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.
Have 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?
Its 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....