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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

The point he made was that the certification would have cost him more than the sub. He is barely profitable as it is.

There are a whole set of laws in the first world that create an absurdly high barrier to entry for certain activities. Instead of making the activities safer, as intended, they simply make them impossible/unprofitable/implausible.

A soup kitchen that fed the homeless near me was forced to close because they could not afford to install a centralized halon fire extinguisher system to meet commercial kitchen code. Instead of making the volunteers and the homeless marginally safer, the volunteers went home to watch TV and the homeless were SOL. Law->Fail.

Different cultures experience risk/reward in different ways. Safety above ALL else is a distinctly first-world/western notion.

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I'm not saying they all work out I'm saying that some are good. In your example of the soup kitchen closed because it couldn't install some fancy-pancy fire extinguisher system, yeah, that's a bad law and a bit of an overkill. Telling someone that they can't legally take other people 700 feet below the water in a sub that isn't certified is a bit of a different story.

He may have barely have been making a profit but the fact of the matter is it would've cost him $100,000 to get papers/certified but he instead spent $200,000 on a new sub. It just seems like the kind of thing that would actually be considered an investment because it could make you more profitable and definitely adds more credibility.

Eventually you end up with a choice. The older, smaller $100k sub with $100k of permission seeking added on (and somewhat known risk) or the newer larger $200k sub with somewhat unknown risk. In the first-world, that choice is made for me (and likely results in no sub ride at all). I'm glad that there are some places in the world where I can still choose for myself.

I'd take the sub ride.

I understand your point, but it doesn't necessarily follow that law->fail. If those people burned alive in a horrible fire, like the patrons of a certain RI nightclub, then we would be calling for the law. Because the homeless have had to find another place to go we won't know.

The problem that I see with regulation is that it's hard to apply it intelligently to each case, so broad, sweeping regulations are made when other, more practical solutions may solve the problem. My pet peeve is the banning of smoking in Boston (I don't smoke and have never been a smoker). Make the law something like "smoke will be undetectable in non-smoking areas to with x parts-per-billion" or something, and let somebody figure out how to build a cheap negative-pressure room for smoking areas in restaurants. Instead, we get "no smoking allowed."

I actually suspect that in a lot of cases (good) regulations help businesses by establishing some trust in the customers' minds.

There comes a point when all that's left is the question, "how many people can be injured in kitchen accidents per X-thousand fed?" People have become strongly conditioned to insist the answer must be zero. So they pass a laws so that there can only be completely safe kitchens. The law fails because instead of safe kitchens, as intended by lawmakers, there are NO kitchens.

I suppose in a perverted way, you could argue that the law actually was a perfect success. All 0 kitchens are completely safe.

But there are kitchens. And they are as safe as we know how to make them (in principle). But some that don't meet those standards are not allowed to operate.

Same with jets. And buildings. The home construction industry in Miami generally concluded that the codes required on houses there were too strict and expensive, so many did not comply. They could have argued that with the rules there wouldn't be houses.

Then Hugo came, and there were (no longer) houses. Plus, we had an expensive mess to clean up.

So just because something is not allowed to happen because it doesn't meet code doesn't mean that the code failed. Perhaps the code did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Sorry: not Hugo, but Andrew (1992)

I agree. I have a condition which technically should restrict me from doing anything interesting and/or exciting but I long ago decided that it's better to live a full life and do what makes you happy than it is to attempt to mitigate every single risk that the world may present you with.

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