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Where is the innovation in any other industry over the past decades exactly? You know, since they brought these in.
How expensive is it to build a bridge now, versus a hundred years ago, adjusted for inflation? "capable of operating", what a joke.
As Kulak is fond of saying, the reason we don't have flying cars isn't that they haven't been invented, it's that they've been made illegal. They were commonly flown (and shot down) by teenagers in the 1910s.
This is the tired same equivocation that motivates all such regulatory barriers. I complain about having to fill forms, you retort about the justifications for the form existing as if I didn't also have such a concern.
There are other answers to the problems of humanity than increasing the size of the bureaucracy. Just no other that fits into managerialism.
Let's go with a simple one - the shale fracking revolution in the oil/gas industry. But nobody is actually going to go counting these things, because no one really has any sort of consistent argument for which sorts of regulations stifle innovation. Again, I totally realize that they do sometimes, in some ways. But what sort of massive innovation is going to be stifled by requiring devices to not have default passwords? Like, surely we can agree on that one. We could at least leave open arguments for other requirements, and I would welcome a wide-ranging debate on them. But if we're stuck with just theoretical arguments, totally disconnected from any specifics, in a way that can't capture basic truths like, "Being forced to not have default passwords is not a significant barrier to innovation," then we're not going to get anywhere.
Ok, so you also have a concern about default passwords. What are you going to do about your concern?
Since we are talking about the UK, shale fracking is illegal there. Hardly a revolution.
Irrelevant. Obviously, people can choose to regulate something specific away. The question is whether there has been "any" innovation in "any" other industry (that is, the non-bits ones that have more regulation). Unless you're claiming that the US has no regulation on the oil/gas industry, the shale revolution, which literally has changed the world at a geopolitical scale, is a huge counterexample.
But there are many others. Space X. Ozempic. Etc. It's really hilarious to have all the huge techno-optimists, who think that AI and tech more broadly is going to revolutionize literally everything, and at the same time, they imagine that the tiniest amount of regulation on fucking light bulbs will grind literally everything to a halt.
That you can scoff at the idea that regulation can kill innovation doesn't mean it cannot.
I have never objected to the idea that regulation can kill innovation. Try again. Actually read what I've said and respond to it rather than a strawman. You have to at least try.
I'm following this conversation from the sidelines, and you're sure not making it easy to understand what you're actually saying, or what's it you're interested in debating, beyond generic sneering.
What are you confused about? This is a standard question of regulation, and the standard objections are that regulation can harm innovation and present barriers to entry. I have welcomed any detailed discussion of these features, but have objected to hyperbolic versions of them, that any epsilon amount of regulation instantly kills innovation to zero, for example. Some folks have quadrupled down on this hyperbolic claim, and are now claiming that I am making a hyperbolic reverse claim - that regulation cannot possibly impact innovation in any way. This is a bullshit strawman.
That is the broad context of the discussion. I also observed some of the features of the culture war. I'm not sure what you're confused about.
There's no point in talking about the specific merits of the specific regulations, since doing so is like the old joke about the prostitute -- "we've established that, now we're just arguing over the price".
Once you've accepted that the government should be regulating this sort of thing your road to hell is paved and greased. The end state might look like aircraft where nothing actually new can be built because the regulatory barriers are too high, it might look like buildings which all have to be basically the same because the rules constrain the solutions overmuch, it might look like dishwashers and laundry where new things are forced to be less and less effective due to regulators' efficiency obsessions. It won't look like innovation. It's not that any epsilon amount of regulation instantly kills innovation to zero; it's that having the regulatory framework in the first place makes satisfying the regulations Job One, and that job tends to expand until it fills the space. Over time, not instantly. And it tends to drive out the kind of people who would do the innovation, because they hate all the box-checking, on top of hating all the constraints themselves.
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