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The cost of compliance -- which is to say, the reams of paperwork and signoffs necessary -- will make this impractical for startups. The large companies making this stuff will do it -- eventually, with the UK getting delayed releases. The Chinese knockoffs will continue to be sold unlawfully, and a lot of new stuff just won't appear in the UK at all.
Sneer all you want (I guess you're a Real Engineer), but I think a big reason bits have continued to grow while everything else has stagnated is the regulators haven't caught up with the bits yet.
My read is that they literally just need to fill in that table that I mentioned on page 32. That's not a lot of reams.
I am most decidedly not a Real Engineer.
Like I mentioned, we will see if the economy of bits will grind to a halt... or if they'll take the couple days necessary to not have a default password and to write "Yes, we don't have a default password" in the table on page 32. Perhaps you could formulate your prediction in numerical terms? Maybe something about growth rates in the tech sector over the next ten years? Maybe something about stock prices and how they'll reflect this immense stagnation? Or maybe an explanation for why the market hasn't already priced this in and had a massive drop in valuations in the past week in response to oppressive new regulation?
I don't think you understand how this works if you think that this is the only necessary step once this becomes an obligation by law.
Since this is a potential liability, someone will have to be responsible for filling that form, and they'll also have to have sufficient means to enforce that the form is true. That person is most likely a lawyer and not technical themselves, which means they'll have to rely on auditors, which means not only that you'll have to pay money to get those audits done, you'll also have to find a company that will do them on the tech stack that you are running and is familiar with the intricacies of the particular legislation you're trying to abide by.
And once the bureaucratic machine gets started like this it doesn't stop, standards will get more complex, there will be people whose whole job is to ensure that they are followed and the costs will balloon accordingly.
Compliance is a huge industry. If following the law was that simple, it would not be.
Like Bastiat says, there is what is seen and what isn't seen.
What is seen is the valuation of established companies that have compliance departments and who'll be able to integrate regulation with a marginal cost change they can pass on to the consumer. What isn't seen is how much harder it is or will be to get funding for a startup that designs novel appliances because the costs to enter the market are now higher.
Weird. I hear about that from my friends in literally every other industry ever. They still seem capable of operating.
I'm always sympathetic to concerns of regulatory capture putting barriers to entry in front of small businesses. Totally agree that this is the single strongest argument against these types of requirements. I just doubt that these particular requirements are that onerous. Plenty of smaller shops that actually care about not being a security clusterfuck already do these kinds of things, and you can do most of them without too much difficulty as a hobbyist. In any event, if you're a start up that can't figure out how to not have a default password on all your devices, I actually kind of don't want you selling stuff, anyway.
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.
what do you mean by this? A homemade airplane isn't the same as a flying car. I guess it could work if you live in a very rural, but the problem with airplanes is that you need a long runway both to takeoff and land, plus clear airspace. That makes them impractical for anyone living in a city. A flying car could theoretically fit in your garage, take off/land vertically, and fly carefully enough to avoid collisions in the sky.
A Sopwith Camel fits in a garage and can take off and land on a piece of uneven land 300m long. And that's with 1910s technology. Central Park is 13 times longer.
The reason we have long runways for planes these days is because they are optimized for speed and drag, not lift. Which means they have weak landing gear and swept wings.
We had flying cars, we have the technology, they're just illegal to operate.
300m long is more than three football fields! That is an absurd amount of space for anyone in a city, where we fight over parking spaces that are about 3 meters long. The one @ToaKraka linked sounds better, but 75m is still way too much space for most people. You also need enough space in the sky for othem to fly without running into someone else, which can happen at any angle in three dimensions. It could work for a select few, but... we already have that, with private planes and helicopters.
Besides, if we're going this route, why not bring back zeppelins? The Empire State Building was designed with a spire so zeppelins could dock on top, as were several other buildings of the time.
I mean if we're talking theoretical numbers, in STOL competitions the world record for shortest landing is a little over 9ft, in aircraft that look very much like WW1 fighers or WW2 recon planes: high lift extremely light tuboprops. That part of the problem isn't really that difficult, it's more of an engineering and architecture problem than anything else.
The safety thing is the real reason, but valuing that over flying cars is parochial to the modern societies we live in. It's a cultural rather than physical limitation.
You might be joking but people keep saying that will happen since we solved most of the technical issues and helium isn't that expensive anymore.
The problem is that they're slow and their only advantage over planes is fuel efficiency and thus range. Making them only really suited for large scale transport where they don't have enough of an edge over boats or rail.
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