As 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.
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....
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.
It depends on your point of view. For the person deciding on giving permission they will not be thanked for allowing it, but might well be blamed if something goes horribly wrong.
That's kind of the issue with a lot of bureaucratic oversight. It often produces systems that aren't at all interested in being streamlined, in letting things that should happen happen. It produces systems where compliance is a drag on the one doing things, and the default state is "forbidden".
Yes, but this is a clasical agent-principal problem.
Theoretically, the bureaucracy works on your behalf, but only approximately so. If it makes a mistake that kills you, the decision maker does not pay any price.
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.
> Some regulations are necessary.
Genuine question — is there a common factor across the regulations you'd keep? Because if there is, you could encode that directly instead of maintaining the specific rules. And if there isn't, "some regulations are necessary" isn't really a position yet.
“Tear it down and see what breaks” is one strategy. I would suggest another based on the principle of Chesterton’s fence:
https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
The point of the ombudsman I suggested is that it’s hard to encode a simple rule in a sentence or two. You need to be familiar with the process so you’re not relearning the same lessons over and over.
Another bureaucracy to help people navigate the existing bureaucracy? Are you missing a "/s"?
No. The companies that hire lawyers to navigate government bureaucracy have their own internal bureaucracies. So the status quo is not “no bureaucracy”.
It seems that in any sufficiently complex thing there will be some irreducible amount of bureaucracy. So it’s reasonable to make that irreducible set of rules more accessible.
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.
The devil doesn't need any more advocates.
Evidently the construct of the devil does because humanity can help but setup complex situations that require a balanced approach rather than only looking at things one way.
In that case, you can explain the nuance and offer a more balanced viewpoint, without invoking the devil as an accountability sink. Your words should stand on their own merits. (To be fair, you did this! I'm just saying you shouldn't preface your words with a trite phrase that signals you'll be lobbing cheap logic over the wall and disavowing responsibility for your words if the logic proves faulty.)
At least to me it sounds like you just have problems with the incorrect use of the devils advocate by some people in the first place, of which I would actually hope you understand its use in rhetoric.
At least in the common HN discussion you nearly have to use its form when talking in an approving manner of things like regulation or unions because it goes against the Holy Church of Capitalism, lest you be punished by the mighty downvote button for heresy.
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?
"Forgiveness is easier than permission" only makes sense when you know what you're doing and understand the consequences. (IE, paying taxes a little late in the US is okay because the fine is roughly the same as the interest of holding the money in the bank.)
In the case of solar panels, I'm going to assume the OP is talking about something like a grid-scale solar farm instead of rooftop solar production:
1: You need an agreement with "the grid" to get payment for the electricity you generate.
2: Feeding electricity into a power grid is a very dangerous thing, at a minimum the grid operator needs to make sure you aren't going to cause a fire or otherwise break their equipment.
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That being said: If you're a homeowner trying to set up a small solar installation, you can pair the panels with batteries and skip feeding into the grid.
I am not sure about a bulldozer, but in the UK you will be forced to demolish it yourself. I am not sure what the penalty is for failing to do so when ordered to, but it seems to be usually effective.
This might work in parts of the US, but the UK will put you in jail for tweets, I would not risk this.
Troll post. Adds nothing to the conversation, just wants to inject a tired meme.
What is the relevance of law and law enforcement around online messaging to renewable energy legislation?
Load of bollocks, this meme is tiresome. It's the USA that fires people and jails people for a month for social media posts
https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-meme-tennessee-arres...
Or if you want some actual context rather than twitter outrage bait
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB3WVygAM8I
There are literally people in the UK in jail for tweets deemed to be incitement to violence. Maybe you think it's a good thing! I don't care! But it's ridiculous to argue over the facts on the ground.
What were the tweets?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yl7p4l11po
> Lucy Connolly, 42, whose husband serves on Northampton Town Council, pleaded guilty in September after posting the expletive-ridden message on X the day three girls were stabbed to death in July 2024.
> She was released from HMP Peterborough earlier after she was handed a 31-month prison sentence in October at Birmingham Crown Court.
Like this one? I mean this is not some hard to find secret.
I don't have examples of tweets handy, but here are stickers that get you 2 years in UK jail: They reportedly contained slogans such as “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066”, “Mass immigration is white genocide”, “intolerance is a virtue” and “they seek conquest not asylum.”
Sources:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867 (does not quote a single sticker that he was jailed for)
https://www.gbnews.com/news/sam-melia-free-speech-activists-...
Ahh, the famous "criminal damage is tweeting" case
"putting stickers on things is criminal damage deserving of prison time" is no better of a position
But we should probably pay attention to what was written on the stickers.
America literally jails people for quoting the US president
The UK jails people for extreme incitement
Extreme incitement to changing government immigration policy.
No you are thinking of AMERICA as I linked
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).