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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
That's what a lot of people seemingly struggle to understand.<p>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.
Yes, but this is a clasical agent-principal problem.<p>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.
Have you tried the "forgiveness is easier than permission" approach? What would happen if you just installed the solar panels? I know that in <i>some</i> 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.)<p>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:<p>1: You need an agreement with "the grid" to get payment for the electricity you generate.<p>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.<p>---<p>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.<p>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<p><a href="https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-meme-tennessee-arrest-larry-bushart-02b445f454bcfb657a48e8fa7e8ddfc9" rel="nofollow">https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-meme-tennessee-arres...</a><p>Or if you want some actual context rather than twitter outrage bait<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB3WVygAM8I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB3WVygAM8I</a>
> More and more promising treatments are accumulating in the pipeline, fueled by an explosion of new therapeutic modalities, ranging from mRNA to better peptides and more recently, by AI.<p>If the pipeline is backed up you put a bigger pipe in place, not get rid of it and hope some of the resulting flood goes where you want.
I'm glad this is getting more attention!<p>I posted the original reporting from The Australian yesterday - it's a good primer.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47379740">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47379740</a>
<a href="https://archive.is/pvRaG" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/pvRaG</a>
The healthcare industry, especially in the US, isn't interested in finding cures for disease. It's interested in maximizing profits, which is a goal that the bureaucracy serves.
Have you ever considered that "finding cures for disease" is really fucking hard to do?<p>Things that were <i>easy to cure</i> were already cured some time in the past century. What remains is the hard to crack nuts that resist simple scalable methods.<p>There's money to be had in curing HIV - but good luck pulling that off. Maybe someone will, this century.
Have you ever considered that once a disease is cured, the industry can no longer profit off of it being a disease? Treating disease rather than curing it, is a much more profitable venture.<p>How is there money to be had in curing HIV? It seems to me like it's much more profitable to continue selling expensive HIV treatments rather than curing the disease. Once a patient is cured, they no longer need to pay for expensive treatments.
And? Why would that be my problem? I'm in the market selling HIV cures, not HIV treatments.<p>If I get to undercut your entire "HIV treatment" business AND line my pockets with your entire market share, then, good for me, bad for you. Sucks to suck. Should have cured HIV first if you didn't want me to do it.<p>There are many, many, many examples of "newer and better treatment X kills the market share of older and worse treatment Y" in the history of healthcare. Your conspiracy theory model predicts this never happening.
I mean, yes, I and many others have thought of that.<p>To counter, have you realized HIV is an evolutionary entity that is optimized to continue existing by <i>not fucking dying</i>. HIV mutates like crazy. I mean there are other things like the flu that mutate, but because we have partial immunity to the flu we can use that immunity to create new vaccines every year against it.<p>It doesn't take much self research to see that HIV is a rather insane virus, and if somehow out of the gate it would have been wildly contagious that it could have wiped humanity.
So you think that complicated diseases are easily curable and the entire scientific world, including very different countries like China, has just decided to hide the knowledge?<p>If your cynical take was correct, there would be no cures ever. And yet there are new ones all the time. For example, vaccines. There are way, way more vaccines developed in the 21st century than in the 250 years before that.<p>Vaccines against HPV have reduced incidence of cervical cancers to basically 0 in the cohorts that obtained them. How come? Shouldn't Big Cancer be interested in treating cervical cancers expensively and promoting relapses?<p>Even in cancers, your chances of surviving, say, Hodgkin's lymphoma, are now north of 90 per cent. The treatment is expensive, but time limited. You don't have to take pills for your entire life.<p>How does that square with your view of the medical system as a machine for prolonging diseases indefinitely?
Healthy people are more productive, which mean they are better paid, which mean they have more money for healthcare, which means profits for the healthcare industry.<p>Finding cures is a good way of maximizing profits, the best way actually, and if the healthcare industry is not doing that, it means that something else is stopping them. It can be bureaucracy, it can be just because it is really hard, it can be some systemic problem linked to health insurance and government funding, but I don't see how the healthcare industry wouldn't want to cure people.<p>It is an industry where demand is guaranteed, diseases in general are not disappearing anytime soon, let alone aging.
The healthcare industry in the US in made up a huge range of individual and organizations, they don’t all have the same motives.<p>Suggesting otherwise is projecting your own fears not representative of reality.
Doesn't matter. Not all have the same level of influence. The ones with the most clearly follow GP's characterization.
>they don’t all have the same motives<p>Regardless of their motives they're all subject to the same regulatory system so they can only stray so far for so long from the net effect of the incentives and remain not bankrupt and being auctioned to pay back creditors.
Then feel free to point out the outliers that aren't interested in maximizing profits.<p><a href="https://www.somo.nl/big-pharma-raked-in-usd-90-billion-in-profits-with-covid-19-vaccines/" rel="nofollow">https://www.somo.nl/big-pharma-raked-in-usd-90-billion-in-pr...</a><p>It seems to me that the leading vaccine manufacturers, who spend billions of dollars yearly in order to lobby US lawmakers that establish the bureaucracy the article is complaining about, are interested in just that (maximizing profits).<p>It doesn't really matter much if there are individuals or other organizations interested in curing disease, when we have a system that allows for legal bribery of lawmakers, and other individuals / organizations with more money that value profits over anything else.
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The usual line is "the regulations are written in blood", and it's a cliche because it's true.
'Bureaucracy' is commonly used as a trigger word. When I see it, I'm alerted to manipulation and, in some contexts, a certain partisan dogma. After all, who likes bureaucracy? By the same token, who like stop lights or authentication or other structures in life? But every large organization functions using bureaucracy - every highly successful one, every median one, every poor one.<p>> A system originally conceived to safeguard patients has gradually produced a strange and troubling outcome: the mere chance of survival is effectively reserved for the very few who possess the means to assemble an army of experts capable of navigating its labyrinthine procedures.<p>The survival of who? The three people who are trying to experiment on themselves (with questionable results, especially when their experiment has N=1)? That's a crisis? What about the 99.9..% of sick people?<p>> I will focus on the former: small, exploratory trials, which will be called early-stage small n trials for the purpose of this essay.<p>'early-stage' - it's just like a startup! Except the human experimentation part.<p>> In recent years, China has been advancing rapidly in biotechnology, in part because it is easier to run early-stage clinical studies there.<p>> “The US can’t afford to lose the biotech race with China.”<p>With the 'bureaucracy', it's right out of central casting, including the scare tactic: The same arguments have been used for labor standards, property rights, democracy itself.
The cure for cancer will come via a revamp of regulations. /s
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I don't see how you can blame this on feminists when other people should also have been pushing for those same rights?<p>Why are you putting more of the blame on feminists and women than any other section of society here? It just reads as unhinged misogyny.
"It's women's fault" is a long-standing thing in the culture.
Because they were fighting for half the population, and they demonstrably lost. We now have pre-1975 law, including horrific laws like Texas creating task forces hunting out women with miscarriages and abortions in other states.<p>They could have made the 'umbrella' of what they were fighting for cover 100% of the population. They didn't. We're all worse for it.
> They could have made the 'umbrella' of what they were fighting for cover 100% of the population [...] They didn't. We're all worse for it.<p>Other people could have stood by them and fought for those rights too. You're blaming the wrong people. Regardless of your intentions, you're not coming across well. I'd urge you to try reframing this, as you're not going to win many supporters outside of the alt-right pipeline as you're pitching it at the moment.<p>I don't want to accuse you of being a misogynist. Nor do I want to accuse you of being alt-right. But that is how you are coming across in your comments. Textual internet discourse always hides nuances. I'd really ask that you reconsider how you frame this, whether internally or externally, because as it stands, I don't think it's great.
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You can see this pattern repeated often by conservatives (not invented by them, but currently popular with them): No matter what happens, attack your political enemies. Every problem, every event, is an opportunity to smear them.
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As long as we do my parents last, and yours first.
Didn't Covid take care of that?
Did you even read the article? What does this have to do with anything?
/s?
That article is exactly on point. There is a process in place for the express reason of slowing and blocking anything that will bring about positive, meaningful solutions and potential cures to the human condition.
Because the old state of affairs had desperate people being experimented on by opportunists, charlatans and fraudsters for money. There's work to be done balancing the equities of people with terminal diagnoses but lets not pretend there's no point to the roadblocks to human experimentation on the dying.