No Harm, No Foul
Somewhere, someone is dreaming up a new potential harm. Because without harm, there can be no regulation.
Closest Point of Approach is about helping decision makers predict bureaucratic action. The more of these cases we see, the better our pattern recognition becomes.
America’s New Regulation Busters
VC fund looks to invest in companies in highly regulated industries. The value that they add is help in clearing the bureaucratic and regulatory path.
“Most venture capitalists invest and help startups with new strategies and hiring a team. Mr. Churi describes what he does as “trench warfare,” fighting with regulators and incumbents deal by deal. He notes that “we have built houses the same way for 1,000 years—with sticks and bricks.” A startup, ICON, hoped to create homes for the homeless in Texas using a giant 3-D printing machine that deposits layers of concrete. It can “print” a 500-square-foot home in 24 hours. For $4,000. Game changing.
“Then came the regulators. Mr. Churi says that for homes, international fire safety codes say, “ ‘You’ve got to put the wooden joists like this.’ But there are no wooden joists. The whole thing is inherently fireproof—it’s concrete.” As for regulators, “they’re like, ‘You’ve got to put the wooden joists like that. See it says it right here on the page.’ ” They grappled with fire-code permitting bodies. “New language got passed. It took two years.””
The Securities and Exchange Commission Is Watching You
Bureaucracy is power. Warrantless, continuous surveillance without the suspicion of any crime is one hell of a power.
Perhaps we should adhere to a principle in which authorities must use the least intrusive measure to accomplish their objective. We could call it the Fourth Amendment.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database—the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT—that monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests in the stock market. As SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce describes it, by allowing the commission to “watch investors’ every move in real time,” CAT will make it easier to investigate insider trading or market manipulation.
…
“The SEC conceived of CAT during the Obama administration. Now, without congressional authorization and under the radar of most Americans, the commission is trying to impose it by executive fiat. CAT will reportedly be the single largest government database targeting the private activities of American citizens.”
Biden’s Fafsa Failure and Forgotten Parents
Bureaucrats don’t get fired. It doesn’t matter how badly they mess up.
“Department leaders seem “tone-deaf,” she added. They have even blamed colleges for their screw-ups. Ms. Feldman was generous in grading the Administration’s Fafsa rollout a “D” for “disappointing.” Financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz and National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators president Justin Draeger gave the Administration an “F.”
“Asked if anyone at the department should be fired, Mr. Draeger replied: “If there was a financial aid director or even a college president that delayed financial aid on their campus for up to six months, the professional price that would be paid for that would be pretty steep.” A CEO who presided over such mismanagement would have been defenestrated long ago.”
For the antitrust authorities in Europe (and a sympathetic US antitrust regime), it was better to kill iRobot then to see it do a deal with the remote potential of some sort of harm …
Minneapolis Council Delays Uber, Lyft Driver Pay Hike as Rideshare Apps Prepare to Abandon City
This will be an interesting experiment.
“Facing the prospect of Uber and Lyft abandoning their city in a few weeks, Minneapolis’s city council voted unanimously on Thursday to push back the implementation of a new rideshare pay policy by two months.
“But the far-left council rejected a proposal to rescind the controversial ordinance that has led to concerns among many residents who rely on the rideshare giants to get to their jobs and medical appointments. And the council refused to lower mandated driver pay rates to a level that a state study found would ensure drivers earn at least minimum wage.”
Adam Schiff Wants to Regulate Spreadsheets
Is this interpretation of the proposed law to regulate AI overly broad? Could it be extended to any automation tool, i.e., any software?
The Adderall Shortage: DEA versus FDA in a Regulatory War
“Indeed, there is a large factory in the United States capable of producing 600 million doses of Adderall annually that has been shut down by the DEA for over a year because of trivial paperwork violations. The New York Magazine article on the DEA created shortage has to be read to be believed.
“’Inside Ascent’s 320,000-square-foot factory in Central Islip, a labyrinth of sterile white hallways connects 105 manufacturing rooms, some of them containing large, intricate machines capable of producing 400,000 tablets per hour. In one of these rooms, Ascent’s founder and CEO — Sudhakar Vidiyala, Meghana’s father — points to a hulking unit that he says is worth $1.5 million. It’s used to produce time-release Concerta tablets with three colored layers, each dispensing the drug’s active ingredient at a different point in the tablet’s journey through the body. “About 25 percent of the generic market would pass through this machine,” he says. “But we didn’t make a single pill in 2023.”
“’… the company has acknowledged that it committed infractions. For example, orders struck from 222s must be crossed out with a line and the word cancel written next to them. Investigators found two instances in which Ascent employees had drawn the line but failed to write the word.’
Regulating Online Food Delivery Platforms
”In a recent research paper, Zhuoxin Li from the University of Wisconsin and Gang Wang from the University of Delaware report the results of their study on the impact of commission fee caps on online food delivery platforms. Even though policymakers intended for these regulatory fee caps to help small businesses, Li and Wang found that the caps reduced both orders and revenue for small businesses.”
AI Providers Should Not Be Liable for Users’ Securities Violations
“Ideally, liability rules would discourage violations of individuals’ rights without discouraging the productive enjoyment thereof. Economists try to strike this balance by assigning liability to the “least cost avoider”—the party for whom preventing or ameliorating rights-infringing activity is the cheapest.
“It appears unlikely that AI tool providers are the least cost avoiders of securities law violations. If, for example, a registered securities firm, such as a broker-dealer, investment adviser, or investment company, uses a generic AI model, it is far likelier that the firm, not the model developer, would have an advantage in mitigating securities law risks—including through a dedicated compliance team.”
The Deep State Lies in Wait for Trump
Liz Truss blames the civil service for the spectacular failure of her leadership in the UK.
“Across the West—especially the English-speaking world—there has been a shift of power away from democratically accountable officeholders to unelected bureaucrats and technocrats. The administrative state undermined Mr. Trump’s first term and undermined my tenure as Britain’s prime minister, forcing me out of office after 49 days. I assumed that I would be able to drive through the agenda on which I was elected. How wrong I was. The opaque British bureaucratic state undermined my proposed reforms, and their American equivalents will have Mr. Trump in their sights if he is victorious in November. The deep state will attempt to undercut him even more than it did in his first term.”
Businesses bank on Narendra Modi election win to ease India’s bottlenecks
Imagine an India that unleashed itself from red tape.
“But in private many businesses still complain about India’s complex tax regulation, difficulties in acquiring land, rigid labour laws, weak intellectual property enforcement and clogged courts. It takes almost four years to enforce contracts in business disputes, among the slowest globally, according to the World Bank.”