Growth Industry

[Jolly]

Link to video

[Axtremus]

Larger societies, more things to do, more choices, more rules.

When you had only one small communication network with essentially one technology and essentially one application (say, the telegraph), you need only a very small set of technical rules standards to have it working across different jurisdictions.

Then you add telephony -- more technical rules standards.

Then you add fax, touch tone, PBX, cellular/wireless, digital, data, coaxial, satellite, fiber optics, security, encryption, privacy protection ...

Yeah, the sheer volume of technical standards that have been developed exploded. But hey, through this explosion, the guy get to post his cute little video about regulation growth and billions of people all over world can (if they so choose) see that cute little video on demand, with sound, in color, on screens big and small, with and without wires!

More people, more things to do, more cboices, more rules.

[Jolly]

Sometimes, you immolate yourself as a burning beacon of ignorance.

Ask anybody who has run an organization of any size about whether people, especially bureaucrats, live to try to make things more complicated, less clear with increasingly harder to understand policies, procedures and regulations. Of course, these require the pool of people who create this impenetrable and unexplainable morass of paper, to increase their numbers to more effectively administer the unadministerable and the unexplainable.

It is the rare individual, indeed, who can make the indecipherable understandable and cut away the bloat of gobbledygook, rendering the silliness into concise, understandable communication.

[Axtremus]

Sounds like you're whining.

Simple or understandable does not mean effective or sufficient. Until you can articulate a framework or method to identify what regulations are extraneous vs. what regulations are necessary to maintain all desired functions and options, you're just whining about the explosion of regulations. Until you can articulate a method to respecify the necessary regulations into simpler, more understandable forms without loss of function or loss of choice, you cannot reduce the volume of the regulations without giving up some functions or some choices -- then you argue over who should give up their preferred choices.

Give you one example: "reducing gun violence"

The simple, understandable regulation that can "reduce gun violence" is "ban guns."

But no, you're not going to go for "banning guns." You want to write large volumes of complicated rules around "mental health (and funding thereof)," "red flag laws," "video games," "school safety (and funding thereof)," "social media monitoring," etc. -- which, after you put all of them together, may or may not work to "reduce gun violence" anyway.

You have things that you don't want to give up (e.g., guns) and are willing to advocate for generating large volumes of other rules to preserve your preferred options (e.g., more types of guns, mags, and ammos you can legally own). Others will have things and options they want to preserve and willing to go to similar lengths. More people means more of you and more of these "others." Hence the "growth industry."