I grew up in the commercial fishing industry and then worked in the tug boat industry. Many USCG regulations that were vehemently opposed by the old men save lives every day.
This is a classic Chesterton's Fence. Those who don't understand the origin of the regulations will continue to have strong, uninformed opinions about them.
Many crew working on boats have safety gear only because USCG requires it. The owners of those boats would not expend the money without the regulation.
> The owners of those boats would not expend the money without the regulation.
Some owners would not, most would. Humans are generally social, intelligent and caring animals. The regulations are helpful guidelines to save lives, not to be seen as mandatory rules that would be flaunted at every chance.
I encourage you to go for a few voyages offshore on commercial vessels. Experience might influence your opinion. Your claims are inconsistent with my experience.
I'd like to retract my statement as I misinterpreted your comment as characterizing them as malicious. I would not go on a commercial vessel as I do not consider the operators as very good at understanding risk.
I see your perspective. I should also have not made such a general statement. I certainly did not mean to imply malice, more negligence or concern for cost over safety.
Just to be clear, I was not talking about operators who are physically on the boats when I wrote about owners. There are three classes of people involved: owners, captains, and deckhands/engineers. Often the owners are never on the boat and are not subject to the same risks.
I know far too many people who are missing a finger or worse. It is a terrible industry in some ways.
You are too naive. Owners who do not incur extra expenses are more competetive in capitalistic market. At some, point, you become disadvantaged if you do take extra precautions.
This committee doesn’t make regulations they make expert suggestions.
This is way off the original topic of course…but you can do a quick search of the federal register they you can see the agenda of meetings and such. A recent one reviewed structural failures that led to boats sinking.
Fields learn as new things happen. There’s a reason aerospace industries talk about rules having body counts. Freezing regulations rarely makes work easier or faster, it just makes knowledge sharing worse.
There this large assumption across HN that if one doesn’t understand something l, that must meant it doesn’t make sense. It’s a bad way to operate in the world…independently of ideology…lack of understanding is not unique insight.
>What regulations of this committee do you think saved lives that other agencies did not?
I did not argue for this specific committee. I replied to your incorrect, uninformed assertions.
> I think fisherman know how to be safe
You have obviously not worked with commercial fishermen. Maybe you have never worked with any complicated industrial process. Safety regulations do not propagate by osmosis. It requires an agency verifying them.
> without bureaucrats in DC that have never been in a fishing boat butting in.
In my experience, the USCG inspectors who execute inspections and inform regulations served on boats. You are making an armchair assumption about how the process works.
> You just need coast guard for emergencies.
This is also ridiculously incorrect. USCG safety inspections have prevented many emergencies.
> They got along just fine before 2018 when this committee was created.
2018 is when we started implementing 46 CFR Subchapter M, which adds many overdue safety improvements and still does not bring us up to the standards of more developed flags.
> But yeah, maybe we should add 20 more agencies just to be safe...
This is strawman nonsense. I get frustrated with regulation as much as anyone. I had to allocate capital to upgrades to be compliant with regulation. I have opinions about which regulations were important and necessary and which were not. Those who want to burn it all down have no real world experience in this domain.
That's not how Chesterton's Fence works? The point isn't that the fence was always there. It's that people who try to dismantle the fence never bothered to learn why the fence was put up in the first place.
The fence could have been put up yesterday but if you never even bother to learn why the fence was put up before trying to remove it, that's still Chesterton's Fence.
Chesterton's point wasn't that the fence should never move (which is what you seem to be implying), but that it should only be moved (or technically removed) when you understand why it was initially put in place.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that there is bloat and over-regulation, but most of the laws and regulations on the books are in response to a bad thing happening. It's kind of like a legacy code base - just deleting the repo and starting over from scratch is usually not the best idea, it takes some careful refactoring and judicious tests to move in the right direction.
It's sort of an interesting idea - what are "tests" in the context of the legal/regulatory framework? The constitution? The judiciary?
The fence is a restriction. i.e. a regulation or series of rules. These committees make those rules. It's not just a state of being.
Getting rid of a fence doesn't mean there's magically an older fence you've moved to. It's only when you replace a set of rules with a different set of rules to serve the same purpose that you've moved the fence.
Removing the fence is exactly that, getting rid of the fence. There is no before fence. You've just removed the fence.
The issue is that fence 2 doesn't serve the same purpose as fence 1.
Fence 1 is that we have the NCFSAC that serves to ensure the safety of commercial fishing.
Fence 2 is no fence because we don't want to limit economic activity.
That's by definition removing the fence, not moving it.
Safety policy is written in blood. By getting rid of the committee that writes that policy you aren't moving the fence, you are just getting rid of it and letting the blood that chesterton's fence once stopped to flow again.
Those are recreational boating accidents. They are completely unrelated to the discussion at hand (which is commercial fishing accidents).
> Now do before 2018 when the NCFSAC didn't exist...
> It's simply returning to the status quo of 6 years ago.
It's not though. Before it was called the NCFSAC, it was the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Advisory Committee (CFIVSAC). That committee existed back to 2010 at least.
And I'm not sure exactly what argument you are trying to make. It's not Chesterton's fence to do something new. It is Chesterton's fence to get rid of something without planning for something to replace it's role. It's not a complicated concept. Chesterton's fence is about removing something without understanding why it was there and planning properly for after it's gone.
The point of Chesterton's fence is that the fence was created for a specific reason and then was removed without addressing that. Replacing that fence with something built for an entirely unrelated purpose isn't replacing that fence. The closest equivalent would be replacing an electric fence with a small stone retaining wall.
They do different things. The electric fence is for keeping animals in/out and the retaining wall is for keeping soil from moving. Sure you may add the retaining wall but you've still removed the electric fence so the foxes can now get into your chicken coops or your cows are running free. That's chesterton's fence. Even if well meaning, making a change that fails to replicate/fulfil the original purpose of the original fence causes the issues to return.
Hey totally! Chesterton's Fence is about not messing with complex systems. Don't change an existing system without first understanding the implications of that change. The subtext is that even if you think you understand the implications, you probably actually don't understand them (since the system is complex) so you just shouldn't make changes at all.
Applied to this scenario, I am saying that the status quo is the result of prior people ignoring this advice and changing a complex system. So the actions in the article are more about correcting this bad change and reimplementing the original fence.
Original fence = smaller, limited Fed gov
New, Bad fence = expansive gov
So the timeline is
Fence #1 exists
Someone removes Fence #1 and builds Fence #2
Someone removes Fence #2, re-builds Fence #1 <--This is where we are today
I understand your interpretation, and I agree with the first part of it. (Don't change an existing system without first understanding the implications of that change.') I think that's the core of the metaphore, as taken by most people.
I don't think the point is that you should never make changes to complex systems at all, though. I don't think its means that more primitive, or unaltered, states of a system are necessarily prefential to more altered states, which I infer from your comment.
If unalterated states were better, we would have to tear Chesterton's fence down — right? Fences don't occur naturally.
“No problem, as a non-employee you are hereby confined to your cabin except to use the head, and you can eat in the galley but you have to pay for your meals, they cost $100 and will be deducted from your final paycheck. If you have a negative balance when we dock at a port in around 3 months, you must pay immediately or we will send the debt to collections. Have a nice day”
Maybe you want to read up on how things work at sea?
> ...to make sure workers have good working conditions and proper pay. That's universal to any job.
This is wildly untrue. The less skilled your labor, the more exploitative the available jobs are. This is why we have labor regulations, to protect these people.
Did they? What were the accident rates before and after? Why was the committee created? Do you think the people who axed these committees have an answer to the above questions? Or is it simply "government is bad"?
>I look forward to the evaluation by the administration to see if it's needed or it's redundant red tape.
That's kind of the point: they're doing no such thing.
All of the talk from Trump, Musk, the now-departed Ramaswamy, etc. hasn't been about sober analysis and careful evaluation, it's endless mockery and dumb jokes ("look at this agency name or person's title, what does that even mean LOL"), or "government bad" as the parent put it.
The pushback this gets isn't because people love bureaucracy or hate efficiency but because it's obvious this isn't an actual effort to improve anything, just mindlessly slashing things businesses/the powerful don't like and stunts to make the base clap.
It just happened. You have no idea what the evaluations were, they haven't been released and you weren't in the discussions. I hope they will be though.
From an outsider perspective this committee in particular seems redundant as there are other agencies that handle this scope.
If you want to boil it down to "government bad" sure, but I view it more as "over-regulation is bad".
Or do you view the government as a well oiled machine that couldn't have any bloat and we should never evaluate and cull feature creep in it?
Sure we do because, again, the people put in charge of these initiatives spend endless time just making jokes about agency names that they clearly (sometimes explicitly!) have no idea about or mindless promises to cut the government in half.
>Or do you view the government as a well oiled machine that couldn't have any bloat and we should never evaluate and cull feature creep in it?
Since you missed it the first time I'll copy the part of my comment that addresses exactly this again:
>The pushback this gets isn't because people love bureaucracy or hate efficiency but because it's obvious this isn't an actual effort to improve anything, just mindlessly slashing things businesses/the powerful don't like and stunts to make the base clap.
The problem is you're assuming good faith when there has been ample demonstration that there isn't any here.
You're assuming good faith of these committees. Comes down to who you trust.
I voted in Trump to do this and more, I trust the evaluations were made properly and I support the decision.
There's obvious bias in your tone (which is okay, which is why I stated my position) so it makes sense you don't like this move because you don't trust this administration.
We're similar in that regard in that I don't trust the government implicitly, which is why I support culling bloat.
If they were made in good faith, then surely we have some documentation for it in order to learn from those original mistakes. Or some way for people to evaluate that choice... It was a transparent decision not some random populist move... Right?...
Fishing is dangerous work and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
What matters are the data which nobody has dug up. Was there a significant reduction in fatalities following this committee's creation? Did it have a significant and likely causal relationship on those declines? And finally - assuming there was a decline d the committee was responsible for it, are they still meaningfully necessary or are the prior established rules sufficient to maintain the improvements moving forward?
