Showtalk said:

Usually condiments aren’t as harmful as secret additives

Things like melamine to bulk up cereals, or formaldehyde to retard spoilage? (thinking of some of the stuff in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle")

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It sounds unappetizing.  We need to read labels.

Both of those things are illegal to add to food, and both are actually toxic. But they have been used as additives in the bad old days. Melamine is used in the manufacture of countertops and not intended for ingestion. Formaldehyde of course is embalming fluid and is rather poisonous. Neither should be anywhere near food. But unfortunately, some unscrupulous characters have done unsavory things in the past and that is why we now have such a maze of regulatory red tape

Red tape is good if it saves lives.

Yeah, there is a correct amount of red tape to keep the worst people from exploiting unsuspecting consumers, desperate workers, etc.

Then there's an excess of red tape that merely hamstrings honest hardworking people with incomprehensible mazes and saps resources to deal with pointless regulatory compliance costs - often regulations written by clueless elite bureaucrats thousands of miles away who have never worked an honest day in their lives in an industry they know almost nothing about.

A classic example from the late 1970s. There was some federal regulatory type that was inspecting drilling rigs for some obscure safety measures that actually were less safe than some more innovative measures that companies were not allowed to do even though overseas, it had a better proven track record than the antiquated methods rigidly imposed in the US.

This dude really believed that you drill one kind of well and you get "regular". You drill another kind of well and you get unleaded. You drill yet another well and you get "premium" and finally another well produces diesel.

The frightening thing is the power this clueless bureaucrat had, the ability to totally shut down a drilling operation over almost anything petty.

And such a bureaucrat mindset was portrayed almost perfectly in the movie "Ghostbusters" where the EPA dude shut down the containment grid.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ObstructiveBureaucrat

Well, of course.  There are separate wells for diesel fuel, too. How do they keep their jobs?

$1,661.87 in cats (ROCKETMAN_S) said...

Yeah, there is a correct amount of red tape to keep the worst people from exploiting unsuspecting consumers, desperate workers, etc.

Then there's an excess of red tape that merely hamstrings honest hardworking people with incomprehensible mazes and saps resources to deal with pointless regulatory compliance costs - often regulations written by clueless elite bureaucrats thousands of miles away who have never worked an honest day in their lives in an industry they know almost nothing about.

The good red tape is about the same percentage as good lawyers... 99.8% of them make the rest look bad!

It's called bureaucracy by any other name and for the most part, it's 99.8% of the time more expensive and less effective than anything the public sector can do!

FWIW

Things that the government does right, they do very well.  Some tasks are only handled properly by a bureaucracy.  Others are done poorly and will never be fixed.  There are reasons the government takes bids and gives money to the private sector to do for them, such as anything requiring innovation. Spacecraft is one area where jobs are bid and the private sector picks up the work, sometimes in conjunction with the military (I just saw an article on Elon Musk).

Showtalk said...

There are reasons the government takes bids and gives money to the private sector to do for them, such as anything requiring innovation. Spacecraft is one area where jobs are bid and the private sector picks up the work, sometimes in conjunction with the military (I just saw an article on Elon Musk).

Yes, but for the past 30 some odd years, most of those private sector bidders try to rip off the government because they know the government has oodles of money to spend. Remember the $150 toilet seats, or the $75 hammers, you name it. There are literally oodles of instances which have hit the news over the past 30 years about over inflated costs.

Remember when Trump got the F-22 and F-35 manufacturer to drop their prices drastically? He was just doing away with all that bloated extra inflated pricing. And it worked.

As for Elon Musk... yes, what he's doing is much cheaper than what NASA used to cost. But at present, he's the sole bidder so basically he can charge any price he likes as long as it's cheaper than NASA. But currently, he has no competition to bid against him.

I saw a news clip on TV today that Bezos is starting to go into the space race as well, but he's still got a long way to go before he can compete head on head with Musk. Bezos just recently offered an 11 minute space ride to the highest bidder in a recent auction, but he still has a long way to go before he can go on a 3 day or 4 day space tour... much less land on Mars!

We need somebody in government who can and will be accountable rather than taking their own silver lining off the top before that will ever truly happen. Trump did that... but I've yet to see anybody before or after him yet who can do just that.

FWIW