Regulations – Page 72 – artdiamondblog.com

Where Ideas Go to Launch Versus Where Ideas Go to Die

(p. 1) PALO ALTO, Calif. — THE most striking thing about visiting Silicon Valley these days is how many creative ideas you can hear in just 48 hours.
. . .
Curt Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, which invented Siri for your iPhone, recalls how one leading innovator (p. 11) just told him that something would never happen and “then I pick up the paper and it just did.”
What they all have in common is they wake up every day and ask: “What are the biggest trends in the world, and how do I best invent/reinvent my business to thrive from them?” They’re fixated on creating abundance, not redividing scarcity, and they respect no limits on imagination. No idea here is “off the table.”
. . .
What a contrast. Silicon Valley: where ideas come to launch. Washington, D.C., where ideas go to die. Silicon Valley: where there are no limits on your imagination and failure in the service of experimentation is a virtue. Washington: where the “imagination” to try something new is now a treatable mental illness covered by Obamacare and failure in the service of experimentation is a crime. Silicon Valley: smart as we can be. Washington: dumb as we wanna be.

For the full commentary, see:
Thomas L. Friedman. “Start-Up America: Our Best Hope.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., FEB. 16, 2014): 1 & 11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date FEB. 15, 2014.)

In the Gilded Age Moguls Cleaned Up Their Own Mess and the Economy Was Not Hurt

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Takeover wars seem to have lost their sizzle. What happened to the battles of corporate goliaths? Where have they gone, those swaggering deal makers? “Harriman vs. Hill” is a corporate dust-up that takes us back to the beginning of the 20th century, when tycoons who traveled by private rail merrily raided each other’s empires while the world around them cringed.
. . .
Mr. Haeg conveys a vivid picture of the Gilded Age in splendor and in turmoil. Champagne still flowed in Peacock Alley in the Waldorf-Astoria, but fistfights erupted on the floor of the exchange, and a young trader named Bernard Baruch skirted disaster with the help of an inside tip, then perfectly legal. There were scant rules governing stock trading, the author reminds us–no taxes, either. “If you won in the market, you kept it all.”
In that era, moguls were left to clean up their own mess. . . .
. . .
Though hardly a cheerleader, Mr. Haeg is admiring of his cast, nostalgic for the laissez-faire world they inhabited. Observing that the economy wasn’t upset by the stock market’s mayhem, he concludes that, “in a perverse way, the market had worked.”

For the full review, see:
ROGER LOWENSTEIN. “BOOKSHELF; When Titans Tie the Knot; Businessmen of a century ago didn’t place ‘competition’ on a revered pedestal. Merger and monopoly were considered preferable.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Feb. 14, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 13, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Harriman vs. Hill,’ by Larry Haeg; Businessmen of a century ago didn’t place ‘competition’ on a revered pedestal. Merger and monopoly were considered preferable.”)

The book under review is:
Haeg, Larry. Harriman Vs. Hill: Wall Street’s Great Railroad War. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Detailed Government Rules Impede Progress

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) The rulebooks should be “radically simplified,” Mr. Howard says, on matters ranging from enforcing school discipline to protecting nursing-home residents, from operating safe soup kitchens to building the nation’s infrastructure: Projects now often require multi-year, 5,000-page environmental impact statements before anything can begin to be constructed. Unduly detailed rules should be replaced by general principles, he says, that take their meaning from society’s norms and values and embrace the need for official discretion and responsibility.

Mr. Howard serves up a rich menu of anecdotes, including both the small-scale activities of a neighborhood and the vast administrative structures that govern national life. After a tree fell into a stream and caused flooding during a winter storm, Franklin Township, N.J., was barred from pulling the tree out until it had spent 12 days and $12,000 for the permits and engineering work that a state environmental rule required for altering any natural condition in a “C-1 stream.” The “Volcker Rule,” designed to prevent banks from using federally insured deposits to speculate in securities, was shaped by five federal agencies and countless banking lobbyists into 963 “almost unintelligible” pages. In New York City, “disciplining a student potentially requires 66 separate steps, including several levels of potential appeals”; meanwhile, civil-service rules make it virtually impossible to terminate thousands of incompetent employees. Children’s lemonade stands in several states have been closed down for lack of a vendor’s license.

For the full review, see:
STUART TAYLOR JR. “BOOKSHELF; Stop Telling Us What to Do; When a tree fell into a stream in Franklin Township, N.J., it took 12 days and $12,000 for the necessary permits to remove it.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., April 8, 2014): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 7, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘The Rule of Nobody’ by Philip K. Howard; When a tree fell into a stream in Franklin Township, N.J., it took 12 days and $12,000 for the necessary permits to remove it.”)

The book under review is:
Howard, Philip K. The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014.

Government Regulations Slow U.S. Use of Drones

Three sophisticated drones. From top to bottom, the Insitu ScanEagle, the Yamaha RMAX, and the Trimble UX5. Source and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) After Greek land surveyor George Papastamos bought his first drones a year ago, he let go most of his workers. Now, instead of a team of 12, he shows up to work sites with just a drone and an assistant.

“I could see this was the future,” said Mr. Papastamos, a second-generation surveyor from Athens. The drones have improved his maps and lowered his costs, enabling him to win more business. “It is much, much more profitable,” he said.
As U.S. regulators and courts grapple with when and how to allow the use of drones for commercial purposes, flying robots already are starting to change the way companies do business in countries from Australia to Japan to the U.K. They are showing the potential to provide cheaper and more effective alternatives to manned aircraft–and human workers–in industries like mining, construction and filmmaking.
The U.S. is “the world leader in producing drones,” but “the reality is the rest of the world has moved further ahead of us in terms of commercial applications,” said drone researcher Missy Cummings, director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University.

For the full story, see:
JACK NICAS. “From Farms to Films, Drones Find Commercial Uses.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., March 11, 2014): B1 & B6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 10, 2014, and has the title “Drones Find Fans Among Farmers, Filmmakers; FAA Still Debating Rules but Drones are Spraying 40% of Japan’s Rice Fields.”)

Better Policies Explain Why Poland Prospers More than Ukraine

“Yaroslav Rushchyshyn, a garment manufacturer, wants to end penalties when his company reports a financial loss.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) LVIV, Ukraine — Every kind of business in this restless pro-European stronghold near the border with Poland has an idea about how to make Ukraine like its more prosperous neighbor.

For Yaroslav Rushchyshyn, founder of a garment manufacturer, it is abolishing bizarre regulations that have had inspectors threatening fines for his handling of fabric remnants and for reporting financial losses.
For Andrew Pavliv, who runs a technology company, it is modernizing a rigid education system to help nurture entrepreneurs.
For Natalia Smutok, an executive at a company that makes color charts for paint and cosmetics, it meant starting an antibribery campaign, even though she is 36 weeks pregnant.
. . .
(p. B10) Victor Halchynsky, a former journalist who is now a spokesman for the Ukrainian unit of a Polish bank, said the divergence of the two countries was a source of frustration.
“It’s painful because we know it’s only happened because of policy,” he said, adding that while both countries had started the reform process, Poland “finished it.”
Ukraine has been held back by a number of policies. Steep energy subsidies have kept consumption high and left the country dependent on Russian gas, draining state coffers. Mr. Pavliv said the state university system, which he called “pure, pure Soviet,” was too inflexible to set up a training program for project managers, or to allow executives without specific certifications to teach courses. An agriculture industry once a Soviet breadbasket has been hurt by antiquated rules, including restrictions on land sales. Aggressive tax police have been used to shake down businesses.

For the full story, see:
DANNY HAKIM. “A Blueprint for Ukraine.” The New York Times (Fri., MARCH 14, 2014): B1 & B10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 13, 2014.)

“Andrew Pavliv, who runs a technology company, wants to help turn Lviv into a little Ukrainian Silicon Valley.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Better Wheat Is “Mired in Excessive, Expensive and Unscientific Regulation”

(p. A19) Monsanto recently said that it had made significant progress in the development of herbicide-tolerant wheat. It will enable farmers to use more environmentally benign herbicides and could be ready for commercial use in the next few years. But the federal government must first approve it, a process that has become mired in excessive, expensive and unscientific regulation that discriminates against this kind of genetic engineering.
The scientific consensus is that existing genetically engineered crops are as safe as the non-genetically engineered hybrid plants that are a mainstay of our diet.
. . .
Much of the nation’s wheat crop comes from a section of the central plains that sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, which is rapidly being depleted.
. . .
New crop varieties that grow under conditions of low moisture or temporary drought could increase yields and lengthen the time farmland is productive. Varieties that grow with lower-quality water have also been developed.
. . .
Given the importance of wheat and the confluence of tightening water supplies, drought, a growing world population and competition from other crops, we need to regain the lost momentum. To do that, we need to acquire more technological ingenuity and to end unscientific, excessive and discriminatory government regulation.

For the full commentary, see:
JAYSON LUSK and HENRY I. MILLER. “We Need G.M.O. Wheat.” The New York Times (Mon., Feb. 3, 2014): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 2, 2014.)

Growth Slow Due to Policies Impeding Start-Ups

(p. A11) The most recent period of rapid productivity growth in the U.S.–and rapid economic growth–was in the 1980s and ’90s and reflected the remarkable success of new businesses in information and communications technologies, including Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Intel and Google. These new companies not only created millions of jobs but transformed modern society, changing how much of the world produces, distributes and markets goods and services.
Rising living standards in the future will depend on the continued success of these businesses but also on the next generation of success stories. Getting the U.S. economy back on track will require a much higher annual rate of new business startups. Sadly, the annual rate of new business creation is about 28% lower today than it was in the 1980s, according to our analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics annual data series.
Why is the startup rate so low? The answer lies in Washington and the policies implemented in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that were, ironically, intended to grow and stabilize the economy. . . .
This explosion in federal regulation, intervention and subsidies has retarded productivity growth by protecting incumbents at the expense of more efficient producers, including startups. The number of pages in the Federal Code of Regulations peaked at nearly 175,000 in 2012, an increase of more than 7% in President Obama’s first three years.

For the full commentary, see:
EDWARD C. PRESCOTT and LEE E. OHANIAN. “U.S. Productivity Growth Has Taken a Dive; It has averaged about 1.1% since 2011, less than half the historical rate since 1948. Here’s how to increase it.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Feb. 4, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 3, 2014.)

Hero Rebels Against the Bureau of Technology Control

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. D8) In “Influx,” . . . , a sinister Bureau of Technology Control kidnaps scientists that have developed breakthrough technologies (the cure to cancer, immortality, true artificial intelligence), and is withholding their discoveries from humanity, out of concern over the massive social disruption they would cause. “We don’t have a perfect record–Steve Jobs was a tricky one–but we’ve managed to catch most of the big disrupters before they’ve brought about uncontrolled social change,” says the head of the bureau, the book’s villain. The hero has developed a “gravity mirror” but refuses to cooperate, despite the best efforts of Alexa, who has been genetically engineered by the Bureau to be both impossibly sexy and brilliant.

In the publishing world, there is a growing sense that “Influx,” Mr. Suarez’s fourth novel, may be his breakout book and propel him into the void left by the deaths of Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton. “Influx’ has Mr. Suarez’s largest initial print run, 50,000 copies, and Twentieth Century Fox bought the movie rights last month.
An English major at the University of Delaware with a knack for computers, Mr. Suarez started a consulting firm in 1997, working with companies like Nestlé on complex production and logistics-planning issues. “You only want to move 100 million pounds of sugar once,” says Mr. Suarez, 49 years old.
He began writing in his free-time. Rejected by 48 literary agents–(a database expert, he kept careful track)–he began self-publishing in 2006 under the name Leinad Zeraus, his named spelled backward. His sophisticated tech knowledge quickly attracted a cult following in Silicon Valley, Redmond, Wash., and Cambridge, Mass. The MIT bookstore was the first bookstore to stock his self-published books in 2007.

For the full review, see:
EBEN SHAPIRO. “Daniel Suarez Sees Into the Future.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Feb. 7, 2014): D8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 5, 2014, and the title “Daniel Suarez Sees Into the Future.”)

The book under review, is:
Suarez, Daniel. Influx. New York: Dutton, 2014.

Author of Influx, Daniel Suarez. Source of photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Incandesce

(p. A11) When I am asked if I want a Compact Fluorescent Light, the only thought I have is that I don’t want my light to be compact, nor do I wish it to be florescent. I want a light that will incandesce across my room, filling it with a familiar yellow surf, and remind me that it was not with wax or kerosene, but with incandescent bulbs that man conquered the night.
. . .
I imagine what will happen when the filaments in my final incandescent bulbs grow weak, and I can hardly read my notes before me. Will I no longer be able to write at night? Or worse, will living with CFLs and LEDs make every day feel like I have just spent nine hours plastered before a computer screen? One day, soon, I will turn on my light and hear for the last time the signature, explosive death rattle of an incandescent bulb, and I’ll hold a vigil for the light that shaped and witnessed more than a century of human history. Tender is the light, Keats might say.
In my lightless room, I’ll sit for a moment and wonder how many more times in my life I’ll watch a bulb go out again. As I look to my dead bulb, I’ll think of the poet again and whisper: Darkling, you were not a piece of technology born for death.

For the full commentary, see:
ALEXANDER ACIMAN. “Tender Is the Light of My Incandescents; Bracing myself for life once the filaments in my beloved bulbs grow weak.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Jan. 31, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 30, 2014.)

Big Island of Hawaii Bans G.M.O.s Despite Papaya Saved from Disease

“Greggor Ilagan initially thought a ban on genetically modified organisms was a good idea.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) KONA, Hawaii — From the moment the bill to ban genetically engineered crops on the island of Hawaii was introduced in May 2013, it garnered more vocal support than any the County Council here had ever considered, even the perennially popular bids to decriminalize marijuana.

Public hearings were dominated by recitations of the ills often attributed to genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s: cancer in rats, a rise in childhood allergies, out-of-control superweeds, genetic contamination, overuse of pesticides, the disappearance of butterflies and bees.
Like some others on the nine-member Council, Greggor Ilagan was not even sure at the outset of the debate exactly what genetically modified organisms were: living things whose DNA has been altered, often with the addition of a gene from a distant species, to produce a desired trait. But he could see why almost all of his colleagues had been persuaded of the virtue of turning the island into what the bill’s proponents called a “G.M.O.-free oasis.”
“You just type ‘G.M.O.’ and everything you see is negative,” he told his staff. Opposing the ban also seemed likely to ruin anyone’s re-election prospects.
Yet doubts nagged at the councilman, who was serving his first two-year term. The island’s papaya farmers said that an engineered variety had saved their fruit from a devastating disease. A study reporting that a diet of G.M.O. corn caused tumors in rats, mentioned often by the ban’s supporters, turned out to have been thoroughly debunked.
And University of Hawaii biologists urged the Council to consider the global scientific consensus, which holds that existing genetically engineered crops are no riskier than others, and have provided some tangible benefits.
“Are we going to just ignore them?” Mr. Ilagan wondered.
Urged on by Margaret Wille, the ban’s sponsor, who spoke passionately of the need to “act before it’s too late,” the Council declined to form a task force to look into such questions before its November vote. But Mr. Ilagan, 27, sought answers on his own. In the process, he found himself, like so many public and business leaders worldwide, wrestling with a subject in which popular beliefs often do not reflect scientific evidence.
. . .
(p. 19) Ms. Wille urged a vote for the ban. “To do otherwise,” she said, “would be to ignore the cries from round the world and on the mainland.”
“Mr. Ilagan?” the Council member leading the meeting asked when it came time for the final vote.
“No,” he replied.
The ban was approved, 6 to 3.
The mayor signed the bill on Dec. 5.

For the full story, see:
Amy Harmon. “On Hawaii, a Lonely Quest for Fact.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., Jan. 5, 2014): 1 & 18-19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 4, 2014, and has the title “A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops.”)

“Papaya genetically modified to resist a virus became one part of a controversy.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Regulators Forbid Doctor from Curing Dentist’s Pelvic Pain

“Dr. Daniel Davidson, an Idaho dentist, has pelvic pain so severe that he cannot sit, and can stand for only limited periods.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A18) After visiting dozens of doctors and suffering for nearly five years from pelvic pain so severe that he could not work, Daniel Davidson, 57, a dentist in Dalton Gardens, Idaho, finally found a specialist in Phoenix who had an outstanding reputation for treating men like him.

Dr. Davidson, whose pain followed an injury, waited five months for an appointment and even rented an apartment in Phoenix, assuming he would need surgery and time to recover.
Six days before the appointment, it was canceled. The doctor, Michael Hibner, an obstetrician-gynecologist at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, had learned that members of his specialty were not allowed to treat men and that if he did so, he could lose his board certification — something that doctors need in order to work.
The rule had come from the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. On Sept. 12, it posted on its website a newly stringent and explicit statement of what its members could and could not do. Except for a few conditions, gynecologists were prohibited from treating men. Pelvic pain was not among the exceptions.
Dr. Davidson went home, close to despair. His condition has left him largely bedridden. The pain makes it unbearable for him to sit, and he can stand for only limited periods before he needs to lie down.
“These characters at the board jerked the rug out from underneath me,” he said.

For the full story, see:
DENISE GRADY. “Men With Pelvic Pain Find a Path to Treatment Blocked by a Gynecology Board.” The New York Times (Weds., December 11, 2013): A18.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 10, 2013.)