As a huge fan of Top Gear and The Grand Tour, I read Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure. Really fun book giving an inside view of what it took to produce these shows
Nobody is far enough, not with that actual power. Everything is connected and ripple effects travel far.
Plus our european politicians are weak and largely clueless, we will fold in front of China and let them roll over our automotive industry. There is war at our doorstep and enemy who repeatedly claimed he will wipe out half of our population, yet our reaction is next to 0, both immediate and long term.
Yeah you say that, but I just saw Elonia Musk stirring the pot by calling for MEGA “Make Europe Great Again”, so it seems he’s trying to spread his cancerous views into your political systems now too.
All you need is a lot of money, a lot of time, a problem that is fixable, legislators willing to work together, and/or a judiciary operating outside political ideologies.
Regulators don’t make laws and local governments have spent years limiting corporate liability, so I don’t think your opinion on this is based in reality, unfortunately.
Actual laws are up to congress etc which frankly don’t understand the intricacies because it’s not their job. So it’s common for agencies to be given authority to oversee something without a law explicitly defining specific level of salt in drinking water etc. Regulators therefore don’t make laws only clarifying where boundaries exist (safe levels > X ppm).
Deference for unintentional ambiguity seems unrelated, but in the real world people want to know where the lines are so they can respond accordingly. Not knowing where the limits are gets expensive for anyone not trying to push boundaries.
Lawsuits meanwhile are horrifically inefficient in terms of time. What exactly are people supposed to do while waiting for a lawsuit to finish? For some things sticking with existing guidelines works but nobody wants to make major investments when the underlying rules are about to change. Clarity is far more valuable than generally perceived and that’s what’s being destroyed here because the courts even decades to make the meanings of laws clear.
This decision is therefore directly and significantly harmful to the US economy.
In theory, I entirely agree - regulation should not be decided by agencies, but by lawmakers. In practice, this is so painfully far from reality. Do you really think congress has the ability to pass meaningful legislation on complex issues? Do you think that lifelong politicians can do a better job than civil servants who have spent their entire lives studying this particular issue?
Well, let's see.. The Affordable Care Act was a meaningful law based on a very complex issue. Was that wrong? Do you think civil servants with no oversight is better somehow?
When Congress writes a law that establishes a new regulatory agency, they outline what that agency does and how they enforce the regulations. Inevitably as time goes on, new edge cases come up or someone realize that the law is ambiguous. Chevron deference established a precedent where the regulatory agencies were allowed to resolve these ambiguous cases or do things not specifically written into the law. This decision means that companies can now fight certain decisions they couldn't previously.
For example, one of the cases that led up to this was due to the National Marine Fisheries Service forcing fishing companies to pay their monitors' salaries. The law established the monitors and their role, but it did not say that the companies must foot the bill.
So basically, Congress is going to have to pass more updates to previous laws to reflect what the regulatory agencies need or want. Basically, fix the bugs in the core legislation instead of patching it downstream.
This seems really inefficient though. Do we really want top-down authority of decision making like this? No one would think it was good if in a company where if the rules of how to do your job were vague (and in this case, we're talking about delegated responsibilities), you had to go to the board of directors to get them clarified.
> This seems really inefficient though. Do we really want top-down authority of decision making like this?
No, which is why we want the people previously free to make top-down decisions, i.e. executive-branch agencies, to be subject to judicial oversight when attempting to read new powers for themselves into the law. Doing away with Chevron restores that oversight.
And it may be so, but the law/constitution doesn't automatically morph to adapt to whatever some particular person thinks is more efficient. If this is really needed, maybe it's time for a constitutional amendment adapt the structure of the government.
We can nit pick what you meant by 'automatically' morph, but the fact that it was just forced into a pretty severe morph to adapt to what 6 particular persons wanted I think challenges the argument you're making.
Welcome to the core of the Anti-Federalists argument. They saw a Federal government as an inevitable on-ramp to creating a top-down governed society. Chevron deference represented a worsened slip down that slide, because each Executive Agency basically Lorded over it's National scaled domain without chance for redress in the relief valve specifically designed for the task; the Courts/the Judiciary.
With Chevron deference struck down; it's now possible to even get an Agency's administrative law sanity checked by the Courts.
That's absolutely 100% false. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act gives the FDA considerable authority to shut down a food factory if it is not adhering to regulations and laws regarding safety.
Where do you find that the FDA cannot shut them down?
But who is making those regulations if congress doesnt write those specific regulations into law? Isn't that the whole point of this being overturned.. the FDA no longer can make regulations that arent explicitly outlined in a bill.
The FDA can absolutely make regulations so long as they are done with the authority granted to them in the law. The problem has been agencies, such as the FDA whom I have worked with for going on a decade, have grossly overstepped their congressional authority. When challenged, the government's case is that the administrative regulators know best, and because of Chevron, the courts should defer to them, even if it's an overreach beyond their congressional authority.
This is not about specific regulations, it's about the authority to write those regulations and where the boundaries are.
Therein lies the issue: Regulators have gone beyond their authority, not only into what is unreasonable, but what is not backed by statute. Chevron said the courts should give deference, unfortunately that deference has gone too far.
Taking your point however, I think congress will eventually be forced to act on this. We do need some deference to regulators, but that deference has been turned into legislative abdication. This decisions sets that right.
When congress is ready to write a law that gives greater deference to regulators they will. Until then, in my opinion, this was a proper decision of government restraint.
I don’t think I can support an objective idea that it’s “gone too far” when the decision was on ideological boundary. This was political activism not jurisprudence.
By opening the package of salmonella you've agreed to binding arbitration agreement in the venue of their choosing.... Sadly I'm not even that far from serious.
> The Supreme Court on Friday reduced the authority of executive agencies, sweeping aside a longstanding legal precedent that required courts to defer to the expertise of federal administrators in carrying out laws passed by Congress. The precedent, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, is one of the most cited in American law. There have been 70 Supreme Court decisions relying on Chevron, along with 17,000 in the lower courts.
Huge and positive in the direction of lawmakers making law, not regulatory bodies that are unelected. Similarly in favor of trials by jury and not by regulatory administrative courts.
A huge win for democracy and freedom that both major US parties and all citizens should celebrate.
Government agencies are similarly dysfunctional, though they do have the benefit of (at least hypothetically) hiring subject matter experts to guide policy, but that's kind of why we have committees in the legislative branch.
The other issue of course is that the people leading agencies are playing politics just like everyone else. Do people not remember the controversy surrounding Ajit Pai's leadership of the FCC?
The difference is you vote for your legislators directly and can hold them accountable for their actions. For federal agencies, you're at best indirectly voting for them through voting in a presidental election, but mostly there's no accountability.
To borrow from Babbage, I can't rightly comprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that might lead one to complain about political institutions being political.
The entire purpose of the political (and judicial) process is to reconcile to competing interests and conflicting values of the wide variety of people who make up society.
It is a delusion to hold that the matters regulatory bodies are involved in are somehow entirely empirical questions with unambiguously correct answers -- in reality, there are normative questions, value judgments, trade-offs and conflicts of interest inherent in every decision point.
These decisions are political ones, and allowing regulatory bodies to make inherently political decisions for everyone else can only have the effect of entrenching one faction's interests and values at the expense of everyone else's.
our "regulatory bodies" (everyone's fav new word) allowed US companies to poison the blood of every child in the world and those companies and people responsible faced little consequence.
Why so much distrust for our civil servants? Have you met any of these people? I grew up in the DC area and both liberal and conservative civil servants are dedicated to truth, science, and the well being of the American people. Sure, there are exceptions, corruption is everywhere, etc. but by and large, the people who work in government agencies have our interests in mind. I say this as a liberal who briefly consulted for U.S. Customs and Border Protection - the people working at that agency understand immigration far better than I ever could. If you left it up to radical politicians to decide immigration, you'd be left with policies that swung too far in either direction every four years.
What have they done to earn my trust? Why would I choose to outsource critical decisions pertaining to my own life and affairs to strangers who are not meaningfully accountable to me and have no direct understanding of my values or interests, regardless of how well-intentioned they may be?
What possible reason could there be to give civil servants authority to make decisions that materially impact us without any oversight or accountability?
Yes, I was a government contractor for a significant portion of my career. This certainly didn't encourage me to trust elected officials or agency employees.
Hey, you can have this position. Just realize that you've lost your future right to complain about project 2025 when that passes and every agency has all their civil servants replaced.
They are putting their faith in a system of civil servants that want to serve the country and do their job, in comparison to those selected to break the system.
So then actually, yes the ruling was correct, and yes people are right to put this power back into the hands of congress, and out of the hands of civil servants.
Whatever terrible thing that someone would be complaining about in the future, it is mitigated by this correct ruling that helps stop that supposedly bad thing.
If you want to accept that position that I just laid out, then fine. You agree with me, but you would also be agreeing with the supreme court decision.
The era of a bipartisan civil service is past. The civil service, at least those offices which are in and around DC, is heavily liberal and is trending more so over time. In 2020, DC went 92% for Biden, and Biden also handily won every county with significant government employment in Maryland and Virginia.
Though I couldn't easily find any hard statistics, which may not exist for Hatch Act reasons or otherwise, I'd rate the current composition of the DC-centered civil service at around 70-80% Democrats; defense and intelligence a little lower, health and social services a little higher. If current trends continue, this will reach 90% in many agencies within a decade.
Whether this is a problem or not is a different matter. It is obviously not representative of the country as a whole, though that is only based on a rather shallow and one-dimensional analysis. However, it explains at least part of why this is happening.
No, that's the core issue. They are overstepping the authority granted in legislation. If Congress passes an open-ended law saying "Agency X can administer Y in accordance with rules 1,2,3" then the agency should not be able to simply decide that rules 4,5,6 should also be created. This is what has been happening for decades, has been defended by Chevron, and is being forbidden by this decision.
A regulatory body that is staffed by people who are well versed in the intracacies of the industries they are overseeing, rather than Representative Marge McCrazyPants who legitimately believes in the existence of space lasers owned and operated by certain religious adherents.
First, that's not true. It's just a degree of separation from your vote that you're uncomfortable with.
But yes, the fact that 99% of our government is made up of these people who are a few layers separated from direct political bullshit is why it functions at all.
We are much better off when these agencies operate autonomously and elected representatives can intervene when necessary instead of making them go back to the meat grinder to do anything.
I don’t understand this take, because the elected officials could have always made any law regulating this stuff regardless of this ruling. The fact they haven’t tells us something.
And this ruling will result in a lot of the common good (limited resources like fish, air quality, etc) being trampled upon and becoming the profit of a couple companies, taking these goods away (sometimes irrevocably such as in the case of over fishing) for the generations of the future.
We need our regulatory bodies to be able to move faster because by the time congress might respond it will be too late.
There's a very good reason why technocrats are better prepared to implement policy and enforce it. They usually have vantage points from which they know the intricacies of the field under their purview, understand where compromises must be made and conversely points where it _should not_ compromise. A good administrator needs to have abilities to administrate without second guessing by a third party, unless it's demonstrable that their general objective (which every state institution has) isn't congruent with the actions taken.
Someone made the example of a factory that sells products for ingestion. If the regulator (FDA) doesn't have the tools to effectively protect the public of insecure foodstuff, who will? Consumers? Consumers will eat excrement if the price is low enough, because that's what's is available to them. Consumer power isn't vested in the consumers, it is vested in the regulatory agencies, since these have resources and expertise to recognize unfair, unsafe, anti-competitive, anti-consumer, etc practices, because unlike consumers, these have an advantage point of view, rather than the individual trying to find others with their same condition.
How is it a win when the US justice system is so incredibly broken? This is a win for rich people and greedy firms who can drown their victims in drawn out legal action by throwing money at them. Jury trials are a zero sum game and are not actually that great at achieving just outcomes. They make sense for individuals, but corporations are NOT people and should not be entitled to the same constitutional rights.
But there's also a revolving door between the regulators and the companies they regulate. Sure, Congress is dysfunctional. But regulators are also flawed.
At least that’s an expert, qualified person going astray which is an infinitely better situation than someone with no expertise succumbing to populist and corporate demands because their seat depends on it.
> A huge win for democracy and freedom that both major US parties and all citizens should celebrate.
You've said this elsewhere in thread but you're making an idealogical claim with no supporting information. Congress is virtually non-functional, the court voted on idealogical lines, it only benefits one party to put more responsibility into congress.
So maybe 50% of the country should be celebrating?
I for one see a lot of problems with this ruling and the secondary and tertiary consequences it will cause.
Chevron says (said) that the courts should defer to agencies as the experts in their specific arenas when interpreting vague laws. This situation comes up a lot. It's quite common for Congress to delegate to an agency with only quite broad language, relying on the agency to fill in the specifics through regulation.
Practically, the major effect here is to reduce the power of the executive (and of Congress to delegate to the executive) and increase the power of the courts.
Like many of the Supreme Court's actions, it needs to be understood in the context of the years of history of Congress being in an almost total state of paralysis, so decisions that nominally "kick things back" to Congress are of enormous significance.
The decision tries to say that this doesn't affect the solidness of the many many prior cases that relied on Chevron deference, but expect a flood of challenges to regulations in basically every field.
If a Federal law telling you what you can and can't do with widgets was ambiguous, then courts were previously required to defer to the Federal Widget Agency's interpretation of the law as long as the judge found the interpretation "reasonable."
Now, if there is a lawsuit or other legal matter over widget usage, the court can take the Federal Widget Agency's interpretation of the law into consideration, but is free to rule however it sees fit on the precise interpretation of Federal widget law.
We are now going to need to place a great deal more trust in Congress to legislate with nuance and understanding of the issues. Obviously the congressmen cannot really become that knowledgeable about every topic, so they will rely even more on advisors to write the legislation for them. We have some idea of how this plays out, because it already happens.
The more things like this happen, the more the function of government (and business, and relationship between labor and business) will return to the way they were operated in the US between 1880 and 1920.
It depends on your needs. I haven’t used that stack, but I maintain projects that have to use autotools, cmake and about a dozen different compilers together to build, 3 of them Fortran compilers. Bazel is easy if you have exactly one blessed toolchain, or very few, but if you need to build in any appreciable number of environments with different toolchains it’s an absolute nightmare. Perhaps this could be fixed, but it was literally years to get support for a compiler installed anywhere other than /usr/bin. It was just never meant to work with variable environments.
This might be what you're looking for? IIRC it was written for the older cgroup (v1) sysfs interface, so you may need to cross reference it with the cgroup2 documentation
Stories like yours absolutely kill me and I feel so much anger toward the management class that thought it would be a good idea to overhire to such an extent and cut us off like it doesn't matter. I know this is unpopular on HN, but I have never felt more cynical about founders than I have as of late. Almost every founder i've spoken too seems to be drinking from the same jar of koolaid and thinks of workers as dispensable resources that can be let go off in a moments notice. I hate that this is what we've come to.
I know it does not help but the founder I work for is absolutely not in that train. When world was hiring like crazy he was executing his plan which was driven by sustainability and revenue. So when crisis knocked to our door, not a single dev was laid off, and we actually hired two (unfortunately we are not hiring now..). This guy is a role model for me when it comes to doing business.
The solution from this imbalance is simple: laid off people should become founders. Then they can maximize the profits not hiring people or keep the previous arrangement of hiring as many as possible to grow
Probably the best take so far. I lost my job earlier this month and have been noticing that the advances in AI are going to be taking away what I would consider my day-to-day. While i'm in the market still for a new gig, I'm slowly coming to the realization that it might take me much longer than i expect. The increase in CS graduates and everyone wanting to do software is also not helping much unfortunately. I feel like software engineering as a career is going to go along the wayside due to AI. Unfortunately, im unsure what to be upskilling in to stay relevant.
> Unfortunately, im unsure what to be upskilling in to stay relevant.
In my opinion the smart move right now isn't upskilling, it's pivoting. I think if you can transition into something with people skills you'll probably be fine for a while yet.
Even learning how to use say PyTorch seems like a short-sighted move at this point. Do we believe the only code AI won't be able to write is AI code or something?
The problem for me is that coding is something I genuinely love, and I'm autistic as hell so there's not much I can actually do with competency. I can't do anything that requires people skills, I'm too soft for hard manual labour, and honestly I'd be fine with a crappy salary if I just got to continue writing code for a living... I know I should be jumping ship right now, but I just can't bring myself to do it. There's really no where else for me to go. And that's a worrying thought when people depend on you...
Best of luck with the job search anyway. Ir really feel for those looking for work out there right now.
