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EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm

(www.nytimes.com)
258 points anigbrowl | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 23:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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consumer451 ◴[19 Jul 25 02:00 UTC] No.44611886[source]▶
One of the most onerous regulation regimes in the USA comes from the FAA.

When people question these regulations, and the cost of certifying aircraft and aircraft parts, someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."

The same can easily be said about environmental regulations, except in their case, the pool of blood is orders of magnitude deeper.

Do people really think that President Richard Nixon created the EPA to stick it to big business?

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eviks ◴[19 Jul 25 09:35 UTC] No.44613951[source]▶
> someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."

No, that's just a lazy ignorant response, there is not enough blood in the world to provide enough ink to write all those rules.

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knuckleheads ◴[19 Jul 25 11:08 UTC] No.44614456[source]▶
Ran the math and and it's factually incorrect to say there's not enough blood in the world to write out all these rules.

There's about ~8 billion people in the world today. Estimates say an average adult has 5 liters of blood in their body, so let's say 2.5 liters per person to account for children. That's about 20 billion liters of blood for available for your macabre comparison.

Looking at the federal register[0] and running some javascript on the page [1], we get an estimate of 4.1 million pages in the federal register in it's whole history. We could get into page yields for various types of printing and how that effects how many pages could be printed, but at a generous one liter per page, it's obvious it could be done.

Skipping some more estimates, but the federal register would require about 1 oil-drum of blood or 115 liters to write out, which would only take one person donating blood at the recommend safe rates about 40 years to complete by themselves. A long time for sure, but if you start today, you could hopefully see just how wrong you were before the end of your life.

[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/federal-register... [1] $("tbody > tr > :nth-child(9) ").text().split("\n").map(function(l){return parseInt(l.trim().replace(",",""))}).filter(function(l){return l ? l: 0}).reduce(function(a,b){return a+b},0)

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1. eviks ◴[19 Jul 25 11:29 UTC] No.44614579[source]▶
You've made a few basic fails: federal register is, well, only federal, so you've ignored all the non-federal ones. But then even at the federal level you've missed laws that contain the rules, and then the court decisions that directly impact how a rule is interpeted. And all that, of course, isn't enough, to understand them you'd also need to read professional literature that explains all of those rules.

Then the rules aren't static, so you'd need to print the full legal version for each change, so it wouldn't be neatly stuck into years, but more frequently.

Then there is the bigger elephant in the world - the actual world! Since you drain the whole wide world of blood, count all the rules that they produce out there.

Also, did you do math in JS wat to get

4.1 million pages * 1 liter per page = 115 liters (not million)

> about 40 years to

Then you've also forgotten to count all the future regulations

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2. knuckleheads ◴[19 Jul 25 11:47 UTC] No.44614698[source]▶
The Federal Register is the log of the changes, the Code of Federal Regulations is the product after applying all those changes. The Code is only about 190,000 page, so about 20 times less, which means if you abandoned your antisocial ways and made one friend (and, big stretch, another one to account for future growth of the code), the two/three of you could bleed out a copy of the updated Code by yourself each year for the foreseeable future.