Mostly Cajun has a scary story of regulation going nuts and how those making the decisions are not the ones with enough information to make the right ones
One of the things I learned was that when these engines were designed, the EPA was some sort of bad dream only found in the diseased minds of abusers of heavy drugs. That was then. This is now. Students of engine operations know there is a certain proportion of fuel to air that produces maximum power. We can’t run many of our engines there. Why? Because we’re not interested in maximum power any more. We’re interested in minimum pollution, and that ‘maximum power’ thing give a higher level of oxides of nitrogen. That’s okay, though. We learned how to operate there, and we tested our engines regularly to see that they met the goal, and if one was acting up and emissions went up, we dutifully took it off line and fixed it. Life loped along. So they changed the rules. Where we could hit a “twenty” on the spotted owl-killing scale, they dropped the number to five. Okay, you guys on the pipeline, tighten up your acts. So the engineers twiddled and tightened things even more. And goals were met. But the baby seals were still crying from their big, soulful eyes, so the number was changed again. You know, it's getting VERY hard to meet the numbers. And our people tell the rulemakers. And the rulemakers say “Meet the numbers or face fines.” And our people say, "We can't meet these numbers. We'll have to shut down horsepower." And the rulemakers say "Meet the numbers." And that's where we're heading.
One of the things I learned was that when these engines were designed, the EPA was some sort of bad dream only found in the diseased minds of abusers of heavy drugs. That was then. This is now. Students of engine operations know there is a certain proportion of fuel to air that produces maximum power. We can’t run many of our engines there. Why? Because we’re not interested in maximum power any more. We’re interested in minimum pollution, and that ‘maximum power’ thing give a higher level of oxides of nitrogen.
That’s okay, though. We learned how to operate there, and we tested our engines regularly to see that they met the goal, and if one was acting up and emissions went up, we dutifully took it off line and fixed it. Life loped along. So they changed the rules. Where we could hit a “twenty” on the spotted owl-killing scale, they dropped the number to five. Okay, you guys on the pipeline, tighten up your acts. So the engineers twiddled and tightened things even more. And goals were met. But the baby seals were still crying from their big, soulful eyes, so the number was changed again.
You know, it's getting VERY hard to meet the numbers. And our people tell the rulemakers. And the rulemakers say “Meet the numbers or face fines.” And our people say, "We can't meet these numbers. We'll have to shut down horsepower." And the rulemakers say "Meet the numbers." And that's where we're heading.
This is a common, human theme, not delegated to just ignorant politicians looking to Do Something, Anything.
As I've bitched about before, my new job is heading into suckage of biblical proportions. We've got Directors, VP's and 'Architects' who, upon reading the latest "CIO Weekly" have declared that Java is the way to go. Oh, and use Beehive. And Struts. And Spring. And Ext-Js. And Wicket. And a few other frameworks. Ignore the fact that 97% of our development over the past years is in .Net. Ignore the fact that nobody here is a Java developer (hint to management – Just because C# and Java look the same doesn't mean they are the same). Ignore the fact that we had to outsource / contract the new applications and that after a week of training, the people who wrote the damnable things couldn't even get them running (16 applications, only one they could actually hit a single debug point). Never mind that in order to troubleshoot any of these applications, it requires over 100 plug-ins in Eclipse, and a dev server that has at least 4 gigs of memory and 150 gigs of hard drive space. And you have to have at least 5 or 6 other applications running or else the entire system fails (gotta love SOA).
No, my management made some piss poor decisions based on what someone thought was a good idea. The reality of this system is that it is so complex, so brittle, and so "flexible" that we've estimated 20 man hours to add a single text box to a webpage. Those who are making the decisions are not the developers on the ground who have to work with reality day in and day out where these so called 'frameworks' do nothing but add complexity rather than make it simple to use.
Politicians work the same way. They're not engineers. They don't understand the laws of thermodynamics and simply assume that by passing a law that requires engines to produce more power than they consume is all that's required. It's these same politicians who think that simply banning guns that look a certain way will stop them from being used, even when reality shows them time and time again that this is not the case.
And for some reason I cannot fathom, it's damned near impossible to educate those who make the decisions.
It's like the Peter Principal, writ large.