The autoimmune state
A rather fitting title - I wonder if anyone actually coined that term before. I mean it rather literally, in any case. Because much like how the immune system that is meant to help keep its body safe and protected from genuine threats can turn on its own cells in a fit of over-excitement or over-reaction, it feels like the regulatory "cells" of governments can run rampant if left unchecked and without moderation. In mild cases it simply temporarily causes slowdowns and upset - in harder cases it can slowly suffocate the host.
Proper regulation is incredibly important for a healthy society, to act as needed checks and balances for... Almost everything. But this can not happen without updating old regulations, without pruning that which is not needed and without ensuring that regulations don't over-reach their purpose. Simply tacking on more and more regulation to "fix" problems - by some abstract Excel-Table metric - simply speeds up deforestation by requiring ever-larger stacks of paper to be signed. We are in Germany, after all. And sadly, it feels to me more and more like this is happening.
An example
A concrete example, and the main aspect of what motivated us to write this, is the recent changes to Germany's "Vergabeverordnung". This is a surface-level reasonable regulation whose purpose it is to prevent a publicly funded institution, such as a university's research institute, from contracting a much-more-expensive-than-necessary 3rd party company (perhaps the owner is a "personal friend") for some arbitrary task, and thusly using up the precious research grant money for personal gains. The initial solution, before the recent change, was... A little cumbersome, but tolerable. For any order above 1000€, you have to get at least three separate offers from separate companies for the same service/product, and choose the cheapest one, unless you can give a pertinent reason why you can't.
What, no, we'll dig a tunnel halfway into the mountain, get the lowest-bidder nuke that doesn't detonate, and then continue to dig at the mountain except we spent all our money on nukes so we're picking at granite with our fingernails.
A quote from Karbon Blenderwolf while talking about this very issue. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide on whether or not the cheapest one is also always the most appropriate one (and I will say hello to a construction project at University that has had to have safety-netting reinstalled for the third time now because the cheap material keeps ripping in the wind), but at least the 1000€ watermark meant it didn't affect most day-to-day operations.
Used to not affect day-to-day operations. See, one small loophole in the 1000€ watermark is that it's on a per-order basis, sssooo... Say, you have multiple components of a bigger order, you could in theory split those up into smaller sub-orders, and fall below the limit. And Berlin did not like that. Recent changes to this regulation decided to "fix" this loophole, apparently with little to no consideration as to the can of worms they had opened.
The change? You are now not allowed to go above 1000€ cumulatively per supplier//contractor... Per eight week window. No matter what you do, if you want to buy something - anything - and you even so much as remotely suspect that you might go over the 1000€ watermark now, you have to do this whooollleee dance of grabbing at least three offers and choosing the cheapest one. And yes, this applies to standard vendors, and standard components. It applies to DigiKey and the generic roll of 10k 0805 resistor. None of it is automated, where and how to get quotes and offers isn't really standardized, and it all ends up as a heterogenous printed stack of papers that you hope is enough to act as sacrifice to the gods of ink and quill.
Consequences
We are a research instutite, working with custom electronics. Spontaneous ordering of material happens all the time, because that's how you often develop electronics - you come up with a circuit, say "Hey, let's try it out", buy some stuff on DigiKey or Mouser, and once your parts arrive you give them to a student for them to solder up your circuit board. Then you turn it on, watch the MCU go up in smoke because your schematic crossed some control lines, and quickly fix and re-order the PCB and whatnot, all in the span of two or three weeks.
Thanks to this new "improvement", however, our entire institute now has to bundle electronics orders into these eight-week windows, and needs to spend energy and time to make and compare the offers. You blew up the last of the amplifier you need but we just ordered completely unrelated components a week ago? Too bad! Gotta wait two months now. And do you know how boring it is to compare different, identical parts such as resistors? Uhg.
And even for orders that are genuinely expensive components, this whole process can often only make a difference of a few tens of Euros, while requiring hours of personal labour - so it's not even cheaper!! This is not conducive to research. It slows things down by a lot, takes manpower away, with minimal to no benefits for most institutes, and makes things less attractive. And the thing is, I don't think anything will be done about it - at most we might get extra regulations added on top - exceptions and new loopholes, new paper to fill out.
And I see this happening not only with this regulation, but in a lot of other areas. Regulations tacked onto a growing pile of old, unsuitable ones, in an attempt to fix and adjust things - but I'm missing the pruning and adjustment and fine-tuning. Hell, sometimes regulations are used as a weapon, piling on larger and larger requirements until a task is no longer easily achievable. Nuclear power is definitely a victim of such a slow, suffocated death, regulated until the mere thought of constructing a new plant will cost you 30k.
A possible adjustment
By the way - I think that the regulation as a whole makes sense. But its scope should be limited, to custom-made orders, devices and contracts. The fact that it affects boring, standard and ubiquitous components and vendors such as DigiKey etc. is the problem. We're already buying the best parts (coincidentally sometimes the cheapest!), mainly because we want to be doing research, and we already have limited funds available. And it's not like I have a personal connection to the CEO of Vishay ((but if you're reading this please say hi uwu)).
Conclusion
The immune system has run out of valid germs to target, and has started to attack healthy tissue in an ever-growing search for new problems to solve, striding ahead with little care of what their "solution" actually does, simply going "Ah, I found/made a problem that I now declare solved!"
I don't really have a nice conclusion here. It's just annoying to see, and I want to let people know about this annoyance - because maybe this is something that we can still change, eventually, with some noise. I do want to improve things. That's why I'm passionate about this - over-regulation like this feels like it can take the breathing room and agility away that's needed to truly create.
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