Rule regulations and ignorance

Are the lunatics running the asylum?

We live in a world of rules and regulations both in Government and business.

Do we ever stop and consider what these rules mean, who makes them and why?    

Were the rules and regulations created by a bunch of bureaucrats who had no idea of the real world, but instead found themselves in a position of influence and power.

In their positions they are expected to do "something" and accordingly come up with ideas that are on the face of it pure BS. Frequently these incompetent fools are assisted by consultants, academics and a range of other snake-oil salesman all with agendas of one sort or abother.

Surely if the rules are made to achieve a specific outcome, one would expect a mechanism or measure to manage the desired outcome.

For the sake of brevity I will provide only three everyday examples for your consideration.

Graffiti

This is an ongoing social issue where councils spend millions trying to clean up the mess.

Homeowners who find their fences and gates "tagged" has to spend time and money to repair and restore their property.

Both enforcement and punishment is a joke and we have vast areas covered in this visual vomit.

We are told that it is difficult to catch the people doing this.

Hardware stores have built special cages to store and display cans of spray-paint and the cost of any such "preventative" measures flow on to all customers.  The stores have no choice, but the rule makers and enforcers somehow lack the capacity to resolve this.

There are simple solutions and one can see that some of those work really well when one visits a place such as Singapore. You are unlikely to find any graffiti there because they have the balls to challenge the "taggers". 

When they catch them they will get a few months in jail PLUS they will probably get about 3 lashes, before they are discharged, at the end of their jail term.

This is a punishment that works but in this country one cannot have such punishment as it would probably offend the civil or human rights or some such woke bs, of the poor little scuzzbuckets doing the tagging.

Academics will blather on about artistic expression and the freedom to express their individuality, reports and studies  at a huge cost to the taxpayer, will support this line of thinking.

The simple equation is if you do not have the balls to punish the crime, there is no point in having the law, rule or regulation.

Shopping trolleys

Supermarkets provide trolleys for their customer's convenience when shopping in their stores and to then take their shopping to their cars.

I frequently see people pushing trolleys miles away from the nearest supermarket and, as often, I see trolleys abandoned at any old place along the suburbs or dumped into streams an canals.

Supermarkets spend a huge amount of money to scout and retrieve these trolleys. Councils issue fines to supermarkets if they do not retrieve or collect trolleys quickly enough ( I am  not sure of the exact current rules here ).

The cost for these activities will be factored into the prices we pay for goods from these supermarkets.

Logic and reason says that anybody who removes a trolley beyond the boundaries of the parking area, servicing the supermarkets, is guilty of theft.

It should be a simple process for the police to arrest any such person and then prosecute them.

Why is the onus and cost for the misbehaviour of some, the responsibility of the supermarkets and indirectly all other customers?

Why is the police not acting on this, Ooops, just remembered they are issuing parking tickets and speeding fines for doing 6 kl over the limit on a downhill section of an 80kl speed zone.

They are also very busy issuing fines to people who dare walk too close to another person or, god forbid, go for a swim when the rulemakers decreed that not to be permissible, as there might be a virus lurking out in the waves just waiting to pounce on some young fit surfer.

Noise

I suspect that all councils have noise abatement laws and no doubt at state level there are rafts of rules and regulations.

Worksites can make noise only after 7 am and parties can run into council regulations for making too much noise at certain hours or even some specific locations.

One can legitimately claim that these rules are there to keep communities functioning in a more harmonious manner.

Now rulemakers please explain :

Garden equipment such as chainsaws, blowers, lawnmowers and more, all generate a huge amount of noise. On weekends this noise can become overwhelming, yet there appears to be no rules regarding this noise even from brand new equipment.

I know that this could be fixed but would add a few dollars to the price of each unit.

One has to conclude that these noise abatement rules are window dressing or applied selectively, based on some unknowable cirteria.

One can buy a decibel meter at a hardware store, so the cost of equipping council staff with such units is easy and cheap.

Motorcycles and cars with huge exhausts systems, where the diameter of the exhaust is bigger than the IQ of the drongo driving it, operate all over our roads.

Frequently I wake in the middle of the night when these noise makers screech around our roads.

Yet, it is legal to import and install these systems!

Where is the noise abatement rules for this, or if we have them, why are they not enforced?

Conclusion

This is a cautionary tale, when those managing the levers of power are unable to get the small things right, consider the danger we are in, as they control and supposedly manage far more complex issues.

It might explain why, for example, Australia placed an order worth billions of dollars for submarines from the French and stipulated that they had to convert a nuclear submarine design to run on diesel at an additional cost of $ 6 Billion.

"The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them." -  Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs