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Re:'The eels were climbing out of the water to die' by myrmidon on Thursday October 08, 2026 @10:58AM (#50006620)
Cases like this are exactly why every populist claim of "cost savings through deregulation" should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism, always.

Not only were many environmental regulations "written in blood" (and are well justified by observed damages before they existed), the average citizen would typically gain little from scrapping them. Allowing some industrialized chicken farm to dump their waste into the next river is not gonna make your eggs that much cheaper. "Socialize (external) costs, privatize gains" is often the actual play instead.

Re:'The eels were climbing out of the water to die' by Tadpole9181 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:26AM (#50006969)
> is not gonna make your eggs that much cheaper.

Any. It's not going to make your eggs any cheaper.

The market is already bearing the existing price, so all that saved money is going in an executive's pocket.

Re:'The eels were climbing out of the water to die' by missinglugnut on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:37PM (#50008042)
Absolute statements like this are just nonsense. Companies really will undercut each other on price to get customers. How much this happens depends on how competitive the market is. And one of the ingredients of a competitive market is not having high compliance burdens making it hard on new entrants.

If any idiot with a chicken could enter the egg business, eggs would be cheaper and more plentiful, but also less safe. Cheap importers would take over and probably start faking expiration dates and making people sick, but golly it'd be cheap. And contrary to you claims, it would also cause the richest execs in the business to lose their bonuses while the sketchy importers took over on slim margins.

I don't want that, but come on, you gotta admit the cost tradeoff is real.

Re:'The eels were climbing out of the water to die' by cucumber3732842 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:27AM (#50006989)
The populists are right on this one if only out of dumb luck.

If you wanted to dump shit on the riverbank in 1950 you'd just bribe/threaten officials with discretion or call in a favor from a friend of a friend to get approved.

To do it in 2026 you have to continually pay a bunch of middle men and compliance parties diffusing responsibility far and wide enough in the process that no one party can be held responsible because the lawyering it would take to drag that across the finish line would be more than you could recoup from said party, often helped by statutory limits to liability for all these middle men and compliance parties.

Focusing on the legality or compliance with rules of any one of the myriad of parties listed in the article or whining about the inaction of the enforcement agencies funding level is basically a red herring to rile up the useful idiots to clamor for more of all this. The more you pass rules that drive up cost the more you create room for additional middle men to diffuse responsibility if operating above the table and the more payoff you create for those who are willing to operate below the table.

Garbage disposal one of those areas where the modern regulatory state is an abject failure by anything other than the definitions of success cooked up by the regulatory state peddlers themselves. I don't know what the solution is. The paradigm it replaced was pretty bad too.

Re:'The eels were climbing out of the water to die' by myrmidon on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:59AM (#50007467)
I think you are being deceptive; the no-regulation alternative/cost to "setting up a middlemen network for responsibility diffusal" is not "bribing officials", it's nothing; companies just used to pump their toxic tailings slurry into the next lake/river/barely secured ditch at basically zero cost.

Having to pay those middlemen is a sign of the regulation working (because the cost for creating superfund sites is no longer zero), and all society has to do is increase enforcement rate/liability limits until the middlemen are more expensive than proper disposal.

Re:'The eels were climbing out of the water to die' by cucumber3732842 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:19PM (#50007756)
You misunderstand. The "middlmen" I'm talking about are the firms regulation has brought into existence and/or drive work to. If you say that some firm that lab tests dirt samples is now on the hook for more money, or perhaps has more business driven to them. In any case cost for who's hiring them goes up and the "zero regulation" solution becomes that much more lucrative.

Like I said, going back to the pre-regulation ways isn't a solution, that was pretty bad too.

Re:'The eels were climbing out of the water to die' by bamboozled on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:29AM (#50007036)
Respectfully, what a load of shit?

In Australia all the regulations exist and the waste management is top notch, insanely easily and fairly cheap.

The solution is electing a decent government.

Re:'The eels were climbing out of the water to die' by cucumber3732842 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:46AM (#50007258)
You're like 10-15yr behind the UK on this same path.

Landfilling has been intentionally regulated into being non-viable in the UK and in many other places. They simultaneously regulate incineration which sets a high minimum price there (whether this is intentional depends on who you ask). This creates all your economic demand for "if we engage in a complex regulatory compliance scheme we can dump obviously bad but technically compliant from the POV of any one party dirt on a farm for a decade before we get shut down and all walk away pocketing an X% ROI" type crap like in the article comes from.

The northeast US and wide swaths of europe have the same problems too.