What Can You Do With An Imported Monkey?

[roo_ster]

http://www.nationalreview.com/exchequer/268214/regulatory-hangover

OK: Getting it high on cocaine.
Not OK: Spanking it.

If you go to regulations.gov and do a search for all of the existing and proposed rules, the listing of headings alone runs more than 6,000 pages, containing more than 61,000 items. That’s not the whole shebang, of course — just what’s available on the web site. The Federal Register, within living memory about the size of a family Bible, today takes up about 30 feet of shelf space...

...For instance, because milk contains fat, it is regulated the same way as petroleum is — milk fat being an organic oil. That means that people who ship and package milk have to be prepared to clean up the Exxon Valdez, basically, spilt milk being the same thing as spilt crude in the eyes of the bureaucrats, costing the dairy industry about $67 million a year. This has led to a lot of “crying over spilt milk” jokes...

...The annual cost of regulatory compliance in the United States runs about $1.75 trillion a year. As the Heritage Foundation points out, that means that regulations cost Americans more than do individual income taxes...

[AJ Dual]

I remember seeing on the short lived "Homeland Security" reality TV show that enormous jungle bats can be boxed and shipped legally to the U.S.... as long as they're smoked/barbecued first.

Yum.

[grampster]

Get ahold of Bucky the cat and he'll take care of the monkey.

[TommyGunn]

......  OK: Getting it high on cocaine.
Not OK: Spanking it.

Sounds like Cass Sunstein needs a good spanking.   Maybe we can enlist Glenn Beck for the job ....

[RevDisk]

I did govt regulation for a year.  I went to expensive training courses.  I worked with the regulation folks from other companies.  I spoke with the folks that implemented the regulation at various federal agencies.  I was the guy that had to translate US regs into company procedures.  No American does, or physically can, understand regulation.  It is physically not possible.  Even the BEST regulation person I ever met (former Customs officer, licensed customs broker, etc) had to look things up all day long. 

Regulation required not-cheap salaries for people to understand it.  Regulation causes red tape to be tossed across every department in the company.  Required training.  Required procedures.  etc etc.  That's all overhead and loss of productivity.  There's lost business opportunities because companies could buy the same stuff from Europe and have stuff overnighted instead of taking months to legally export.  No, I am NOT exaggerating. 

My auditing binder was "larger than the family bible". 

You have NO idea how much time and money it took to ensure that we could prove we did not all our four Canadian employees to view a Wescam FLIR (made in Canada) being installed onto an aircraft being sold to Canada.  If we DID allow a Canadian national to see the FLIR being installed, or WE COULD NOT PROVE THAT HE DIDN'T (yes, legal presumption of guilt, yes it has held up in court), we'd do a voluntary disclosure.  That isn't cheap to prepare and is very disruptive to business.  It could range from nothing...  To millions in fines.  It's more or less entirely arbitrary punishment, and depends on a lot of factors.  How much the government agency likes you, how many expensive lawyers you have, the political climate at the time, etc.

A LOT of stuff that was listed as a controlled munition hasn't been made in the US in decades.  It was high tech back during the Cold War, so it's just as controlled today.  It's been a huge boat anchor on the aerospace industry.  And that's just ITAR.  EAR isn't so bad, actually.  You'd merely want to weep upon reading it, now go catatonic while whispering "The horror, the horror."

 

$1.75 trillion is a believable low ball number. 

[230RN]

So professional compliance folks gotta go through all kinds of excruciating research to figure out what the law is, and for you and me and the rest of us common schnooks, "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

I have long maintained, on this board and others, that the ordinary mortal cannot go out to his car, drive five miles, park the car, walk half a mile, and then drive back home, without breaking at least five laws.

So I mentioned this to somebody and he said that was crazy. 

So I says to him, I says, "Care to lay down a $10 bet on that?"

And he says, "Sure."

So I looks at him in straight in the eyeballs and I says, "That's one."

Terry, 230RN

[grampster]

Terry, the reason you know stuff like that is that you are old.  I supplement my pension by making bets with young people. 

[230RN]

You... you... fellow dirty old dog, you!

So he blinks at me and I says, "You only got four to go."

So he pulls a pair of fins out of his wallet and hands them to me, grinning.

I didn't take them.

[grampster]

Oh, ya gotta take 'em.  Otherwise they never learn.