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The CIA's tricks that everyone should know

The CIA has done a lot of bad things, but they were good at being bad, as Walter White (Breaking Bad) once said.

How were they good at these bad things, like disrupting and targeting activists? By infiltrating and acting incompetent af in activists’ meetings, like this goober pictured below —

How’d they act incompetent? Activist groups would meet to make decisions (as groups who are trying to get stuff done tend to do), so the CIA would infiltrate undercover and make these meetings as unproductive as possible — drawing out them out as long as possible, trying to get way too many people involved in easy decisions, etc.

If you’ve ever been in a painfully long, unproductive meeting before, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

These annoying tactics employed by the CIA (and unintentionally exemplified by Michael Scott in The Office) show how good things (like collaboration, hashing things out in meetings) can be abused and twisted into bad things (too many opinions, long and repetitive conversations), which keep anything productive from getting done.

We’ve all suffered from people at work who happen to be unintentionally acting like an annoying CIA agent.

And I hate to inform that tons of federal agencies and local and state governments are (unintentionally) employing these same CIA practices when it comes to approving development projects like housing, bridges, etc.

This is known as —

Permitting.

You probably have no idea wtf this means, and that’s ok 😎

Here’s a steroid shot to the brain of what I’m talking about:

Lots of things in the world need to get built - roads, factories, offices, homes, etc.

But these things cost money to build.

And meetings have to happen and procedures have to be followed to be able to start construction. Every country has their own way of regulating these things.

These procedures and regulations require companies to fill out paperwork, and depending on the country (like the U.S.), you sometimes have to do LOTS of paperwork and dances.

But no one really thinks about this part.

Like when you see a photo of the Empire State Building, you don’t think “wow, they must’ve filled out thousands of pages of paperwork to comply with regulations, like making sure the building wouldn’t disrupt the flight patterns of the rare Maroon Pigeon or the underground nest of the Wily Mammoth Ant.”

NO!

You DON’T have those thoughts because that’s an INSANE thing to think about.

But paperwork of all kinds is needed to make things happen all around us — a bar applying to get a liquor license, a food truck getting inspected, an apartment building being “up to code” - this is all basically permitting. 

It’s ~obviously~ good to have some rules and procedures in place, like making sure to protect endangered species, for example.

But, as you saw with the CIA’s tactics listed above, there should be limits, or these rules and regulations can be abused pretty easily.

For example, this law called National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA, for short) was passed decades ago out of the good intention of protecting the environment. Before building great things like bridges or clean energy projects, federal agencies would have to comply with this law by filling out paperwork to assess the project’s potential impact on the environment.

This sounds nice. But this law kind of sucks, in contrast to the other dope things passed in the late 60s and 70s, like the Clean Water Act, Endangered Animals Act, and Clear Air Act.

Why does it suck? Because now it takes YEARS and tons of money to improve and build things that involve the federal government, which is a lot of stuff!

Plus, there are other laws inspired by NEPA that make it harder for private businesses to build things.

Just look below at this 4,000 page environmental review that took THREE YEARS to complete for measuring the impact of NYC’s congestion pricing 👇

Or how the city of Charlotte spent ELEVEN YEARS filling out an environmental impact statement (paperwork) to expand it’s rail system.

Not only is it a mortal sin to force anyone to write something longer than a Game of Thrones book as a boring ass government report, but the worst part is that laws like NEPA are stopping us from saving the world.

We passed laws like the Endangered Animals Act decades ago because we were polluting and damaging the environment, so we needed some good regulation.

Air quality used to be really bad, so we made it way better. We had to conserve and clean up.

But times have changed. The things that got us to here will not get us to the future. Now our biggest challenge is reducing carbon emissions to zero.

Conservation, like national parks, is still super important, and we can and should keep doing this. But these regulations shouldn’t delay good projects by years and years.

To reduce carbon emissions to zero, we have to build more clean energy projects and denser cities (sprawl = lots more pollution)

There will be no environment to conserve if we don’t reduce our carbon emissions.

China, of all countries, knows this, which is why they’re building solar like crazy —

But we in the U.S. have gotten really bad at building things quickly, especially housing and infrastructure. This is why Kamala Harris has tried changing our labeling of the housing crisis to a housing shortage **queen shit**

We’re especially bad at building things in blue states (sad ☹️), because these state and local governments have put in place tons of excess regulation. They’ve also given tons of decision-making power to small groups that block new projects and developments (like usually older, wealthier white folks that don’t like new housing because of concerns about “neighborhood character,” even though this means younger families don’t get affordable homes).

This is why the housing shortages are so bad in places like NYC and California and not Texas - they don’t build enough housing to keep up with demand.

They’re also bad at building out clean energy, like solar, compared to red states like Texas.

Look at Texas letting it rip baby

This is why I’m mad at Biden.

The other week, Congress passed some great legislation to reform permitting laws like NEPA, but Biden may veto it.

Here's a real example of the cost of doing nothing about permitting, from policy guy Alec Stapp:

- In 2001, US Forest Service wanted to do a wildfire prevention project

- But first, the agency had to go through NEPA

- Before they could finish, half the forest burned down

I’m not saying we should recklessly build things anywhere and any time we’d like, but this status quo is the bigger evil by keeping us from getting to a future full housing, up-to-date infrastructure, and clean energy!

So don’t act like a CIA asshole at work and support building something new!

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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