Of course they are. Just look at air travel: people complain about small seats, long lines, and all the nickel-and-dime fees, but they keep on buying the cheapest seat available. OTOH you can pay more and get a first-class seat that has none of those problems and includes priority boarding and security screening. You get the service you pay for.

No, they don't.

What kind of support do you need for a DVD player?

There is a solution to this problem: goats. Turn all that thorny nuisance into yummy meat and cheese.

The solution is not to render everything in the world suitable for blind experimentation by five-year-olds with no impulse control.

Perfect example: you can still get the final update firmware flash for a USRobotics Courier. Or take ReplayTV, who lifetime-activated all devices when they shut down the servers. If you can find a place to give you the guide data, you can still run one.

Put them out of reach of the small children and teach firearm discipline to the older ones. I certainly knew to keep my hands off guns by the time I was six.

The amendment process for the Constitution is not for the faint of heart. The usual method is to have a 2/3 majority of both the houses of Congress pass the amendment, and for that amendment to be ratified by 3/4 of state legislatures. There is no way in hell that amendment would ever get through Congress, let alone the state legislatures.

Strict constructionists think that to change the meaning of the Constitution, you have to actually amend it. There's a process for that written right into it.

My point is not that "overregulation is responsible for disasters"; my point is that "even overregulation does not prevent disasters".

No, I'm juxtaposing can't and don't. When theory and reality diverge, which one needs to be updated?

If your counting the number of articles and saying it isn't enough isn't a complaint about length, then what is it? Oh guru, tell me, how many articles does it take to properly regulate an oil industry? And if California - a wealthy, environmentally conscious state - can't do it adequately, then what hope do you have that anyone can?

Government is not run by the Platonic ideal of disinterested technocrats; it is run by humans.

The fact that these regulations didn't work doesn't mean regulation can't, but it does suggest at the least that the ones they have should be scrapped as ineffective and replaced.

Are you seriously arguing that the quality of regulation should be judged by its length? Never mind that some of these 56 articles covering something less than 193 sections (some have been repealed, not going to bother going through them all) reference other sections, like this from section 6529:

Well, by your count that's one line, except that one line just embeds an entire set of other regulations.

Incidentally, if California - a wealthy state with a high-tax, high-service approach to government - can't design effective regulation, doesn't that tell us that pretty much nobody is going to come up with good regulations?

If one of the wealthiest and bluest states in the country - cannot effectively regulate itself, then perhaps the problem is that regulations don't actually work very well.