The question is rather why Lamda School didn't get themselves approved?
It's beneficial for society to make sure entities representing that they are something, actually are that something.
Isn't this a trade school? Why in the world does a trade school need this kind of regulation. It just seems like most of our laws are passed in secret you don't know you violated anything until you get hit.
There are many.
Perhaps the most compelling is a long history of scams. California's regulations might be arduous, but they didn't come out of nowhere.
Another reason is that the customers almost by definition doesn't know how to asses quality.
> It just seems like most of our laws are passed in secret.
This law wasn't passed in secret.
We’ve submitted all the paperwork and have worked closely with California. This all happened a long time ago.
I’m not sure what the right level of regulation is (it’s hard taking care of 50 states at once - one state registration was 2,277 pages and weighed 25 pounds https://twitter.com/austen/status/1153450365712388096?s=21), but it’s reasonable that it would be regulated somehow.
Good thing there are APIs for printing and mailing changes to a diff :)
[1] https://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1888&c...
Out of curiosity, was the paperwork cumbersome, or did the old counsel just not know?
note: I considered rewording the "not know" bit since regulations can be tricky, there can be other reasons why they might've felt that the need to register wasn't there. Most of which I feel, for counsels, falls into the didn't know, didn't look category.
It took two people two months full-time to prepare and submit.
New is the easiest case.
If your "new thing" entrenches the status quo and generally benefits those on the top of society the law will be interpreted as in your favor as it can possibly be.
If your "new thing" threatens the status quo or makes the poor more able to annoy those on the top of society the legal system will go through whatever contortions it must to throw up roadblock after roadblock.
If your "new thing" is somewhere in between or if most people are indifferent but there's small vocal minorities who feel strongly for/against your thing that's where it gets interesting.
At Metis, state and federal regulation (we're accredited) is a big burden - but something I as an instructor feel is in the best interest of my students.
I'm so shocked that this isn't simply about certification (aka, you can't give out some sort of officially accepted slip of paper without a license, which I would at least be able to come up with arguments for), that I am really curious as to how this is an issue.
In particular:
1. It seems you can exchange knowledge for money as long as you don't have a physical presence in the state. Do you think this is an unfortunate loophole that in an ideal world would be "fixed"? If I create a new framework or technology and live in Bolivia, do you believe that ideally before I can offer a course on it online that accepts payments I should first be licensed in the state of the person taking the course? Should random people who happen to live in the state have a leg up on me teaching the technology I invented simply since they live there already and it is probably easier/in-their-means to get registered?
2. It doesn't seem to have anything in particular to do with "bad knowledge", as there are plenty of people willing to teach bad things for free (you can define bad however you want here). And separately, as far as I can tell, no one is really checking the courses are good or anything. Using the example above, would California have the capability to know that my React course is up to snuff?
So what is the registration for? Why is the sale of knowledge different than the sale of t-shirts?
1. Is the only goal to have these places on file for easier class-action lawsuits later? That might make sense?
2. Is it because tuition is particularly expensive, so it is known to attract more scams? So, merely a consequential result and not anything inherent to knowledge itself.
3. Is it because this sort of "institution" qualifies for government assisted funding/scholarships? In that case I could certainly understand it.
Any of those reasons could make sense, but none lead me to the feeling that the sale of knowledge, of all things, should of course necessarily be licensed/registered outside any other variables.
The citation date is March 20th of this year, which is only four months ago. When will Lambda School be fully registered with California?
EDIT: Whoops sorry, didn't realize my comment was submitted twice.
https://a16z.com/2014/02/06/why-i-did-not-go-to-jail/
TL;DR, A widely respected CFO makes a suggestion regarding stock and being competitive as far as employee compensation. CFO says that they have done the same thing at numerous companies. The CEO is not very knowledgeable and asks the general council (who unlike a lot of places at the time reports directly to the CEO, not the CFO) to weigh in. General council says don't do it, so they don't. 2 years later, CFO goes to jail, CEO and everyone else stays out of jail because of a good decision.
I would extend your lesson and say to be sure you are asking a lawyer who has knowledge / experience in the area of law you're asking about.
There are some laws explicitly written to say that ignorance of the law is an excuse. "knowing an willing violation" (I don't know if this is one of them though)
Taking that to the logical extreme of having a legal opinion with every email puts you in a very privileged situation with the state
It exponentially increases the cost of the state to investigate. The state now knows you have a lawyer already, but doesn't know the contents of the advice and doesn't get to use things under attorney-client privilege even if a judge approved a fishing expedition that exposed your digital artifacts. And in the meantime it lowers your compliance burden if the advice says you don't have to comply, depending on how you compensate your lawyer your costs were super low.
If there is potentially criminal liability, but the burden of proof is a knowing and willful violation, then you're practically exempt because of the lawyer on payroll.
So in this case they negotiated the fine and get to improve operations.
Costs of investigating and prosecuting aside, the state likes to see a rationale for compliance. The lawyer also provides that, which you would prefer to have some case law to support it. This doesn't result in sanctioning the lawyer, its just not worth it to the state.
But the legal system is so complex, how are you as a laymen suppose to verify it if you are basically the test case for trying something new?
How is it regulated there? better or worse?
I don't have a strong opinion about if such things should be regulated or not, but I do know that there's a lot of people who have just slapped together programs to ride a money wave, and offer relatively little in exchange and it's hard to vet the places by yourself.
That said, we (App Academy) found that the BPPE was a mostly accommodating regulator that worked with us to come into compliance. We did face a couple challenges that will likely still exist today:
1) BPPE won't give approval to operate until the whole application process is completed. This means that Lambda School is likely operating without approval and will continue to do so for 6-12 months at a minimum. Contracts are unenforceable during this period, the school could be forced to shut down CA operations overnight, etc.
2) BPPE doesn't have a formal policy for Income Share Agreements (ISAs). We were able to get our ISA approved in 2015, but it took some doing and was not nearly as straightforward as getting a normal tuition contract approved. Several other ISA programs that applied a year or two after us were not approved.
More info: https://venturebeat.com/2014/01/30/california-bootcamp-will-...
I realize California isn't just "any" state but needing to seek unique approval from up to all 50 states just to run an online school seems like a really high (and expensive) bar.
It would be nice if more states cooperated on things like this. Then you seek approval from the collective, rather than at an individual level.
You don't need all 50 states approval to run an online school, but you will need the approval of the state that you are actually in.
I assume they also have to come into compliance to avoid further fines, but given that they provide a legit educational service, that shouldn't be too hard for them.
We’re lucky to be big and VC-backed and growing fast. $75k would be near deadly to a lot of smaller schools, so I’m sure the BPPE sized the fees accordingly.
My apologies for assuming that!
Could that be any more broad? Education is often just verbal and written communication between people. Seems like a first amendment violation.
https://i.imgur.com/CKt5ZGT.png
(notice the $75,0000.00 - in bold, no less)
> A person shall not open, conduct, or do business as a private postsecondary educational institution (a private entity with a physical presence in this state that offers – advertise, publicize, solicit, or recruit – postsecondary education to the public for an institutional charge) in this state without obtaining an approval to operate under this chapter. The institution must be approved to operate, which means approved to establish, keep, or maintain any facility or location in this state where, or from which, or through which, postsecondary education programs are provided.
I think the key part is the determination of their location. Their California headquarters counts as a facility through which programs are provided. The fact that the classes are fully online is unrelated. They would have to argue that their headquarters don't have anything to do with providing postsecondary education programs.
The reason we have inordinate amounts of regulations to fill out paperwork for is because “reason” doesn’t work the same way in law as it does in practicality. What’s absurdly stupid in layman’s situations is but a part of the game of legal chess in court.
We could have a law that says “Use common sense and don’t be an idiot”, which makes perfect sense in theory, and without very specific precedents will debated to hell in court with how common law cases work.
We end up with a lot of nonsense clauses and rules and requirements due to this, but it also is how chaos is supposed to be kept in check from erupting at the seams when people use lack of specific regulation as an incentive to find ways to screw other people over.
Just hoping they start a slightly more flexible cohort for people who are working and looking for the next promotion
However, we can only offer the $0 upfront option to permanent residents of the US and EU right now. Hopefully soon other countries.
So much for regulation.
I will never forget watching a grown man cry in a mock interview because he could not solve FizzBuzz. I made sure they understood the relevant operators, the problem, inputs and expected output, gave ample time, kept things very casual and relaxed, and told them to ask any questions they needed. This was practice, after all.
I suppose I would cry too, if I wasted months and ~20,000, likely banking on a great new life as a programmer.
At the same time I've worked with great entry-level developers who used the code camps to jump from "bad" positions, e.g. young dead-ended professionals, folks with complimentary degrees but no job prospects in that industry, etc. The common thread with these folks is either prior background programming, a personal support network of programmers, or both.
What kind of regulation would help for this? Mandated entrance exams with a hard-cutoff?
It's not clear if you're intending to criticize Lambda School in particular here, but given the context that's how it comes across. If that wasn't your intention, it might be worth clarifying your comment; otherwise it might be worth providing some supporting evidence. I'm not associated with Lambda School, but am a fan precisely because they have always struck me as a really sincere organization that works hard to maximize value for their students.
I can't remember the last time I recommended anyone attend one of these schools; perhaps never honestly. I've seen them be really useful for some people, but also really unhelpful for many more.
They are a short cut, and leave people with a large amount of technical debt starting out in the form of a knowledge gap. Sometimes you need that, but I'd still recommend (if they can) someone do Course 6 at MIT any day over a 12-week course. Even without it being MIT, there's no way to fit 4 years of knowledge and experience into 12 weeks; none.
It looks like you ignored a lot of the text of the order, such as the citation of exemptions, and the limiting qualifier “postsecondsry” before education.
> Could that be any more broad?
Well, no, it would be harder for it to be more broad than your mischaracterization.
> Seems like a first amendment violation.
Probably not even if it was as broad as you mischaracterize it. The first amendment does not prevent the State from general regulation of commerce, even if what is being traded is speech.
>Looking at the text of the fine, you can't charge money to teach adults things in a cirriculum ("offer education" in their parlence) in a physical location without state approval.
It's an important distinction, but I don't think that huge game changer. Still looks clearly unconstitutional.
I could literally rent a storefront and recite audio books and that would be illegal. How is that a constitutional law? Note: educational books often have a curriculum built in. The difference between a book and a class is just the medium it's presented.
Limiting the spread of information is what dictatorships do. There is a reason it's the very first amendment.
>Seems like a first amendment violation.
The key phrase here is charging money. Commercial speech has always been more strictly regulated than other forms of speech.
The government can often regulate selling things in ways that it could not Constitutionally regulate the thing being sold outside of commerce.
No, the law at issue (as stated in the document mischaracterized upthread) restricts only “private postsecondary education”.
The applicable definition of “postsecondary education” is at Cal.Ed.Code § 94857:
“Postsecondary education” means a formal institutional educational program whose curriculum is designed primarily for students who have completed or terminated their secondary education or are beyond the compulsory age of secondary education, including programs whose purpose is academic, vocational, or continuing professional education.
https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/education-code/edc-sect-94857.h...
Private tutoring is not within it's scope (private tutoring at the elementary/secondary level that is used as an alternative to mandatory schooling or parent howmschooling is regulated in CA by a different law, but that's only when it is taking the place of mandatory schooling, not supplementing it or serving unrelated functions.)
If you do, you pay 17% of income for 2 years, capped at $30k total.
Edit: 20k up front, versus 30k if taken out of your salary over 2 years. That's around 20% interest. They mention that payments are 17% of your income, but this is calculated pre-tax and paid after taxes.
It is not a class of school, it is indeed a company. A scam/cult masquerading as a startup. It's hyped, it's batshit insane. A thread from yesterday https://twitter.com/KeziyahL/status/1155154616281178114 but of course there is more. To me, it was obvious there is something wrong because PaulG often raved about it and nothing good comes out of that. You can't growth hack education. Humans don't work like that. I started a (very small, very unprofitable) school in a far away country and also happen to have a teacher's degree and oh boy.
As for scam, just look at their website.
> "Pay $0 tuition until you land a high-paying job Lambda covers your tuition costs until you're making at least $50,000 a year. "
How is $50 000 a high paying job? According to the SSA, the average wage in 2017 was $48,251.57. Also, the 17% is calculated from before tax but paid after tax. So if you earn 50K, take home 40K then Lambda doesn't take 6800, no they will take 8500.
> "You can choose to pay $20k upfront for Lambda tuition ... You'll never pay more than $30k ..."
Wait, you are charging 50% interest? Possibly over two years?
Just pointing out how funny it is for someone to say that nothing good comes from PG... on HackerNews
> Wait, you are charging 50% interest? Possibly over two years?
that's not how interest works. on a variety of levels. for starters, "50% over two years" would be 22% annualized, which is the only way anyone talks about interest. admittedly, that would be a high interest rate.
except it isn't interest. what you pay is a function of how much you earn. try borrowing money from the bank for 6%, and see if they'll let you just stop paying if you don't make any money.
> I started a (very small, very unprofitable) school in a far away country and also happen to have a teacher's degree
what were you teaching that didn't require simple arithmetic, or reading comprehension?
However, literally nothing in that linked twitter thread, or the one it in turn links to, do a single thing to demonstrate that at all. The people who posted both have no first hand experience at all and there's no data or details or facts to support their arguments. It’s just someone reading the website and posting reaction gifs.
But how are you going to handle the yearly (or more often) tax filings in all these jurisdictions going forward?
However, it sounds a bit like backdating stock options type thing, and a fair amount of people went to jail over that across various industries.
Which to me shows that "the regulatory state" is not the right model.
There will always be a regulatory state, the question is what is the authority that imposes the regulation; is it a democratic government, a private company that institutes policy and terms of service, a gang that rules by force and violence. No society I know of has existed without a code of rules and obligations, and America is actually really amazingly effective.
Unfortunately, there is a received "professional speech" semi-exception to the First Amendment, explaining things like how there can be laws against charging money for legal advice (pure speech) without a state license. I assume that's what California is thinking here.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It clearly distinguishes the press as different from speech, but teaching someone certainly seems like it would fall under normal speech.
No, the applicable legal definition of “postsecondary education” is not as broad as you are painting it: I've directly quoted it, with citation to the Education Code, in another subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20559878
Literally just one fax. They want to avoid any complaints on their record, especially valid ones.
I DO think there is something that should set off someone's spidy sense that "Wait, we're changing the dates on these options that already exist?" or "We're lying about the dates / price these options were really granted at?".
To me at least that raises a lot of questions just changing the date on something financal to say it happened in the past like magic. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd be very nervous about that.
Perhaps there is an opportunity for some start-up to help solve this.
--
On a different note, I love what you folks are doing and keep pitching lambda to folks who're stuck in long uber/lyft rides with me.
Big props to the author too, who leans pretty libertarian-ish, for following the data where it leads, rather than trying to make it fit his ideas.
That’s one example I could think of. The day off could also move around so Monday could be off
The teachers know within a week or two who is going to have real problems with the material. The schools do not want them to put assessments in place that would have them leave, because they want money.
Then had grew bigger groups, lowered the bar for students, increased prices, reduced scholarships, more focus on financing via loans, and then changed the curriculum in response to the requests of local industry.
On paper they all have reasonable explanations.
Bigger groups? Well we just have so many more people applying! After all, they evangelized the hell out of the program, getting both graduates and local well-known business leaders to speak about the wonders of the program.
Lowering the bar and offering loans? Well they're just opening it up to folks from non-traditional and more varied backgrounds. Don't want to be classist or whatever the hell else -ist! I'm self-taught, I sure didn't want to be one to pull the gate up behind me, and what's more I saw folks from non-traditional backgrounds do well. There is some validity to this.
Changing the curriculum in response to your local board of industry advisors? Great idea! The students will be even more likely to land roles afterwards because those doing the hiring are telling us what their actual needs are. Well what it turned into was a tale of too many cooks. You have an already small time frame with which to teach core material further reduced to satisfy an advisor. Teaching Java and Spring? Why not throw in some Android! Well we'd be in remiss to not touch on Scala, oh and Clojure too! Because they need exposure to other languages!
So now you have a three-month camp for someone that needs to learn Java basics of Spring, basics of their build tool, Gradle, so throw in some Grovvy, oh and basics of Hibernate... which means basics of databases. Oh, don't forget this is all being run on their shiny new MBPs so there's the whole systems administration jackassery. So why not then throw in a week of Android, another week of Scala and Clojure, when they barely understand syntax as a concept to further confuse them. So that's 12 weeks minus 4 weeks for the capstone gives you 8 weeks for all that I just listed, only 6 weeks for the core material.
As I write this out, I'm even more amazed at the folks who came out of that and landed anything. Thankfully for a few of my friends and colleagues the front-end courses were a bit more focused and seemed to produce more working candidates.
Sometimes a shyster comes along and hoodwinks people, sometimes you have incompetence, sometimes both. Either way it's the students left holding bag.
I think the main thing regulation should do is help manage how much risk the students are exposed to. They can filter out low effort scams while allowing experimental programs that can rationalize their approach a wide latitude to innovate and even fail. Based on my cursory assessment of Lambda's model, they would likely survive this type of scrutiny.
I don’t think (for us) this process have improved the school at all.
The juice may still be worth the squeeze for larger/funded ventures. Your efforts to translate what you do to what regulators want to see is probably worth it. However, smaller outfits might be inclined to avoid that work by following the regulatory ruts and deliver exactly what they are looking for to avoid these costs/complexities/risks.
Note that Lambda School's lawyer interpreted the law the same way you'd like to -- Lambda School doesn't have a physical presence in California because it doesn't operate any classrooms. But the state felt differently.
And the state is pretty unambiguously correct on this point -- Lambda School is apparently incorporated in California as Lambda Inc. with a business address of 921 Crescent Court, San Ramon, CA 94582.
( https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/1574959D:US )
Fascinatingly, they seem to have been incorporated in 1983.
Surely not $75,000 for a letter. A few hundred, yes.
Recouping even $5,000 (in a "f u, go away please" payment) would be a big win for a scrappy startup, no?
Their old law firm probably would prefer not to be drug around town making it known they gave very wrong, and very costly advice. They'd prefer the matter just went away. Those conditions are ripe for a quick settlement.
So it’s not in our best interest to string someone along who can’t write fizzbuzz.
We use mastery-based progression so realistically that person wouldn’t progress past the first week or two, then would repeat until he or she had mastered the content.
I have to say, thank you for your thoughtful comments here and on Twitter, and your dedication to students. As a former teacher myself, I know the work is hard.
I only wish there was a Lambda School here in Philadelphia so I could teach here. :)
And usually lawyers are personally liable, so there is no “going out of business” unless they go personally bankrupt.
Dunno how true all of the above is in CA.
Get your own lawyer’s advice :)
The question isn’t whether it’s moral or ethical. It’s what the risk exposure? What are the likely outcomes? Do we have our bases covered?
Fire them! (Or, we can’t, it overexposes us, create a new department, assign them and then dissolve the department some time later and declare them redundant).
Stating that a thing is or is not legal is making a claim about the opinion other humans in positions of authority (whose specific identity is unknown) will have on a similar question in the future.
There is always subjectivity in it, since you are literally predicting someone else's subjective opinion. The objectivity of law is a conceit, not a reality.
But we only get paid $30k in the case where you get a software engineering job after Lambda School that pays $85k+. Everyone else pays less, and absolutely no one pays more than $30k.
Our upfront tuition for the nine-month, full-time course is $20k if paid upfront.
So if you’re making $50k you actually pay less than the upfront tuition amount ($17k).
You have to be making $85k or more to pay the full $30k.
For example, we use mastery-based progression, where students don't move on to the next unit until they've demonstrated mastery in the unit they're currently in, even if it takes longer. It's super expensive to do, but incredibly, incredibly effective.
When a student repeats a week we call that a "flex."
Regulators ask us how long a course is and what exactly the curriculum is for every week. As you can imagine, building in mastery-based progression into the program wasn't on anyone's mind when they created all the regulations.
My wife is an instructional coach in a public district in Ohio that went from traditional curriculum to a personalized, mastery-based approach. The mastery model has taken a few years to get traction but seems to be catching its stride. One of the challenges is the loss of nuance in a binary grading system, another is the tendency to fall into retry loops with assessments and wasting lots of educator/student time.
The personalized learning is just starting and this past year their data in standardized testing took a hit across the board. My guess is that the teachers are just overwhelmed and its going to take a bit of time and possibly some technology to really dig deep into personalized learning.
The regs you are describing seem far too prescriptive. If you can define measurable goals it seems like they should back off one step in the regulation and try to find a way to just pin you to your promises.
Not sure if you’re in Ohio yet but it might be worth a look.
I read through the poster’s comments and it became clear we’re not going to agree based on general economic frame of reference.
> Lambda, Inc. of California, doing business as Lambda School, operates as a school. The School offers course such as computer science, software engineering, machine learning, web developing, and java script learning programs. Lambda School serves clients in the State of California.
> SUB-INDUSTRY
> Educational Services
> WEBSITE
> www.lambdaschool.com
So far so good.
The address does appear to be wrong, judging by the entry for "LAMBDA INC. WHICH WILL DO BUSINESS IN CALIFORNIA AS LAMBDA SCHOOL" at https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/
But,
> Entity Address:
> 5820 STONERIDGE MALL RD STE 212 PLEASANTON CA 94588
sure seems to suggest that you've got a physical presence in California.
I was under the impression that extant businesses have some value purely for their history of being extant businesses, and are sometimes bought and sold for that reason, so it didn't seem impossible that Lambda School was technically the reimagining of some now-dead shell corporation founded in 1983.
Bloomberg's phone number for Lambda School appears to be right, or at least appears to be a phone number once controlled by an Austen Allred in his capacity as executive officer of a company in Utah. Now I'm pretty curious where the Bloomberg information comes from.
yes
> and is downvoting any comments that are negative.
no
The fact of the matter is that to protect people... you need to have a system where ordinary people can complain, and companies get taken to task.
99% of preventative/reporting regulation is just cronyism.
Whether or not "college education" in general is "a scam" can be debated for sure.
But we aren't talking about "college education" - imagine paying for "college education" but it's a scam so you end up with less money and no education.
SOX compliance is arduous but it only exists (and is as strict as it is) because some banks decided to destroy the global economy just to make a bit of money and couldn't understand why this was a bad thing.
you are not kidding.
"You mean we have to monitor for this because someone ACTUALLY tried doing that before...?"
That sort of thing happens all the time and that opportunity cost is not often talked about.
SOX compliance is arduous but it only exists (and is as strict as it is) because some company built a $60 billion market cap in 2000 with financial-statement mischief that concealed a bankruptcy in the making.
Greed doesn't listen to reason.
Because that's the most palatable alternative.
Our design engineers had to fill out government paperwork (many pages) that provided an estimate for how long the rest of the government paperwork would take.
https://politics.theonion.com/truck-accident-that-killed-raf...
Check the box that you understand and expect possible, random inspections.
Tyco International Adelphia Peregrine Systems WorldCom (which was a big one)
And there were many more.
yes, it's a felony because of regulation, made by... regulators
Weirdly enough, cities that had their own power companies could have such contracts and didn't get rolling blackouts. I worked in Santa Clara at the time and lived in Sunnyvale. We never lost power at work but frequently found all the clocks flashing when I got home.
Which sort of suggests that centralization is the problem, not public versus private. We had a private company failing and public power companies unperturbed.
You seem to be looking to blame centralization to fit a preconceived normative view of economics rather than just acknowledging maybe markets were not effective or efficient in this particular instance and in fact suffered a massive distortion specifically because a decentralized profit motive allowed one party to abuse market making mechanisms and hijack the price setting function so crucial to efficiency.
And if we did, we would probably change it the day after it failed.
Centralization enables a lot of good thing but also some bad things. Lobbying thrives on centralization because it is easier for decision makers to scam people they don't know, more likely to happen with centralization.
the market itself was a massively cool idea, it's just that Enron had a massive conflict of interest and played both sides. they should have stuck to being a market maker and spun off their trading arm.
The CA blackouts predates the Enron fraud and accounting scandal by at least 6 months. At no time during the blackouts was anyone aware of Enrons fraud.
SOX was regulation to prevent that fraud. Notice, it does and says absolutely nothing about the energy market. That's because SOX was not designed to address the cause of the CA blackouts.
What's the difference? Laws are written by legislators, i.e., the elected representatives. Regulations are written by agencies created and empowered by laws to oversee certain parts of the government/governmental functions.
Regulators work largely by requiring reports because most agencies don't have criminal enforcement powers, and thus can act only on the basis of what is (or isn't) reported...
Laws and regulations which are not merely codification of natural law ultimately come down to attempting to create rules which apply to some people and not others. Unfortunately, legislators and regulators get away with this all to often through a combination of good propaganda and willingness to employ unjustified force to achieve their goals.
