Alcohol prohibition in the US didn't end because everyone stayed good and sober.

The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them.

Someone will disagree with almost every law, and some subset of them will violate it in protest. No single person knows which law is the 1 in 100 that shouldn't exist - even someone who thinks they know. Often, the people who so passionately think a law shouldn't exist that they're willing to break it are actually the least representative of society.

(I'm completely ignoring whether space launch access is or isn't a worthwhile law; it's moot.)

That's very much debatable. It's not even clear how to count the number of laws, even if we are only considering Federal law in the US. (see https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43056.pdf )

Certainly there is no one who knows all the laws, and unlike in coding, there's no commitment to DRY or modularization, which leads to very common unintended consequences.

You're arguing the 99/100 case, but I'm sure it would be easy to find someone to credibly argue the 1/100 case.

Because if so, so far reading this, it seems the Federal government has a pretty solid, and measurable grip on that very activity, just from the text of the report, and it doesn't seem remarkably difficult for them since they've come up with seemingly multiple ways to delineate the different types of Federal rules from each other, and have been able to point to various methods used to come up with their final assessment totals.

None of it seemed overtly complicated or difficult, and I'm about as far removed from "well read" on government reports as a person can get.

Where every person would individually benefit from breaking them, but the community as a whole would be worse off.

E.g. environmental regulations

There was an article on the front page last week [1] about the total cost to the economy from licensing “professional” work which can clearly be done safely and effectively without a license, for example, hair weaving.

While the direct cost of obtaining licenses and completing the educational requirires (which often provides no actual benefit in increased skill or earnings), is relatively low… If you factor in the cost to the economy of people who aren’t able to work at a more profitable profession because they are restricted from entering it due to the licensing, the cost was extraordinary.

I think any analysis which covers all the myriad misguided attempts government makes to micromanage our lives is going to blow far past 1/100 of laws and regulations being damaging rather than helpful, even when considering the general populace.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18682946

You have to pass a written and practical test (aka subjective test) - administered by other licensed florists (aka your competitors).

Licenses should be about public safety. There's no reason to have a subjective test when it comes to this.

It seems though in some industries (not all), as you allude to in the floral industry, that licensing is just another manifestation of rent seeking and ever encroaching regulatory capture.

Would you concur? Curious to hear what you think there could (or should) be done about it in your opinion? In the case of selling floral products-caveat lector: I know nothing about flowers other than they are pretty and smell nice-would it make sense to replace licensing with some sort of rating system for businesses to aid consumers in deciding who they want to procure professional services from based on assessed expertise and past services rendered (not Yelp, an assessment from your industry peers)?

+ E.g. a cheap electrician using aluminum wiring that may short in 10 years and burn the house down. But of which the customer may not be aware / informed.

I see licensing as buying into the system and aligning interests. Suddenly, it's in a tradesperson's personal interest to follow regulations, as they otherwise risk their right to practice.

That said... as was mentioned upthread, there's a happy balance. If there's limited long term harm, it's probably not justifiable to require licensure.

I think that's a good example of a field where lack of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. I'd have thought like you until having seen first hand what some such hair products can do.

I'm sure there are unnecessary licensing. But I'm equally sure a lot of the licensing that seems pointless actually has reasonable justifications that are just not obvious if you don't know the field.

As a general rule, these type of moves can only be controlled by breaking them and testing then in court. The agencies have a strong incentive to go for a maximal interpretation of the relevant statues and increase their influence and funding.

And we don’t control crimes like murder by allowing people to break the laws and then testing them in court.

I usually err on the side of constructive conversation, but I have to say that is a ridiculous straw-man - and you know it.

But they are still backed by actual laws, and are not lessened by being regulations - if anything they are better because you can always apply to the implementing authority to change things without going the whole parliamentary route.

There's a downside in less well developed countries without a tradition of a non-political civil service (like the US) where an incoming politician installs their political flunkies can change the regulations to suit their donors

Should the violence of the state be brought to bear on citizens because it is known that "most" laws are good? Would we benefit from a higher standard? Could we instead renew and expire laws?

Sometimes yes. But other times, the laws exists (and more than 1 of 100) to "protect" some industry (from competition from another industry) and not necessarily because it's a benefit to society / general public.

Not to get off topic, but this is the crux of the argument of (e.g.,) The Brothers Koch. That is, it's not gov they are against per se. But the fact that the gov leads to rules & reg that (too often) end up offering advantages to some and disadvantages to others - which is __not__ what should happen if benefit to society were the true goal. Put another way, they're not against gov per se. They're against the uneven playing field the gov is so fond of creating.

Note: I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with them. I only wanting to point out this finer-point is often lost when people scream "OMG...The Kochs...The Kochs...". The reality is, there's a fair amount of evidence / validity to their POV.

Personally, I'm reasonably happy laws against assault create disadvantages to some people.

To your original point, I'd say that yes, a lot of laws exist because they solved some problem at the time they were introduced (or because someone acted corruptly, but let's ignore that for now). I believe in questioning laws, but when the argument is "it'd make our private endeavors more effective," then I'd carefully consider why the laws were there in the first place.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

This doesn't pass the smell test. You actually believe that over the history of the United States that legislatures had a 99% success rate at passing good legislation?

This United States has a history of civil disobedience for a reason and it's part of what makes the country great. The law isn't something to be venerated, it should be treated with respect up to a point and that point ends when the law ceases to be relevant.

Case in point look at how people from the migrant caravans are being treated, ICE and Border Patrol are following the law by the book, can you tell me that law is good?

Everyone has a different definition of which laws are “relevant”.

> ICE and Border Patrol are following the law by the book

Are they? I was under the impression that most of the outrage was around officers circumventing Constitutional checks and abusing their power.

And even if it is 99 of of 100, does that mean we should ignore the 100th, which could be causing untold harm?

Laws and government programs should have expiration dates. Government can choose to renew said laws and programs, but an expiration date (aka Sunsetting) is good policy because it forces government to stay currently relevant.

This is about enabling fair access to and good stewardship of a scarce resource.

Prohibition was the imposition of one form of morality through law.

In my view, it's easier to argue that one is about personal freedom and so fair game to consider breaking, whereas the other is more about being a good neighbour.

Activists were (with different language) very much worried about negative externalities and effects on the commons when it came to Prohibition.

Remember, people were getting rampantly drunk, fighting in the streets, neglecting their families, becoming unemployable, and so on. Beer/wine/spirits sellers were more than happy to promote drinking even with all the social problems produced by it.

It certainly didn't feel like a private matter at the time, like praying in your bedroom each night.

So "someone making a fortune while leaving the alcoholism and broken homes in its wake" would look very much then like "someone making a fortune while raiding the available housing units and ruining neighborhoods" does today.

Edit: And, to be sure, that doesn't mean Prohibition was a good idea. But means the right solution wasn't "free for all for alcohol", but "okay, you can sell alcohol, but with these rules to contain that problem".

Sometimes it does take a little pressure.

Please don't make it seem like Uber's law-breaking is some kind of brave sacrifice protecting mom-and-pop restaurants everywhere.

Startups in general seem to benefit just one category of people: investors, and it's usually to the detriment of Joe B. Average who happened to use their product/service.

One nearly killed me, but I don't judge all other drivers by his lack of sleep/attention/whatever prescription drugs he relies on to stay awake.

My issue with uber/etc is that they spend more money, campaigning against laws that would require background checks for their drivers, than it would cost for them to actually do the background checks. If that doesn't raise some questions for you, you may as well just look for vans with "free candy" spray painted on the side, I'm sure they'll be great.

"Taxis are terrible" is such a vague blanket statement its almost meaningless.

I've literally never "hailed" a taxi in my life - I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel). Even as someone who uses taxis very rarely, I'm well aware of taxi booking apps both here in Thailand and in Australia.

Your argument is essentially "American taxis are crap, therefore uber is good for breaking the law". Why exactly couldn't Uber have just operated as a better taxi company? Oh right. Because then they'd have to follow the laws, and pay the drivers an actual income.

The second reason was that not 1 of the non-Grab taxi drivers uses anything like Google Maps. So I was never sure if we actually ended up at our hotel or somewhere else. Also because our hotel (Aetas) had (at least) 2 locations in Bangkok it made it all worse. This is assuming that a taxi driver actually knows where to go, we've also encountered multiple times the situation where a taxi driver didn't know where to go.

Grab on the other hand always provided the amount upfront and every driver had Google Maps for navigation.

Edit: I'd rather use the official taxis, but the number of conveniences Grab added with a single app was worth it to me.

You mean none of the existing holders will sell them? $22B. Twenty two billion fucking dollars. That's how much VC money has been pumped into this bullshit company. And you're saying they can't buy some taxi medallions?

> I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel)

But even when I have traveled, I generally don't use taxis much. I've only ever been to a few countries where I didn't end up driving - Hong Kong and Singapore, where public transport is beyond amazing, and a wedding (and thus spent the whole time at a resort) in Fiji years ago.

The taxi industry was hurt the most, but it wasn't taxi laws that were broken it was chauffeur laws.

They weren't banned in the UK. Or London. Their application for a license renewal was temporarily denied in London. They appealed, once.

They worked with TfL to resolve their concerns and were granted a new license - though slightly shorter term than normal. They're not entirely off the hook and will need to continue to show that they're behaving appropriately, but they're absolutely fine to operate now and that is not likely to change any time soon.

In my observation, startups aren't just breaking unjust laws.

The solution is for gov fix the laws to reflect society. Unfortunately modern governments are designed around protecting established market cartels and political special interest groups over evolving with the times.

I don’t see this as relevant to Swarm either. They aren’t an evolution AFAIK, besides maybe the rise of private rocket launches.

You assume that because something is new that it is better. Hotel and taxi laws were put in place for a reason. Just because a new business comes along and doesn't want to play by the rules doesn't make that business right and the laws wrong.

In a civilization, it's up to the business to enumerate the reasons that the laws should be changed, and then go through the same legislative process as any other business or member of the public to have those laws changed.

Breaking the law and then blaming the law is like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum and expecting adults to feel bad for it.

That reason being to entrench the incumbent players by raising the barrier to competition.

And having laws requiring particular fare structures and payment methods is certainly meant to keep companies from competing with taxis.

What color is the sky in your world?

Should fire safety not apply to all large residential buildings? Why just hotels? Would generally applicable regulation not be better?

> And having laws requiring particular fare structures and payment methods is certainly meant to keep companies from competing with taxis.

At least in part.

Hotels have more strict fire safety laws because of the way they’re constructed and because there are more potential victims in a smaller space.

I will skull fuck a dead pig with a chicken shitting on my face before I ever try to use AirBnB again.

As for Uber. People complain that taxis are all just greedy fuckers who act like pricks to the customers, and then they expect a private company paying less than minimum wage to people will give them a better outcome. Let me know how that works out when Uber stops subsidising all the rides with VC money.

Make it too easy to repeal laws, and anti-corporate interest laws that were difficult to pass find themselves quietly unwritten soon after.

A difficult game theory problem.

I'm not saying that regulatory capture is not a problem; that would be an absurd claim. But trying to make the law about right and wrong is not the solution.

Everything from slave laws to miscegenation laws to gay laws had to be broken first before they could be changed. The one of the central aspects of the civil rights movement was breaking laws - ie rosa parks.

Also, this is hacker news and the hacking community generally isn't fond of restrictive laws and regulations.

The fact is that all the examples in the grand parent post involved businesses that could have operated legally but chose not to because they could make the economic decision to break laws to profit from fast expansion. In my view laws should be written with penalties to prevent people from breaking them, not as some sort of toll booth.

The fines, by contrast, seem to be working pretty well: how many other companies get busted by the FCC for violating satellite launching regulations? The fact that it is so rare is a testament to how effective the deterrent has been in regulating companies in this space.

I’m all in favour of civil disobedience when laws are stupid but breaking laws just to make a fast buck isn’t the same as defying inequality.

One is clearly immoral and no one would question the validity of civil disobedience as a method to over throw immoral laws. The comparison here is not a good one at all, these are two different things.

As long as the regulations of the US don’t make sense, smart people will continue to break them in the spirit of innovation. Will this breaking of regulation always end in relatively little consequence? No, and soon the FCC or another regulatory body will feel obligated to make an example out of some company with serious charges and I will feel bad for the CEO and company that is used for an example

When we were young lots of rules didn't make sense. As we got older we realized many of these were to keep us safe from things we weren't old enough to understand yet.

The US has quite a number of spy satellites that we can't detect, even with our own detection methods. Some are covered in vantablack and radar absorbing shields, others hide behind giant mirrors that reflect the darkness of space back down towards the earth.

How would your opinion change if a Swarm microsat had crashed in to a 6 billion dollar satellite and disabled it? What if it threw that bird out of orbit and it hit the ISS, killing everyone on board?

I wonder what Thoreau would think about all this. He wrote Civil Disobedience which grapples with these ideas, but I bet he didn't imagine them in this new market/corporate context.

Actually the related mantra of "Hey as long as it's just a fine you can reasonably pay -- or you don't think you'll get caught -- then sure, go ahead an break the law!" has been around the Valley for quite a while. In fact, we might say it's become something of a chant.

What? No!

That's the equivalent of the mythical software rewrite that fixes all current issues: three are a lot of reason why we have customer and environmental protections and even if some are forgotten throwing them out without because "disruption is good" strikes me as quite naive.

After all, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior". I'd guess that Swarm knew someone would notice and they knew the fine would be worth paying in lieu of dealing with the red tape needed to get the launch authorized.

Now the question is, what penalty is significant enough to deter this behavior and why isn't that the penalty presently?

seems a foregone conclusion - aren't these laws designed around some situation in the first place? why not just not write them in the first place? except that would be negligent..

I really have no problem with people or companies evaluating risk/reward and pursuing whatever goal they want... if you want to disincentivize behavior then increase the penalty and change the risk/reward calculation individuals and corporations make.

I think some need to be made an example of.

The law is a messy area. Many places are simply unresolved until a court gets to them, and often there is no incentive for that resolution to happen, so the question gets a lot more complicated.

Here's an example (In all of this I'm trying to focus on legality and not if I think it's a good thing. I'm also not a lawyer and likely have lots of details wrong). I get around to saying why this is relevant at the end of this wall of text.

In the world of tabletop RPGs (D&D and the like) there's a big grey area as to what is/isn't protected by copyright.

From general literature, we know (indeed, it was one of the big pushes for the creation of copyright) that translations and other "derivative works" are covered by copyright.

From boardgames, we know (have court cases saying) that _rules_ aren't copyrightable, while the exact expression of them are. I can make a Monopoly clone so long as I don't violate any trademarks (which are different than copyright) and use my own words to express the rules.

From comics and other literature, we know that characters and settings can be covered as "derivative works". I cannot write my own Superman take, nor have a story involving Superman and the Justice League even if I omit/replace the exact trademarked words. Three notes: (1) Parody is an allowed defense against copyright infringement and (2) A lot of stuff happened in the early years of comics that today would likely not fly today. (3) Given the universality of themes, there's lots of dispute about what creative works are or are not derivative, in both a legal and non-legal sense.

But a tabletop RPG lives in a weird place: it is rules...for telling a story. It may come with characters and a setting...with the intention that people use them. Is my use of the product creating a "derivative work"? If I make an adventure that assumes you are using the rules but doesn't include any of the text, is that a derivative work? Does that change if I refer to setting details?

For a long while, the expectation was that, no, if you avoided trademark infringement and didn't copy exact text, you weren't infringing. Several RPG magazines would buy (from freelance authors) and sell (as the magazine to subscribers) adventures for various different systems. [Notable exception: Palladium games, maker of Rifts, TMNT, and other (ahem) strangeness) were very prickly about this, so magazines simply skipped them and didn't offer adventures for them.] Heck, adventures were such a cost sink for game publishers and so requested (but unbought) by audiences, it was generally considered a SERVICE to the publisher to put out adventures for their material, as it would drive demand for their books.

Now, this was the genre-wide expectation (excluding Palladium), but it was never actually legally established. RPG companies were (and often still are) shoestring budget operations, and a bad judgement (and if I learned one thing from my lawyer friends, it's that initial court decisions are often bad judgements - it's why appellate courts are so important) would devastate many companies and the hobby that relies on them. Heck, just going to court would destroy most companies at the time, even if they'd eventually win. So the law in the area was allowed to continue undefined, with the few cases that cropped up almost always (always?) settling out of court.

Side note: Think games aren't terribly relevant to the law? Check out how the EFF came to be in relation to tabletop RPGs: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

Then Wizards of the Coast (The Magic: The Gathering people) bought TSR (The Dungeons and Dragons people) and came out with D&D 3rd edition. This is when Linux was breaking free from the "you get what you pay for" stigma, when "open source" was a new term (vs free software), and when Stallman vs Raymond had just finished peaking. The concept of open licensing and copyleft was getting a broader awareness, and tech and RPGs have always had a tight bond, so when D&D introduce the Open Gaming License (OGL), to set explicit rules to allow derivative works, it was a big deal.

The OGL did a lot of things. It spawned a revolution in the RPG market that would bring in a lot of new players, spawned a bunch of new companies - most of whom folded just as quickly, but a few modern companies made their start then and survived - crushed or crippled some relative giants in the industry, dealt a blow (due to unsold product) to the RPG stores that were already reeling from the correction in the trading card industry...and normalized new intellectual property practices.

The OGL made it clear what was allowed to be done, and even allowed activities that distinctly required permission under copyright...IF you accepted limitations that are probably more than copyright would ever require. If there are gaming magazines (or 'zines, or any other commercial enterprise) that offer adventures without explicit license, I don't know of them. Similarly, character creation programs and the like all operate under explicit license now...because we're never figured out if they need to.

Bringing this all back to the original point: "move fast and break things" in terms of the law has two possible ends: you either tick off the established players and they bring the law against you and resolve the legal vagueness one way or the other, OR you establish a new norm because no one has the resources to challenge you (and if they did, the fact that you created an accepted norm makes it more likely that the law will accept that as the norm: See how EULAs have crazily become enforceable without even offering refunds if you don't accept in most situations).

End conclusion: Is "move fast and break the law" good? I really don't know. I feel like ending vagueness is good, but I feel like allowing initial corporate actors to define the starting point of the new rules is bad. Either way, I feel like it's a different situation when you're dealing with legal vagueness than when dealing with clear established laws in the Uber and AirBnB situations, but even in those cases the "little guys" weren't going to be able to impact the law without a clear market demand...and yet, I don't like encouraging companies to play fast and loose.

Messy.

A part of being an entrepreneur is that you have take risks from time to time, and under term "risk" I don't mean business risks.

The law cares, but realistically those regulations are in place to prevent fraud or dysfunctional products. If Theranos' machine actually did what they said it could, it would've been a victimless crime and I wouldn't have a problem with it.

It was possible to make products which benefited humanity before those regulations existed, and it's possible to do the same while skirting those regulations.

A lot of the regulations around laboratories exist because people have died or been injured as a result of lab screwups. Theranos hid entire labs from inspectors, let uncertified people run laboratories, and a lot more that wasn't fraud, but definitely violated regulatory requirements.

But again, I think it's morally fine for an uncertified person to run a laboratory as long as they are running it correctly. But the Theranos labs were not being run correctly, and they were lying about the results that their machines could deliver.

You can build a medical product that has a higher sensitivity and/or specificity than the other products on the market without regulatory oversight. But the Edison had neither of those and they were pretending it did. That was the problem.

How do you determine if they're "running it correctly"?

The whole point of certification is to require a minimum set of skills/knowledge to do so.

Insert "faster" or "cheaper" as well, but that is my point. There are very clear ways to measure if your medical device is effective.

Laws are just a contract. There are terms and penalties. If you weigh the consequences of breaking the contract and decide it’s worth the risk why not do it? Most people in America do it everyday (speeding in their cars).

Textbook example of how a career criminal thinks.