I wonder if they could, in theory, sell you the car for 150% of it's final price (so that they seats are there when sold), then buy back the seats immediately for 50% of its price. The invoice would say something like: Car with passenger seats: $15,000; Passenger seat buyback: $5,000; Total after buyback: $10,000.

That way everyone gets what they want, and they've technically sold it with the seats still installed.

Law isn't interpreted by computers, it is interpreted by human judges, who generally aren't impressed by such hacks (though you might get lucky).

Yeah, when the law allows additional sanction for willful/knowing violation, courts will not only often see through your “clever hack”, but also see it as evidence of deliberate wrongdoing.

Also see: structuring.

You have to report behavior X, and if you deliberately don't do behavior X to avoid reporting it, that's a crime too!

Let's see you put that on the blockchain...

See also: the $10k reporting threshold for banks. Deliberately doing smaller transfers to avoid the reporting threshold can be illegal (depending on intent), and the banks are legally mandated to report suspicious activity (such as that) as well.

That is what I meant.

Aren't the seats themselves already a "hack"?

Yes. Seems like Subaru got lucky and Ford didn't.

Subaru left them in and let the customer do whatever. Ford removed them.

But the "hack" is that they were never intended to be practical even if left in.

Frankly I think our justice system should be less tolerant of "hacks" like this. They clearly violate the intent of the law, even if technically following it to the letter.

I prefer judges and lawyers interpret what the law says, not what they believe lawmakers meant to say. It is lawmakers responsibility to craft quality laws. Such hacks expose weaknesses in the laws as written.

Edit: ...when successful.

Ideally: sure!

In reality: are you a software engineer? Or do you know one? Surely you (or they) have experienced how difficult it is to write code that manages even a small number of inputs? Even 10 different yes/no inputs give you 1,024 possibilities.

Now imagine writing laws to precisely cover an effectively infinite number of possibilities, many of which don't exist at the time the law is written, and expecting the laws to cover these new situations and variables with absolute certainty and unambiguity. And unlike software, you can't just push a commit to prod to fix the problems as they pop up. It's a really long process, because democracy.

It's not happening, no more than you'd be able to handle a piece of software that took some infinite and random number and variety of inputs and did something useful with them.

We should, as you say, write "quality" laws to the best of our ability but there will always been a sizable human element to the interpretation of law.

An interpreter tries to understand what your code means. It doesn't try to guess at your intentions. (Pedantically, some do, but on a limited scale.) You should write quality code. You should try to anticipate edge cases. Your code will fail sometimes. You'll fix it.

Law has the advantage of much more advanced interpreters; but judges should still be interpreting the law, not guessing at the minds of the people who wrote the law. Lawmakers should be writing quality laws and fixing problems.

     Your code will fail sometimes. You’ll fix it.

That isn’t isn’t remotely how passing laws in a democracy works. I can push a fix to prod in minutes (or in the worst case, days) and it rarely if ever affects peoples’ lives in the way that laws do.

In contrast, passing new laws and updating existing laws is (by design) an arduous process in a democracy. There are things that can and should be improved about the ways that we accomplish this, but it will never be (and really shouldn’t be) fast and easy.

Sometimes I just want to ignore HN entirely because of embarrassing comments like this. “Code works this way, so everything should work this way!”

You're being unnecessarily rude.

I never said the law worked exactly like code. I used your code metaphor to explain my point in language you might understand.

Apologies for the tone. You're right to call that out.

Yes, you should try to write quality code.

Yet almost everyone fails.

You should also try to write quality laws. But when you fail, do you want the same sort of consequences as with code? How much time, effort, and money has been lost to hacks taking advantage of errors in code?

I would love an interpreter/compiler/processor that knew that I didn't intend to allow a security vulnerability so anyone could escalate their privileges. Sounds great, truly.

Unspecified behavior[1] is used in programming language standards for a very similar reason: to provide the freedom to interpret in the, uh, spirit of the code, rather than the letter, when it would be overall beneficial.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unspecified_behavior

That is a source of bugs and a known failure of crypto that try to consider the code as authoritative. If interpreters could figure out the intended behaviour, there'd be fewer or no bugs.

Lawmakers shouldn't be focused on bugs in written law, they should be working on new law

Law isn't code and it isn't crypto.

Judges aren't the only interpreters of law. They're simply the authoritative ones (ultimately). The law needs to be relatively authoritative so that people can make decisions around it. The whole process is actually a lot messier than such statements and there are usually valid arguments and evidence, but in general we should err on the side of least harm: which means if a law is poorly written, people might get away with something lawmakers wanted to stop. This can, and has, happened, and lawmakers deal with it by updating the law or crafting new ones. (Of course, I also think there is a distinction between the 'intent' of a law and what lawmakers intended and I really only object to basing decisions on the latter.)

Why? Because if an interpreter screws up, we update its code (or ours); but if a person screws up, we throw them in prison or fine them potentially devastating amounts. A person ought to be reasonably secure in acting in accordance with the law.

> It is lawmakers responsibility to craft quality laws.

Judging by how hard it is for programmers to write bug-free instructions for literal computers, I'm not sure your expectation of flawless legislation is something realistic for mere mortals.

This is not my expectation. Law, like code, can and has been patched and rewritten.

Companies with literally thousands of people with billions of dollars to invest have a hard time making their products bug-free no matter how many times they patch and rewrite, and we're talking about dealing with computers here. Exactly how many years of rewrites are you willing to spend on each piece of legislation to make it bug-free? Is it even remotely realistic? or will your solution grind legislation to a halt?

My statement that judges should interpret law and not lawmakers is not equivalent to this idea that law must be flawless and bug-free. Those are ideas you've brought to the table that I've already disclaimed. I said laws should be quality laws. What qualifies as quality in law isn't "100% bug-free, literal, unambiguous, single-definition words that don't require any interpretation at all." To the extent that a law is bad (as qualified by law, not by a computer code metaphor), no I don't think judges should go about the business of guessing how it should work. It ought to be punted back to lawmakers. (Otherwise why even separated the two: Just have lawmakers act as judges or vice versa.)

I realize you're disclaiming them, but I'm trying to say you what you're asking for has consequences that you can't just "disclaim" like that. Practically every law will have unintended loopholes that legislators couldn't think of or practically enumerate when writing the law. If you keep "punting it back to lawmakers" instead of letting judges handle the exceptions, you obviously further obstruct the legislature's ability to move onto new, more pressing issues. Maybe that's fine with you—or maybe it's even your goal, I can't possibly know—but your optimization on that axis has severe consequences that will quite obviously lead to undesirable outcomes on many other axes that others (if not you) actually care about. You can disclaim the implications and the consequences, but that doesn't mean they won't come along with your idea.

Maybe spending more time on getting current laws right would be better than moving on to new laws.

More laws = more ways people/organisations are burdened with things they need to know (and will be punished for whether or not they know). Having canonical interpretations of laws that aren't written in the laws just makes that even more fraught with peril.

Those consequences do not follow, because I am not asking for judges to interpret the law literally. If that's what you've read, we have a miscommunication here. There's an entire spectrum of interpretation from literal to "I personally know the guy who authored this law and I asked him what he meant."

The poster I originally responded to thinks we ought to be further right along this spectrum. I think we're either in a good place or if anything we ought to move a little further left. I don't think either extreme is desirable, and the left extreme is where we get those consequences you want to ascribe to me.

The justice system is already quite intolerant of such hacks. In the Ford case, they didn't even interpret the law differently. Instead, they determined—with evidence— that Ford was actually importing cargo vans and not passenger vans.

Perhaps having fewer laws on the books would be a good idea? Especially if the laws were simpler?

And I prefer to see judges and lawyers as safety valves for mitigating badly written legislation.

You've misunderstood if you think your idea is mutually exclusive with mine.

Fair enough, maybe I read your post as more absolutist than intended.

It is a judge's responsibility to literally judge whether a given application of the law is appropriate.

This encompasses every possible input including "what they believe lawmakers meant to say".

Edit: To get out in front of the obvious "Well what about when a judge just decides to do whatever they want??" response, I will say: That is why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust all matter.

I'm having a little trouble interpreting (pun a happy happenstance!) your comment. Judging whether an application of a law is "appropriate" basically gives judges free rein to do whatever they want, although I can't think of a better description of what judges should do. (I suppose your use of "literally" is problematic in that, as used, it simply refers to your definition of a judge's responsibillity but is easily conflated with other posters' use of "literal" in the sense of the judge not doing any "interpretation" of the law.)

Gorsuch infamously ruled that the application of contract law (I guess, IANAL) was appropriate against a man who chose not to freeze to death by staying with his stranded work vehicle. I imagine a lot of other judges thought it was inappropriate and would have ruled in favor of the employee.

Taking into account what a judge thinks lawmakers meant to say also gives the judges a lot of wiggle room in their pronouncements.

Your list of 5 things that matter is commendable. However, the last 3 things have been torn to shreds over the past 4 decades -- and were never that strong historically, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. Tradition and precedent are easily side-stepped when convenient. And, of course, you have the infamous Supreme Court decision effectively placing Bush in the White House that explicitly said it was not to be used as a precedent.

And, of course, everything gets thrown out when corruption comes into play!

For anyone interested but previously unaware of the Gorsuch case:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neil-gorsuch-and-the-case-of-...

https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/gorsuch-transam-t...

My use of "literally" is only intended to convey the literal meaning of the word.

And thank you for providing some excellent example of why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust are important.

I don't think the writing is the authority for what the law is for.

Judges are there to make the boundaries clear for the greyzone on what's not written down

The world is too complex to get perfect laws written. You're always going to miss weird edge cases in both directions

Absolutely not. Throwing people in prison who were explicitly obeying the law as written is a terrible road to go down.

The law as written is indescript.

Ate they following things specifically as the law said they're supposed to, or hacking some edge case that isn't explicitly called out?

That would return us from the rule of law back to the rule of men. History hasn't been kind to the rule of men.

While I agree with your well intentioned sentiment, “intent” is even more nebulous and arguable.

Or have the dealerships take care of the aftermarket conversion.

Ford should only have issued a guide to independent dealers and repair centers on how to do a conversion between cargo and passenger (and made sure both were possible) but only import the passenger version into the country.

Then it's murkier, because not all dealerships would offer it and the customer isn't buying it from Ford, he's getting an independent dealer to install additional things (or remove) from the vehicle.

Isn’t a lot of securization necessary for two more seats? Adding floor reinforcements, seatbelts, and more importantly, passing the crash tests with two more seats?

They have to do that for the passenger version of the van anyway.

And collect tax on $20,000 in sales instead of $10,000? Maybe they would be happy if car companies used this scheme.

Then the government would collect income tax from the owner on that rebate as well, no? Seems like an expensive operation.

This doesn't really assuage his concern. The government is still dictating what you do with items.

CBP is one of the worst infringers upon personal rights, I wouldn't defend them.

> The government is still dictating what you do with items.

Well, no, they are dictating what taxes you owe based on intent, and using consistent patterns of behavior as evidence of ongoing intent.

This isn't Ford changing their mind about the purpose of the vehicle after importing them.

They aren't telling you what you can do with your items. They are telling you what taxes you owe based on the intended function of said item.

The power to tax is the power to destroy. The same overzealous power they have to tell me what my usage intent was also allows them to totally ban items that aren't actually banned.

So in your view they just felt like adding seats and then removing them later?

I’d expect some were also sold with the seats, they just changed the default config. I wonder what the ratio was though.