Maybe the intrusiveness and overreaching was just fundamental consumer protections all along.

Oh, no, there is definitely some questionable overreach in regulations, the most known example to the outside is probably just how shittily the "cookie law" was written, good intentions with law that made the intentions irrelevant as implementation just trained users to click the stupid button and get on with their day.

And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel...

The cookie law wasn't half as shitty as the lazy ways companies adhere to it. But even that I'll take any day over the time before the cookie law (which, BTW, is much more extensive than just regulating cookies).

If a law results in companies taking actions that annoy and impede hundreds of millions of people in aggregate, there's something wrong with the law. Governments need to consider the actual effects when they write laws, not what the effects would be in an ideal world.

The law doesn't result in the companies taking actions that annoy, that is the decision of the company. Why do you absolve the company of any and all responsibility?

The law causes malicious compliance therefore it's a bad law?

Well, sure. However, quite a lot of the websites aren't actually in compliance in the first place.

For example, this Christmas I had to remind a company that me placing an order was not permission for them to email me a survey asking how good the delivery was — customers aren't a free QA team.

A law that results in negative outcomes outweighing the positive ones is a bad law, yes.

Like all US tax law?

A lot of tax law is bad, yes. I certainly wouldn't say all though.

Maybe they should have worked out some basic scenarios and written the law with those in mind?

That what appears to what happened with GDPR, it is much more sensible and covers the common "workarounds" of making the reject harder or blocking the site content if you reject

"And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel..."

You have to start somewhere and go step by step, if you want to solve huge problems.

Who would pay for an infrastructure for EVs, when there are no EVs around? Chicken and egg problem.

There is many crazy shit the EU has done, like the famous regulation on how cucumbers are supposed to bend exactly, which they abolished by now, but still once a month, the whole parliament and stuff moves from Strasbourg to Bruessel - and back, because they cannot settle one one place to be, but the slight push for renewable energy would not be on my list of big faults, even if it is inconsistent.

> Who would pay for an infrastructure for EVs, when there are no EVs around?

The owners, obviously. You think we installed gas stations before we had cars?

But an ICE car is an obvious improvement in both cost and usability to a horse-drawn carriage. Half of the value of an EV is that it's cheaper and easier to refuel. Making everyone who'd want one pay thousands to install infrastructure for them removes a lot of the reason you'd ever buy one, since it's otherwise essentially the same as an ICE car in terms of usage.

If anything, right now, an EV is literally a worse car to an equivalent ICE in terms of what it's capable of. The reasons you'd have one is either general environmental altruism or because it'll be cheaper over the long term to own one.

Back when horse drawn carriages were the most common, EVs looked better than ICEs.

We had to find the petroleum reserves before diesel and petrol could get cheap enough for ICEs to fully dominate over that era's EVs.

Sure, but that's not really relevant to the point I'm trying to make. People moved away from animal-based travel to cars because cars had distinct improvements in usability and upkeep cost. It was ok to have the infrastructure come later because they were still an obvious improvement even without the infrastructure being in place yet.

Right now, if I want an EV, I'm paying 20% more money to buy it, it's got a shorter range than my ICE for the same size car, and the infrastructure to do things like long trips with multiple recharges isn't there yet.

Okay, I'm interested, how did one get car fuel back then? Did people have to send one of their servants to a chemist for a mixture?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filling_station#United_States :

> The first "drive-in" filling station, Gulf Refining Company, opened to the motoring public in Pittsburgh on December 1, 1913, at Baum Boulevard and St Clair's Street. Prior to this, automobile drivers pulled into almost any general or hardware store, or even blacksmith shops in order to fill up their tanks.

No, but only because gas station idea (drive through automated fuel retail) wasn't a thing.

However a human with a fuel reserve that could top you up was a thing before cars (a fuel retail). Before the dawn of the automobiles people were replacing steam engines with gas and liquid powered engines.

Here it is the USDA regulations on how cucumbers are supposed to bend and how to grade them:

https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/cucumber-grades-an...

Damn that US government overreaching, telling cucumbers how much should they bend!

...or maybe that regulation is there for a reason (most times to protect consumers)?

"or maybe that regulation is there for a reason (most times to protect consumers)"

Erm, can you tell me in what way a cucumber is dangerous to consumers, if its shape is bend a little bit more or less, so they need to be protected of that threat?

As far as I can see, if you produce a fruit that is healthy, with good coloration and the only thing “wrong” about it is the shape then you can still sell it.

You just can’t call your torus shaped fruit a cucumber because that’s not what anyone expects a cucumber to look like.

I'm looking at the USDA regulations and they seem reasonable to me. Looks like they're protecting consumers from being sold garbage labeled "cucumbers" instead of cucumbers labeled "cucumbers".

"The maximum diameter of each cucumber shall be not more than 2-3/8 inches and the length of each cucumber shall be not less than 6 inches"

Why is that reasonable?

This regulation means, that perfectly fine cucumbers that happen to be a bit smaller will get thrown away. Or well, into the lower grade category, but even in the lowest category

"maximum diameter of each cucumber shall be not more than 2-3/8 inches and the length of each cucumber shall be not less than 5 inches"

These are arbitary size regulations. You do not need to regulate that to ban garbage. You can have a cucumber with the perfect shape, that is still garbage, because sunburned or too ripe or the plant was sick or whatever. Yes it should be illegal to sell garbage as fresh food and it probably is, but I do not see the connection to shape at all. This is merely aesthetics and personally I prefer a weird shaped ecological cucumber over a perfectly sized and shiny tasteless thing full of pesticides any day.

Do you pay by the kilo (or pound) for cucumbers or per unit?

That depends on the market and seller, I have seen both. And whether I buy a cucumber depends on its quality.

What big cucumbers they sell in stores nowadays!

In all seriousness, if you’re paying by weight (or volume) then it should be OK not to have standard sized cucumbers… but pricing per unit should be reasonably consistent.

These regulations are descriptive. They exist so that there is a law somewhere that describes what a cucumber is.

Sidenote, this whole exchange is .. urgh. People criticizing things they haven't spent a minute to try to understand :/

Imagine if I came up to your monitor and started looking at individual lines of your code, and then I see an "x = 0", and I start criticizing it in a vacuum, completely cluelessly, as someone who has never coded before?

"People criticizing things they haven't spent a minute to try to understand"

Or maybe I have indeed worked on fields and packaging when I was younger and travelling and witnessed the throwing away of perfectly fine food, that just did not met some arbitary size regulations?

"Sidenote, this whole exchange is .. urgh"

But I agree to that. I am not really here to discuss the sense of defining cucumber sizes. If you are into that, have fun with it.

> can you tell me in what way a cucumber is dangerous to consumers, if its shape is bend a little bit more or less

I can't tell why a bent cucumber is dangerous, but I can tell tell why specifications for cucumbers are sometimes needed. When someone in the food industry needs cucumbers, he can't use any kind of cucumber, because it will go through machines with a calibre expectation. The industry that builds the machines also need specifications for their inputs.

Many regulations on fruits and vegetable are meant to help the food processing, since nowadays most of the raw food is processed by the food industry, not by consumers in their kitchens.

Oh, and you can still sell vegetable that are out of spec. AFAIK that's still legal in Europe, but since they can't have the right label, wholesale buyers may be hard to find at the same price.

" When someone in the food industry needs cucumbers, he can't use any kind of cucumber, because it will go through machines with a calibre expectation"

We were talking about consumer products.

"Oh, and you can still sell vegetable that are out of spec. "

Now you can. The regulations regarding sizes of cucumbers have been abolished in 2009, even though the whole theather about it was rather populism.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verordnung_(EWG)_Nr._1677/88_(... (german)

That's not stopping you from selling the cucumbers, just normalizes "quality classes" so customers know what they get. EU does stuff like that for many regional product, you can make cheese, you just can't name it say "Parmigiano Reggiano".

It's not the same as banning

Putting money in infrastructure so customer sees it's cheaper to use EVs and just buys it is fine, but ban on ICE car sales is not "slight push".

Given the size of the problem climate change, it is a slight push, especially since the sales ban is supposed to start in 2035.

I trust you are aware that a very very small portion of aviation fuel burned is leaded (mostly just small general aviation aircraft)

If companies had respected the Do Not Track and browser vendors had made it easier to adopt we wouldn't have ended up with the situation we are in now.

If we really cared about tracking and privacy, browsers would just disable 3rd party cookies (or make it easy to disable cookies). It's full-on insane to use the law to force every website developer to add their own cookie banner when we could just change the browser and be done with it.

Or, the website could just not track you and thus not require a cookie banner?

They could, but ultimately they want to track us.

People also want to perform CSRF attacks. So what do we do? Make a law against CSRF? Or change the browsers to make it much harder?

You've just said:

> It's full-on insane to use the law to force every website developer to add their own cookie banner […]

Which is obvious FUD. And this comment now makes it clear that you actually knew that you're spreading FUD.

> browsers would just disable 3rd party cookies (or make it easy to disable cookies)

Firefox has that built into its tracking protection. I don't know what's it set to by default, but it took me three clicks to reach the setting.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/third-party-cookies-fir...

> browsers would just disable 3rd party cookies (or make it easy to disable cookies).

Hasn't that been a standard browser setting since the 1990s? I remember Netscape had it.

> And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel...

To be clear, normal planes don't run on leaded fuel. Avgas, which is often leaded, is used in small propellor planes.

Also, these seem, er, totally unrelated? The EU could ban leaded fuel tomorrow, and arguably should; this would lead to the grounding of a small number of small planes. But it doesn't have a lot to do with cars.

What's wrong with "the cookie law"?

If a website wants to spy on you it needs to make that at least very clear to the user.

Nobody likes "cookie banners". But those banners are just a result of the fact that almost all web sites want to spy on their users, and sell the this way collected data. If you don't do that you don't need any banner. (Does HN has a cookie banner? Does for example https://noyb.eu/en has a banner? Does Wikipedia has a banner? Go figure.)

But probably the truth is somewhere in between, like most of the time.

Partly. But it's wildly mixed with market protection mechanisms, and quite some pure bureaucratic craziness.

And it's not like you couldn't buy worst "chinesium" in the EU. On the other hand they will "protect" you from buying useful stuff…

The basic rules and guiding principles are at least customer friendly. (And we usually don't wait until something breaks in terrible ways. We try to enforce high standards early on. But like said, often the rules are only there to protection EU vendors and their markets in the end).

Europe is always saving everyone's ass ... Airline policies, usb-c on phones, 5 years support, etc etc. But it's still never enough.

I guess the libertarian American argument would be that the free market is already doing its job here, as the parent commenter is no longer using Amazon quite as much as they used to. Walmart is providing a better service. People will eventually figure that out and flock to Walmart. Why do we need the law to tell Amazon what to do?

Yes, but truth is that free market is not actually working.

If free market really worked, there would be no Amazon bad customer care, because they would not survive the competition of a great number of better services.

In reality in most places in America Amazon and Walmart are the only alternatives, with only one of the two easily available.

Free market has killed the small shops that provided the aforementioned good customer support.

If USA version of free market was so good as advertised, things like food deserts [1] would not exist. It's something that have an enormous impact on society at large and hits fragile families harder, if that wasn't possible by law, wouldn't it be better?

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

Yeah good points - I definitely don't want to say that free market always results in perfect outcomes. n=1, Amazon does seem to be out-competed by Walmart in terms of customer support. If they still survive after awhile of this without improving their customer support, then the stubborn conclusion would be that people on average actually don't care so much about customer support! Or maybe more like people don't use customer support quality as a big factor for deciding which website to buy from (and that definitely might be a good reason to include some regulation. customer support is in peoples' best interest but they don't think about it so much)