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Re:FDA Proposes Ending Use of Oral Phenylephrine as OTC Nasa... by ryandrake on Friday November 08, 2024 @04:57PM (#42090786)
It would be great if laws worked like software deployments:

1. Roll out law to 2%, look for any obvious unintended effects (like we check for crashes)

2. Roll out law to 50%, study for effectiveness. Is the intended positive effect happening in the experiment population? Any effect on the control population?

3. Finally, roll out law to 100% and keep monitoring.

4. Be ready to roll back to 0% if failures seen at any stage.

5. Be ready to apply a zero day patch after it's at 100% if edge cases are found.

But, we don't do any of this! Lawmakers make a law and yolo it into production on a fixed date, and it's often impossible to roll it back or modify it.

Re:FDA Proposes Ending Use of Oral Phenylephrine as OTC Nasa... by justinpombrio on Friday November 08, 2024 @05:16PM (#42090899)
We do sort of do that, with state laws. Different states try out different laws, and copy laws from other states. Ideally a state will repeal laws that don't work well, and copy laws from other states when they work well. In practice it's all a mess of course.

California is the experimental group.