[beambot]

> Getting rid of them would simply prolong the process of passing laws.

Sounds good to me! If I ever run for office (ha!), I'd run on a platform of reducing the number of outstanding laws -- e.g. every new law passed requires two antiquated laws to be rescinded. Plus, as a side benefit, we could massively reduce the amount of quid pro quo pork added via amendments. Consider it the legal version of "My net programming contribution this week was -2000 lines of code." [1]

[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...

[mangeletti]

I would vote for you, based on that merit alone.

I often hear people say things like, "If Republicans and Democrats (or the house and senate) could work together, they'd get a lot more done.", and I think to myself, "Is a 'productive' congress one that passes thousands of pages of legislation?".

[Retra]

You have to pass a law to repeal another one.

[manicdee]

Bills are like diffs. They are not law, they merely make changes to the laws that exist. Some bills will add new files to the working repository, others will delete files. The diff isn't the code.

[vacri]

"A law" is not like "a line of code".

[beambot]

That's a deeply insightful observation about my analogy... thanks! </s>

The point was: Continuously bolting on new {law, code} tends to monotonically increase a system's complexity. Many people consider unnecessary complexity "bad." I'm one of those people.

[vacri]

Sometimes I just can't be bothered to spoonfeed the drones. That's not sarcasm. My point was that "a law" is not an atomic item like you think it is.