[ryandrake]

Exactly. I hate this mentality: "We can't possibly regulate companies, because they are so clever and they'll find loopholes and work around any law we make!" So write better laws! Add provisions for loopholes you anticipate. Add wording to remove ambiguity that the company will try to use to weasel their way out. Analyze the ways companies already get around laws and shore them up with a patch. Do something!

We've tried one thing, and it didn't work so we're all out of ideas! - The USA when it comes to regulating companies.

[JuniperMesos]

There are a lot of regulations I would like to get rid of because they are already being evaded, or otherwise have bad second order consequences; and those second-order consequences are themselves an annoying part of the fabric of daily life that I'm familiar with.

[idle_zealot]

There are definitely bad regulations. Sometimes the right answer is to get rid of them, but only if you can evaluate why they were put in place, what they were meant to stop/correct, and why/how they failed, then determine that it would be better to remove them than fix them. If you have a shitty module in your codebase it can be tempting to remove it, but if you need the feature it's meant to provide then removal isn't the right framing, or is only the right solution if you have a better design to replace it with.

You have to remember that profit-motivated companies are completely amoral actors that have and will hire militias to manage slave workers or dump known-poisonous waste into people's drinking water or spend unfathomable amounts on convincing hundreds of millions of people that climate change is a hoax if it's the most self-enriching course of action. They will literally cause extinction if not regulated.

[georgemcbay]

> We've tried one thing, and it didn't work so we're all out of ideas!

(I'm sure you're fully aware of this, but just to add on to what you're saying that I agree with...)

This is all an intentional messaging strategy for kicking the can down the road indefinitely done by people who stand to lose if things are changed for the better of the masses.

Same exact strategy is used (often by the same people) to dismiss the idea of more fair taxation and lots of other things we supposedly can't ever make any progress on because our first attempt to address an obvious problem might not be perfect.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> I hate this mentality: "We can't possibly regulate companies, because they are so clever and they'll find loopholes and work around any law we make!" So write better laws! Add provisions for loopholes you anticipate. Add wording to remove ambiguity that the company will try to use to weasel their way out.

Unfortunately, that is exactly how you end up with legalese and laws that are hard for normal people to understand: because bad-faith actors will invent ambiguity, litigate definitions, and argue over the exact meaning of every word.

It's like trying to tell a child "No jumping on the bed!" and they keep doing it while insisting they're not jumping, they're hopping, and then go into a diatribe about the difference between jumping and hopping until you say something like "Do not jump, hop, bounce, spring, leap, vault, stomp, rebound, or otherwise employ your feet, legs, knees, or body weight to produce repeated or excessive vertical motion upon, across, or within the boundaries of the bed."

And then they remove the mattress from the bed, put it on the floor, and start jumping on it, and say that wasn't against the rules because you only specified the bed, and declare that a mattress on its own does not constitute a bed.

[happymellon]

> declare that a mattress on its own does not constitute a bed.

And so you remove the mattress from their possession, because they obviously don't need the mattress to sleep.

Make it painful for those companies that want to fight the rules.

[ryandrake]

That's right. We have to assume that companies are always going to do whatever they can to get around regulation. The regulatory system needs to think of companies as nimble attackers in its threat model, and the system needs to be capable of responding with the same nimbleness.

[Sohcahtoa82]

The problem right now of course is that the enforcers are paid off by the corporations.