Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws. Purposely ignoring laws, regulations, or seeing vague ones that didn't expect your crazy idea, and then hoping you can work it all out later after you've made lots of money- this is becoming more and more common in tech startups. And I personally don't like it.

Uber and AirBnB are the classic examples (and it's worked out wonderfully for them). In Toronto, Car2Go told customers to just park anywhere- don't worry about getting parking tickets, we'll handle it. (They didn't). Swarm was told that their satellites could not be launched, so they just did it anyways hoping no one would notice. (Someone did). RobinHood announced checking accounts without checking if there were laws around such things. (There are).

Governments would be better to be ready for disruptive ideas and have flexibility in regulations to try them out. And we should all be voting and supporting candidates who want to see such changes happen. But until they do, it seems wrong to purposely break laws in order to make money.

View on HN

Unfortunately, laws are unlikely to change without a bit of violation.

Alcohol prohibition in the US didn't end because everyone stayed good and sober.

Indeed, Uber and AirBnB were evolutions of the marketplace. They aren’t going away (and shouldn’t go away) just because the laws were designed in a previous century for a different type of business.

The solution is for gov fix the laws to reflect society. Unfortunately modern governments are designed around protecting established market cartels and political special interest groups over evolving with the times.

I don’t see this as relevant to Swarm either. They aren’t an evolution AFAIK, besides maybe the rise of private rocket launches.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Uber and Airbnb have changed the world and how people commute or travel fornthe better.

Airbnb has clearly been a win for travelers. As for the people who live in an apartment building next door to someone who illegally rents out their unit with Airbnb, their world has changed also, but not for the better.

Not true. You're just hearing a vocal minority of people complaining about bad experiences. Having bad neighborhods is not an airbnb specific problem.

People on vacation are much more likely to stay up late partying, not understand or follow local customs, and you can't build up a long term relationship with people who are only around for a week. It is definitely a real problem.

The solution is for gov fix the laws to reflect society.

You assume that because something is new that it is better. Hotel and taxi laws were put in place for a reason. Just because a new business comes along and doesn't want to play by the rules doesn't make that business right and the laws wrong.

In a civilization, it's up to the business to enumerate the reasons that the laws should be changed, and then go through the same legislative process as any other business or member of the public to have those laws changed.

Breaking the law and then blaming the law is like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum and expecting adults to feel bad for it.

> Hotel and taxi laws were put in place for a reason

That reason being to entrench the incumbent players by raising the barrier to competition.

Yes, because having extra fire safety in hotels is certainly designed to keep people from operating amateur hotels.

And having laws requiring particular fare structures and payment methods is certainly meant to keep companies from competing with taxis.

What color is the sky in your world?

or skin. my off the cuff guess is that the world of AirBnB has a lot more racial discrimination than the world of regulated hotels.

That would be an interesting study.

> Yes, because having extra fire safety in hotels is certainly designed to keep people from operating amateur hotels.

Should fire safety not apply to all large residential buildings? Why just hotels? Would generally applicable regulation not be better?

> And having laws requiring particular fare structures and payment methods is certainly meant to keep companies from competing with taxis.

At least in part.

Should fire safety not apply to all large residential buildings? Why just hotels? Would generally applicable regulation not be better?

Hotels have more strict fire safety laws because of the way they’re constructed and because there are more potential victims in a smaller space.

Hotels are governed by laws. They cannot for example, agree to rent you a room, charge your credit card, AND THEN demand that you provide your facebook account, and if you don't have one, upload a video explaining why you want to stay in the room, before failing to provide a timely refund, literally saying "we want to refund you, but the bank just doesn't believe that we want to give you back your money".

I will skull fuck a dead pig with a chicken shitting on my face before I ever try to use AirBnB again.

As for Uber. People complain that taxis are all just greedy fuckers who act like pricks to the customers, and then they expect a private company paying less than minimum wage to people will give them a better outcome. Let me know how that works out when Uber stops subsidising all the rides with VC money.

I think it's clear that Uber longs for autonomous driving.

And I'm sure they'll cut every corner they can to get there, and resist every effort to assess that their cars are safe, and reliable for people.

This isn't all that much like alcohol prohibition, though.

This is about enabling fair access to and good stewardship of a scarce resource.

Prohibition was the imposition of one form of morality through law.

In my view, it's easier to argue that one is about personal freedom and so fair game to consider breaking, whereas the other is more about being a good neighbour.

That feels like a whitewashing of history.

Activists were (with different language) very much worried about negative externalities and effects on the commons when it came to Prohibition.

Remember, people were getting rampantly drunk, fighting in the streets, neglecting their families, becoming unemployable, and so on. Beer/wine/spirits sellers were more than happy to promote drinking even with all the social problems produced by it.

It certainly didn't feel like a private matter at the time, like praying in your bedroom each night.

So "someone making a fortune while leaving the alcoholism and broken homes in its wake" would look very much then like "someone making a fortune while raiding the available housing units and ruining neighborhoods" does today.

Edit: And, to be sure, that doesn't mean Prohibition was a good idea. But means the right solution wasn't "free for all for alcohol", but "okay, you can sell alcohol, but with these rules to contain that problem".

> "Laws are unlikely to change without a bit of violation"

The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them.

Someone will disagree with almost every law, and some subset of them will violate it in protest. No single person knows which law is the 1 in 100 that shouldn't exist - even someone who thinks they know. Often, the people who so passionately think a law shouldn't exist that they're willing to break it are actually the least representative of society.

(I'm completely ignoring whether space launch access is or isn't a worthwhile law; it's moot.)

> The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them.

That's very much debatable. It's not even clear how to count the number of laws, even if we are only considering Federal law in the US. (see https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43056.pdf )

Certainly there is no one who knows all the laws, and unlike in coding, there's no commitment to DRY or modularization, which leads to very common unintended consequences.

You're arguing the 99/100 case, but I'm sure it would be easy to find someone to credibly argue the 1/100 case.

The 99/100 case (in this argument) is mostly tragedy of the commons laws.

Where every person would individually benefit from breaking them, but the community as a whole would be worse off.

E.g. environmental regulations

Disagreeing with the law just because it would personally financially benefit you to break it is pretty weak sauce. I think a much stronger argument could be made that many laws — and particularly regulations — fail even at their stated purpose.

There was an article on the front page last week [1] about the total cost to the economy from licensing “professional” work which can clearly be done safely and effectively without a license, for example, hair weaving.

While the direct cost of obtaining licenses and completing the educational requirires (which often provides no actual benefit in increased skill or earnings), is relatively low… If you factor in the cost to the economy of people who aren’t able to work at a more profitable profession because they are restricted from entering it due to the licensing, the cost was extraordinary.

I think any analysis which covers all the myriad misguided attempts government makes to micromanage our lives is going to blow far past 1/100 of laws and regulations being damaging rather than helpful, even when considering the general populace.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18682946

The florist example reads as the most egregious: https://ij.org/report/blooming-nonsense-2/

You have to pass a written and practical test (aka subjective test) - administered by other licensed florists (aka your competitors).

Licenses should be about public safety. There's no reason to have a subjective test when it comes to this.

Licenses should be about public safety.

It seems though in some industries (not all), as you allude to in the floral industry, that licensing is just another manifestation of rent seeking and ever encroaching regulatory capture.

Would you concur? Curious to hear what you think there could (or should) be done about it in your opinion? In the case of selling floral products-caveat lector: I know nothing about flowers other than they are pretty and smell nice-would it make sense to replace licensing with some sort of rating system for businesses to aid consumers in deciding who they want to procure professional services from based on assessed expertise and past services rendered (not Yelp, an assessment from your industry peers)?

Imho, licenses should only be used in situations where (1) there are cost externalities to be considered that the free market doesn't expose+ or (2) it's better for society as a whole if supply is managed (e.g. capped licenses / quotas)

+ E.g. a cheap electrician using aluminum wiring that may short in 10 years and burn the house down. But of which the customer may not be aware / informed.

We have codes and laws about what wiring you are allowed to use, and independent inspections to ensure that things were done right. (even the best person makes a mistake). Adding a license doesn't really do much. I can teach a smart person how to write a house in a couple days (this includes looking up what size wire to use on the charts - the NEC is actually very readable once you figure out which section applies), from there on some experience will make you faster. Yet to become licensed requires years of experience, mostly to keep people out of the job.

Hypothetically we have code enforcement. In reality, the chance of getting caught on a non-obvious building defect is much lower than certain.

I see licensing as buying into the system and aligning interests. Suddenly, it's in a tradesperson's personal interest to follow regulations, as they otherwise risk their right to practice.

That said... as was mentioned upthread, there's a happy balance. If there's limited long term harm, it's probably not justifiable to require licensure.

Some hair weaving involve first relaxing the hair with chemicals that can cause severe burns if done incorrectly in order to ensure the weave and the natural hair blends properly. Some weaves are attached with adhesives that can also cause damage if used incorrectly. In both cases there is a potential for hair loss and disfigurement.

I think that's a good example of a field where lack of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. I'd have thought like you until having seen first hand what some such hair products can do.

I'm sure there are unnecessary licensing. But I'm equally sure a lot of the licensing that seems pointless actually has reasonable justifications that are just not obvious if you don't know the field.

Your link to the Congressional Research Service report, was that included to highlight how difficult it is to enumerate the number of Federal laws?

Because if so, so far reading this, it seems the Federal government has a pretty solid, and measurable grip on that very activity, just from the text of the report, and it doesn't seem remarkably difficult for them since they've come up with seemingly multiple ways to delineate the different types of Federal rules from each other, and have been able to point to various methods used to come up with their final assessment totals.

None of it seemed overtly complicated or difficult, and I'm about as far removed from "well read" on government reports as a person can get.

So, how many federal laws are currently in effect?

And can you say for certain that you didn't break a law today?

Always a good link: https://twitter.com/CrimeADay

This is not even a law, it's a regulation from an agency that tries to assert itself as a regulator of communication satellites. This has strategic implications for US and it's probably a good idea anyway from a space collision point of view - but nonetheless is a regulatory land grab from other international bodies.

As a general rule, these type of moves can only be controlled by breaking them and testing then in court. The agencies have a strong incentive to go for a maximal interpretation of the relevant statues and increase their influence and funding.

Governments have a mandate to regulate what happens in their own country. It’s how the entire world functions. And so it makes no sense that enforcement should be considered a land grab from other international bodies.

And we don’t control crimes like murder by allowing people to break the laws and then testing them in court.

> And we don’t control crimes like murder by allowing people to break the laws and then testing them in court.

I usually err on the side of constructive conversation, but I have to say that is a ridiculous straw-man - and you know it.

Regulations are laws where the details were left to the bureaucrats by the politicians who drafted the laws - it allows for implementation flexibility.

But they are still backed by actual laws, and are not lessened by being regulations - if anything they are better because you can always apply to the implementing authority to change things without going the whole parliamentary route.

There's a downside in less well developed countries without a tradition of a non-political civil service (like the US) where an incoming politician installs their political flunkies can change the regulations to suit their donors

This is an interesting comment. My interpretation is that your reasoning rests on the intuition that the tens of thousands of laws you know nothing about and created by strangers whose motivations may or may not be shared by you must be just 99% of the time. Further, that this view is shared by the rest of society. Does either idea seem likely?

Should the violence of the state be brought to bear on citizens because it is known that "most" laws are good? Would we benefit from a higher standard? Could we instead renew and expire laws?

re: "The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should. They benefit society, so essentially the whole population wants them."

Sometimes yes. But other times, the laws exists (and more than 1 of 100) to "protect" some industry (from competition from another industry) and not necessarily because it's a benefit to society / general public.

Not to get off topic, but this is the crux of the argument of (e.g.,) The Brothers Koch. That is, it's not gov they are against per se. But the fact that the gov leads to rules & reg that (too often) end up offering advantages to some and disadvantages to others - which is __not__ what should happen if benefit to society were the true goal. Put another way, they're not against gov per se. They're against the uneven playing field the gov is so fond of creating.

Note: I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with them. I only wanting to point out this finer-point is often lost when people scream "OMG...The Kochs...The Kochs...". The reality is, there's a fair amount of evidence / validity to their POV.

Everyone thinks that laws they don't like are bad in the general case and laws they do are excellent examples of good governing.

Personally, I'm reasonably happy laws against assault create disadvantages to some people.

Can you clarify how assault is relevant in the context of the current thread? Private rocket launches, general biz, etc.? I think I'm missing your point and would feel better if you would clarify.

A better example would be laws that benefit the solar and wind energies, sometimes at the expense of the fossil fuel industry. Good governance to those who think a fossil fuel world is a dead end to nowhere, an example of picking winners and losers to the fossil fuel industry and its ideological allies.

Laws about solar and wind energy benefit producers of the equipment at the expense of the society. Solar energy wouldn’t be price competitive with fossil fuels if it wasn’t for tax breaks and other forms of government subsidies. Why won’t we just wait until technology advances enough so that solar wins on free market?

> The flaw with that argument is that something like 99 of 100 laws exist because, basically, they should.

This doesn't pass the smell test. You actually believe that over the history of the United States that legislatures had a 99% success rate at passing good legislation?

This United States has a history of civil disobedience for a reason and it's part of what makes the country great. The law isn't something to be venerated, it should be treated with respect up to a point and that point ends when the law ceases to be relevant.

Case in point look at how people from the migrant caravans are being treated, ICE and Border Patrol are following the law by the book, can you tell me that law is good?

> it should be treated with respect up to a point and that point ends when the law ceases to be relevant

Everyone has a different definition of which laws are “relevant”.

> ICE and Border Patrol are following the law by the book

Are they? I was under the impression that most of the outrage was around officers circumventing Constitutional checks and abusing their power.

No single person knows.

99 out of 100 laws might have been a good idea at the moment of their conception, but a much larger proportion of laws are outdated or irrelevant or just completely wrong. FATCA is an example of such a law. The Patriot Act might be grouped in as well.

Laws and government programs should have expiration dates. Government can choose to renew said laws and programs, but an expiration date (aka Sunsetting) is good policy because it forces government to stay currently relevant.

This is super tangential, but regulation around space access is (ideally) there to prevent congestion, collision, and space debris. It's not hard to imagine a world where space access is abused and bad things end up downwind (Kessler syndrome[0] is a classic example).

To your original point, I'd say that yes, a lot of laws exist because they solved some problem at the time they were introduced (or because someone acted corruptly, but let's ignore that for now). I believe in questioning laws, but when the argument is "it'd make our private endeavors more effective," then I'd carefully consider why the laws were there in the first place.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

How do you know it's not 80 of 100, or 40 of 100?

And even if it is 99 of of 100, does that mean we should ignore the 100th, which could be causing untold harm?

Uber wouldn't be a thing today if they had followed every laws. Actually very few startup would exist. Very few restaurants as well.

You have to wonder how big Facebook would be today if a GDPR-esque law already existed and was common in most countries at the time of its launch.

On the flip side, if Facebook had never existed and never committed the privacy violations it has, would the GDPR exist?

I think Uber not being a thing might have been for the best.

That's the stupidest thing I've heard today.

Uber also wouldn't be a thing today if they didn't have billions in VC money buying them lawyers and lobbyists, and developing Greyball to help drivers avoid giving rides to people identified as regulators.

Please don't make it seem like Uber's law-breaking is some kind of brave sacrifice protecting mom-and-pop restaurants everywhere.

I'm not sure if your comment is a response to mine.

And that's a bad thing?

Startups in general seem to benefit just one category of people: investors, and it's usually to the detriment of Joe B. Average who happened to use their product/service.

I don't know anyone who would choose a taxi over lyft or uber even if it was cheaper. Taxis are terrible.

I don't use taxis a lot. I have had a car and a licence basically since I was 17, but when I have had to use them, they've mostly been fine. Mostly to or from an airport/hotel.

One nearly killed me, but I don't judge all other drivers by his lack of sleep/attention/whatever prescription drugs he relies on to stay awake.

My issue with uber/etc is that they spend more money, campaigning against laws that would require background checks for their drivers, than it would cost for them to actually do the background checks. If that doesn't raise some questions for you, you may as well just look for vans with "free candy" spray painted on the side, I'm sure they'll be great.

"Taxis are terrible" is such a vague blanket statement its almost meaningless.

Uber/Lyft are great for getting between two points in an overcrowded city where you would neither be able to park your own car nor hail a taxi. Taxis are terrible because of the lack of convenience and lack of a rider rating system.

And then you have apps (at least outside the US) for hailing taxis with the same UX for Uber. In some countries the Uber app hails taxis too.

> Uber/Lyft are great for getting between two points in an overcrowded city where you would neither be able to park your own car nor hail a taxi

I've literally never "hailed" a taxi in my life - I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel). Even as someone who uses taxis very rarely, I'm well aware of taxi booking apps both here in Thailand and in Australia.

Your argument is essentially "American taxis are crap, therefore uber is good for breaking the law". Why exactly couldn't Uber have just operated as a better taxi company? Oh right. Because then they'd have to follow the laws, and pay the drivers an actual income.

I believe you're missing a few things, considering taxi medallions are basically impossible to come by, and that what taxi driving laws here in the US allow are not incredibly unlike what Uber does to its drivers.

> I believe you're missing a few things, considering taxi medallions are basically impossible to come by

You mean none of the existing holders will sell them? $22B. Twenty two billion fucking dollars. That's how much VC money has been pumped into this bullshit company. And you're saying they can't buy some taxi medallions?

I think the answer is yes. (Or more accurately, not enough to be competitive.)

Why would they? Medallions are a MLM

Can you please not post acerbic rants to HN?

The main reason for me to use Grab while on holiday in Thailand was the fact that not getting scammed by a taxi driver in Thailand was almost impossible for me. I'm not sure if this is an issue for everyone, but I dare to say that as much as 50% of all taxi drivers in Bangkok just drove away the moment we asked for 'on the meter'. And this is saying something because we have used taxis at least twice a day for 2 weeks.

The second reason was that not 1 of the non-Grab taxi drivers uses anything like Google Maps. So I was never sure if we actually ended up at our hotel or somewhere else. Also because our hotel (Aetas) had (at least) 2 locations in Bangkok it made it all worse. This is assuming that a taxi driver actually knows where to go, we've also encountered multiple times the situation where a taxi driver didn't know where to go.

Grab on the other hand always provided the amount upfront and every driver had Google Maps for navigation.

Edit: I'd rather use the official taxis, but the number of conveniences Grab added with a single app was worth it to me.

If you've never hailed a taxi then I supposed you've never travelled abroad?

Not at all. Try reading what I wrote. Hint: look for the parts where it says:

> I've either gotten in one at a rank (i.e. at an airport) or called for one in advance (i.e. at a hotel)

But even when I have traveled, I generally don't use taxis much. I've only ever been to a few countries where I didn't end up driving - Hong Kong and Singapore, where public transport is beyond amazing, and a wedding (and thus spent the whole time at a resort) in Fiji years ago.

taxis aren't terrible. the distribution of medallions in most cities is the problem.

Taxis are terrible.

No. They benefit their customers and their investors. There investors usually one or two digits so its negligible.

Would that be the customers whose private data is surreptitiously gathered and analysed and re-analysed, to show some kind of 'value' to investors, or would it be the customers who use a service, and then find it's cancelled with one months notice, because it turns out you can't just keep spending someone else's money and hope for it to become profitable by magic?

I'm not sure this is right. One of the very clever things Uber did was take advantage of a loophole in the hackney laws that allowed drivers to operate for hire without taxi medallions as long as they did not perform street hails. From the point of view of taxi operators who had long relied on this system to protect them from meaningful competition, this was a flouting of the intent of the law, if not the actual language of the law itself. They did not however, as far as I know, actually break the law.

Uber broke limousine chauffeur laws, not taxi laws. It varies from state to state, but generally you need a chauffeur license to pick someone up for hire. From what I understand there is generally no limit to how many might drive around but they are not allowed look for customers, the customer must find them.

The taxi industry was hurt the most, but it wasn't taxi laws that were broken it was chauffeur laws.

What? In the UK, private hire licensing is & always was a normal thing and the way Uber uses it is entirely normal too. It's not a loophole. They weren't even the first to allow booking without phoning.

Uber was banned in the UK. And they keep appealing. They're still in service. It's hilarious.

Your comment seems to lack much in the way of fact.

They weren't banned in the UK. Or London. Their application for a license renewal was temporarily denied in London. They appealed, once.

They worked with TfL to resolve their concerns and were granted a new license - though slightly shorter term than normal. They're not entirely off the hook and will need to continue to show that they're behaving appropriately, but they're absolutely fine to operate now and that is not likely to change any time soon.

Just remember this the next time people say that Zuckerberg should go to jail or that the US needs something like GDPR.

In my observation, startups aren't just breaking unjust laws.

Not saying I agree with you, but most places frowned on lane splitting with motorcycles in the US, but people splitting caused California to eventually codify the legality of it.

Sometimes it does take a little pressure.

Prohibition ended because people were sick of it and it was repealed not because people violated the law and the government decided not to enforce it after all.

It was repealed because the people who disagreed with a significant political force. Those who don't drink and wanted it didn't really change their mind at all.

Alcohol prohibition is an odd choice here, considering that its implementation is an example of a law that did change without anyone violating an existing law. And then it wasn't done away with just because people were violating it. People violated it because it was deeply unpopular. It was repealed as much because of the chaos it caused and the fact that legalizing alcohol would re-institute a much needed source of tax revenue.

So your argument is seriously that regulating satellite launches is akin to alcohol prohibition? Do you think that's a reasonable comparison?

The problem is not all laws are moral. Regulatory capture is a thing. Many different people (often paid by a corporation) have come up with scheme that greatly harm their competition for no gain, yet made them sound good.

On the other hand, this is also one of the reasons I'd be hesitant to put garbage collection in place for laws.

Make it too easy to repeal laws, and anti-corporate interest laws that were difficult to pass find themselves quietly unwritten soon after.

A difficult game theory problem.

There is a difference between law and morality and for good reason. There has never been massives groups of people that completely agree on right or wrong. Instead of trying to codify right and wrong, law is about defining how we can all get along despite those differences.

I'm not saying that regulatory capture is not a problem; that would be an absurd claim. But trying to make the law about right and wrong is not the solution.

What do you do about an unjust law though?

Fight to change it. Laws are not set in stone for a purpose. They're supposed to evolve as they people governed by them evolve.

Breaking laws is normally not a good idea. But most of the time, the only way to change bad laws and regulations is to break them first.

Everything from slave laws to miscegenation laws to gay laws had to be broken first before they could be changed. The one of the central aspects of the civil rights movement was breaking laws - ie rosa parks.

Also, this is hacker news and the hacking community generally isn't fond of restrictive laws and regulations.

I think you're right that there are some laws that are worth breaking, but let's not conflate choosing to break laws as a matter of principle with breaking laws as a matter of sloppiness. There was no real reason for Swarm to break these laws beyond a fundamental unwillingness to follow basic standards that are there for good reason. Their law breaking a FCC investigation has almost certainly cost them more than it would've cost to engage with the FCC.

The fact is that all the examples in the grand parent post involved businesses that could have operated legally but chose not to because they could make the economic decision to break laws to profit from fast expansion. In my view laws should be written with penalties to prevent people from breaking them, not as some sort of toll booth.

What exactly would be a good alternative? Jail time is also not a good penalty. See: marijuana.

The fines, by contrast, seem to be working pretty well: how many other companies get busted by the FCC for violating satellite launching regulations? The fact that it is so rare is a testament to how effective the deterrent has been in regulating companies in this space.

I think the fact that Swarm consulted with the FCC, had their plan to launch satellites rejected and then decided to launch anyway indicates the fines weren't suitable. A simple 3 year ban on further launches would've changed that. I find the fact that Swarm did this knowingly particularly egregious. I'm also not sure the lack of violations is a good indicator that the FCC is working since I don't think there's a particularly big sample of companies doing this for other structural reasons.

If they broke the existing law what difference is a ban going to make?

I don’t think you can really equate slavery and Rosa Parks to wilfully encouraging drivers to get parking tickets and launching satellites without authorisation.

I’m all in favour of civil disobedience when laws are stupid but breaking laws just to make a fast buck isn’t the same as defying inequality.

No shit. Rosa Parks wasn't being backed by coastal VC money. She was just some lady.

Well if you launch your own army of satellites and they smash into and destroy someone else's - will you pay? Will you be able to pay? What if it was another government's spy satellite/military Comms/positioning system and you just caused a diplomatic incident? There's a lot of space around earth but crashes aren't rare anymore (see how Iridium has backups already in space to ensure coverage once there's failures/crashes) - add more satellites and the issue gets worse.

Comparing regulations around financial instruments or satellite launches, no matter how onerous, to slavery is ridiculous.

One is clearly immoral and no one would question the validity of civil disobedience as a method to over throw immoral laws. The comparison here is not a good one at all, these are two different things.

The problem with this statement is it worked, and gives me great hope in this company that they were smart enough to risk it. The FCC said no, you cannot launch the satellite you spent years developing for reasons that ended up being completely wrong. So, what is a company to do? Launch anyways and accept the backlash as they had no other option. Once the satellites launched, they were able to effectively track them and the company got approved for more launches but this time without the 900k fine.

As long as the regulations of the US don’t make sense, smart people will continue to break them in the spirit of innovation. Will this breaking of regulation always end in relatively little consequence? No, and soon the FCC or another regulatory body will feel obligated to make an example out of some company with serious charges and I will feel bad for the CEO and company that is used for an example

The problem with "don’t make sense" is that very often they do but the arrogance/mistrust is stronger. Reading the comments on /r/robinhood is very eye opening. There is a big disconnection between the regulators and the regulated.

I think r/robinhood is a particularly bad example, the naïveté in that subreddit is overpowering. In general financial regulations are probably more good than bad given how completely irrational people get when money is involved.

This could have gone an entirely different way. I am glad it worked out but I do not gain respect or hope in a company because they willingly ignored a very serious regulation and the consequences of a failure on their part could have caused a big problem up there. Feels very amateur and irresponsible.

As some clarification I am all for breaking laws that can really only hurt the individual doing the lawbreaking. The government shouldn't have the right to protect us from ourselves. However, that this could have affected the other items in the payload or existing satellites in orbit if something went wrong is why I am disappointed.

> for reasons that ended up being completely wrong

When we were young lots of rules didn't make sense. As we got older we realized many of these were to keep us safe from things we weren't old enough to understand yet.

The US has quite a number of spy satellites that we can't detect, even with our own detection methods. Some are covered in vantablack and radar absorbing shields, others hide behind giant mirrors that reflect the darkness of space back down towards the earth.

How would your opinion change if a Swarm microsat had crashed in to a 6 billion dollar satellite and disabled it? What if it threw that bird out of orbit and it hit the ISS, killing everyone on board?

You can track a swarm microsat. The government could even help them make sure they orbited correctly and wouldn't hit the ISS. That's what good governance is. Bad governance is telling everyone no you can't do something unless we deem you worthy of our time.

These specific ones cannot be reliably tracked as they are smaller than normal cubesats.

The problem is if we rely on lobbying gov't for change, then we're going to get change written by corporate lobbyists (including by your employer, Amazon / Jeff Bezos - no offense). They tend to build up barriers to entry to competition and entrench themselves.

I wonder what Thoreau would think about all this. He wrote Civil Disobedience which grapples with these ideas, but I bet he didn't imagine them in this new market/corporate context.

My concern is the asshole factor. Some of this stuff is just being a jerk to other humans.

It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws.

Actually the related mantra of "Hey as long as it's just a fine you can reasonably pay -- or you don't think you'll get caught -- then sure, go ahead an break the law!" has been around the Valley for quite a while. In fact, we might say it's become something of a chant.

> Governments would be better to be ready for disruptive ideas and have flexibility in regulations to try them ou

What? No!

That's the equivalent of the mythical software rewrite that fixes all current issues: three are a lot of reason why we have customer and environmental protections and even if some are forgotten throwing them out without because "disruption is good" strikes me as quite naive.

A more apt mantra here is "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission".

After all, FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said the size of the penalty “is probably not significant enough to deter future behavior". I'd guess that Swarm knew someone would notice and they knew the fine would be worth paying in lieu of dealing with the red tape needed to get the launch authorized.

Now the question is, what penalty is significant enough to deter this behavior and why isn't that the penalty presently?

> Governments would be better to be ready for disruptive ideas and have flexibility in regulations to try them out. And we should all be voting and supporting candidates who want to see such changes happen. But until they do, it seems wrong to purposely break laws in order to make money.

seems a foregone conclusion - aren't these laws designed around some situation in the first place? why not just not write them in the first place? except that would be negligent..

Laws are just contracts and have consequences if you get caught breaking them. People and businesses break contracts all the time.

I really have no problem with people or companies evaluating risk/reward and pursuing whatever goal they want... if you want to disincentivize behavior then increase the penalty and change the risk/reward calculation individuals and corporations make.

I think criminal law probably should not be looked at in this way. Murder? Best if people think of not murdering people as an absolute and not some contract that should be contemplated as breakable if risk/reward calculation is right. Most humans don't think on gradients and are much more comfortable with binary choices. And we would probably have to bring back torture to get the risk/reward appropriate on that law.

How many startups do they have to fine into bankruptcy for the rest of the community to take notice?

I think some need to be made an example of.

I am sure this is exactly how all the regulatory groups in congress that people hate so much feel when enacting things 'for our own good.' Meet the new boss (some millennial that feels superior because they know what gulpgruntwebpacknpm are), same as the old boss.

> "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws.

The law is a messy area. Many places are simply unresolved until a court gets to them, and often there is no incentive for that resolution to happen, so the question gets a lot more complicated.

Here's an example (In all of this I'm trying to focus on legality and not if I think it's a good thing. I'm also not a lawyer and likely have lots of details wrong). I get around to saying why this is relevant at the end of this wall of text.

In the world of tabletop RPGs (D&D and the like) there's a big grey area as to what is/isn't protected by copyright.

From general literature, we know (indeed, it was one of the big pushes for the creation of copyright) that translations and other "derivative works" are covered by copyright.

From boardgames, we know (have court cases saying) that _rules_ aren't copyrightable, while the exact expression of them are. I can make a Monopoly clone so long as I don't violate any trademarks (which are different than copyright) and use my own words to express the rules.

From comics and other literature, we know that characters and settings can be covered as "derivative works". I cannot write my own Superman take, nor have a story involving Superman and the Justice League even if I omit/replace the exact trademarked words. Three notes: (1) Parody is an allowed defense against copyright infringement and (2) A lot of stuff happened in the early years of comics that today would likely not fly today. (3) Given the universality of themes, there's lots of dispute about what creative works are or are not derivative, in both a legal and non-legal sense.

But a tabletop RPG lives in a weird place: it is rules...for telling a story. It may come with characters and a setting...with the intention that people use them. Is my use of the product creating a "derivative work"? If I make an adventure that assumes you are using the rules but doesn't include any of the text, is that a derivative work? Does that change if I refer to setting details?

For a long while, the expectation was that, no, if you avoided trademark infringement and didn't copy exact text, you weren't infringing. Several RPG magazines would buy (from freelance authors) and sell (as the magazine to subscribers) adventures for various different systems. [Notable exception: Palladium games, maker of Rifts, TMNT, and other (ahem) strangeness) were very prickly about this, so magazines simply skipped them and didn't offer adventures for them.] Heck, adventures were such a cost sink for game publishers and so requested (but unbought) by audiences, it was generally considered a SERVICE to the publisher to put out adventures for their material, as it would drive demand for their books.

Now, this was the genre-wide expectation (excluding Palladium), but it was never actually legally established. RPG companies were (and often still are) shoestring budget operations, and a bad judgement (and if I learned one thing from my lawyer friends, it's that initial court decisions are often bad judgements - it's why appellate courts are so important) would devastate many companies and the hobby that relies on them. Heck, just going to court would destroy most companies at the time, even if they'd eventually win. So the law in the area was allowed to continue undefined, with the few cases that cropped up almost always (always?) settling out of court.

Side note: Think games aren't terribly relevant to the law? Check out how the EFF came to be in relation to tabletop RPGs: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

Then Wizards of the Coast (The Magic: The Gathering people) bought TSR (The Dungeons and Dragons people) and came out with D&D 3rd edition. This is when Linux was breaking free from the "you get what you pay for" stigma, when "open source" was a new term (vs free software), and when Stallman vs Raymond had just finished peaking. The concept of open licensing and copyleft was getting a broader awareness, and tech and RPGs have always had a tight bond, so when D&D introduce the Open Gaming License (OGL), to set explicit rules to allow derivative works, it was a big deal.

The OGL did a lot of things. It spawned a revolution in the RPG market that would bring in a lot of new players, spawned a bunch of new companies - most of whom folded just as quickly, but a few modern companies made their start then and survived - crushed or crippled some relative giants in the industry, dealt a blow (due to unsold product) to the RPG stores that were already reeling from the correction in the trading card industry...and normalized new intellectual property practices.

The OGL made it clear what was allowed to be done, and even allowed activities that distinctly required permission under copyright...IF you accepted limitations that are probably more than copyright would ever require. If there are gaming magazines (or 'zines, or any other commercial enterprise) that offer adventures without explicit license, I don't know of them. Similarly, character creation programs and the like all operate under explicit license now...because we're never figured out if they need to.

Bringing this all back to the original point: "move fast and break things" in terms of the law has two possible ends: you either tick off the established players and they bring the law against you and resolve the legal vagueness one way or the other, OR you establish a new norm because no one has the resources to challenge you (and if they did, the fact that you created an accepted norm makes it more likely that the law will accept that as the norm: See how EULAs have crazily become enforceable without even offering refunds if you don't accept in most situations).

End conclusion: Is "move fast and break the law" good? I really don't know. I feel like ending vagueness is good, but I feel like allowing initial corporate actors to define the starting point of the new rules is bad. Either way, I feel like it's a different situation when you're dealing with legal vagueness than when dealing with clear established laws in the Uber and AirBnB situations, but even in those cases the "little guys" weren't going to be able to impact the law without a clear market demand...and yet, I don't like encouraging companies to play fast and loose.

Messy.

> It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws.

A part of being an entrepreneur is that you have take risks from time to time, and under term "risk" I don't mean business risks.

And then there's Theranos.

Theranos wasn't bad because they skirted regulation, they were bad because they outright lied about the efficacy of their (non)product.

Theranos was bad for both reasons. Even if you remove the fraud, they were skirting all sorts of regulations around patient safety and the operation of laboratories.

Not sure I agree. If you're skirting regulation but your product actually works, I don't personally think you've done anything morally wrong.

The law cares, but realistically those regulations are in place to prevent fraud or dysfunctional products. If Theranos' machine actually did what they said it could, it would've been a victimless crime and I wouldn't have a problem with it.

It was possible to make products which benefited humanity before those regulations existed, and it's possible to do the same while skirting those regulations.

I'd encourage you to read Bad Blood.

A lot of the regulations around laboratories exist because people have died or been injured as a result of lab screwups. Theranos hid entire labs from inspectors, let uncertified people run laboratories, and a lot more that wasn't fraud, but definitely violated regulatory requirements.

I actually did read Bad Blood, and thought it was a very interesting book!

But again, I think it's morally fine for an uncertified person to run a laboratory as long as they are running it correctly. But the Theranos labs were not being run correctly, and they were lying about the results that their machines could deliver.

You can build a medical product that has a higher sensitivity and/or specificity than the other products on the market without regulatory oversight. But the Edison had neither of those and they were pretending it did. That was the problem.

> But again, I think it's morally fine for an uncertified person to run a laboratory as long as they are running it correctly.

How do you determine if they're "running it correctly"?

The whole point of certification is to require a minimum set of skills/knowledge to do so.

> You can build a medical product that has a higher sensitivity and/or specificity than the other products on the market without regulatory oversight. But the Edison had neither of those and they were pretending it did. That was the problem.

Insert "faster" or "cheaper" as well, but that is my point. There are very clear ways to measure if your medical device is effective.

Notice that with the global liberalism regime force feed on peoples, corporations have the right to sue governments when the later have laws preventing the corporations to make profit. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/10/obscure-leg... And when it's corporations that have revenues ten or hundreds of times greater than the sued state, the later stands no chance. Reality is different than what you think. It's also probably different from what it should be. But who are you compared to Soros, Rockfeller and the bankers of the GAFAM?

>It feels to me as though the mantra of "move fast and break things" wasn't meant to apply to laws

Laws are just a contract. There are terms and penalties. If you weigh the consequences of breaking the contract and decide it’s worth the risk why not do it? Most people in America do it everyday (speeding in their cars).

Because often the consequences are paid for by other people. I'm specifically thinking about things like environmental regulations or regulations around accessibility.

Then that's on the government for not making the disincentive to break the contract strong enough.

Sadly, you're probably right. Investors seem to be only too happy to back sociopaths.

> If you weigh the consequences of breaking the contract and decide it’s worth the risk why not do it?

Textbook example of how a career criminal thinks.

What about strategic defaults on a home you've bought? Breaking a contract with a vendor because you'll save more with another one to more than make up the penalties? Not cleaning your apartment when you move out because you're willing to lose some/all of your security deposit?

First one sounds like fraud if premeditated but I don't know the details. 2nd one could work depending on the business but could also make future partnership impossible. Last one is just petty.

Cool, didn't realize these were so cut and dry. Have you considered an Ethics As A Services (EASS) startup?

Because its an unpatriotic antisocial thing to do, obviously.

Speeding?

Speeding is also an anti-social thing to do. But, like most things, there are degrees, and exceptions of exingency, etc. I would not call it unpatriotic, as it only threatens the social order very indirectly, if at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com