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Comment by roncohen | Hacker News Reader

The other problem here is that politicians are either oblivious or simple don't care about the cost associated with complexity in the laws. On top of that, the other unfortunate dynamic that exists is that politicians all work to get their little special case into new bills so they can point to that when their constituents ask how they influenced the new law.

Taken together, the complexity of the law just accumulates. Tax law in Denmark being a particularly gross example.

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I don't doubt that writing a new laws is complicated, but if I write code, and realise that I constantly need to tack on more code to handle special cases, then I will normally revisits my design. It is not my impression that politicians do the same with laws.

One major issue, at least with Danish law makers, is that they want to target special groups, but that would be discriminating, so instead they attempt to target the behaviour of those group. This of cause will affect a number of people who where not in the original target group, so they add on exceptions and and details to narrow down the law. Also there never seems to be any clean up in the laws.

If your laws/rule exploded from a few hundred pages to 30.000 pages, you should really revisit that thoughts behind that law.

It's crazy out here in DK. The most embarrassing example of such crazy targeted laws is the "hand shake with the mayor" requirement for new Danish citizens, clearly target at a certain ethnicity that would hesitate to do just that. The intent is to make it difficult to that ethnicity, the result is just a veiled law that makes them "appear" just enough secular and non-discriminatory.

There's a lot I love about life in Denmark. This is just to say that no place is perfect and DK also has stuff that all Danes should be rightly embarrassed about.

> the "hand shake with the mayor" requirement for new Danish citizens

One might wonder what would happen do Danes abroad not respecting the local customs in certain conservative countries.

This was exactly my question while discussing with a few Danish friends who brushed it off saying, “yeah it’s wrong, but it’s not that bad.... while in Denmark they should be willing to live like a Dane”. My argument was whether they would be willing to wear a burka or give up driving as a woman without complaining in Saudi Arabia a not that they are good anywhere. The point is what is wrong should just be called out as wrong and not politically sugarcoated.

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