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Comment by awillen | Hacker News Reader

It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace the stuff that you want to burn down.

It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well (because rich folks can use the complexity of it to escape taxation), so it's easy and popular to say let's just get rid of it and start with a new, simple tax code.

The problem is it got to be the way it is for a reason. We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that. If you tear it down without a plan on how to keep incentivizing all the things you want, you're going to end up with some undesirable results that you then have to fix.

It's fine to say let's throw it out and start over, but if that's as far as your plan goes then it's pretty lazy.

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> It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace the stuff that you want to burn down.

And what do we want to replace targeted ads, surreptitious tracking, and a system that exploits its users for money while not being held accountable to its users with?

I'd say we're better off with nothing. So yes, in this instance, burn it all down actually is a solution.

I'm aware I'm ignoring the externalities, I'm aware it's complicated, and I'm aware what I'm proposing actually is lazy. I'm aware a bunch of people will lose their jobs (mostly in tech though so I really don't feel bad, having spent most of life in that industry). I'm saying in this instance it doesn't matter. We're still better off burning it all down.

Presumably we want companies to be able to use user data to improve their product, so that's one thing we'd have to legislate around.

Someone else proposed what I consider a very reasonable solution. Just make whatever data they have 100% transparent, and you as the user can choose to offer less (or more) at any point in time. This should be regulated similar to HIPAA with serious penalties for any violations, because it absolutely is about avoiding privacy violations.

And if you as the user want to share no data at all, you should have that option. This is the company's problem, not the customer's problem - or at least that's the world I want to live in.

And obviously don't hide anything behind dark patterns, and all the other common sense gotchas. Violations should be treated as criminal fraud with prison time (assuming they are found guilty in a court of law, and proving criminal fraud is notoriously difficult but the threat needs to be real).

>We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that.

[If we want] to incentivize...

While it's true that incentivization necessitates tax code complexity, we don't all agree on the necessity of incentivization in the first place.

Sure - that's absolutely fair. But with that said, I do think that a lot of people would agree that a lot of the incentives are good (I for one am glad that the government is trying to get people to move to electric cars) and would want to maintain something to keep promoting the same things even if the tax code were restarted from scratch.

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