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Comment by rmbyrro | Hacker News Reader

Proposals should have an exponential backoff algorithm. Otherwise they'll keep proposing over and over until it passes.

This has been the strategy of every political party to hold office in the UK for as long as I've been alive.

There is always some privacy-defeating 'online safety' bill going through the parliament. Every time it gets knocked down, but almost immediately returns with slightly different wording.

What do you mean by "to hold office"? How does this help a politician hold to power?

They mean any party that's had majority control of parliament, they don't mean it's been used as a strategy to get there but rather once they're ruling it's been introduced

Parent is saying it has been the strategy of every party which has held power. Not that the strategy helps them hold power.

I don’t think that’s what they mean. I just read it as all the political parties that have been in power or in office.

It's not what the comment meant, but worth adding that the UK security forces have wanted this ever since they lost the ability to read everyone's mail and listen to our calls. They actively lobby every sitting government for this kind of bill, and (I have no doubt) promise all kinds of support for politicians who push their agenda.

It's similar in concept to 'in power'. The government holds office, rather than it being in power. It's more to say that the power isn't derived from the government itself, but the office they are elected into.

Every government to hold office = every previous party that was elected and formed a government

Indeed, this is the standard playbook worldwide for people in power, especially:

1. Politicians in power that want to do something that is unpopular.

2. Corporations that want to implement an unpopular policy.

The evil genius part of it is that it not only allows them to test the temperature of the water, but also to:

1. Claim they are hearing the people and withdrew it, and even claim it as a victory.

2. Shift the Overton window so next time it comes up, people are desensitized.

3. Try again basically forever until they're able to get it passed.

4. Time it better around elections to avoid consequences. Voters have the memory of a goldfish, and are so party/identity-driven that it isn't hard to manipulate them.

It's the standard playbook for anyone who wants to be successful. Persistence is frequently cited as a crucial factor in success, and frequently celebrated in the back stories of stars in business, tech, sports, media, the arts, etc.

Persistence is so important because other people you're competing against are also persistent.

This is not specific to "people in power" and there is no special legislative trick to defeat it. If you care about something, you have to stand up for it, persistently.

Problem is that they can just keep rewording and repackaging it endlessly until the checksum doesn't match but the final effect is mostly the same.

I know a similar principle is successfully applied in judicial courts, in some cases.

If it's possible in justice, why not in law making?

Perhaps because courts are not a democracy? This class of problems gets much easier when an individual is designated to make a binding declaration (e.g. that these three seemingly different feelings are effectively the same) that's hard to challenge. Democracy has a hard time dealing with "obvious when you see it" problems.

The US House and Senate have parliamentarians, who have some power about what bills can be voted on. This was in the news some years ago, when they (if memory serves) blocked some bills from being voted on.

I am unsure of the limits of this power, and how easy it is to change parliamentary rules in the first place.

Similarly in 2019 John Bercow (then speaker of the British House of Commons) notably rebuffed the government when they attempted a third vote on what he considered to be basically the same motion

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47614074

> Mr Bercow cited a convention dating back to 1604 that a defeated motion could not be brought back in the same form during the course of a parliamentary session.

Courts are a fundamental part of a Democracy.

There should be an exponential back-off algorithm for proposals. The public should be able to ask a judge to decide whether a new proposal triggers the back-off or whether it's a new one that can be proposed immediately.

Solution, perhaps, is equally persistent opposition.-

But that's a problem. People get tired of having to fight against the same thing over and over and over.

Put another way, we have to successfully oppose things like this every single time it comes up. But the people pushing it just have to win once.

Well then again, we've been fighting against tyranny for thousands of years and things have slowly gotten better. There are always new people, new generations, prepared to fight for the same thing their parents did and they are not tired.

Put that way, it sounds a lot like infosec ...

(I'd humbly posit, however, that - even at worst - even if those promoting this were to win, it does not necesarily follow that any legislative/regulatory change is "irreversible" ...

... so contrarian persistence might still be warranted).-

Opposition needs public support.

The public, in general, gets tired of repeated messages.

I suspect their motivation to pass orwellian laws are higher than the public's resiliency.

The public is always changing; one generation will age out, while another joins the fray.

They're insisting on such proposals on a yearly basis. I suspect they'll intensify the frequency from now on. They can saturate the current generation's resiliency threshold until the proposal is passed.

I thought about letting people take the issue to court and making politicians face actual consequences if a judge decides that politicians brought up the same law over and over again in bad faith. But I guess it'd be abused when tactics like the filibuster work to kill off badly needed laws.

In a well functioning democracy, politicians that fail to bring laws that they and their voters believe in, into action, would be voted out.

And would be voted out, if they fail over and over. And would not be elected in the first place when they operate on bad faith.

Unfortunately, such a democracy doesn't exist and probably never will be. When marketing, spinning, populism and other such tactics make the civis vote in the best interest of the politicians rather than the civis themselves.

There would be massive counter-productive effects the moment a significant enough fraction of the population is willing to bring forward bogus lawsuits to use as a political weapon and for propaganda purposes. It is DOA.

That's a common misconception on how democracy (modern democracies at least) work.

Let's now imagine that we want gay marriages or abortion rights or something minor, like the right to repair, and the proposal is rebutted by the parliament.

Should the parliament respect an exponential backoff algorithm to propose them again?

I'm not sure I want that.

Democracy it's all about proposing the same things over and over again, with slight modifications, until the majority reaches a consensus on the matter.

At least that's what I understood about it.

BTW usually when a proposal is refused it won't be discussed again until the next legislature.

This is not a law per se, It"s a draft being discussed by a technical commission which is working to write a proposal for the parliament to vote.

> Let's now imagine that we want gay marriages or abortion rights or something minor, like the right to repair, and the proposal is rebutted by the parliament.

> Should the parliament respect an exponential backoff algorithm to propose them again?

Sure, put a cap on it of one parliamentary term if you're worried about it going to infinity.

Liberal democracies are relatively new, but the process of deciding norms that satisfy different groups with conflicting interests is as old as the human history.

In Italy, for example, it's already like that: legislative proposals that are not approved by the parliament lapse at the end of the legislative term.

Laws are not simply voted by the parliament, presenting them it's a process per se, with its specific rules.

Throughout history many tricks have also been developed to work around the limitations of the system, for example presenting the same law with slightly different wordings or use amendment bombing to block some proposal ad libitum (in Italy this happens a lot, there have been examples of software programs written specifically to do that: emit an infinite number of amendments so that they would never run out of them)

Of course if some group is really determined or bears enough power it can push its own agenda while smaller less powerful ones can have a very hard time to get attention, even if their proposals are good. It's not ideal, but democracy it's a process to find tradeoffs, usually not the best one, but the lower common denominator one.

Can't we just pass a law that is incompatible with this proposal? Or can a new law always overrule existing laws?

New laws always overrule older laws. Most legal systems, including the EU, have a constitution, that is harder to change and that governs what laws are allowed or not (the UK is rather unique in not really having such a law, so that in principle Parliament is free to pass any law they want).

Enshrining a right to private communication and online anonimity into the EU constitution would probably prevent such laws from having any hope to go into effect, but that's a massive undertaking that I don't think would easily succeed.

You mean something like a charter of fundamental rights? Perhaps containing the text

> Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.

Admittedly that is part of a treaty rather than an actual constitution, though those amended treaties are the closest thing the EU has to a constitution.

That right already exists. These Acts are always struck down by the EU's Court of Justice along with all others that are in conflict with the founding legal documents of the Union.

The problem is that there isn't a mechanism to refer a proposed Act to that court before it's passed to prevent it hitting the books in the first place, and I think that's something that's easier to fix than (eg) trying to introduce new freedoms to the Bill of Rights when Hungary is able to block that.

Locally it'd be progress if member states stopped attempting to transpose new EU law when that law is clearly going to be struck down later on. National courts have that expertise but refuse to use it.

Generally speaking outside of constitutional questions, most legislatures cannot bind their successors. So yes, new laws can be written most of the time in most places.

Apparently this already contradicts some constitutional (right word?) principles in the EU. But they don't care.

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