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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

It's not a solvable problem. Like most tech problems it's political, not technical. There is no way to balance the competing demands of privacy, security, legality, and corporate overreach.

It might be solvable with some kind of ID escrow, where an independent international agency managed ID as a not-for-profit service. Users would have a unique biometrically-tagged ID, ID confirmation would be handled by the agency, ID and user behaviour tracking would be disallowed by default and only allowed under strictly monitored conditions, and law enforcement requests would go through strict vetting.

It's not hard to see why that will never happen in today's world.

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> It's not a solvable problem

Lawnmower manufacturers said the same thing about making safe lawnmowers. Until government regulations forced them to

https://i.imgur.com/mXU28ta.jpeg

Specifically, 1970.

Well, something to consider is that part of why everything is so much expensive these days is that a lot of the solutions to those problems add costs. That cost needs to be absorbed by the price.

One of the reasons it's so expensive to build a house is safety regulations. They exist for a reason, but they nevertheless add a substantial cost to building a house. If you had mandated such a cost to people living in 1870 then a lot fewer people could've afforded a house.

Building codes are written in blood.

In fact you can say that about most regulations of any sort, this seems to hit people's brains in the same way as how anti-vaxxers are so cavalier about things like Measles because we effectively eradicated it via vaccination (except it's now making a comeback thanks to anti-vaxxers) and people have forgotten how horrible it is, in the same way people forget, sure, houses used to be cheaper to build. And they also burned down a hell of a lot more, or were constructed poorly and not to code, or were built too close together, etc. etc. etc.

Just about every regulation that exists for every product or thing or way of doing something was written not even after a death, that's usually not enough, it needs to be a substantial number of deaths that can be directly linked to the thing the regulation covers and only then does it become law.

Yes, and?

It still adds an enormous amount of cost. Despite that buildings (and even bridges) still collapse. What is often not asked is how many people lack housing because those building codes made it unaffordable for them.

We should stop begging the for profit house building industry to make affordable housing. Just use the army core of engineers and build the mega cities from Judge dredd.

Well, perpetual motion is also considered unsolvable. Perhaps the right regulation would make it happen?

Or... maybe that line of reasoning isn't super strong.

There's a big difference between breaking the physical laws of the universe and Big Tech not wanting to spend money on moderators.

"Big" is pretty vague there.

But my point was that you asserted that regulations can overcome claims of impossibility. I was just illustrating that is not always true, and therefore we can't assume it is true here.

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