Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws is not a convincing argument to me. It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals.
I find this view to be lacking in nuance.
Laws are intended to exist with the consent of the governed. Substantially the whole of society agrees that murder should be illegal, so if someone commits murder we're willing to commit significant resources to investigating and prosecuting the perpetrator. It doesn't have to be efficient or have perfect enforcement because its purpose is to act as a deterrent. Everyone is willing to spend the resources to enforce those laws because everyone agrees that their enforcement is important. Enforcement efficiency is not required when there is popular consent.
Opposing laws that "help criminals" exposes society to shifts in the definition of a crime. When there is a law against being of a particular ethnicity or religion or political ideology, you want to enable people to be criminals. Preventing laws like that from ever being effective is worth sustaining a significant amount of inefficiency in the enforcement of other laws.
And this is not a binary distinction with "laws against murder" on one side and "laws against being Jewish" on the other. The latter is only the viscerally powerful extreme that once made us say never again.
The spectrum spans the full scale, where the middle is filled with police corruption and political retaliation against the opposition and petty busybodies inducing poverty and homelessness through the incompetent micromanagement of society.
Should governments have the ability to freeze the bank accounts of protesters? It doesn't matter what they're protesting or what crimes some minority of the protesters are alleged to have committed when the account freezes are instituted as collective punishment, the answer is no. The government should not have the ability to do that, because in that case they are the criminals, and structural defenses against government abuses are important.
This is not necessarily a good thing and laws can change without requiring them to be broken.
That's kind of the problem, right? Suppose you have a system that actually allows perfect enforcement and then the government passes a law against some religious practice. Espousing atheism is banned, or Islam, or Christianity, depending on who controls the government this time; take your pick. If anybody who does it is instantly brought up on charges with severe penalties then nobody does it. But that's bad. That's the problem. You need to sustain enough friction to prevent things like that from being possible because enforcing laws like that is worse than anything that could come out of making ordinary law enforcement require more resources.
I don't think it's bad. Similar to closed and open source software there is room for closed and open societies. They are different approaches that have different pros and cons.
Sure, but of course it isn't black and white.
>In which case we shouldn't have any such thing in the open countries.
I still think being able to effectively apply the will of We the People would be good to do. Being afraid that the people will be able to want for something you don't like to happen is disrespectful to the will of the people.
Right, I mean, wrong.
before you go trying to do the HN thing of explaining why your open/closed source analogy was super brilliant, and my response was reductive and clueless, please consider that societies are composed of living people and software is composed of 1s and 0s.
If they had access to better data they wouldn't have to do it arbitrarily and could more accurately target problematic people. I believe there isn't room for doing it arbitrarily as from my perspective it is a suboptimal strategy towards accomplishing one's goals.
>please consider that societies are composed of living people and software is composed of 1s and 0s.
I am not interested in making an emotional argument. I would be willing to hold my belief regardless of what a system is made up of.
One’s goals? And if my goal were to enslave a nation of people to enrich myself and maintain power for as long as possible?
> I am not interested in making an emotional argument. I would be willing to hold my belief regardless of what a system is made up of.
You cannot discuss governance and civilization design without emotional arguments - i mean i guess you can you can if you lean psychopathic. I don’t mean to name call so please correct my assumptions here what you mean.
Closed societies are tolerable in theory - but in theory people should be able to opt-in or opt-out. If they aren’t free to opt-out such as with a national closed society it’s not civilization, it’s slavery.
Yes, wherever it is criminal to improve the wellbeing or support progress of society, I support the ability of people to be criminals.
Rosa Parks wasn't allowed to sit at the front of the bus. Criminal.
I doubt MLK had a permit for every march. Criminal.
I doubt the founding fathers were legally allowed to oppose the British taxes. Criminals.
A society with no crime is a dystopia.
The law does not, by default, prosecute all crimes. There is no country in the world that has even close to the law enforcement capacity to investigate and prosecute all crimes. What tends to happen instead is crimes that to put it colliquially, "piss off the wrong people" get prosecuted. ie, crimes that draw attention of either the general public or specific people in power.
A reasonable approximation is single digit or less of crimes get investigated and prosecuted, with it obviously being high for violent and visible crimes like murder and lower for less violent and visible crimes like stealing the office paperclips.
Another way of looking at this is, in the current system, if your house get burgled, you need to report it to the police if you expect anything to happen, whereas one could imagine another system where the police already know your house has been burgled and you don't need to report it.
So they roll up on the guy and put him in the squad car and see if he’ll admit (or have the stuff on him) and when he doesn’t, release him hours or the next day.
If you want to do it, get a warrant.
Or from a different direction: if your method of analysis leads you to believe a HN contributor “want to enable people to be criminals” based on their policy preference about KYC, you’re not taking the discussion seriously.
Which is why people who want to be able to always do activity X regardless of the law will make it infeasable to enforce a ban on X and will try and oppose anything that would make it easier.
To use the US as an example (I doubt other countries are much better) it's estimated that every adult in the US commits multiple Federal felonies per day[1], Federal law is replete with ridiculous laws[2] and the number of federal laws is uncountable by Congressional Research Service staff. Does it matter at that point?
[1] Three Felonies A Day - ISBN 978-1594035227
That's not a serious estimate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43744267
Someone who smokes weed daily in a place where it's illegal could easily commit multiple crimes a day just for drug possession and consumption, for example.
There is no state where cannabis derivatives are federally legal.
[1]: https://decider.com/2022/01/04/is-it-federal-crime-to-share-...
> In 2016, the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that sharing online passwords is a crime prosecutable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Nosal
>A few months after leaving Korn/Ferry, Nosal solicited three Korn/Ferry employees to help him start a competing executive search business. Before leaving the company, the employees downloaded a large volume of "highly confidential and proprietary" data from Korn/Ferry's computers, including source lists, names, and contact information for executives.
Extending that ruling to netflix password sharing is a stretch.
Moreover you can't say "I can think of one activity that many americans do is a felony", and then apply induction on it to claim that the other activities americans due surely contain felonies.
>That's probably another 1/6 at least. Now it's 1/3 of the country.
That's only true if you assume the population of weed smoker and netfilx watchers don't intersect, which is... doubtful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
at any rate possession of Marijuana or other controlled substances does not mean that one uses them, so lots of people are theoretically in possession because they give someone a ride that has drugs with them.
To begin with, let's not ignore how broad a category "small business" is. Laws requiring health inspections or licenses etc. often operate on the basis of frequency or number of patrons. If you have around a dozen people over for movie night every Saturday with the event published on social media and you all chip in for pizza, are you a food service business? For that matter, is that a public performance in violation of copyright?
If some criminals break into one of your devices or your personal website while you're traveling and you find out about it while you're out of state but don't have time to deal with it until you get back home, have you committed a crime? What if they put some illegal materials there and you clean off the device but still have a backup containing the illegal materials? What if you do delete all of them right away; is that destruction of evidence? What if there's a federal law against keeping the materials and a state law against destruction of evidence and a very specific way to comply with both of them at the same time that may not have been clearly decided by the appellate court when it was happening but has been decided by the time they bring the case against you? What if it was clear ahead of time but wasn't intuitive and you can't afford a lawyer and can't have one appointed until after you've been charged?
It's unreasonable to expect ordinary people to be able to navigate this.
That's what courts are for. I don't think there's any case where people tried to prosecute a shared movie night as a business, because it'd be laughed out of court. Same goes for whether it's copyright infringement or not. Moreover if you look at how authoritarian regimes work in practice, dissents are often prosecuted under national security laws, campaign finance violations, or libel laws, not because they violated the health code by having a movie night.
But that exotic case is not that much needed. Laws will be abused by the powers whenever they want; you don’t need to look farther than the current USA administration and how the president is using war powers to treat poor laborers as enemy combatants and send them to concentration camps. And yet, USA’s system of government was designed in a way that should have prevented the executive to abuse power; why it has failed is another (difficult) discussion, but the founding fathers seemed well acquainted with the despotism of other nations.
[^1]: https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20090828/cuba-detiene-a-disiden...
That isn't really how courts work. If you're violating the letter of the law then you are breaking the law and an actual impartial judge would enforce it against you. In practice whether they let you get away with it is based in significant part on whether or not they like you. If the judge doesn't like the administration then maybe they do like you. But if the judge doesn't like you for the same reason the administration doesn't like you then you're going to jail. And it shouldn't have to depend on that; we shouldn't have laws that people are constantly in technical violation of so that the only thing keeping anyone out of jail is prosecutorial discretion and judicial affinity.
Meanwhile you can characterize anything in a negative light. A random home kitchen typically isn't going to meet the standards for commercial operation and the prosecutor's press release isn't going to say "we're prosecuting our enemies for movie night", it's going to say "defendants were operating a for-profit restaurant in violation of zoning rules and storing uncooked meat above fish in the freezer used for storing food sold for resale in violation of the health code" and then stick them with a fine that would make them lose their house.
> Moreover if you look at how authoritarian regimes work in practice, dissents are often prosecuted under national security laws, campaign finance violations, or libel laws, not because they violated the health code by having a movie night.
When the dictator of petrolistan wants to retaliate against their enemies and those laws are available for that, sure.
When the mayor of some US town wants to do the same thing, they might very well resort to health code violations that wouldn't have otherwise been enforced.
Deterrents well short of political executions are still very much official misconduct.
Exceeding the driving speed limit is more of an "infraction" and not a crime until it becomes reckless.