https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory
This is like arguing if "heater on" or "AC on" is better, which is a pointless argument. That entirely depends on what the temperature is!
Thanks for the link.
This is the usual "the market will regulate itself" argument. It works when the imbalance arises organically, not so much when it's intentional on the side with more power and part of their larger roadmap.
The conflict of interest needs to be accounted for. Consequences for whom? Think of initiatives like any generic backdooring of encrypted communication but legislators are exempt. If legislators aren't truly dogfooding the results of that law then there's no real "market pressure" to fix anything. There's only "deployment strategy", roll out the changes slowly enough that the people have time to acclimate.
Control theory doesn't apply all that well to dynamical systems made entirely of human beings. You need psychohistory for that.
Bizarrely horrible approach. A lot of damage would already be done, most importantly changing the status quo is inherently much harder than doing nothing. So going back won’t necessarily be straightforward.
Claiming that “slippery slope” is always a fallacy is a gross misconception and misinterpretation. It varies case by case, very often it can be a perfectly rational argument.
“Let’s restrict democracy and individual freedoms just a bit, maybe an authoritarian strongman is just what we need to get us out of this mess, we can always go back later..”
“Let’s try scanning all personal communication in a non intrusive way, if it doesn’t solve CSAM problems we can always adjust the law”, right.. as if that was ever going to happen.
Some lines need to be drawn that can never be crossed regardless of any good and well reasoned intentions.
Too late. We already let the government cross the lines during Covid with freedom of movement and freedom of speech restrictions, and they got away with it because it was "for your protection". Now a lot of EU countries are crossing them even more also "for your protection" due to "Russian misinformation" and "far right/hate speech" scaremongering, which at this point is a label applied loosely to anyone speaking against unpopular government policies or exposing their corruption.
And the snowball effect continues. Governments are only increasing their grip on power(looking enviously at what China has achieved), not loosening it back. And worse, not only are they more authoritarian, but they're also practicing selective enforcement of said strict rules with the justification that it's OK because we're doing it to the "bad guys". I'm afraid we aren't gonna go back to the levels of freedom we had in 2014- 2019, that ship has long sailed.
I very heavily disagree here, we aren't doing as much of this as we should be.
Society is too complex of a system to predict what consequences a law will have. Badly written laws slip through. Loopholes are discovered after the fact. Incentives do what incentives do, and people eventually figure out how to game them to their own benefit. First order effects cause second order effects, which cause third order effects. Technology changes. We can't predict all of that in advance.
Trying to write a perfect law is like trying to write a perfect program on your first try, with no testing and verification, just reasoning about it in a notebook. If the code or law is of any complexity, it just can't be done. Programmers have figured this out and came up with ways to mitigate the problem, from unit testing and formal verification to canaries, feature flags, blue-green deployments and slow rollouts. Lawmakers could learn those same lessons (and use very similar strategies), but that is very rarely done.
Either it is possible to easy change law to make it worse ("slippery slope" is valid objection) or changing law is "much harder than doing nothing"("slippery slope" is a fallacy).
Control Theory does not work (in the general) for politics for the simple reason that incentives are misaligned. That is to say that control theory itself obviosuly works, but for it to be a good solution in some political context you must additionally prove the existance of some Nash equilibrium where it is being correctly applied.
Edit: See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs (CGP Grey - Why Do All Governments Work the Same Way?)
The thesis argues that dictators regularly both harm groups clearly inside the winning coalition, and please groups clearly outside of it. A common, but not the only reason, is ideology.
One has to be careful when using game-theory models on messy human entities. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and it's hard to determine just at what point the model breaks down. At least without empirical research.
(Another example is that actual negotiation outcomes rarely end up at the minimax or Nash product equilibria that game theory sequential negotiation concepts would suggest.)
Perhaps not when it comes to matters like these.
I think the problem here is more that _some_ people want the heater to be on and _other_ people want the heater to be off.
One group has a lot more money, power, and influence than the other.
Humm.. that was supposed to be a joke but our law making dev team isn't all that productive to put it mildly. Perhaps some of that bloat would be a good thing until we are brave enough to do the full rewrite.
The world's complicated. "Every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, and wrong"
Simplicity is a laudable goal, but it's not always the one thing to optimize for.
Code is first and foremost for human consumption. The compiler's job is to worry about appeasing the machine.
(Of course, that's the normative ideal. In practice, the limits of compilers sometimes requires us to appease the architectural peculiarities of the machine, but this should be seen as an unfortunate deviation and should be documented for human readers when it occurs.)
Tangentially, it continues to frustrate me that C code organization directly impacts performance. Want to factorize that code? Pay the cost of a new stack frame and potentially non-local jump (bye, ICache!). Want it to not do that? Add more keywords ('inline') and hope the compiler applies them.
(I kind of understand the reason for this. Code Bloat is a thing, and if everything was inlined the resulting binary would be 100x bigger)
Regarding code size, it's not just that binary becomes larger, it's that overly aggressive inlining can actually have a detrimental effect on performance for a number of reasons.
As in, you can pretend hardware doesn't exist but that doesn't actually change anything about the hardware. So, you are then forced to design around the hardware without knowing that's necessarily what you're doing.
Exhibit A: distributed systems. Why do people keep building distributed systems? Monoliths running on one big machine are much simpler to handle.
People keep building distributed systems because they don't understand, and don't want to understand, hardware. They want to abstract everything, have everything in it's own little world. A nice goal.
But in actuality, abstracting everything is very hard. And the hardware doesn't just poof disappear. You still need network calls. And now everything is a network call. And now you're coordinating 101 dalmatians. And coordination is hard. And caching is hard. And source of truth is hard. And recovery is hard. All these problems are hard, and you're choosing to do them, because computer hardware is scary and we'd rather program for some container somewhere and string, like, 50 containers together.
You're missing the point. Code is separable from hardware per se, even if practically they typically co-occur and practical concerns about the latter leak into the former. The hardware is in the service of our code, not our code in service of the hardware. Targeting hardware is not, in fact, the most straightforward option, because you're destroying portability and obscuring the code's meaning with tangential architectural minutiae and concerns that are distracting.
> you can pretend hardware doesn't exist but that doesn't actually change anything about the hardware
You're mischaracterizing my claim. I didn't say hardware doesn't matter. Tools matter - and their particular limitations are sometimes felt by devs acutely - but they're not the primary focus.
My claim was that code is PRIMARILY for human consumption, and it is. It is written to be read by a person first and foremost. Unreadable, but functioning code is worthless. Otherwise, why have programming languages at all? Even C is preposterously high-level if code isn't for human consumption. Heck, even assembly semantics is full of concepts that have no objective reality in the hardware, or concepts with no direct counterpart in hardware. Hardware concerns only enter the picture secondarily, because the code must be run on it. Hardware concerns are a practical concession to the instrument.
So, in practice, you may need to be concerned with the performance/memory characteristics of your compiled code on a particular architecture (which is actually knowledge of the compiler and how well it targets the hardware in question with respect to your implementation). Compilers generally outperform human optimizations, of course, and at best, you will only be using a general knowledge of your architecture when deciding how to structure your implementation. And you will be doing this indirectly via the operational semantics of the language you're using, as that is as much control as you will have over how the hardware is used in that language.
> Exhibit A: distributed systems. Why do people keep building distributed systems? Monoliths running on one big machine are much simpler to handle.
In principle, you can write your code as a monolith, and your language's compiler can handle the details of distributing computation. This is up to the language's semantics. Think of Erlang for inspiration.
> People keep building distributed systems because they don't understand, and don't want to understand, hardware.
Unless you're talking about people who misuse "Big Data" tech when all they need is a reasonably fast bash script, that's not why good developers build distributed systems. Even then, it's not some special ignorance of hardware that leads to use of distributed systems when they're not necessary, but some kind of ignorance of their complexity and an ignorance of the domain the dev is operating in and whether it benefits from a distributed design.
> But in actuality, abstracting everything is very hard. And the hardware doesn't just poof disappear. You still need network calls. And now everything is a network call. And now you're coordinating 101 dalmatians. And coordination is hard. And caching is hard. And source of truth is hard. And recovery is hard. All these problems are hard, and you're choosing to do them, because computer hardware is scary and we'd rather program for some container somewhere and string, like, 50 containers together.
This is neither here nor there. Not only are "network calls" and "caching" and so on abstractions, they're not hardware concerns. Hardware allows us to simulate these abstractions, but whatever limits the hardware imposes are - you guessed it - reflected in the abstractions of your language and your libraries. And more importantly, none of this has any relevance to my claim.
i’d rather something a bit more verbose and clear than cryptic and confusing. there are many actors in the world with different brains.
(joke)
Unenforceable laws go unenforced, undefined behaviour is undefined and varies based on compiler (law enforcement agency or officer).
Think about how hard it is to write code that has no bugs. Now imagine you're using English and working with a system with so many parameters and side effects that you can't possibly anticipate all eventualities.
And now you want to rigidly apply your operators to this parameter space?
Selective enforcement is necessary for justice, because no law is perfectly just, and selective enforcement helps move toward justice.
It unfortunately also means there is the eventuality of corruption. So you just have to keep vigilant. Because a rigid system with no selective enforcement has no fix for injustice other than "live with it."
That doesn’t seem to be working.
I argue there’s an acceptable level of corruption, only the particular flavours change from time to time.
Come out of government better off than when you when in. Fine, good on ya. No need to tells us about how you’re going about it while you’re going about it.
Learn to be at least a little bit discreet, and at least do something occasionally that comes across as good for the average person.
The world isn't black and white. Flexibility, including selective enforcement, is necessary in a just system.
But the history of selective enforcement strongly suggests that it does not usually lead to just results. It is often instead something that unaccountable officials find themselves easily able to exploit for questionable purposes.
For a notable example, witness how selective enforcement during the War on Drugs was used to justify mass incarceration of blacks, even though actual rates of drug usage were similar in black and white communities.
Yep, and while we fix that bad law we need judges to be able to say "I won't apply that" or "I won't sentence you to jail for this". That's kinda the point.
Allowing judges to not enforce bad laws turns them into unelected legislators. It's also worse from a corruption perspective because a single bought judge in the right place is much more cost effective than having to buy a new randomly selected jury at every trial.
By that measure every law is a bad law.
All laws are in some degree bad; perfect laws do not exist.
Some laws are useful and produce more good than harm in the concrete situation in which they exist.
Should laws be improved where possible? Yes. Does the need for selective enforcement indicate a problem? Yes. Does it provide sufficient information to determine the precise form of a better law to replace the one it shows a problem with? Very rarely.
Source: https://iep.unibocconi.eu/europes-internal-tariffs-why-imfs-...
How do you estimate the cost of regulations on businesses? You ask businesses. Businesses have absolutely zero incentive to say that regulations are not bad. "Just in case", they will say it hurts them.
That is, until there is a de facto monopoly and they can't compete anymore, and at that point they start lobbying like crazy for... more regulations. Look at the drone industry: a chinese company, DJI, is light-years ahead of everybody else. What have US drone companies been doing in the last 5+ years? Begging for regulations.
All that to say, it is pretty clear that no regulations is bad, and infinitely many regulations is bad. Now what's extremely difficult is to know what amount of regulation is good. And even that is simplistic: it's not about an amount of regulation, it depends on each one. The cookie hell is not a problem of regulations, it's a problem of businesses being arseholes. They know it sucks, they know they don't do anything with those cookies, but they still decide that their website will start with a goddamn cookie popup because... well because the sum of all those good humans working in those businesses results in businesses that are, themselves, big arseholes.
Shame we can’t regulate the quality of regulations.
That's an executive order (regulation) requiring proposed regulations undergo a cost-benefit analysis before being promulgated.
It's why we got mandated backup cameras in cars: the cost-benefit analysis revealed the cost to have these in every new car was dwarfed by the cost in human lives of all the kids who were being run over in driveways bc they weren't visible behind cars.
I was somewhat disappointed, however, to aee that this applies only to "major rules" from "executive agencies" and as such doesn't seem to apply to an executive order. There would have been some recursive satisfaction to see EO12291 itself tested by its own standard.
Your overall point is solid, but I'd like to what I think is another reason that businesses could desire regulation. You're right that a dominant business can use its political power to "regulatory capture" its market and prevent new entrants, but I believe this isn't limited to uncompetitive markets.
Regulation can also prevent "arms races" by acting like explicit collusion. A straightforward example is competitive advertising in a saturated market, like cigarettes. Under the rough assumption that cigarettes are all equivalent and most potential smokers already smoke, then competitve advertising cuts into the profit margin, and companies have to participate or lose out. If you ban advertising then it's as if the bosses all got together and agreed not to compete like that. See e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31547234/
Per https://iep.unibocconi.eu/europes-internal-tariffs-why-imfs-..., the model treats shopping local as evidence of the existence of a trade barrier, as opposed to a rational preference based on cultural and environmental considerations. This is why the numbers are ridiculously high. (Is there a 120% implicit tariff for textiles? Or do people just prefer warm clothes in the north and breezy clothes in the Mediterranean?)
There's no reason to expect the warm clothes to be made in the north and the cool clothes to be made in the south.
European people also still have a much stronger national identity than a European identity, especially compared to the US with state vs. country level.
The translation infrastructure is huge, and reasonable-quality machine translation⁰ has been freely available for years now.
I don't mean to refute your experience, but I am suprised by the claim, because it's really not what I've seen here. Could you give some more detail on what you mean.
⁰ EU procedure means there are some notable absences in the list, but it's pretty comprehensive once you include citizens' second languages. See https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
All of this is correct, and that's why the single market for goods (except for booze and tobacco) has been such a massive success. However, lots of growth (particularly in the US) comes from services, and for this, languages matter a lot more.
Sure, lots of continental Europeans speak multiple languages, but the vast discrepancies in languages and regulations (insolvency, capital markets etc) means that there are dis-economies of scale in the EU. Like, there's a reason that companies start selling in their home market and then move directly to the US.
A common language can't be assumed across the EU, while other large blocs (China, US) can make this assumption which is important for services trades in particular, as well as bespoke goods trade.
(This despite Ireland and Malta having it as an official language, and the Nordics often having better English skills than natives.)
Come to Ireland, we have Guinness!
coats have gotten higher, but across the board for different countries
And that is just one of many new regulations.
If an unethical business gets started due to underregulation and it generates revenue and contributes to GDP, is that a good thing?
Deregulated gambling has had a horrible impact on individuals. Repealing Glass—Steagall led to a global financial crisis. Gig economy businesses are exploiting workers by the thousands through self employment loopholes. We have insane monopolistic pricing and practices in the US in eg the telecom industry. Worst of all is that we’ve likely doomed the entire planet based on what is effectively too little environmental regulation.
Yes, but gambling and all vices for that matter, are a centuries old issue that's well studied and well understood by everyone, while AI(hate that term in this case) LLMs are only an issue since November 2022, while most influential politicians are dumbass boomers who don't understand how a PC or the internet works let alone how LLMs work but yet are expected to make critical decisions on these topics.
So then it's safe to assume that the politicians will either fudge up the regulations due to sheer cluelessness, or they will just make decisions based on what their most influential corporate lobbyists will tell them. Either way it's bad.
Let's not be overly pedantic and overly Pius on petty semantics like that. It was clear from my original comment, the context of what I was talking about.
E.g. "if a decision cannot be explained by a human, it should bot be done by a machine" applies to them, too.
Basically, if you read the EU AI Act for example, it's hard to find anything you'd disagree with regardless of whether it's about ML, LLMs or three if statements in a trench coat.
Of course the industry is up in arms about it (just like GDPR)
Actually, around here they are giving a second chance to people whom over-regulation of the work market made too expensive to hire.
> insane monopolistic pricing and practices in the US in eg the telecom industry
It's actually regulations deterring competition in telecom who are responsible to those practices.
It goes like this: (well intended) regulation => raise price of doing business => fewer startups => less competition => incumbents enjoying practically monopoly => incumbents behaving like monopolistic a-holes.
> too little environmental regulation
In China. You forgot "in China". That is where most of that planet dooming is happening. Good luck promoting environmental regulation there.
Over-regulation being what, minimum wages? Coverage for basic social safety nets? ‘Cause that’s what we lost.
> It goes like this: (well intended) regulation => raise price of doing business => fewer startups => less competition => incumbents enjoying practically monopoly => incumbents behaving like monopolistic a-holes.
Bell system was broken up into seven different companies, thanks to regulation. It’s _lack_ of regulation that let telecoms merge together into behemoths. There _are_ small ISPs and telecoms in the US, they just can’t compete due to the size differential.
> In China. You forgot "in China". … Good luck promoting environmental regulation there.
Right, let’s jump for a Tu Quoque. China is destroying the planet so who cares what we do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m not blind to the existence of plain bad regulation, regulatory barriers and capture — but the overwhelming majority of these arguments have just been used to make regular people’s lives’ worse.
“Cheap housing isn’t being built in the UK because regulation makes it more expensive!” -> remove regulations -> there’s still no cheap housing but anything from 1990s onwards is now also badly built.
As a construction developer I’m sure I’d say there’s still too much regulation though. Gotta bump those margins.
One easy example is regulation making it hard to fire people. Then, naturally, firms will hire just as hard. The tradeoff is thus between a healthy, fast, dynamic and competitive job market with plenty of opportunities but with job insecurity and - fewer jobs, smaller salaries but the lazy unproductive bum slowing everybody down is now impossible to get rid of.
Yes, minimum wage is another. In effect it makes people whose work is worth less than the minimum wage - legally unemployable.
> Bell system
Bell system was a monopoly thanks to government regulation in the first place. The government actually passed a law that made illegal to connect a 3rd party telephone to Bell's network!
Yes, you need more regulation when your regulation f'd up a market. In free markets competition keeps market participants honest and even breaks monopolies. This is why one of the first regulation incumbents lobby for is meant to deter competition.
> Cheap housing isn’t being built in the UK
I do not live in the UK, but I am willing to bet everything that there is still a ton of regulation stopping building there. Last summer I visited London during a heat wave. We were sweating in our AirBnB, complained to the owner but he answered that he couldn't install an A/C because he wasn't allowed to change the building facade...
There are some "mosquito" businesses that imho provide no net value and we'd be better off if they didn't exist (c.f. Bastiat's window breaker⁰). For example; payday loans, gadget insurance, MLMs, f2p games. The trouble is that there is an apparent need they're meeting, and nobody wants to "destroy jobs" or even worry too hard about exploiting the vulnerable.
Even if I were emperor and believed hese businesses were unjustifiably bad, I'd be worried about the authoritarian consequences of shutting down the less egregious ones. I'd also hope to have the humility to entertain the idea that I don't understand their full benefits.
In conclusion I think it's bad to have unethical businesses, and that even if they make the indicator go up, they are probably a net negative on the economy and society. However, I don't know what's to be done about it.
⁰ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
(Coda: You might say that's impossible, and local loan sharks will spring up to meet the need. That's probably true, but at least those guys merely break your legs, rather than advertising incessantly on daytime tv.)
Privacy is in a different category altogether, but there's more to think about than just how much things cost companies.
Maybe I should have used dumping waste in a river and paying workers below minimum wage as examples. Profits could go up, but most people would agree it should still be illegal.
What have we gained by framing it as such other than an extremely biased take pro unregulated business?
Yeah, regulation generally tries to do good but that is going to be little consolation when EU's economy will go broke because all products and services we consume are build in less-regulated territories (USA and China to be specific).
Oh no. How are you going to build your new ChatGPT wrapper without selling user data to thousands of "privacy-preserving partners"?
GDPR (and a very small number of other applicable regulations) are somewhere between place 1000 and 1500 of things that hinder startups. And unless you are a complete moron those regulations will maybe apply to you when you reach 10 million+ users.
No. GDPR was presented as a company ending regulation. You make a mistake - you are doomed. The fines are in revenue percentages. User data was said to be "toxic". You touch it, you better know what you are doing or else.
This kind of regulation has a strong chilling effect on the budding founder. Countless web-startups were never created because the most common monetization model (ads) became basically illegal (for European startups only, US/Chinese competitors kept enjoying full freedom).
> and a very small number of other applicable regulations
But it's not a small number. And regulations have a cumulative effect. See, startups are like distance running. You know it's a hard thing, but you believe you can try to do it. But then regulations are like potholes. You run around a few, but the more potholes to avoid the harder the run, until your main job turns from running to avoiding potholes. Then you simply say "why bother" and give up.
The more regulations you have, the more obstacles you put in front of startups, the fewer young people choose the entrepreneur path and decide to just get some bureaucratic job instead.
This is the tragedy we are living in the EU right now, in the clapping of bureaucrats who never build a product or service in their entire life and do not understand what those damn entrepreneurs are complaining about.
Bullshit
> You make a mistake - you are doomed. The fines are in revenue percentages.
Tell me you didn't even read a line of GDPR in the past 9 years or know anything about European regulations without telling me
> This kind of regulation has a strong chilling effect on the budding founder.
A moron who gets their advice from ads industry, sensationalist headlines and HN? Perhaps.
> But it's not a small number.
It is.
> The more regulations you have, the more obstacles you put in front of startups
GDPR is not an obstacle. It quite literally is "do not scrape user data and sell it to third parties without user consent".
> in the clapping of bureaucrats who never build a product or service in their entire life and do not understand what those damn entrepreneurs are complaining about.
Yeah, "entrepreneurs" complain about a lot, and then make a surprised pikachu face when they are told in no uncertain terms that no, sending precise geolocation data to third parties to store for 12 years is not okay: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
As a matter of fact, I am the founder&owner of a small ISV (nothing ad, privacy, crypto or AI-related) in the Eastern EU. Everything I am telling about European regulations comes from dozens of years of direct, painful, personal experience.
How about you?
> Everything I am telling about European regulations comes from dozens of years of direct, painful, personal experience.
Strange that you then spew absolute bullshit about GDPR.
> How about you?
I've worked in large multinational corporations (banking, streaming) that were "hit" with GDPR and spent several years making sure they are compliant. Not because GDPR is bad, but because no one really cared about the data collected, and where it ended up. [1]
Startups had it and have it easy since they can just not siphon all the data. Especially now, when you have all the tools to handle data properly. Hell, a decade ago you couldn't even get privacy-preserving analytics. Now you're drowning in them.
We're also preparing to launch a few (admittedly small scale) projects with friends, and what do you know? GDPR is the absolute last thing that even bothers us. You know why? We know what data to collect and for how long to store it, and we're not sending that data to thousands of "privacy-preserving partners".
"Company-destroying fines" boogeyman or whatever other "chilling effect" bullshit belongs in the mind of children and morons. Hell, I've seen banking regulators come, list issues, and give a deadline to fix them. Much less GDPR.
[1] That's not entirely true. Payment and payment-adjacent regulations are significantly more stringent than GDPR, so everything related to that was and is extremely serious. As anything related to things like "data of persons under state protection". It's never black and white.
However, in big companies, especially at the time, you would eventually end up with a lot of data duplicated across many systems, often barely connected. 10 years ago cleaning up that mess required companies to reverse engineer and document 10-15 years of bad/hasty/adhoc decisions and assumptions. Surprisingly often that resulted in just retiring certain internal microservices wholesale (they just were no longer needed) and/or significantly reducing bandwidth and storage requirements in certain cases (because you no longer cary and store heavy duplicate objects around).
So the main opposition to GDPR came not from "poor chilled startups", but from companies like Facebook and Google who rely on 24/7 surveillance exclusively, ad industry, and large corporations who didn't want to deal with cleaning up internal messes.
Normally I'm against overrgulation, but when it comes to privacy more fine for big corp is need if ANY violation is found. Rather NOT have AI than compromise on privacy.
Most of us actually don't mind losing a little privacy to read a news article when faced with the alternative of paying money or that news website ceasing to exist at all.
But, hey, keep pushing your warped privacy sense onto all of us, I am sure you are right.
BTW, when presented with clear non-dark-pattern choice 96% of people opt-out of "losing a little privacy": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...
There is no universal measure for that, only each individual can answer the question for herself. GDPR is robbing people of that chance though.
> Is this a small amount
For me, yes. I already have a device in my pocket reporting my exact location to a private company at all times and I accepted that a long time ago.
> 96% of people opt-out
I bet they would chose very differently when the alternative is to pay or stop using the product. Just look how many people use privacy-destroying fidelity cards in supermarkets for some measly discounts.
How exactly? GDPR is quite literally "you can ask people for their consent to give you their data".
> I already have a device in my pocket reporting my exact location to a private company at all times and I accepted that a long time ago.
There's a difference between "one company" and "thousands of companies". And yes, there's an expectation that the company doesn't sell that location data which even in the US results in lawsuits: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-court-upholds-ve...
> I bet they would chose very differently when the alternative is to pay or stop using the product.
False dichotomy. You don't need 24/7 suveilance to show ads or monetise products.
Patently untrue. Under GDPR you are not allowed to withhold your services from users refusing to give you "their" data. Their opt-out costs them nothing.
This is what you pretend to care about: "There is no universal measure for [what small amount of privacy constitutes], only each individual can answer the question for herself."
What you actually want (and what is actually happens): "users are not given no privacy whatsoever and every single scrap o user data has to siphoned off and sold to the highest bidder, and the false alternative should be for users to pay to preserve their privacy". That is basically what Facebook is arguing.
So. First you define what "small amount of privacy" is, and put a price on that. And then present users with a choice. Or skip the pretence.
Our ancestors survived perfectly fine with telephone directories dropped at every house for free which contained everyone's name and address.
Are you sure someone knowing your address is that bad?
It's bo longer just "your home address".
Yeah but our ancestors also doesn't amount of processing power that the current big corps have. Constrain what big corp can collect personal data is beneficial for average users in current day and age.
It would be much cheaper and pro-business to let them collect everything and secure nothing.
When we let structural regulations assert protective conditions on a market, we try to advantage proactive harm reduction at the cost of innovation, because artificial market limitations will be barriers to innovation and create secondary game conditions that advantage some players.
Which way we lean should depend on the type and severity of potential harms, especially with consideration of how permanent or non-reversible those harms are.
People bemoan bureaucracy (which is a totally fair criticism) without understanding its deeper meaning:
Bureaucracy is how it works
That's it. Digital government is also bureaucracy. Applying to YC is also bureaucracy.
Of course the meaning drifted with the times, but it still means that
First definition here https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bureaucr...
Yes, some regulations will result in outcomes most might want and others may result in outcomes most don't want. In both cases, though, everyone not in power has to accept that they gave up some level of free will in hopes that those in charge will always wield that power well.
On one end we have regulations as part of regulatory capture. Opposite effect of regulations that would help say a small business compete fairly.
Nuance and sober analysis like you've suggested do not mix well with religious dogma. It's much easier for people to react emotionally to symbols.
For many here, 'GDPR' is a variable that equals 'privacy' in their brain computer. So any criticism of it or its implementation realities, no matter how well argued, will not be met with reasoned response, but instead religious zeal.
My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in.
So I went to the source, and I found it surprisingly easy to read and quite clear.
I think theres a lot of bad faith discussion about the GDPR being complex by people who have a financial interest in people disliking it (or, parroting what someone else said).
Heres the full text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read.
That's some serious speed reading! :-)
Or perhaps they also never read the law they are chiding others for not reading.
The text is 56k words, novella length but dry and tedious. This is hours of reading.
I’m not saying it’s unreasonable to read this document if your work involves GDPR compliance. But this is not a quick or easy read.
I’m not lying, why would I provide the source if I was?
You also didn’t read 56k words in 20 minutes. This is nonsense, at 46 words per second.
and yes it took 20 minutes, it’s not the dense legalese you’re implying.
it’s just not. unless the dense one here is not the text.
What I cannot believe is that you would in any way imagine that this is normal. Speed readers know that they read faster than other people and do not casually assume others could read The Hobbit in 34 minutes.
So no, I don’t actually believe you read this in 20 minutes, at >4 pages per minute, >46 words per second, and 10x faster than an average reader. Generously I would say you perhaps skimmed the doc in that time.
On the off chance that this is true, again congrats. You should know for the future that your experience reading does not map to the typical person who literally reads about 10x slower than you.
Jesus Christ, it’s like talking to a brick wall.
The amount of effort I’ve spent replying to you is more than was necessary to understand the entire fucking text.
Every statement is very clear what they’re saying, don’t record what you don’t need, how do you define what you need, make sure personal information can be deleted, what constitutes personal information.
It’s really really really fucking easy, like dude; you’re halfway through a sentence you know exactly what they’re getting at. You finish it anyway in case there’s an exception or something, and it’s never the case that there is.
Whatever… you believe whatever the fuck you wanna believe don’t call me a fucking liar though you cunt.
That the other replies to you said basically the same should clue you in that this is not realistic for others even if it were realistic for you.
> don’t call me a fucking liar though you cunt.
You could have easily just walked your claim back and said “Okay, 20 minutes is an exaggeration but it’s not a hard law to read”. Instead you repeatedly doubled down and backed yourself into a corner where the only possible options are that you are an ultra speed reader at 10x normal pace or you are a liar.
Not my problem if you don’t like those options.
Normally one tries to hire lawyers that have read the law and formed an opinion already…
The full text of GDPR is 261 pages long with 99 articles and 173 recitals. Here's a condensed version and guide to reading the actual passages that matter, still 88 pages long: https://www.enterpriseready.io/gdpr/how-to-read-gdpr/#:~:tex...
And even if it was, being easy to read is not necessarily good when it comes to regulation, because this means there is a WIDE berth for interpretation by court cases and judges. This becomes a shifting target that makes compliance impossible.
For example, you could write a one sentence net-zero law that says "All economic activity in the EU must be net zero by tomorrow."
However, what constitutes economic activty? Is heating my home in the winter economic activity? What if I work from home? What about feeding my children food? What about suppliers and parts from outside the EU? Finished goods vs. raw materials? How will we audit the supply chains on each globally? Who will enforce those audits and how detailed do they need to be? Etc. etc.
To these questions, the religious green fanatics on EcoHackerNews will simply reply: it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!
What you need to realize is that of course companies hate regulations. Every company, anywhere on Earth, will tell you regulation X is bad. All of them. They will do everything they can possibly do to not have the regulation.
When slavery was outlawed in the US, you can bet your ass that every single bad-faith recreation of slavery was tried. Many of them highly successful, and some taking over 100 years (yes, really!) to be fixed.
What that means is that, just because a company puts up a cookie banner, or says "this law sucks", doesn't mean you should take that to heart. Of course, to them, it sucks, and it's too complicated, and it's all legalese, and la dee da. They would prefer to hire children, okay? And we know that, for a fact, because they did. So just, grain of salt.
Doesn't mean the law is good either, but just know these are the adversarial forces here.
Have you missed all the large AI companies in US loudly demanding and otherwise lobbying for more regulation?
Regulations can be good for companies when you can make sure that they are written in a way that entrenches them against any new competitors.
It allows them to force startups to match their (slow) pace of development.
My feeling is that in 9 years you could read it.
However, I read most of the relevant bits in an afternoon. Most people on HN making preposterous claims about GDPR have never in their life read anything but industry's take on it.
> it's actually super easy to comply, you can read it yourself, it's one sentence!
It's trivial to comply with for the absolute vast majority of companies, you can very easily read it yourself, the bits that are relevant to most businesses shouldn't even take an hour to read.
I have seen people that are fanatical on privacy. Cheers to them!
Ok. I hereby do. The only complaint I have is that it isn't enforced automatically and that we often don't have a way to force the worst offenders, because they have the military we rely on on their side.
religion was classically politics. Moses's tablets were Law. the circle of life.
you didn't really say anything
Because in my mind, they are not. There are many, many people ideologically opposed to regulation. I've never met anyone ideologically opposed to auto repair, or even just opposed in general.
"i no longer consider these issues to be black and white [riffing on another comment], i now see it more nuanced, where some things need more of something and others need less of that thing. deep, no?"