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US Law Can't Keep Up With Technology -- and Why That's a Good Thing (newsweek.com)
HughPickens.com writes: In the 1910s, the number of cars in the US exploded from 200,000 to 2.5 million. The newfangled machines scared horses and ran over pedestrians, but by the time government could pass the very first traffic law, it was too late to stop them. Now Kevin Matley writes in Newsweek that thanks to political gridlock in the US, lawmakers respond to innovations with all the speed of continental drift. New technologies spread almost instantly and take hold with almost no legal oversight. According to Matley, this is terrific for tech startups, especially those aimed at demolishing creaky old norms—like taxis, or flight paths over crowded airspace, or money. "Drone aircraft are suddenly filling the sky, and a whole multibillion-dollar industry of drone making and drone services has taken hold," says Matley. "If the FAA had been either farsighted or fast moving, at the first sign of drones it might've outlawed them or confined them to someplace like Oklahoma where they can't get in the way of anything too important. But now the FAA is forced to accommodate drones, not the other way around." Bitcoin is another example of a technology that's too late to stop. "But have you heard the word bitcoin uttered once in any of the presidential debates? Government doesn't even understand bitcoin, and that's been really good for it." Uber and Airbnb show how to execute this outrun-the-government strategy. By the time cities understood what those companies were doing, it was too late to block or seriously limit them.
"But have you heard the word bitcoin uttered once in any of the presidential debates? "
Obviously not. What we did hear, is that politicians have still problems understanding email and that's technology in their 30ies.
Why should laws keep up with technology? Laws should be written in such a way that the technology involved doesn't matter. Typically laws should be about an outcome more than a method. There are already so many laws on the books that the first thing to look at is if an existing law applies. If not, is there a law that should be amended to cover the new technology?
Example: Highway speed limits are for all motor vehicles and not just a specific type of vehicle. It does not matter how many wheels (car, motorcycle, tractor trailer, etc) the car has, what type of the engine (gas, diesel, electric) is under the hood, what kind of transmission (auto, manual), or if if has some fancy new electronic accessory ... the speed limit is the speed limit.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Once again this drivel from a worshipper of The Church of Invisible Hands and Shrugging Atlases.
I do agree that laws are not always for the best. But there ends our agreement. The worst laws are those bought by "whole multibillion-dollar industr[ies]". The shrugging (should I say bribing?) Atlases.
hah, poor Oklahoma.
Someone doesn't understand how bitcoin works.
I don't think bitcoin is the best example to use for technology in a presidential debate. It isn't used by enough people. It does represent a way that something existed that there wasn't a law for and the fact that a presidential debate isn't the place to discuss these kinds of matters highlights the real issue: Representative democracy.
Now this is what the presidential debate should really be focused on, aside from all the other populist agendas on show, how do we use technology to create and electoral process for both national economies and the globalized world that is fair, secure and MORE EFFICIENT.
I'm a bit of a Luddite when it comes to technology despite reading slashdot several times per day, I don't have the time or the energy these days to go exploring every interesting new thing the way I did when I was a teenager and had a few hours free time per week at the expense of my parents. I've been using Linux all my adult life and have become used to being isolated from many newest and greatest new things, and subsequently became used to viewing the mainstream from a different perspective in other ways - essentially I am aware that politically I am a minority. This means the current electoral systems don't really give a result I see as valid, both in the sense of counting my input but really in even discussing the matters I think are important.
Social media allows us to form groups and follow topics and even hierarchies within these. The reality is that this is where most of the topics you want discussed about technology will occur. Only once a group is powerful enough (by numbers), or credible enough (has proven they are experts on the matter) will they be able to effect change. What needs to be taken out of all political systems is the ability to influence change with money. Democracy as I understand it was about giving equal say to equal people. The use of money in a political system is a clear statement that you are not equal, as an individual.
Bitcoin seeks to take the power away from governments using the very thing that has corrupted the political system, however this is also one of the very reasons it is unlikely you will ever see bitcoin discussed based on merit - if it is discussed it will be based on fear or as a weapon to dominate some other sovereign market.
It would be nice to have a system where daily several simple questions about current events, economics and technology for example were delivered to you to vote on in a form of unofficial direct democracy and truly representative detailed analysis of these subjects were discussed by the various departments/ministries in a detailed manner months before the election as the very first step towards the campaign trails. Instead of campaigns based on political spin it would anchor the politicians to the people and force them to discuss topics that mattered and allow the people to search for data and ask relevant questions that interested them along the way.
Modern democracy acknowledges our different views but technology has not yet delivered us a way to deliver it more effectively or even sort our views before delivering the vote. In reality an election should be a 3 hour multi choice exam. Some of it should be sections you have because you opted in due to interest, some of it should be sections you're qualified to answer and if you want you can abstain or just pick a proxy to vote on your behalf. This is what political parties are proxies with a predefined set of views. There are not just two views. Stating there are just to views on the myriad of topics that concern a government and its people is ridiculous. It is not efficient and it proves that in reality democracy is just one vote away from dictatorship, you are merely voting in the puppet leader, or assessing their performance, not actually having a say.
Further reason why esoteric technology discussions have nothing to do with politics.
And I haven't even begun to discuss the difficulty of legislating for things that do not yet exist.
It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. This is true with any sort of bureaucratic management system.
The only caveat is, it had better truly be an awesome thing that you're doing that will have the masses behind it. If it is something that just pisses off management/government, you have just stepped on your own dick wearing cleats, and will be screwed in short order.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Nope.
There is a long history (in New York anyway) of unlicensed gypsy cabs. Sometimes they get caught and are hit with heavy fines. I don't see how Uber is any different.
There is one way Uber is different - they are spending millions on lobbying governments. Take this job ad for example: https://www.uber.com/jobs/6280...
Lawmakers think that the role of government is to set explicit, concrete boundaries on every avenue of human action. Instead of abiding by a principle for government's role, like the defense of individual rights, they debate "what percentage tariff should be imposed on imported TVs from South Korea this year, so as to maximize competition and minimize harm to domestic labor unions." Or something equally disintegrated.
The latter mentality will never be able to keep up with the pace of change, and this will become increasingly evident as change accelerates. It will shine a bright light on how the "control everything" principle is fundamentally flawed, and how a principled approach to government's role is the only way to maintain a modern civilization.
someplace like Oklahoma where they can't get in the way of anything too important
Q) Why doesn't Texas fall off into the Gulf of Mexico?
A) Because Oklahoma sucks.
Just imagine the chinese coming and cashing in your debts. Your whole country would be out their houses.
The Fed would print enough dollars to pay them. There would be inflation, which would devalue the dollar. Most people would no longer be able to afford 'cheap' Chinese imports, because they'd now be very expensive and the Chinese economy would crash from having one of its two biggest markets suddenly disappear. Exports from the USA would suddenly become very cheap. Of, and all of the rich folk who had moved a load of their capital to Chinese investments would make a huge loss. Guess which of these reasons is why it hasn't happened.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
To be honest: O only have read the summary, but that was already dumb enough.
First regarding drones: for them apply more or less the same rules as for manned air crafts or more precisely all the secondary regulations regarding low flying stuff like kites, hobbyist baloons etc.
New regulation is IMHO only needed where small crafts are an anoyance ir dangerous and no current ruling (or common sense of the operators) keeps them in order.
Secondly, regarding bitcoins: there is big difference between a BitCoin and a hand written Cheque. If I give you a handwritten Queque, which is more or less a payment order to my bank, handing out the money either to the named person on the Cheque or to the owner, then depending how people trust you or me, that Cheque might flow freely from person to person.
In north Afrika you find hand written cheques floating around that are decades old, usually in frensh francs or itallien lira, but also pound sterling.
They are not that 'anonymous' though, as often when handing over the cheque to the new owner, the old one 'signes' it again on the backside.
BitCoin is a little bit more than an electronic cheque transfer mechanism, but not that much more.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I know it fits perfectly inside the wet dream of what Americans think the US is all about, but I'm not sure that allowing the flying of drones without some regulation is a good idea.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
So what is the assertion here- the government will stop technology as soon as it gets a whiff of what's going on? Are you sure you're not mixing up the government with your parents?
The government has no interest in stopping the forward movement of technology, nor do they have a historical record of trying to do so. The idea that they *might have* stopped the automobile or drones or bitcoin is just that, an idea you have for some reason. It's a historical counterfactual injected to frame the government as technologically regressive.
I see no evidence that the government is ideologically technologically regressive. If your point is that politicians think the internet is a like a bunch of old fashonied vacuum tubes through which messages get sent (which actually is not a terrible analogy) then consider that about as many older movie stars and writers and artists don't use or *get* modern technology as politicians, who skew heavily upwards in age.
Just recalling instances from one day's reading and listening Richard Gere isn't on Twitter and Richard Ford writes his novels longhand without a computer. So it goes.
OTOH we fund via DARPA and other programs vast amounts of the most cutting edge science, science which if it were declassified would seem like magic to us. We're talking advances in things like human cloning and quantum computers which are mind blowing even to readers of /.
So where is this "good thing they didn't know about THIS" attitude coming from? America celebrates it's inventors, tinkerers, mavericks, oddballs. All these things you cite are products of tinkering. They're not basic science but the application of well known technologies to solve problems in novel ways.
Say what you want about America, pre-emptive legislation is not in American's DNA. If something becomes big enough to start impacting innocent bystanders, broadly considered, then Congress steps in, as is its right and duty.
Highway speed limits are for all motor vehicles But trucks used to be _much_ smaller than modern double wides or tanker-trucks for fuel and chemical delivery, so a whole new set of laws
But somehow, conquering other nations and plundering their wealth just for your own coin mints has been frowned upon recently, and thus the gold standard had to be abandoned, as the gold available couldn't scale anymore with the gold needed for minting.
Does Mr. Matley expect the government to anticipate the next fad and outlaw it just because? Maybe the government should have outlawed Segways, they were supposed to be game changers.
The Code of Hammurabi or the Law of Moses (in particular) could probably handle most situations arising from "being a dick and hurting someone with your toys." We settled the basic problem of how to handle actual cases of hurting people with your toys about 4k-5k years ago, we just quibble on what the punishments should be. In fact, ironically, if we stole the standards of evidence used in the Law of Moses for our own system, it would put the innocence project out of business (for good reasons) because prosecutors and cops would be scared shitless to abuse the defendant, but I digress...
Most of what TFS mentions are just regulatory decisions. These are often just "nice to haves" that have little bearing on whether you can accurately say that the courts are unable to address real harms done to real people and property. The FAA might not be able to regulate the nuances of drones now, but I'd bet good money that at any point since they became commercially available, that had you caused someone's death with one (even by accident) a prosecutor could have nailed you to the wall in any court in the union.
Why should laws keep up with technology? Laws should be written in such a way that the technology involved doesn't matter.
Kind of adorable that you think that is possible. Oh you can put a general framework out there but there ALWAYS are going to be specific details that need legislation. Congress in the 1700s could not possible have written a law that deals adequately with the nuances of radio communications 200 years later. Nobody is so smart as to be able to write laws in such a way that technology doesn't matter. Furthermore any law that is so broad as to cover everything will have innumerable corner case, loopholes and problems. You need a good framework but sooner or later you are going to have to get into the ugly specifics.
That's obviously one law that's been obsoleted since the Founding Fathers couldn't have anticipated the arrival of the submachine gun and the shoulder-fired rocket.
1. Tinkerer invents something.
2. Regulator goes to office, gets cup of coffee, reads the paper, doesn't care.
3. "Wild West" economy as millions buy and use invention.
4. Regulator goes to lunch.
5. Nine Journalists report on invention as wonderful, spectacular, world-changing.
6. Regulator does some shopping on way back from lunch.
7. Tenth journalist, beaten to punch, finds "man bites dog" story, unintended consequence of invention
8. Regulator packs briefcase for ride home.
9. Legislators get panicked calls from people either hurt by invention, or afraid they'll be hurt by invention.
10. Regulator has dinner, goes to bed.
Guess what regulator reads in the paper tomorrow morning? Guess what's in the regulator's email tomorrow morning?
As a former regulator, there's nothing sinister about either the cowboy market or the regulations, and I get weary of the memes of anti-cowboy and anti-sheriff. What is broken is risk-benefit analysis, and it's probably broken at the journalism juncture. "if it bleeds, it leads" gives journalists money if they shock us, and there's nothing more shocking than a new risk we have to worry about.
Gently reply
Is a currency, it is already regulated as are all other currencies, nothing new about it
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
"If the FAA had been either farsighted or fast moving, at the first sign of drones it might've outlawed them or confined them to someplace like Oklahoma where they can't get in the way of anything too important"
Hey, I live in Oklahoma, you insensitive clod!
On a serious note, the Panhandle is the perfect place to test drones, absolutely nothing out there.
He who laughs last is at 300 baud.
The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die
http://www.amazon.ca/The-Great...
From the blurb: "Our markets are hindered by overcomplex regulations that debilitate the political and economic processes they were created to support; the rule of law has become the rule of lawyers."
Learn about unintended consequences of regulations.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
It is odd that the New testament speaks of the end times when we will be confounded by our complexity. Beyond that we have a situation where numerous laws can be applied to many situations and the effect is that a judge can pretty much do anything he likes which in a way is the same as having no laws at all. Then we have an issue with law makers creating laws which have severely negative effects that were unexpected. A huge example is in the creation of smart guns. The intention was to keep people in our nation a bit safer. But the law that passed actually doomed the sale of smart guns completely. The problem is linked to a law passed in New Jersey that mandated that once available on the market anywhere in the US the residents of NJ would be denied the right to purchase any regular gun and buy only a smart gun. So nobody in the firearms industry and almost zero gun owners will tolerate a smart gun being made or sold. If NJ had simply passed a law saying that a gun store must offer at least one smart gun for sale then we would have smart guns all over the nation while most gun hobbyists would still buy non smart guns. We also have a lot of laws and customs that are actually causing crimes. Allowing private bail companies and failure to provide money to hire private lawyers are causing people to commit crimes to pay for lawyers and bails. But because money is involved no progress can be made to build a decent criminal justice system.
Sorry , your response confused me. AFAIK it's conservative-libertarian spectrum who oppose regulation and "libtards" (an insult which almost made me not bother replying to you) are often accused by those same conservative-libertarians of wanting to regulate anything not nailed down.
Perhaps you're new to these ideas and you've got yourself turned around? After all, people are always coming "on line" politically speaking.
In ay case, the sane 60-80% in the middle of the polity agree that thoughtful, flexible regulation which is open to being tweaked revisited is indispensible to civilization. At the extreme ends of the spectrum and well outside the aforementioned 80% lie on the right the Ayn Randers and libertarians and on the left ideologically driven Communists and Anarchists.
Going forward, it might be worth your while to check to see if you actually have a real difference with people you think are your opponents, at least, before lobbing the insult grenade.
Cheers.
Wanting a minimal state is wanting anarchism.
Why don't you show that first?
A too powerful government becomes paralyzed but a too weak one is manipulated by the powerful to create laws which make a citizen life miserable -- or can be more easily bent by a tyrant e.g. to wage a war without impediment.
Why don't you show an example of that? For example, the US had an extraordinarily weak central government for well over a century prior to the First World War. And the only time tyranny was an issue was during the Civil War and First World War when the power of the central government was unusually enhanced.
Meanwhile we have all sorts of examples of strong, too powerful governments during the 20th Century and these are considered to have led to the deaths of something like 400 million people due to war and democide which is a rather big way to make someone's life miserable. They're also remarkably easy to twist in the way you claim weak governments can be twisted. Recall for example, how fast the USSR went off the rails once the Communists had complete control.
Finally, what makes the powerful powerful? The most common answer on Slashdot is money. For example, in the scenario of the weak government, somehow the wealthy will be able to wave money around and get anything they want, even if the government is not powerful enough to deliver it and nobody else is inclined to do it for just money. This is a silly scenario especially when you consider the blowback from such an attempt - destruction and seizure of assets, boycotts of products, etc - all which do a really good job of destroying the wealth and hence, the power. Reality just doesn't work that way where waving money gets you what you want.
And when you look at actual tyrants of history, they didn't get that way by mere money. Joseph Stalin became the most feared man in Russia because of his army of informers (I've heard that something like 1 in 20 to 1 in 10 citizens of the USSR were regular informers during that time) and the bad things that happened to you when the secret police decided your time was up.
I know this is old and beaten but this is the mentality which seems to pervade all these great ideas of "let's profit while we can before the government catches up with reality". Of course, such things must come to be because everything has a lag -- but should we really throw parties that we're free from responsibilities?
Notice how we digressed from arguing about the size of government to protecting special interests, We don't need government to be big enough to protect the taxi companies/medallion holders from competition with Uber. We don't need government big enough to protect Google and Amazon from competition with other drone users. Nor do we need it to protect banks and lazy law enforcement agencies from competition with currencies that don't force you to register every large transfer of money you make with a hostile government.
This is the problem with making government bigger than the minimal. You immediately start creating and protecting special interests. Sometimes the resulting public goods and services can be useful (though not more useful than a private counterpart), but you don't have a compelling reason for the expansion.
A precious metal standard was kinda okeish, as long as you could set aside some productivity gains to mine more precious metals to represent the gained productivity in additional coins. It worked as long as countries in dire need of more precious metals simply invaded other countries and either stole theirs or started to mine non-depleted resources.
Ah yes, the Good Old Days before SJWs ruined it all for everyone.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Airbnb and fire codes / safety issues as well.
Now if some dies in a unsafe airbnb rented place I don't think they may be able to hide under that EULA.
Capitalism is a law of nature,like evolution: communism is a religion, like creationism.
They are both human social constructs.
Lions and zebras practise neither capitalism nor communism.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Many people who hail the gold standard ignore a simple fact: A gold standard for coins means constant deflation, which is bad in most economic situation, because it gives incentives for hoarding money instead of spending it.
Yes! The HORROR OF THINGS GOING DOWN IN PRICE! IT MUST BE BANNED!
Dude, we've had constant deflation in electronics prices since... well, forever, in electronics terms. Deflation is the norm in a free market, as productivity increases lead to lower prices.
Only governments think it's a bad thing, because they can tax inflation, but can't tax deflation.
Where legislators aren't keeping up -and it's having negative impact- is in drafting appropriate legislation while understanding its implications.
How are a bunch of lawyers going to understand the implications of new laws on technology?
There is a level of complexity the average consumer doesnt want to deal with. They want their banking secure, their cars reliable, and to not incur a risk of jail for their daily affairs. Government is not allowing criminal action (fraud, theft, harassment, etc) to be prosecuted in many cases. To my mind, an unenforced law might as well be taken off the books.
What you can say on air: can be covered by laws about printing presses (which they had at the time.) All you need is that the law isn't specific to ink-on-paper technology.
Generic laws are often not appropriate in new circumstances. While you could in principle apply the same standards for speech, it's pretty easy to show cases where that isn't really optimal in different formats. Furthermore radio communications isn't just broadcasting. There is a LOT more to it than that.
The radio spectrum itself wasn't discovered, but you could certainly have a generic law about the use & regulation of any severely limited resource that becomes popular.
That's a framework but there still are radio specific nuances that need laws for radio specific issues. What sort of frequencies can you transmit? Who is allowed? What sort of power is acceptable? How do you prevent interference? Etc. None of these issues could be covered adequately by a generic law. We have the FCC precisely because we need a neutral arbiter to keep the airwaves usable and avoid a tragedy of the commons situation.
Many people who hail the gold standard ignore a simple fact: A gold standard for coins means constant deflation, which is bad in most economic situation, because it gives incentives for hoarding money instead of spending it.
Yes! The HORROR OF THINGS GOING DOWN IN PRICE! IT MUST BE BANNED!
Dude, we've had constant deflation in electronics prices since... well, forever, in electronics terms. Deflation is the norm in a free market, as productivity increases lead to lower prices.
You're confusing decreases in individual prices with overall increases in value of currency. These are two completely different things, and they have completely different macroeconomic effects.
Only governments think it's a bad thing, because they can tax inflation, but can't tax deflation.
Nope. Anyone who likes to spend money or invest money likes inflation. You speak about "productivity increases," but productivity increases need to be FUNDED by someone. Who funds them? Well, particularly if they require more risky or uncertain innovation, they tend to be jumpstarted by investors. And rich people have significantly less incentive to invest in risky things when they can make more money just by piling it up in their money bins, as is true in a deflationary economy.
Just stop and think about the consequences of deflation for a moment. I think people who argue in favor of it tend to believe that somehow things will "cost less" for them. But they won't -- prices may go down, but so will incomes. Wait -- you thought you'd be able to keep your same salary when everyone is paying less and earning less for investments??? No dice. Your income needs to be cut to conform with reduced revenues and investment income. Thus, prices go down, but you get paid less.
You want to buy a house? You want to open a new business? Why would you?? -- it will likely be worth significantly less in a few years. Mortgages and loans become next-to-impossible to justify either for lenders or for borrowers, because you end up paying MORE in value as your income decreases, while the value of your asset is depreciating. (With mild inflation, your principle payments decrease in purchasing power, while your income generally rises gradually.)
Why would you invest any money in any significant asset in a deflationary market, since you'll only lose money in the long run? Sure, rich people with "money to burn" will still have their luxuries, but most people won't be interested in throwing money away at depreciating assets everywhere when they could just keep it in their account and get more value. Well, actually people take money out of banks, because banks start charging people to hold money, since they can't earn interest on most investments anymore. So, there's a run on the banks and everyone stuffs cash under the mattress.
Gradually, the economy grinds to a halt as a deflationary spiral begins. Welcome to the next Great Depression. (You think I'm joking? Just take a moment and look at periods of sustained deflation in world history -- they almost always correspond to severe economic depressions.)
TL;DR: Sustained deflation of currency is NOT the same as price decreases in specific sectors. Sustained deflation of currency is generally bad for just about everyone, except rich people who already have a giant bin full of cash and will now just sit on it as it grows and grows in value, rather than moving that money around where some investments might lead to further economic activity.
I'm not sure I understand. You want me to prove my assertion? Well, I thought it was immediate: anarchists want less state.
That's not the definition of anarchists or anarchy. The actual definition is:
1: A state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority:
[...]
1.1: Absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.
See? It's not about having the government do less, but not having a government to do anything.
> We don't need government to be big enough to protect the taxi companies/medallion holders from competition with Uber. We don't need government big enough to protect Google and Amazon from competition with other drone users. Nor do we need it to protect banks and lazy law enforcement agencies from competition with currencies that don't force you to register every large transfer of money you make with a hostile government.
Yes, we do. Not me and you, but the ones that play the major roles in our society really need that. The state must be small to be highly maneuverable, and yet have the minimal functions of a good vehicle to enable them to use it effectively. This is my point.
Perhaps you need a reminder on the definition of "we"? "We" includes "you" and "me". You do nothing to contradict my original post, because it is not "we " who need rent seeking established by government, but "them", a relatively small number of people who desire this protection and don't have much to offer, aside from artificially making life more expensive for the rest of us, for why they should get it.