
The Law Can’t Keep Up with Technology, and That's Good - sjcsjc
http://www.newsweek.com/government-gets-slower-tech-gets-faster-389073
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noonespecial
It is good so long as the legal philosophy of the land is "unless something is
explicitly forbidden, it is automatically allowed". This is _not_ a good thing
when that philosophy is "you're not allowed to just go and do new stuff until
we get a chance to consider it and pass regulations".

There are plenty of examples around of "unless explicitly permitted,
automatically denied" that are stifling innovation in my opinion. Pick a
random county in America and try to build a residential dwelling using any
sort of alternative materials or architecture for example.

~~~
richmarr
Agree with your point in principle, but I'd nitpick with your example.

Building regulations & planning approval are a matter of public safety
precisely because human beings have a millenia-long track record of putting
together dwellings in weird ways using whatever materials are
available/convenient, and often aren't aware of the repurcussions.

Should it be okay for someone to build a 3-storey domestic dwelling, in a
unique way, out of unregulated materials, 4 feet from another home? Not next
to my home it shouldn't. Nor should it be my responsibility to discover &
research their building materials and lodge a complaint.

If they want to build their house using 3d-printed ceramic blocks using plans
they downloaded from douchebrick.io, and raw materials they sourced
themselves, then the burden of proof should reasonably be on them that they're
not putting neighbours, friends, Airbnb guests, adjacent property, kids
fetching their ball from your garden, tenants, future buyers, passers-by,
postal workers, and Avon ladies at risk.

You could make an argument that these approval processes should move faster,
but it doesn't sound like the argument you're making, and it may result in
more mistakes (Asbestos anyone?).

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vinceguidry
> It’s whether they’re willing to take action that would destroy the
> companies’ $2.5 billion combined value owned by important investors (and
> campaign donors) like KKR, Comcast, NBC, Major League Baseball and several
> Silicon Valley VCs.

On one hand I want to agree, on the other hand I'd like to see some
justification for this statement. $2.5 billion doesn't seem like a really big
industry, sure, it's a lot for two companies to be dominating in, but nothing
compared to even the smallest durable goods market.

It seems like a really small fish that the government wants to protect, rather
than some giant that can't be touched. What it reminds me of is Hollywood. I
read somewhere that the market cap of the entire movie business is handily
outstripped by Disney's toy arm, or something like that, and what gives them
outsized influence on policy-making is the symbiotic relationship that so much
of our capitalism has with our content industries.

Football is like that. Yes, there's a lot of money in advertising and ticket
sales and the actual business of football. But the rest of the economic
effects that football generates is just huge. The govt is loathe to do
anything to endanger football's ability to make money because of all that.
It's not that they can't, they just don't want to.

~~~
Silhouette
That seems like a compelling argument for restricting corporate political
donations.

If the politicians want to block something that their _voters_ don't want to
see blocked, that's the politicians' problem and they can pay for it at the
next election. But if they aren't blocking something they should be because of
the business connections involved, that's corruption pure and simple.

As for the businesses collectively investing a few billion in a new industry,
that's why the value of your investment can do down as well as up and why
you're supposed to do your homework before you put your money into a new
venture. It doesn't always work out, and if you backed a controversial scheme
and that was one of those times, that was the risk you took.

~~~
vinceguidry
> But if they aren't blocking something they should be because of the business
> connections involved, that's corruption pure and simple.

Well, first off, corruption involves people and not industries. I highly doubt
that the two firms dominating the industry are themselves politically
connected. Government officials protecting an industry is categorically not
corruption, protecting individual firms and giving them a leg up over other
firms in the same industry categorically is.

Propping up an industry is called subsidization and it's part and parcel of
how modern governments manage the economy.

Second, whether they should be blocking it or not is not a settled question.
Gambling is weird, it can't really be called good or bad, like any vice, in
moderation it's fine for people. And it's arguable whether fantasy football is
actually gambling. Also we lost the ability to regulate real gambling when the
big online poker companies fled the country and set up shop overseas. Seems
like there would be nothing keeping this niche from doing that either.

~~~
Silhouette
My point was that if you have public officials making decisions about whether
or not to enforce regulations that would potentially cost businesses money
_because the investors are campaign contributors_ , as not-so-subtly implied
by the quotation from your previous post, then that is clearly corrupt. Those
officials should be responsible to the people they represent, not to whichever
big businesses give them the most money at election time.

I'm not offering any opinion on whether the government in any particular place
should take steps to protect any particular industry here.

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ilaksh
We may want some way to regulate company and individual actions even though we
don't want traditional government. Bitcoin-like technologies could be a
starting point.

We do have unwritten and written social contracts and expectations and having
a common framework for encouraging/discouraging certain types of behavior
might be important.

Another issue is that these companies become so dominant that they are almost
the de facto government in certain areas. Technopolies lioe Google and Amazon.
Which its nice to decouple modules of (effectively) governance but we probably
would be better off with many smaller companies operating on public
information technology platforms.

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PhasmaFelis
I'm not seeing anything to convince me that this is a "very good thing." It
seems to be a thing that's great if you're a Disruptive Tech Startup(TM) and
somewhat mixed if you're an average Joe, but--like many recent tech articles--
it's written solely from the perspective of a Disruptive Tech Startup, which
is getting tiresome.

~~~
vonklaus
caveat, I didn't read the article because either it is timing out or ublock is
blocking it (just see white page)

I think it is a good thing that the law can't keep up with technology. Take
Uber, people like it and it works well. It is hard for the law to stop this
and public opinion is quite loudly for it, so it stands. The internet is
changing from centralized to distributed with finance depending on it wholly
for infrastructure.

Protocols will change at that level and slowly money will become more
digitized. Even without bitcoin, it will be possible to quickly transfer funds
from organizations at banks. If the public embraces this, the gov't can't do
anything.

This is like a riot for freedom. When enough people do something the
government is outnumbered and it becomes defacto legal. Often, this rare
phenomenon is referred as _democracy_.

Drones falling on people will be bad. Some people will be scammers. Medical
devices/technoques will be more dangerous (with better upside). People will
hide income which is good for the individualshort-term but bad for the
governemnt, and possibly everyone long term. Wages are fucked.

This will force cooperation between people and ultimately governments because
the power distance delta will be lowered significantly from a person to "the
government". Technology is killing government just like home taping killed the
music industry. Very slowly.

~~~
pjc50
_it will be possible to quickly transfer funds from organizations at banks_

This is called "Faster Payments" in Europe, where it's already working quite
nicely.

~~~
Silhouette
Indeed. In fact, a great deal of what is wrong with financial infrastructure
is precisely because the industry is dominated by a few huge players with a
vested interest in not rocking the boat, and because of their scale and often
their multinational later they are very hard for governments to regulate
effectively.

Many problems, from highly visible ones like the crazy level of fraud and
financial crime we tolerate or the way some governments have propped up failed
financial institutions with public money in recent years, to more hidden
problems like the one-sided deals small businesses get with financial services
and the amount creamed off almost every electronic financial transaction by
those same financial service providers, should have been dealt with long ago.

