The problem is that the vast majority of code will not have long term implications so long as it reaches a minimum of design, performance, and does its job without bugs. Consistency of patterns is more important than the optimal pattern for most decisions.
There are some core areas of the application that are much more important, but they are often the earliest data structures and built before the problem is known. You will not know how your code will change, so make it as consistent as possible with the rest of the system until you know more.
Summary: if it doesn't hit the bottom line of the polluter, then there is no reason for them to change their behavior.
That's pretty obvious, but the message needs to be hammered in over and over. The bigger issue is that game theory gets in the way - if pollution is taxed here, it will be exported to places where it is not.
For carbon pricing specifically, border carbon adjustments are being developed as an analogue to duties to blunt the effectiveness of "pollution exports."
The nice thing about being a massive market like the US is that you can impose regulations that producers in other countries need to follow to be able to participate in the market. It does make enforcement harder, but as long as you have the political will its definitely feasible. O/c having the political will is an entirely different thing.
Example: The US has banned lots of Chinese stuff. The stuff now sneaks across the border into southeast Asia, or goes to a final assembly plant there and becomes Vietnamese or Cambodian. There are _supposed to_ be supply chain records and audits in many cases, though reality often doesn't match paperwork...
Probably should work on catching a few murderers and figuring out an even moderately effective enforcement mechanism before pretending you can make more stuff illegal. Otherwise people just laugh at you as you further undermine any perceived authority you once had.
We have done close to nothing to enforce the current tariffs and such, allowing blatant country of origin laundering to go the whole time with next to zero enforcement action. You can bring a ready to prosecute case to regulators and they do utterly nothing.
Adding more to this regime would just be yet more performative nonsense to make some people feel good about themselves. We need far less of that in this world.
Now if you're just arguing the penalties need to be stiffer: sure!
But on a cursory search, I don't believe it's fair at all to say we've done "close to nothing" or there's "next to zero enforcement action" or regulators "do utterly nothing" or it's "performative nonsense".
What evidence do you have to back up your claims? It seems like perhaps you've actually brought a ready-to-prosecute case forward? Curious to learn!
I quickly scanned all those examples, and it doesn't appear a single one had to do with laundering country of origin? That's specifically what I mean - not just fining US companies for trying to under report custom values, which seems to be the bulk of those cases and is nothing new.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197961495 I think is the best quick example of the problem I am talking about here. Outright actual fraud by foreign companies laundering country of origin through intermediary countries. There is next to zero enforcement on this considering how rampant it is. There seems to be very little interest in doing any sort of "hard" prosecution on this problem - likely because it is complex and difficult to investigate appropriately.
I consider it rampant and enforcement a joke since I have spoken to vendors about past and future potentially tariffs and they are completely unconcerned by them. Minor cost of doing business increase to have products shipped through an intermediary company and relabeled. Maybe some quick final assembly if they really are trying to play the game.
I think current enforcement works okayish for folks trying to push the limits. It seems to fall over on outright fraud imposed by bad actors.
This is a great and thoughtful response! Thank you for writing it up. I imagine it is fairly hard to catch (and/or prove) the origin laundering you’re talking about
Another way to look at is the USA is overdeveloped that we have a duty to make everything as advanced as possible. Which raises the sophistication of other nations.
I wonder if the biggest hindrance to good corporate behavior might be the fiduciary responsibility to the investor that was established with Dodge vs Ford.
It is very interesting when capitalists confess that capitalism itself will never solve these issues. It throws away delusional thinking by the uninformed. Any hope of solving environmental issues rests in having a government that is powerful enough compared to the market and willing to work against businesses main financial interests.
We're just seeing the example of tech companies, which for years paraded around as earth saviors with pledges of "carbon neutrality", just to discard any such plans when competition for AI supremacy makes them spend as much energy as they possibly can, as quickly as possible, the environment be damned.
Okay, so I agree with many leftist critiques of capitalism, but we can also tell that communism also caused environmental destruction, particularly in the soviet block. Mixed economies are not doing that much better - see the Norwegian sovereign fund as but one example. Further, I'd argue that the opposite of a weak state is a totalitarian one, not a socialist one.
And I'm arguing that the problem is you need over 200 governments to agree on both it and its enforcement, and that the wealth disparity between countries in and of itself will cause game theory issues for these sorts of agreements to break down, even if each government was enlightened socialist.
Capitalism is making it worse, to be sure, but socialism is not a solution here in and of itself.
I mean that line of thought has been core to capitalism from the start though. The originators of capitalism argued that it needed strong governments to stop/prevent the negative aspects of capitalism (such as stopping collusion and monopolistic behavior). By it's nature and from the beginning one of capitalism's core requirements is that capitalism cannot function without a framework of rules and enforcement mechanisms that only a strong government can provide.
They're useful in a small set of behaviors. If you have a particular job that is run infrequently but is burstable, it doesn't make sense to have a server hanging around for just that purpose.
My current employer standardized on serverless and for many things it works well enough, but from my standpoint it's just more expensive.
It takes effort to become better than you are at your current level. To get past junior, that should happen by osmosis. For some people, talent alone will take them to senior. For others, they will need to put in the time to learn how do work more efficiently.
Consider that it will take a senior developer 20 hours to do a job a junior might take 80 and the quality will be better for the senior. In turn, the senior may only code 20 hours a week and spend the other 20 in something that might take a staff engineer 5 hours.
I have never gotten a “promotion” in 28 years of working across 10 jobs.
I’ve always changed jobs. It’s a lot easier to get a “promotion” as part of an interview when you control the narrative than going through the promo process.
Besides because of salary compression and inversion, even if you do get an internal promotion, you will probably make less than someone coming in at your level.
And if that’s the case, you have to find another position.
But I’ll tell you the lack of a framework does not change anything. Then all you get is “in my judgment, you haven’t proven yourself to be senior yet.”
And the result is the same: the person leaves to a place that will appreciate them.
Because the alternative is based on your manager's impressions. You get fired because "your manager doesn't like you." You get a promotion because "your manager likes you." Your coworker sits around doing very little and nobody notices for a few months.
Your company and boss is sued because someone says their firing was based on discrimination because they can't prove it was for performance.
The truth is that managers can suss out 90% of the problems without a number. However, we are asked to document the hell out of it if we want to do something about it. And twice in my career I've been wrong: I mistook someone who was quiet for not doing much until I dove into the work. I trust my gut, but I confirm with numbers.
I think you're being underly charitable. The vast majority of congress critters are pretty smart people, and by Jeff Jackson's account, even the ones who yell the loudest are generally reasonable behind closed doors due to incentives.
The problem is that the real problems are very hard, and their job is to simplify it to their constituents well enough to keep their jobs, which may or may not line up with doing the right thing.
This is a truly hard problem. CSAM is a real problem, and those who engage in its distribution are experts in subverting the system. So is freedom of expression. So is the onerous imposition of regulations.
And any such issue (whether it be transnational migration, or infrastructure, or EPA regulations in America, or whatever issue you want to bring up) is going to have some very complex tradeoffs and even if you have a set of Ph.Ds in the room with no political pressure, you are going to have uncomfortable tradeoffs.
What if the regulations are bad because the problem is so hard we can't make good ones, even with the best and brightest?
It's ridiculous to say that a bad law is better than no law at all. If the law has massive collateral damage and little-to-no demonstrated benefit then it's just a bad law and should never have been made.
It seems far too common that regulations are putting the liability / responsibility for a problem onto some group of people who are not the cause of the problem, and further, have limited power to do anything about the problem.
As they say, this is why we can't have nice things.
The "collateral damage" you're talking about represented the UK's best answer to Meta - a UK-run collection of online communities that people were choosing to use instead of foreign alternatives. If they ban running them domestically then everybody will use American ones...
> The Act would also require me to scan images uploading for Child Sexual Abuse Material and other harmful content, it requires me to register as the responsible person for this and file compliance. It places technical costs, time costs, risk, and liability, onto myself as the volunteer who runs it all... and even if someone else took it over those costs would pass to them if the users are based in the UK.
There is no CSAM ring hiding on this cycling forum. The notion that every service which transmits data from one user to another has to file compliance paperwork and pay to use a CSAM hashing service is absurd.
> I appreciate that Lfgss is somewhat collateral damage but the fact is that if you're going to run a forum you do have some obligation to moderate it.
Lfgss is heavily moderated, just maybe not in a way you could prove to a regulator without an expensive legal team...
True, we absolutely couldn’t allow a place that people can voluntarily participate in to say things to exist without a governing body deciding what is and isn’t allowed to be said
> What if the regulations are bad because the problem is so hard we can't make good ones, even with the best and brightest?
To begin with, the premise would have to be challenged. Many, many bad regulations are bad because of incompetence or corruption rather than because better regulations are impossible. But let's consider the case where there really are no good regulations.
This often happens in situations where e.g. bad actors have more resources, or are willing to spend more resources, to subvert a system than ordinary people. For example, suppose the proposal is to ban major companies from implementing end-to-end encryption so the police can spy on terrorists. Well, that's not going to work very well because the terrorists will just use a different system that provides E2EE anyway and what you're really doing is compromising the security of all the law-abiding people who are now more vulnerable to criminals and foreign espionage etc.
The answer in these cases, where there are only bad policy proposals, is to do nothing. Accept that you don't have a good solution and a bad solution makes things worse rather than better so the absence of any rule, imperfect as the outcome may be, is the best we know how to do.
The classical example of this is the First Amendment. People say bad stuff, we don't like it, they suck and should shut up. But there is nobody you can actually trust to be the decider of who gets to say what, so the answer is nobody decides for everybody and imposing government punishment for speech is forbidden.
> The answer in these cases, where there are only bad policy
proposals, is to do nothing.
Or go further.
Sometimes the answer is to remove regulations. Specifically, those
laws that protect wrongdoers and facilitators of problems. Then you
just let nature take its course.
For the mostpart though, this is considered inhumane and unacceptable.
Sometimes we do exactly that. In general, if someone is trying to kill you, you are allowed to try and kill them right back. It's self-defense.
If you're talking about legalizing vigilantism, you would then have to argue that this is a better system and less prone to abuse than some variant of the existing law enforcement apparatus. Which, if you could do it, would imply that we actually should do that. But in general vigilantes have serious problems with accurately identifying targets and collateral damage.
Not quite my line of thinking but appreciate the reply. There's
definitely an interesting debate to be had there about the difference
between "legalizing vigilantism" and "not protecting criminals" (one
that's been done to death in "hack back" debates).
It gets messy because, by definition the moment you remove the laws,
the parties cease to be criminals... hence my Bushism "wrongdoers"
(can't quite bring myself to say evil-doers :)
One hopes that "criminals" without explicit legal protection
become disinclined to act, rather than become victims
themselves. Hence my allusion to "nature", as in "Natural Law".
"Might is right" is no good situation either. But I feel there's a time and
place for tactical selective removal of protectionism (and I am thinking
giant corporations here) to re-balance things.
As a tepid example (not really relevant to this thread), keep copyright laws in
place but only allow individuals to enforce them.
If you want a fun one in that line, allow piercing the corporate veil by default until you get to a human. Want to scatter conglomerates to the wind? Make the parent corporation fully liable for the sins of every subsidiary.
I wonder what the world would be like if we took corporate personhood to its logical conclusion and applied the same punishments to corporations as we apply to people.
You can’t really put a corporation in jail, but you could cut it off from the world in the same way that a person in jail is cut off. Suspend the business for the duration of the sentence. Steal a few thousand bucks? Get shut down for six months, or whatever that sentence would be.
>You can’t really put a corporation in jail, but you could cut it off from the world in the same way that a person in jail is cut off.
I have imagined a sci-fi skit where James works at CorpCo, a company that was caught doing something illegal and sentences to prison. As punishment James goes to work by reporting in at a prison at 8 am. He sits in his cell until his 'work day' is over and it's released at 5 pm to go home. It's boring, but hey, it pays well.
Good ones. Nice to shake up this thinking. We need more courageous
legal exceptionalism to redistribute power and deal with complexity.
I've just finished recording a Cybershow episode with two experts in
compliance (ISO42001 coming on the AI regulatory side - to be broadcast
in January).
The conversation turned to what carrots can be used instead of sticks?
Problem being that large corps simply incorporate huge fines as the
cost of doing business (that probably is relevant to this thread)
So to legally innovate, instead, give assistance (legal aid, expert
advisor) to smaller firms struggling with compliance. After all
governments want companies to comply. It's not a punitive game.
The trouble is that governments might not have a bias towards any company, but the government employees doing everything do. If the government is handing out a lot of assistance then you get a layer of middlemen who will help companies "get things done". The issue with this is that they are an additional burden that suck out resources from the system.
I think on balance there's a net gain in value. Enabling new
companies to navigate burdensome regulation contributes to the economy
in the long run. If money is a problem big companies who made the
regulation necessary with their ill behaviour can subsidise the entry
of competitors. I think people are starting to call that
"coopertition" as a idea somewhere between taxation and corporate
social responsibility.
One of the major things governments should be doing and largely aren't is publishing open source software (e.g. BSD license) for regulatory compliance. Not just a tax filing website, the actual rules engine that some government lawyers have certified as producing legally-compliant filings.
The point being to allow members of the public to submit a pull request and have their contributions incorporated into the officially-certified codebase if it's accepted, so the code ends up being actually good because the users (i.e. the public) are given the opportunity to fix what irks them.
And sometimes good regulations are really hard to swallow for the uninformed, while bad regulations sound really good on paper.
"children are getting raped and we aren't going to do anything about it because we want to protect indie websites" sounds a lot worse than "this is a significant step in combatting the spread of online child pornography", even if reality is actually far more complicated.
> You solve it with police work. That's how it always gets solved.
My dude, I’m sorry to tell you, but the problem usually is law enforcement. For so many things. You try barely training people who already like beating people up and then give them a monopoly on legal violence.
Btw, the reason the cops were invented in Britain was to put down riots by the populace bc they were so poor[1], and in America it was to divide poor whites and poor blacks and turn the poor whites into slave catchers.[2]
“Their job is to simplify it to their constituents well enough to keep their jobs” sounds awfully similar to what I’m saying. Maybe “don’t care” is a little too absolute, but it doesn’t make much difference if they don’t care or if they care but their priority is still keeping their jobs.
The 90% schedule is not a bad idea, but you need to look at it via metrics - what percentage are you actually meeting that schedule? If you are not doing so 9 out of 10 times, you are at a 20% schedule or a 10% schedule.
reply