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Some of those can and should be consolidated - but they're not all quite as flippant as you might think. The prohibition of transport of water hyacinth, for ex
by dgacmu 10y ago
Some of those can and should be consolidated - but they're not all quite as flippant as you might think. The prohibition of transport of water hyacinth, for example, is because it's a massively bad invasive species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichhornia_crassipes#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichhornia_crassipes#United_St...
Sure, it too should probably be consolidated - perhaps under the Lacey act or the Plant Protection Act or Alien Species Prevention and Enforcement Act. But it's not actually a dumb regulation, just an inefficient expression.
You can probably imagine that the letter carrier uniform one may have been in response to fraud. Same for the false weather reports - it's kind of useful to be able to whack someone on the wrist for publishing a hoax tornado warning.
I'm all for the idea of cleaning up our soup of regulations, but I think it's worth noting that many of them exist for a reason, and it's typically more complex than the famously silly "can't ride a horse in a dress on sunday"-type laws still found on some state books.
Putting my geek hat back on, It'd be cool if we could train an LSTM to de-dup laws... ;) But I guess in the meantime there are interns.
- jack9 10y ago> Some of those can and should be consolidated Some should be state laws.
- KirinDave 10y agoGiven the staffing decisions proposed, they're probably going to be things around health care, business practice, environmental restrictions, and energy reform. It's very difficult for States to regulate those effectively because without federal funding, they are medium term losses that inhibit growth. One of the reasons the Federal Government gets such a bad rep is because they're the one who needs to take a tough position on this.
- baddox 10y ago> You can probably imagine that the letter carrier uniform one may have been in response to fraud. I would expect there to already be a federal law prohibiting fraud.
- fnord123 10y agoWell now there is one where a judge and/or jury don't have to determine if wearing a letter carrier uniform is fraud or freedom of expression.
- usrusr 10y agoSometimes it is comparatively easy to effectively ban a certain kind of fraud attempt, whereas actual success of the attempt would be impossible to prosecute because the victims can only be victims when they not even notice any wrongdoing. Not banning the attempt. In that case, you have a choice between banning attempts, together with everything that is indistinguishable from an attempt, versus effectively giving fraudsters free reign, despite having a law that technically forbids successful execution of an attempt. Classic legal balancing act: how valuable is the freedom of dressing up as a postman compared to not having to question the authenticity of each and every on of them?
- seanp2k2 10y agoYeah, once AI can do stuff like that, I'll be impressed. Right now it's somewhat useful but the consumer applications are all just lame gimmicks.