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I think the single biggest roadblock to building new things is regulation. How do we eliminate most regulations, and simplify the rest to fight off regulatory c

I think the single biggest roadblock to building new things is regulation. How do we eliminate most regulations, and simplify the rest to fight off regulatory capture? What if we had a github for laws and required that anybody who worked on a law use their real name and if they were paid by a company they had to list how much?

jakub_g 7y ago
"Use GitHub for lawmaking" is something I've had in mind for a long time. However, not sure how this could work in practice. I've heard from a friend of mine who used to work for Deloitte (or similar kind of company) that on practical level, lawmaking often happens in those private consulting/lawyer's offices - it's not like a MPs sits down and write stuff down themselves. So the git commit would say "John Smith the lawyer" which tells you nothing. There's probably also so many patches and reverts and rewrites going on that history would be really bloated. Or if you want nice history, you lose all those important nuances you wanted in first place ("who exactly put this comma here which changes the whole meaning?"). It would also probably horrendously slow down the law making process. (which might actually be a good thing in many scenarios!)
marcus_holmes 7y ago
Regulation is all about stopping people from getting taken advantage of, or hurt, usually by their own decisions. Financial regulation is mostly about stopping people from selling dodgy investment schemes that are some variant of Ponzi. Health and Safety regulation is mostly about stopping people from doing stupid things that might kill them. FDA is about stopping Snake Oil salesmen. And y'know, making sure the drugs we're sold don't make us worse. You can see it coming in the Cryptocurrency world - people lose money on stupid bets and then feel that someone else should have done something to stop this. Someone being the regulatory agencies. So what would a solid set of regulations for crypto look like? What process would you devise that would result in a set of rules that prevented most of the crooks from profiting from their crookedness, while allowing honest folks to make some money investing in crypto?

jakub_g 7y ago

"Use GitHub for lawmaking" is something I've had in mind for a long time. However, not sure how this could work in practice. I've heard from a friend of mine who used to work for Deloitte (or similar kind of company) that on practical level, lawmaking often happens in those private consulting/lawyer's offices - it's not like a MPs sits down and write stuff down themselves. So the git commit would say "John Smith the lawyer" which tells you nothing. There's probably also so many patches and reverts and rewrites going on that history would be really bloated. Or if you want nice history, you lose all those important nuances you wanted in first place ("who exactly put this comma here which changes the whole meaning?"). It would also probably horrendously slow down the law making process. (which might actually be a good thing in many scenarios!)

marcus_holmes 7y ago

Regulation is all about stopping people from getting taken advantage of, or hurt, usually by their own decisions. Financial regulation is mostly about stopping people from selling dodgy investment schemes that are some variant of Ponzi. Health and Safety regulation is mostly about stopping people from doing stupid things that might kill them. FDA is about stopping Snake Oil salesmen. And y'know, making sure the drugs we're sold don't make us worse. You can see it coming in the Cryptocurrency world - people lose money on stupid bets and then feel that someone else should have done something to stop this. Someone being the regulatory agencies. So what would a solid set of regulations for crypto look like? What process would you devise that would result in a set of rules that prevented most of the crooks from profiting from their crookedness, while allowing honest folks to make some money investing in crypto?