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I wonder what would happen if we did this with laws. There are so many laws that get passed that are literally no longer applicable (funding to build a bridge i

I wonder what would happen if we did this with laws. There are so many laws that get passed that are literally no longer applicable (funding to build a bridge in the US is done as a law), but also I wonder if this would engage everyone a bit more in how the country runs.

Waterluvian 4y ago
That might be a good idea. But I’m not sure your example is a good one. Repealing a budget law only adds paperwork and cost and complexity. It’s not like these kinds laws have an ongoing cost. I wonder if one issue is just perception: people often see laws as “ongoing rules” when they can often just be, “on this date congress agreed to these terms and conditions for some thing.”
- pdntspa 4y ago
  But they do, the US legal code has grown into a gargantuan and byzantine thing
  - jxramos 4y ago
    Deadweight essentially huh
yieldcrv 4y ago
Many laws are like that Even various key provisions of the Patriot Act usually they are unceremoniously reauthorized by Congress because its just too much to think about sometimes Congress forgets (or the related lobbyist forgot/couldnt get a lunch date with the co-sponsor) but this isn't a perfect system its just more case load in practice that no individual person is aware of I personally cant think of any debate that occurred on an upcoming sunset provision where people consciously said “yeah that has no more applicability let it expire” or “we have to reauthorize this or itll be a disaster” its just nobody has time to think about it so they rubber stamp it in the annual budget reconciliation bill to keep the government open
mLuby 4y ago
I like the idea but predict legislatures would enact keep-alive bills that `renew *.law`.
- dylan604 4y ago
  but would that law not also be up for sunset review as well?
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  Then you push back on that. You don't have to give up, it's not all-or-nothing. That's sort of the history of the law. You outlaw crime (new types of crime are variations of fraud, deceit, etc) and then people "innovate" their methods to get around that and you outlaw that too. Hopefully suppressing them more than they "innovate". But we don't have to just hope, we historically suppressed these new crimes when it became a big problem. You dont just give up and let them create and do new types of (yet to be classified) crime just because they will always predictably want to do it anyway.
- Tangurena2 4y ago
  Knowing our legislature, they'd be done with voice vote and no accountability at all.
HWR_14 4y ago
Alternatively, the renewal of the EPA or the FTC or the FDA would be filibustered and agencies would stop existing, leading to rivers catching on fire and snake oil salesmen using deceptive ads.
- sneak 4y ago
  These things happen now, and worse, so we might as well stop paying the bill. How’s that PFAS situation coming along?
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    If Congress cannot pass laws to deal with current problems because of gridlock and the filibuster, you think putting more items on their plate will help? But the FDA just issued new rules around PFAS this year and tens of billions were allocated to upgrade water plants to prevent contamination in that omnibus spending bill that just passed. Why do you ask?
    - d110af5ccf 4y ago
      > you think putting more items on their plate will help Not GP, but I think it would stress the system to the breaking point and force us to fix it. I strongly suspect this would actually be a good thing. If a periodic process is painful for an organization in many cases doing it more frequently will result in the problems being fixed. There is clearly significant disagreement in the US over the desirable scope of federal powers. Forcing that issue to a head would hopefully result in a more functional system in the end.
      - axiolite 4y ago
        > Forcing that issue to a head would hopefully result in a more functional system in the end. Perhaps it would... but only after we finish with the cleanup from the inevitable civil war. Forcing controversial issues to come to a head very often ends badly. Compromise is more likely to lead to stability.
      - 4y ago
dub 4y ago
"It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.... Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right" - Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in 1789, expressing feelings on why laws should automatically expire Full letter: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-0248 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-024...
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >"It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.... Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right" - Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in 1789, expressing feelings on why laws should automatically expire IMHO that should also apply to land ownership rights which should also expire after some time. How can we say with a straight face that granting people, institutions or corporate entities rights to own a piece of the Planet Earth in perpetuity, forever, is fair or a good thing that is sustainable? It might have sounded good 300-500 years ago when new land was constantly discovered (cough conquered/taken cough) but what happens when the land pie runs out? Do we just say "tough shit mate, you should have been born 50 years ago when land was still available and affordable for everyone, or you should have been born in a family with inherited land ownership"? It's a hot take but I think land should be only leased for a limited time, like the max lifespan of a person, ~100 years or so, and then expire, never owned in perpetuity by any individual or corporation.
  - ayende 4y ago
    In Israel, for example, a lot of land is not "sold", but leased by the state to people. In practical terms, there is no real difference. Technically speaking, the lease terms are 49 / 98 years. The problem is that when you reach the end of the lease, there is no real possibility of _not_ extending the lease. And the lease is for the _land_, not anything on top of that. So it "sounds" nice, but in practical terms, it just adds another body that you have to go through. From economic perspective, there is very little difference between the two. A bank will give you a mortgage to buy a house whose "land lease" expire next year, for example. Because there is no possibility of that not being extended. There is _slight_ advantage to buying houses not leased, but mostly because that means somewhat less paperwork to go through.
pishpash 4y ago
It's like tech debt, you have to clean house once in a while because there is no natural tendency to do so.
- pas 4y ago
  exactly. and the way to do that is not rm -rf --no-preserve-root, but incremental refactoring, lots of tests, etc.
- jq-r 4y ago
  There is a natural tendency though. It’s called a war. The bigger it is the bigger that reset button is.
adamrezich 4y ago
the previous sitting President made an Executive Order that for every new regulation passed, "at least two" must be repealed. but then everyone kind of ignored it, because it's an Executive Order. would be nice to have something like that but for real though. the best commits are ones where you delete more lines than you add...
- pas 4y ago
  completely befitting the idiot he is. mr sharpie guy. he would be the first to game his own rule. just pick two random ones, copypaste into the new one, repeal the old ones, and enact the new one. yaay. procedurally, formally, technically correct! > the best commits are ones where you delete more lines than you add... then you end up with trivial perfection, nothing whereas the real life zen is accepting imperfections, and still working to decrease them, to converge on some better goal. sure, law is web 0.1, it would be good to refactor it, but the main problems are not the number of laws. just as you can't (oughtn't?) measure code by lines, you can't do with laws. arguably many narrow laws might be even better than a few super vague ones, etc
- Tangurena2 4y ago
  He also wanted to outlaw immigration from Muslim countries. When he found out that was neither legal nor possible, he zeroed out quotas for worker visas, such as H1 & H2. And also zeroed out quotas of many immigrant visas such as EB1-3. Over 4 years that was about 2 million worker visas that were not issued. The media outrage over the "worker shortage" or "quiet quitting" should instead have been directed at the orange dude who made it impossible to import workers. When things were shut down due to covid, it was hardly noticeable. But now, blame gets flung in all the wrong places.
candu 4y ago
Auto-expiry of laws is an interesting idea, and one that gets floated here on HN with some regularity (possibly because it appeals to the refactoring mindset?) I wonder about "Chesterton's Fence" effects, though - maybe we'd have to make a _lot_ more use of the "institutional memory" of the non-political parts of government. Behind every law, there's usually at least some advisory recommendations / reports from various agencies, and over 10-30 year timescales there's a non-zero chance that some of the original authors of those are still around. Otherwise, we'd run the "junior developer" risk of perpetually refactoring laws without understanding the reasoning behind them, and breaking functionality users depend on in the process. Sure, it's obvious that some blue law about not pasturing your cow on ye towne grasse on ye Holye Sundaye is outdated, but I suspect those obvious deprecation cases are few and far between. Thoughtful, context-aware refactoring applies to systems in general, not just computer systems.
- _0ffh 4y ago
  Shouldn't be a problem, because along with the law you can also hand down what it is supposed to achieve, and how.
  - axiolite 4y ago
    Sounds nice in theory, but after decades of everything running smoothly, people forget just how instrumental certain laws were to ensure that stability. It's a lot like anti-vaxers, anti-pasteurization, and other anti-science fads. And I can point to the repeal of banking regs like Glass-Steagall which resulted in the ~2007 financial crisis and recession. Including a post-it note on a law isn't going to give future people the same perspective as someone who lived through the issues first-hand. If that worked, we wouldn't have voters repeatedly supporting politicians who make the same insane promises that never work.
    - NoGravitas 4y ago
      Not to mention cryptocurrencies, which are currently speedrunning the history of financial crises and the regulations they inspired.
greggman3 4y ago
reminds me of this https://youtu.be/BN8B12xmisY https://youtu.be/BN8B12xmisY
Timwi 4y ago
What would engage everyone a bit more in how the country runs is to let everyone have a say in how the country runs. You can't expect people to “engage” when they just get ignored and politicians do what they want anyway.

Waterluvian 4y ago

That might be a good idea. But I’m not sure your example is a good one. Repealing a budget law only adds paperwork and cost and complexity. It’s not like these kinds laws have an ongoing cost. I wonder if one issue is just perception: people often see laws as “ongoing rules” when they can often just be, “on this date congress agreed to these terms and conditions for some thing.”

pdntspa 4y ago
But they do, the US legal code has grown into a gargantuan and byzantine thing
- jxramos 4y ago
  Deadweight essentially huh

yieldcrv 4y ago

Many laws are like that Even various key provisions of the Patriot Act usually they are unceremoniously reauthorized by Congress because its just too much to think about sometimes Congress forgets (or the related lobbyist forgot/couldnt get a lunch date with the co-sponsor) but this isn't a perfect system its just more case load in practice that no individual person is aware of I personally cant think of any debate that occurred on an upcoming sunset provision where people consciously said “yeah that has no more applicability let it expire” or “we have to reauthorize this or itll be a disaster” its just nobody has time to think about it so they rubber stamp it in the annual budget reconciliation bill to keep the government open

mLuby 4y ago

I like the idea but predict legislatures would enact keep-alive bills that `renew *.law`.

dylan604 4y ago
but would that law not also be up for sunset review as well?
llanowarelves 4y ago
Then you push back on that. You don't have to give up, it's not all-or-nothing. That's sort of the history of the law. You outlaw crime (new types of crime are variations of fraud, deceit, etc) and then people "innovate" their methods to get around that and you outlaw that too. Hopefully suppressing them more than they "innovate". But we don't have to just hope, we historically suppressed these new crimes when it became a big problem. You dont just give up and let them create and do new types of (yet to be classified) crime just because they will always predictably want to do it anyway.
Tangurena2 4y ago
Knowing our legislature, they'd be done with voice vote and no accountability at all.

HWR_14 4y ago

Alternatively, the renewal of the EPA or the FTC or the FDA would be filibustered and agencies would stop existing, leading to rivers catching on fire and snake oil salesmen using deceptive ads.

sneak 4y ago
These things happen now, and worse, so we might as well stop paying the bill. How’s that PFAS situation coming along?
- HWR_14 4y ago
  If Congress cannot pass laws to deal with current problems because of gridlock and the filibuster, you think putting more items on their plate will help? But the FDA just issued new rules around PFAS this year and tens of billions were allocated to upgrade water plants to prevent contamination in that omnibus spending bill that just passed. Why do you ask?
  - d110af5ccf 4y ago
    > you think putting more items on their plate will help Not GP, but I think it would stress the system to the breaking point and force us to fix it. I strongly suspect this would actually be a good thing. If a periodic process is painful for an organization in many cases doing it more frequently will result in the problems being fixed. There is clearly significant disagreement in the US over the desirable scope of federal powers. Forcing that issue to a head would hopefully result in a more functional system in the end.
    - axiolite 4y ago
      > Forcing that issue to a head would hopefully result in a more functional system in the end. Perhaps it would... but only after we finish with the cleanup from the inevitable civil war. Forcing controversial issues to come to a head very often ends badly. Compromise is more likely to lead to stability.
    - 4y ago

dub 4y ago

"It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.... Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right" - Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in 1789, expressing feelings on why laws should automatically expire Full letter: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-0248 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-024...

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>"It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.... Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right" - Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in 1789, expressing feelings on why laws should automatically expire IMHO that should also apply to land ownership rights which should also expire after some time. How can we say with a straight face that granting people, institutions or corporate entities rights to own a piece of the Planet Earth in perpetuity, forever, is fair or a good thing that is sustainable? It might have sounded good 300-500 years ago when new land was constantly discovered (cough conquered/taken cough) but what happens when the land pie runs out? Do we just say "tough shit mate, you should have been born 50 years ago when land was still available and affordable for everyone, or you should have been born in a family with inherited land ownership"? It's a hot take but I think land should be only leased for a limited time, like the max lifespan of a person, ~100 years or so, and then expire, never owned in perpetuity by any individual or corporation.
- ayende 4y ago
  In Israel, for example, a lot of land is not "sold", but leased by the state to people. In practical terms, there is no real difference. Technically speaking, the lease terms are 49 / 98 years. The problem is that when you reach the end of the lease, there is no real possibility of _not_ extending the lease. And the lease is for the _land_, not anything on top of that. So it "sounds" nice, but in practical terms, it just adds another body that you have to go through. From economic perspective, there is very little difference between the two. A bank will give you a mortgage to buy a house whose "land lease" expire next year, for example. Because there is no possibility of that not being extended. There is _slight_ advantage to buying houses not leased, but mostly because that means somewhat less paperwork to go through.

pishpash 4y ago

It's like tech debt, you have to clean house once in a while because there is no natural tendency to do so.

pas 4y ago
exactly. and the way to do that is not rm -rf --no-preserve-root, but incremental refactoring, lots of tests, etc.
jq-r 4y ago
There is a natural tendency though. It’s called a war. The bigger it is the bigger that reset button is.

adamrezich 4y ago

the previous sitting President made an Executive Order that for every new regulation passed, "at least two" must be repealed. but then everyone kind of ignored it, because it's an Executive Order. would be nice to have something like that but for real though. the best commits are ones where you delete more lines than you add...

pas 4y ago
completely befitting the idiot he is. mr sharpie guy. he would be the first to game his own rule. just pick two random ones, copypaste into the new one, repeal the old ones, and enact the new one. yaay. procedurally, formally, technically correct! > the best commits are ones where you delete more lines than you add... then you end up with trivial perfection, nothing whereas the real life zen is accepting imperfections, and still working to decrease them, to converge on some better goal. sure, law is web 0.1, it would be good to refactor it, but the main problems are not the number of laws. just as you can't (oughtn't?) measure code by lines, you can't do with laws. arguably many narrow laws might be even better than a few super vague ones, etc
Tangurena2 4y ago
He also wanted to outlaw immigration from Muslim countries. When he found out that was neither legal nor possible, he zeroed out quotas for worker visas, such as H1 & H2. And also zeroed out quotas of many immigrant visas such as EB1-3. Over 4 years that was about 2 million worker visas that were not issued. The media outrage over the "worker shortage" or "quiet quitting" should instead have been directed at the orange dude who made it impossible to import workers. When things were shut down due to covid, it was hardly noticeable. But now, blame gets flung in all the wrong places.

candu 4y ago

Auto-expiry of laws is an interesting idea, and one that gets floated here on HN with some regularity (possibly because it appeals to the refactoring mindset?) I wonder about "Chesterton's Fence" effects, though - maybe we'd have to make a _lot_ more use of the "institutional memory" of the non-political parts of government. Behind every law, there's usually at least some advisory recommendations / reports from various agencies, and over 10-30 year timescales there's a non-zero chance that some of the original authors of those are still around. Otherwise, we'd run the "junior developer" risk of perpetually refactoring laws without understanding the reasoning behind them, and breaking functionality users depend on in the process. Sure, it's obvious that some blue law about not pasturing your cow on ye towne grasse on ye Holye Sundaye is outdated, but I suspect those obvious deprecation cases are few and far between. Thoughtful, context-aware refactoring applies to systems in general, not just computer systems.

_0ffh 4y ago
Shouldn't be a problem, because along with the law you can also hand down what it is supposed to achieve, and how.
- axiolite 4y ago
  Sounds nice in theory, but after decades of everything running smoothly, people forget just how instrumental certain laws were to ensure that stability. It's a lot like anti-vaxers, anti-pasteurization, and other anti-science fads. And I can point to the repeal of banking regs like Glass-Steagall which resulted in the ~2007 financial crisis and recession. Including a post-it note on a law isn't going to give future people the same perspective as someone who lived through the issues first-hand. If that worked, we wouldn't have voters repeatedly supporting politicians who make the same insane promises that never work.
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    Not to mention cryptocurrencies, which are currently speedrunning the history of financial crises and the regulations they inspired.

greggman3 4y ago

reminds me of this https://youtu.be/BN8B12xmisY https://youtu.be/BN8B12xmisY

Timwi 4y ago

What would engage everyone a bit more in how the country runs is to let everyone have a say in how the country runs. You can't expect people to “engage” when they just get ignored and politicians do what they want anyway.