6 ms·

Proposals should have an exponential backoff algorithm. Otherwise they'll keep proposing over and over until it passes.

moffkalast 2y ago
Problem is that they can just keep rewording and repackaging it endlessly until the checksum doesn't match but the final effect is mostly the same.
- rmbyrro 2y ago
  I know a similar principle is successfully applied in judicial courts, in some cases. If it's possible in justice, why not in law making?
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Perhaps because courts are not a democracy? This class of problems gets much easier when an individual is designated to make a binding declaration (e.g. that these three seemingly different feelings are effectively the same) that's hard to challenge. Democracy has a hard time dealing with "obvious when you see it" problems.
    - puzzledobserver 2y ago
      The US House and Senate have parliamentarians, who have some power about what bills can be voted on. This was in the news some years ago, when they (if memory serves) blocked some bills from being voted on. I am unsure of the limits of this power, and how easy it is to change parliamentary rules in the first place.
      - didntcheck 2y ago
        Similarly in 2019 John Bercow (then speaker of the British House of Commons) notably rebuffed the government when they attempted a third vote on what he considered to be basically the same motion https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47614074 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47614074 > Mr Bercow cited a convention dating back to 1604 that a defeated motion could not be brought back in the same form during the course of a parliamentary session.
    - rmbyrro 2y ago
      Courts are a fundamental part of a Democracy. There should be an exponential back-off algorithm for proposals. The public should be able to ask a judge to decide whether a new proposal triggers the back-off or whether it's a new one that can be proposed immediately.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  Solution, perhaps, is equally persistent opposition.-
  - kelnos 2y ago
    But that's a problem. People get tired of having to fight against the same thing over and over and over. Put another way, we have to successfully oppose things like this every single time it comes up. But the people pushing it just have to win once.
    - moffkalast 2y ago
      Well then again, we've been fighting against tyranny for thousands of years and things have slowly gotten better. There are always new people, new generations, prepared to fight for the same thing their parents did and they are not tired.
    - Bluestein 2y ago
      Put that way, it sounds a lot like infosec ... (I'd humbly posit, however, that - even at worst - even if those promoting this were to win, it does not necesarily follow that any legislative/regulatory change is "irreversible" ... ... so contrarian persistence might still be warranted).-
  - rmbyrro 2y ago
    Opposition needs public support. The public, in general, gets tired of repeated messages. I suspect their motivation to pass orwellian laws are higher than the public's resiliency.
    - esafak 2y ago
      The public is always changing; one generation will age out, while another joins the fray.
      - rmbyrro 2y ago
        They're insisting on such proposals on a yearly basis. I suspect they'll intensify the frequency from now on. They can saturate the current generation's resiliency threshold until the proposal is passed.
- soraminazuki 2y ago
  I thought about letting people take the issue to court and making politicians face actual consequences if a judge decides that politicians brought up the same law over and over again in bad faith. But I guess it'd be abused when tactics like the filibuster work to kill off badly needed laws.
  - berkes 2y ago
    In a well functioning democracy, politicians that fail to bring laws that they and their voters believe in, into action, would be voted out. And would be voted out, if they fail over and over. And would not be elected in the first place when they operate on bad faith. Unfortunately, such a democracy doesn't exist and probably never will be. When marketing, spinning, populism and other such tactics make the civis vote in the best interest of the politicians rather than the civis themselves.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - kergonath 2y ago
    There would be massive counter-productive effects the moment a significant enough fraction of the population is willing to bring forward bogus lawsuits to use as a political weapon and for propaganda purposes. It is DOA.
ljm 2y ago
This has been the strategy of every political party to hold office in the UK for as long as I've been alive. There is always some privacy-defeating 'online safety' bill going through the parliament. Every time it gets knocked down, but almost immediately returns with slightly different wording.
- rmbyrro 2y ago
  What do you mean by "to hold office"? How does this help a politician hold to power?
  - utensil4778 2y ago
    Parent is saying it has been the strategy of every party which has held power. Not that the strategy helps them hold power.
  - ytwySXpMbS 2y ago
    They mean any party that's had majority control of parliament, they don't mean it's been used as a strategy to get there but rather once they're ruling it's been introduced
  - newdee 2y ago
    I don’t think that’s what they mean. I just read it as all the political parties that have been in power or in office.
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    It's not what the comment meant, but worth adding that the UK security forces have wanted this ever since they lost the ability to read everyone's mail and listen to our calls. They actively lobby every sitting government for this kind of bill, and (I have no doubt) promise all kinds of support for politicians who push their agenda.
  - ljm 2y ago
    It's similar in concept to 'in power'. The government holds office, rather than it being in power. It's more to say that the power isn't derived from the government itself, but the office they are elected into. Every government to hold office = every previous party that was elected and formed a government
navane 2y ago
Can't we just pass a law that is incompatible with this proposal? Or can a new law always overrule existing laws?
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  New laws always overrule older laws. Most legal systems, including the EU, have a constitution, that is harder to change and that governs what laws are allowed or not (the UK is rather unique in not really having such a law, so that in principle Parliament is free to pass any law they want). Enshrining a right to private communication and online anonimity into the EU constitution would probably prevent such laws from having any hope to go into effect, but that's a massive undertaking that I don't think would easily succeed.
  - contravariant 2y ago
    You mean something like a charter of fundamental rights? Perhaps containing the text > Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications. Admittedly that is part of a treaty rather than an actual constitution, though those amended treaties are the closest thing the EU has to a constitution.
  - handelaar 2y ago
    That right already exists. These Acts are always struck down by the EU's Court of Justice along with all others that are in conflict with the founding legal documents of the Union. The problem is that there isn't a mechanism to refer a proposed Act to that court before it's passed to prevent it hitting the books in the first place, and I think that's something that's easier to fix than (eg) trying to introduce new freedoms to the Bill of Rights when Hungary is able to block that. Locally it'd be progress if member states stopped attempting to transpose new EU law when that law is clearly going to be struck down later on. National courts have that expertise but refuse to use it.
- giobox 2y ago
  Generally speaking outside of constitutional questions, most legislatures cannot bind their successors. So yes, new laws can be written most of the time in most places.
peoplefromibiza 2y ago
That's a common misconception on how democracy (modern democracies at least) work. Let's now imagine that we want gay marriages or abortion rights or something minor, like the right to repair, and the proposal is rebutted by the parliament. Should the parliament respect an exponential backoff algorithm to propose them again? I'm not sure I want that. Democracy it's all about proposing the same things over and over again, with slight modifications, until the majority reaches a consensus on the matter. At least that's what I understood about it. BTW usually when a proposal is refused it won't be discussed again until the next legislature. This is not a law per se, It"s a draft being discussed by a technical commission which is working to write a proposal for the parliament to vote.
- Macha 2y ago
  > Let's now imagine that we want gay marriages or abortion rights or something minor, like the right to repair, and the proposal is rebutted by the parliament. > Should the parliament respect an exponential backoff algorithm to propose them again? Sure, put a cap on it of one parliamentary term if you're worried about it going to infinity.
  - peoplefromibiza 2y ago
    Liberal democracies are relatively new, but the process of deciding norms that satisfy different groups with conflicting interests is as old as the human history. In Italy, for example, it's already like that: legislative proposals that are not approved by the parliament lapse at the end of the legislative term. Laws are not simply voted by the parliament, presenting them it's a process per se, with its specific rules. Throughout history many tricks have also been developed to work around the limitations of the system, for example presenting the same law with slightly different wordings or use amendment bombing to block some proposal ad libitum (in Italy this happens a lot, there have been examples of software programs written specifically to do that: emit an infinite number of amendments so that they would never run out of them) Of course if some group is really determined or bears enough power it can push its own agenda while smaller less powerful ones can have a very hard time to get attention, even if their proposals are good. It's not ideal, but democracy it's a process to find tradeoffs, usually not the best one, but the lower common denominator one.

Problem is that they can just keep rewording and repackaging it endlessly until the checksum doesn't match but the final effect is mostly the same.

rmbyrro 2y ago
I know a similar principle is successfully applied in judicial courts, in some cases. If it's possible in justice, why not in law making?
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Perhaps because courts are not a democracy? This class of problems gets much easier when an individual is designated to make a binding declaration (e.g. that these three seemingly different feelings are effectively the same) that's hard to challenge. Democracy has a hard time dealing with "obvious when you see it" problems.
  - puzzledobserver 2y ago
    The US House and Senate have parliamentarians, who have some power about what bills can be voted on. This was in the news some years ago, when they (if memory serves) blocked some bills from being voted on. I am unsure of the limits of this power, and how easy it is to change parliamentary rules in the first place.
    - didntcheck 2y ago
      Similarly in 2019 John Bercow (then speaker of the British House of Commons) notably rebuffed the government when they attempted a third vote on what he considered to be basically the same motion https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47614074 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47614074 > Mr Bercow cited a convention dating back to 1604 that a defeated motion could not be brought back in the same form during the course of a parliamentary session.
  - rmbyrro 2y ago
    Courts are a fundamental part of a Democracy. There should be an exponential back-off algorithm for proposals. The public should be able to ask a judge to decide whether a new proposal triggers the back-off or whether it's a new one that can be proposed immediately.
Bluestein 2y ago
Solution, perhaps, is equally persistent opposition.-
- kelnos 2y ago
  But that's a problem. People get tired of having to fight against the same thing over and over and over. Put another way, we have to successfully oppose things like this every single time it comes up. But the people pushing it just have to win once.
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    Well then again, we've been fighting against tyranny for thousands of years and things have slowly gotten better. There are always new people, new generations, prepared to fight for the same thing their parents did and they are not tired.
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    Put that way, it sounds a lot like infosec ... (I'd humbly posit, however, that - even at worst - even if those promoting this were to win, it does not necesarily follow that any legislative/regulatory change is "irreversible" ... ... so contrarian persistence might still be warranted).-
- rmbyrro 2y ago
  Opposition needs public support. The public, in general, gets tired of repeated messages. I suspect their motivation to pass orwellian laws are higher than the public's resiliency.
  - esafak 2y ago
    The public is always changing; one generation will age out, while another joins the fray.
    - rmbyrro 2y ago
      They're insisting on such proposals on a yearly basis. I suspect they'll intensify the frequency from now on. They can saturate the current generation's resiliency threshold until the proposal is passed.
soraminazuki 2y ago
I thought about letting people take the issue to court and making politicians face actual consequences if a judge decides that politicians brought up the same law over and over again in bad faith. But I guess it'd be abused when tactics like the filibuster work to kill off badly needed laws.
- berkes 2y ago
  In a well functioning democracy, politicians that fail to bring laws that they and their voters believe in, into action, would be voted out. And would be voted out, if they fail over and over. And would not be elected in the first place when they operate on bad faith. Unfortunately, such a democracy doesn't exist and probably never will be. When marketing, spinning, populism and other such tactics make the civis vote in the best interest of the politicians rather than the civis themselves.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- kergonath 2y ago
  There would be massive counter-productive effects the moment a significant enough fraction of the population is willing to bring forward bogus lawsuits to use as a political weapon and for propaganda purposes. It is DOA.

ljm 2y ago

This has been the strategy of every political party to hold office in the UK for as long as I've been alive. There is always some privacy-defeating 'online safety' bill going through the parliament. Every time it gets knocked down, but almost immediately returns with slightly different wording.

rmbyrro 2y ago
What do you mean by "to hold office"? How does this help a politician hold to power?
- utensil4778 2y ago
  Parent is saying it has been the strategy of every party which has held power. Not that the strategy helps them hold power.
- ytwySXpMbS 2y ago
  They mean any party that's had majority control of parliament, they don't mean it's been used as a strategy to get there but rather once they're ruling it's been introduced
- newdee 2y ago
  I don’t think that’s what they mean. I just read it as all the political parties that have been in power or in office.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  It's not what the comment meant, but worth adding that the UK security forces have wanted this ever since they lost the ability to read everyone's mail and listen to our calls. They actively lobby every sitting government for this kind of bill, and (I have no doubt) promise all kinds of support for politicians who push their agenda.
- ljm 2y ago
  It's similar in concept to 'in power'. The government holds office, rather than it being in power. It's more to say that the power isn't derived from the government itself, but the office they are elected into. Every government to hold office = every previous party that was elected and formed a government

navane 2y ago

Can't we just pass a law that is incompatible with this proposal? Or can a new law always overrule existing laws?

tsimionescu 2y ago
New laws always overrule older laws. Most legal systems, including the EU, have a constitution, that is harder to change and that governs what laws are allowed or not (the UK is rather unique in not really having such a law, so that in principle Parliament is free to pass any law they want). Enshrining a right to private communication and online anonimity into the EU constitution would probably prevent such laws from having any hope to go into effect, but that's a massive undertaking that I don't think would easily succeed.
- contravariant 2y ago
  You mean something like a charter of fundamental rights? Perhaps containing the text > Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications. Admittedly that is part of a treaty rather than an actual constitution, though those amended treaties are the closest thing the EU has to a constitution.
- handelaar 2y ago
  That right already exists. These Acts are always struck down by the EU's Court of Justice along with all others that are in conflict with the founding legal documents of the Union. The problem is that there isn't a mechanism to refer a proposed Act to that court before it's passed to prevent it hitting the books in the first place, and I think that's something that's easier to fix than (eg) trying to introduce new freedoms to the Bill of Rights when Hungary is able to block that. Locally it'd be progress if member states stopped attempting to transpose new EU law when that law is clearly going to be struck down later on. National courts have that expertise but refuse to use it.
giobox 2y ago
Generally speaking outside of constitutional questions, most legislatures cannot bind their successors. So yes, new laws can be written most of the time in most places.

peoplefromibiza 2y ago

That's a common misconception on how democracy (modern democracies at least) work. Let's now imagine that we want gay marriages or abortion rights or something minor, like the right to repair, and the proposal is rebutted by the parliament. Should the parliament respect an exponential backoff algorithm to propose them again? I'm not sure I want that. Democracy it's all about proposing the same things over and over again, with slight modifications, until the majority reaches a consensus on the matter. At least that's what I understood about it. BTW usually when a proposal is refused it won't be discussed again until the next legislature. This is not a law per se, It"s a draft being discussed by a technical commission which is working to write a proposal for the parliament to vote.

Macha 2y ago
> Let's now imagine that we want gay marriages or abortion rights or something minor, like the right to repair, and the proposal is rebutted by the parliament. > Should the parliament respect an exponential backoff algorithm to propose them again? Sure, put a cap on it of one parliamentary term if you're worried about it going to infinity.
- peoplefromibiza 2y ago
  Liberal democracies are relatively new, but the process of deciding norms that satisfy different groups with conflicting interests is as old as the human history. In Italy, for example, it's already like that: legislative proposals that are not approved by the parliament lapse at the end of the legislative term. Laws are not simply voted by the parliament, presenting them it's a process per se, with its specific rules. Throughout history many tricks have also been developed to work around the limitations of the system, for example presenting the same law with slightly different wordings or use amendment bombing to block some proposal ad libitum (in Italy this happens a lot, there have been examples of software programs written specifically to do that: emit an infinite number of amendments so that they would never run out of them) Of course if some group is really determined or bears enough power it can push its own agenda while smaller less powerful ones can have a very hard time to get attention, even if their proposals are good. It's not ideal, but democracy it's a process to find tradeoffs, usually not the best one, but the lower common denominator one.