4 ms·

I'm always confused when I see someone talking about laws and regulations as something you can't change. Care to explain why? If in the land of cable freedoms

by mrtksn 2y ago

I'm always confused when I see someone talking about laws and regulations as something you can't change. Care to explain why? If in the land of cable freedoms they come up with something noticeably better, they can just change the law to allow it. Am I missing something?

TiredOfLife 2y ago
Just stupid Americans saying Stupid American stuff.
wqaatwt 2y ago
So how would anyone prove that its “noticeably better” while not being allowed to use that standard on any device? People keep repeating the same thing but it just makes no sense..
wmf 2y ago
Legislatures have limited bandwidth and they tend to consider a topic "closed" once they have passed a law. So flawed laws often stick around for decades.
- okanat 2y ago
  That's why laws are written in broad strokes and redirect exact specification to regulations written by regulatory committees, at least in Continental Europe (i.e. Civil Law system). You don't need to make new laws just update regulatory text.
  - nforgerit 2y ago
    The problem is that those regulatory committees always put some kind of idealistic nonplus ultra standards into the regulations without respecting the real world. "Sorry kids, no kindergarden here for you because the regulator requires us to build parking space for SUVs and obeying this means we can't build enough parking space for all your parents which would break another rule. So we'll do nothing."
    - Timon3 2y ago
      And what are the "idealistic nonplus ultra standards" in the concrete USB-C example we're discussing?
      - nforgerit 2y ago
        Parent was discussing systematic issues and I was answering to that. In fact, what I'm getting downvoted for (the problem of outsourced over-engineered regulations that frequently contradict each other) is openly discussed, at least in Germany. Maybe you should check yourself in "seeing anti Europeans everywhere".
        Timon3 2y ago
        Sure, but here we have a concrete example of a regulatory committee making a rule that apparently doesn't do what you fear. So it seems like it's certainly possible for regulatory committees not to do what you described? I get your point, but painting with such broad strokes honestly just poisons the discussion. If you're rejecting everything on principle by applying a slippery slope, why should people care about your position? Lastly, I'm not sure I understand what "seeing anti Europeans everywhere" you're talking about, could you expand on that?
    - bmicraft 2y ago
      Parking minima are a distinctly American phenomenon.
      - nforgerit 2y ago
        Not at all. E.g. Germany requires housing projects to build "enough parking lots" for newly built flats[0]. The result is that flats either don't get built at all or "green surfaces" (or playgrounds) get transformed into parking lots. So the _real world_ result is, as a society, we favor parking lots over homelessness or green surfaces which is contradictory to pretty much everything else we're discussing. These laws are from times in which the legislator thought of them to be a good idea. Times have changed, the regulation hasn't and nobody is talking about exactly those issues. There's plenty more of those examples which can only lead you to the conclusion that most finely granular regulation is rather harmful than helpful. [0] https://dejure.org/gesetze/LBO/37.html https://dejure.org/gesetze/LBO/37.html (German, it might be different from federal state to state)
  - jkaplowitz 2y ago
    Regulations to address the ambiguities and gaps in legislation, or to update them within specifically legislated boundaries, happen often in common-law systems too.
MattGaiser 2y ago
It is more that they never get around to addressing many of them, as legislators/regulators have limited bandwidth. Tons of things just fall off the wagon.
nemo44x 2y ago
You’re missing a thing called regulatory capture. 1) no one will invest in new charging technology because it’s an uphill battle to be approved 2) entrenched charger organizations with political connections will resist change. Their existence depends on it. You will only see change as they use regulations to starve upstarts and acquire their tech Pennie’s on the dollar. But the good news is Europe invents almost nothing today so they can just have a friendly debate on which American or Asian tech to standardize on.
- mrtksn 2y ago
  What Europe does is to educate talent, then that talent goes to America and works hard. Then their inventions come to Europe to get standardized. Meanwhile, Europe is making good money by investing in America, without the mess of being an experimental zone. Notice how there are barely any names like John or Henry on those research papers or patents. It’s even a hot topic lately, acknowledged by the tech titans. As they say, Americans don’t do much and even if the legal entity is in the US, the capital and the talent is actually from Europe, China and India. Unfortunately, it appears that with the rise of Maga Europe will eventually have to provide its talent a place to experiment things but the techies are fighting hard to prevent that.
  - wqaatwt 2y ago
    > Europe is making good money by investing in America Except it’s not. The gap had been continuously growing for the last 10-20 years. Europeans are just getting (relatively) poorer and poorer.
  - nemo44x 2y ago
    Europe doesn’t matter. At all. It’s a dying and increasingly irrelevant place. Sorry but true.
    - mrtksn 2y ago
      Look who was consuming propaganda on Twitter all day :)
ggreer 2y ago
There are a lot of laws and not all of them get updated, as regulatory bodies only have so much time, attention, and political capital. The EU's cookie law still requires a banner if your site uses a cookie to store something like preferred language or default location (even if it's not tied to a specific identity), as those aren't considered "strictly necessary" cookies. GDPR's right to be forgotten hasn't been updated to stop abuse by people who want to hide their past crimes or controversial behavior. The EU's laws on self-driving vehicles still restrict maximum lateral acceleration and lane change behavior, forcing vehicle manufacturers to gimp their software in the EU. The new USB-C law could be improved significantly if it was a tax instead of a mandate. There is a dollar value associated with the cost of recycling proprietary chargers. Taxing that would be a source of revenue for the EU and allow other chargers for purposes that we can't predict today. The current law is purely a cost center for both governments and manufacturers. And since everyone agrees it will need to be updated at some point, it's the law equivalent of tech debt. I'm surprised at the responses I've gotten considering how I didn't say I was against this law. I just said I'm not sure if it's a good idea in the long term. And so far, the replies haven't engaged with most of my points. The EU's mandate helps big companies at the expense of small ones, does nothing to discourage electronic waste unrelated to chargers, and makes it harder to switch to whatever will come after USB-C. Yes it's possible for the EU to change the law, but considering they've started with a flawed law and they haven't updated quite a few other laws, I would bet against this law getting updated promptly.
- daveoc64 2y ago
  >The EU's cookie law still requires a banner if your site uses a cookie to store something like preferred language or default location (even if it's not tied to a specific identity), as those aren't considered "strictly necessary" cookies. This simply isn't true, and your source for this is biased as another commenter has stated. The EU website has the exact legal definitions: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers/data-protection/online-privacy/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
  - ggreer 2y ago
    I'm happy to be corrected on this, but your source says nothing about the kind of cookies I mentioned. Examples of strictly necessary cookies are auth sessions and shopping cart contents, not preferred language or default location. Paragraph 25 of the law states[1]: > Where such devices, for instance cookies, are intended for a legitimate purpose, such as to facilitate the provision of information society services, their use should be allowed on condition that users are provided with clear and precise information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC about the purposes of cookies or similar devices so as to ensure that users are made aware of information being placed on the terminal equipment they are using. Users should have the opportunity to refuse to have a cookie or similar device stored on their terminal equipment. Is storing preferred language or default location strictly necessary, or just a legitimate purpose (and thus requires consent)? The EU has had since 2009 to clarify this, but many sites (including the news article about the USB-C law) interpret it to mean that consent is required, and thus have cookie banners for these things. If you can't agree that the cookie law is a bad law that either needs to be repealed, clarified, or made more strict, then I don't know what to tell you. It's a perfect example of a well-intended law that causes more problems than it solves. And it's a perfect example of the EU failing to update a law with clear flaws. I don't know if the USB-C law will have a similar outcome, but considering the EU's track record, I'm not confident it will be a good thing in the long term. 1. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32002L0058 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...
School-Cotton 2y ago
Lightning is already better than USB C, and yet a new law has been passed banning it.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  What makes it better? Last I checked, the specs were objectively worse.
- Timon3 2y ago
  It's entirely legal to add a Lightning port to a device. Why do you think that was "banned"?
- bmicraft 2y ago
  Lightning is worse to the point where it isn't even funny - 480Mb/s vs 120Gb/s data transfer - 9V? vs 48V - 2.4A? vs 5A - resulting in 18W vs 240W - proprietary vs open. Youre calling the connector supporting 13.3x the power and 250x data transfer while being an open standard and almost the same size "worse".
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  For definitions of "better" that don't consider its being proprietary, perhaps.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    Yes, indeed, some things about it are better and some worse. Which means it’s good for consumers to have a choice, and more importantly, for companies with a track record of good taste in designing high-quality smartphones to have a free hand. I trust Apple to make decisions that lead to a phone I enjoy using a lot more than I trust the EU regulatory bureaucracy to do so.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      Consumers don't have a choice, though. Up until recently, if you wanted an iPhone, you get Lightning, and that's it. That's great for you, since you believe it's the best cable/connector for you. But if someone wanted something different, they had no choice, unless they wanted a different kind of smartphone. And I don't think someone is going to make an iPhone -> Android switch simply because of the cable. That's a bit absurd.

by mrtksn 2y ago

TiredOfLife 2y ago

Just stupid Americans saying Stupid American stuff.

wqaatwt 2y ago

So how would anyone prove that its “noticeably better” while not being allowed to use that standard on any device? People keep repeating the same thing but it just makes no sense..

wmf 2y ago

Legislatures have limited bandwidth and they tend to consider a topic "closed" once they have passed a law. So flawed laws often stick around for decades.

okanat 2y ago
That's why laws are written in broad strokes and redirect exact specification to regulations written by regulatory committees, at least in Continental Europe (i.e. Civil Law system). You don't need to make new laws just update regulatory text.
- nforgerit 2y ago
  The problem is that those regulatory committees always put some kind of idealistic nonplus ultra standards into the regulations without respecting the real world. "Sorry kids, no kindergarden here for you because the regulator requires us to build parking space for SUVs and obeying this means we can't build enough parking space for all your parents which would break another rule. So we'll do nothing."
  - Timon3 2y ago
    And what are the "idealistic nonplus ultra standards" in the concrete USB-C example we're discussing?
    - nforgerit 2y ago
      Parent was discussing systematic issues and I was answering to that. In fact, what I'm getting downvoted for (the problem of outsourced over-engineered regulations that frequently contradict each other) is openly discussed, at least in Germany. Maybe you should check yourself in "seeing anti Europeans everywhere".
      - Timon3 2y ago
        Sure, but here we have a concrete example of a regulatory committee making a rule that apparently doesn't do what you fear. So it seems like it's certainly possible for regulatory committees not to do what you described? I get your point, but painting with such broad strokes honestly just poisons the discussion. If you're rejecting everything on principle by applying a slippery slope, why should people care about your position? Lastly, I'm not sure I understand what "seeing anti Europeans everywhere" you're talking about, could you expand on that?
  - bmicraft 2y ago
    Parking minima are a distinctly American phenomenon.
    - nforgerit 2y ago
      Not at all. E.g. Germany requires housing projects to build "enough parking lots" for newly built flats[0]. The result is that flats either don't get built at all or "green surfaces" (or playgrounds) get transformed into parking lots. So the _real world_ result is, as a society, we favor parking lots over homelessness or green surfaces which is contradictory to pretty much everything else we're discussing. These laws are from times in which the legislator thought of them to be a good idea. Times have changed, the regulation hasn't and nobody is talking about exactly those issues. There's plenty more of those examples which can only lead you to the conclusion that most finely granular regulation is rather harmful than helpful. [0] https://dejure.org/gesetze/LBO/37.html https://dejure.org/gesetze/LBO/37.html (German, it might be different from federal state to state)
- jkaplowitz 2y ago
  Regulations to address the ambiguities and gaps in legislation, or to update them within specifically legislated boundaries, happen often in common-law systems too.

MattGaiser 2y ago

It is more that they never get around to addressing many of them, as legislators/regulators have limited bandwidth. Tons of things just fall off the wagon.

nemo44x 2y ago

You’re missing a thing called regulatory capture. 1) no one will invest in new charging technology because it’s an uphill battle to be approved 2) entrenched charger organizations with political connections will resist change. Their existence depends on it. You will only see change as they use regulations to starve upstarts and acquire their tech Pennie’s on the dollar. But the good news is Europe invents almost nothing today so they can just have a friendly debate on which American or Asian tech to standardize on.

mrtksn 2y ago
What Europe does is to educate talent, then that talent goes to America and works hard. Then their inventions come to Europe to get standardized. Meanwhile, Europe is making good money by investing in America, without the mess of being an experimental zone. Notice how there are barely any names like John or Henry on those research papers or patents. It’s even a hot topic lately, acknowledged by the tech titans. As they say, Americans don’t do much and even if the legal entity is in the US, the capital and the talent is actually from Europe, China and India. Unfortunately, it appears that with the rise of Maga Europe will eventually have to provide its talent a place to experiment things but the techies are fighting hard to prevent that.
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  > Europe is making good money by investing in America Except it’s not. The gap had been continuously growing for the last 10-20 years. Europeans are just getting (relatively) poorer and poorer.
- nemo44x 2y ago
  Europe doesn’t matter. At all. It’s a dying and increasingly irrelevant place. Sorry but true.
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    Look who was consuming propaganda on Twitter all day :)

ggreer 2y ago

There are a lot of laws and not all of them get updated, as regulatory bodies only have so much time, attention, and political capital. The EU's cookie law still requires a banner if your site uses a cookie to store something like preferred language or default location (even if it's not tied to a specific identity), as those aren't considered "strictly necessary" cookies. GDPR's right to be forgotten hasn't been updated to stop abuse by people who want to hide their past crimes or controversial behavior. The EU's laws on self-driving vehicles still restrict maximum lateral acceleration and lane change behavior, forcing vehicle manufacturers to gimp their software in the EU. The new USB-C law could be improved significantly if it was a tax instead of a mandate. There is a dollar value associated with the cost of recycling proprietary chargers. Taxing that would be a source of revenue for the EU and allow other chargers for purposes that we can't predict today. The current law is purely a cost center for both governments and manufacturers. And since everyone agrees it will need to be updated at some point, it's the law equivalent of tech debt. I'm surprised at the responses I've gotten considering how I didn't say I was against this law. I just said I'm not sure if it's a good idea in the long term. And so far, the replies haven't engaged with most of my points. The EU's mandate helps big companies at the expense of small ones, does nothing to discourage electronic waste unrelated to chargers, and makes it harder to switch to whatever will come after USB-C. Yes it's possible for the EU to change the law, but considering they've started with a flawed law and they haven't updated quite a few other laws, I would bet against this law getting updated promptly.

daveoc64 2y ago
>The EU's cookie law still requires a banner if your site uses a cookie to store something like preferred language or default location (even if it's not tied to a specific identity), as those aren't considered "strictly necessary" cookies. This simply isn't true, and your source for this is biased as another commenter has stated. The EU website has the exact legal definitions: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers/data-protection/online-privacy/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
- ggreer 2y ago
  I'm happy to be corrected on this, but your source says nothing about the kind of cookies I mentioned. Examples of strictly necessary cookies are auth sessions and shopping cart contents, not preferred language or default location. Paragraph 25 of the law states[1]: > Where such devices, for instance cookies, are intended for a legitimate purpose, such as to facilitate the provision of information society services, their use should be allowed on condition that users are provided with clear and precise information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC about the purposes of cookies or similar devices so as to ensure that users are made aware of information being placed on the terminal equipment they are using. Users should have the opportunity to refuse to have a cookie or similar device stored on their terminal equipment. Is storing preferred language or default location strictly necessary, or just a legitimate purpose (and thus requires consent)? The EU has had since 2009 to clarify this, but many sites (including the news article about the USB-C law) interpret it to mean that consent is required, and thus have cookie banners for these things. If you can't agree that the cookie law is a bad law that either needs to be repealed, clarified, or made more strict, then I don't know what to tell you. It's a perfect example of a well-intended law that causes more problems than it solves. And it's a perfect example of the EU failing to update a law with clear flaws. I don't know if the USB-C law will have a similar outcome, but considering the EU's track record, I'm not confident it will be a good thing in the long term. 1. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32002L0058 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...

School-Cotton 2y ago

Lightning is already better than USB C, and yet a new law has been passed banning it.

Qwertious 2y ago
What makes it better? Last I checked, the specs were objectively worse.
Timon3 2y ago
It's entirely legal to add a Lightning port to a device. Why do you think that was "banned"?
bmicraft 2y ago
Lightning is worse to the point where it isn't even funny - 480Mb/s vs 120Gb/s data transfer - 9V? vs 48V - 2.4A? vs 5A - resulting in 18W vs 240W - proprietary vs open. Youre calling the connector supporting 13.3x the power and 250x data transfer while being an open standard and almost the same size "worse".
ceejayoz 2y ago
For definitions of "better" that don't consider its being proprietary, perhaps.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  Yes, indeed, some things about it are better and some worse. Which means it’s good for consumers to have a choice, and more importantly, for companies with a track record of good taste in designing high-quality smartphones to have a free hand. I trust Apple to make decisions that lead to a phone I enjoy using a lot more than I trust the EU regulatory bureaucracy to do so.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Consumers don't have a choice, though. Up until recently, if you wanted an iPhone, you get Lightning, and that's it. That's great for you, since you believe it's the best cable/connector for you. But if someone wanted something different, they had no choice, unless they wanted a different kind of smartphone. And I don't think someone is going to make an iPhone -> Android switch simply because of the cable. That's a bit absurd.