- solidsnack9000How would anyone be voted out in the EU?
- It was not that long ago, that most countries regulated products, communications, food, and many other things, even arms & munitions, very, very lightly. In the UK in 1903, a law was passed prohibiting the sale of pistols to children. The UK is a country where adults who have served in the military have a hard time buying a pistol today.
From 1900 onwards, the scope of safety regulation greatly expanded, and the state apparatus necessary to make that regulation stick also expanded. Different countries have gone in different directions with it. The US has a lot less safety than many other countries, but our regulations and regulatory apparatus greatly expanded, too. It's easy to sell safety to voters and with improving technology and information systems, more and more safety was possible.
We are probably approaching a local maxima of some kind in our approach to safety; or maybe we just suffer from a maniacal focus on it. Legislators are ever more willing to set aside the fundamental rights in the name of protecting the vulnerable from harm.
- At one time, they were targeting much a broader array of languages -- it wasn't specifically a JavaScript tool:
- It does stand to reason that all law could be formalized. For example, consider the definition of murder in the first degree from 18 USC § 1111:
"Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought."
You might say, well, "unlawful" and "malice" are fuzzy concepts; but we can take them to be facts that we input into the model. I guess we could write something like this in Catala:
In the calculation of social benefits and taxes, the facts input to the model are generally things like prices, depreciations, costs, areas of offices, percentages and so on, input numerically and sworn to be true. These numbers are then used to calculate an amount due (or in arrears). Performing the calculation in a way that is verified to conform to the law is a big part of the work.scope Murder : definition in_the_1st_degree under condition is_malice_aforethought and is_unlawful consequence equals trueHowever, in other areas of law, determining the facts is actually where the real work is -- was there malice aforethought? A formalized legal machine could process these facts but it's not a big help. The models would just be a huge list of assumptions that have to be input and a minimal calculation that produces `true` or one of the alternatives of an enum.
- There is no country where a person has to declare all their possessions or they are otherwise forfeit. That is transparently bad policy. Possessions are one important basis of wealth.
This is, I think, another example of people's intuitions about tracking wealth just not being very robust.
- I am not talking about hiding wealth. How do you find all of a person's wealth in a principled way? There isn't a central clearinghouse of this information.
People can own houses, factories, &c, in indirect ways, or in other jurisdictions, and these are all basically legal and make it hard to say what, exactly, people own.
The easiest people to tax are people whose inflows are simple wage income, who own a house and a car in their own country, and don't have a business. In other words, ordinary people. They make up a bulk of the financial activity in a country and the bulk of the tax revenues (most of the time).
It is easy to imagine that the way to capture greater tax revenue from wealthy people is simply to scale this system up -- tax the wealthy people more on their income, their expensive car, &c. However, wealthy people are also wealthy in structurally different ways from ordinary people.
- Interesting write-up.
- The article mentions cathedral projects that issued their own local currencies. I guess they must have backed it with gold or silver, or some collection of valuable things donated to fund the cathedral?
The article really is light on technical details that would help one to understand how these local currencies worked.
- Yeah, it seems like most people assume there is a reach and scope of taxation that isn't really possible. Wealth can be expatriated, it can be in non-fungible objects (paintings, &c), it can be in goods held in common such that no transfers occur (for example, a house that people live in together and jointly own).
There isn't anywhere an index or lookup table of all legal rights a particular person has to wealth (or, in truth, to "things", since anything can be worth something and contribute to wealth). There are things they may have a right to that they don't even know about.
- I think it is more common for them to write 8:00 to 25:00 - omitting AM and PM.
- People like to criticize stuff like this but England was and is one of the most well-governed countries in the world. It was perhaps the leading center of development, technologically as well as in terms of institutions, from 1650 until 1900 or 1950, during which time its legal system was even more archaic.
Respect for pre-existing rights and arrangement isn't really such a big deal and rigorously exterminating that kind of stuff doesn't seem to be a requirement or even an advantage to modernity or having an ordered society.
The article's remark about "...legal daftness..." is anachronistic and absurd.
- What are those mistakes?
It seems like Ada more or less has to have memory safety bolted on -- that is what SPARK does -- and it's not clear that Ada's bias towards OO is better than Rust's bias towards functional programming.
Are you talking about features like type inference (so the Rust code could be less clear, since types are not always written out)?
- What are realistic options for "gradual improvement" of memory safety in C and C++?
My first thought is that it is kind of like talking about gradually improving manual memory allocation in Java. C and C++ are fundamentally memory unsafe; it's part of their design, to offer complete control over memory in a straightforward, direct way.
- ...it is still worrying if in community projects such as Debian when decisions that come with a cost to some part of the community are pushed through without full consensus.
What are some concrete cases you can point to where a decision was made with full consensus? Literally everyone agreed? All the users?
I'm not sure many projects have ever been run that way. I'm sure we've all heard of the Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDfL). I'm sure Linus has made an executive decision once in a while.
- What does this line have to be drawn for, though?
- Francis Fukuyama mentions this in one his books -- The Origins of Political Order or Political Order and Political Decay, I can't remember which -- and argues that this is an important part of how American democracy was workable (and British democracy too, by the way).
Other thinkers with related ideas are mentioned by other commenters:
* https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=45364562
* https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=45365419
As far as I can remember, Fukuyama's idea was that small organizations gave people a way come together as members of a certain community of practice or interest -- a trade, religion, a hobby -- and to gain first hand experience with self-governance. The organizations also provided a way give the shared concerns of their members a public voice. It's not feasible for a political candidate to visit every tradesman of every stripe in his shop, but when the horseshoers have a regular meeting at their hall, a candidate can often arrange to visit the hall for an hour or two. The same is true for ladies' charitable societies, religious groups, libraries, map collectors and many other groups that represent certain interests or powers in the society. These organizations were often (though not always) chapters in larger organizations, which provided a way to really focus people's voice at higher levels of government.
I believe the absence of these social organizations is more or less the cause of the imbalance in US democracy today. It simply is not workable for the individual to face off, toe-to-toe and unmediated, with the state.
- Yes, his autobiography is full of incidents relating to them. Starting a library, a fire department, two companies of militia...
- I actually have bought many books that I started reading online. The book format is useful.
- Allegedly, some companies with deep pockets have paid them for access to their collection. The collection turns out to be useful for training LLMs.