Mandating basic standards to ensure that products sold to children are non toxic seem vital enough. Whether this is the best way of managing that, is a different matter.

not necessarily. we have kneejerk reactions to statistically anomalous events all the time. Some things happen so infrequently that the regulation does far more harm than good. People have a desire to do something, anything, but never question if something should be done in the first place and establishing rational criteria to determine if they shouldn't act at all.

No. They're not regulated. Everyone knows where to get them anyway, or knows someone who knows where to get them. And they do.

But those things are more dangerous for everyone. You don't get to make them safe by demanding inspections. You don't get to make sure no one's cheating. It acts as a huge drain on revenue, instead of the taxable economic activity it should be.

Your "regulation" is some delusional DEA Czar talking about protecting kids from drugs and winning a war against an abstract concept. Meanwhile those kids buy dirty street shit mixed with rat poison and elephant tranquilizer.

I'm not a big fan of regulation, mind you, but I think I speak even for the pro-regulation folks when I say "that's not the kind of regulation anyone wants or that anyone means when they use the word".

> But upon later reflection it occurred to me that what are laws if not the legislation of morality? That’s literally what laws are.

That's not what laws are for. It seems like it to naive people. But then they try to prohibit things people are going to do anyway, even when those things won't harm others if done.

And, if any of this just rubs you the wrong way, you can go read up on the extensive real world experimentation where we discover just how awful those attempts go.

Laws are for "making things better". It may be that people who rape toddlers deserve to be executed, but if you make that a law you don't make the world better... you just end up with more dead toddlers. Laws drafted badly create perverse incentives.

> Ah but you say, it’s a victimless act. Let people have their big gulps, let people gamble. It is a victimless act until it isn’t, like speeding or drunk driving.

No one said you can't prohibit drunk driving. Though, even for that, there are limits to how intense this prohibition can be. The thing you can't do without it being lunacy, is outlawing the drinking itself.

> If a father downloads an app and blows through his families monthly resources with a few button presses that creates problems not just for him but the rest of his family and other people are going to have to pick up the slack.

The teatotalers would've loved you. But then we prohibit something, and we get mobsters having machine gun fights on Main Street about black markets. No thanks.

This isn't a gambling problem. It's a "why wasn't she a good enough judge of character to not have his kids". I'd like to solve that one too, but I don't know how. Not my problem. Not yours, feel free to not pick up their slack.

> These ventures being allowed into the system of capital creates incentives for as much of these problems in society as possible from the perspective of the proprietors of these ventures in order for them to extract the most capital profits that they can.

The initial prohibition (and the naivete of the legislators) caused that. Rather than digging deep and becoming subject matter experts on the regulation of gambling (and we have quite alot of history and learning materials for this), they passed the buck until it managed to be legalized in a half-assed manner.

You elect bad legislators (so do I, there are no good candidates).

> What is good for society?

We're no longer in a "what is good for society" phase of civilization. Even if I agreed with you, I wouldn't waste political capital trying to be anti-gambling. It's just bad strategy.

That ship sailed by 1980 or so. I was a kid then, and largely unaware of it at the time. If you invent time travel though, don't show up in 1978 or whatever, it'd need to be the 1950s or 1960s to have any chance at all of fighting that battle. The seeds of universal gambling in the United States were sown way back when.

Long story short: undermining fundamental human rights to fight a war you lost before you started sounds like a fool's solution to a problem that doesn't even cause him any trouble.

I assume you don't mean for this to apply to others areas, like food and drug inspection, vehicle safety standards, etc.

Blocking information which could be used for harm is just as much “morality” as any other moderation.

Yes all those regulations that actually make things worse.

Which ones are those again? specifically?

I find that generally people who make hand-wavey boogeyman 'regulation is bad' arguments typically struggle to identify which regulations are bad and why, and conveniently forget about the thousands of regulations that make their life livable every day.

That's the Platonic/Napoleonic mindset right there :)

It's one of the Great Philosophical Questions - do we build society from first principles, or do we just react to what people do as they get together? The latter is the current fashion, at least in theory - in practice, the former keeps coming up over and over, because lawmaking is fundamentally a prescriptive action that instinctively moves from first principles (and it's the only way that lawmakers can forever justify their role: if we ever figured out a society working so well that no reaction or correction is necessary, what would lawmakers do? Write law covering behaviour in places where humans could only potentially exist, i.e. prescribe from first principles).

TBH I rarely ever thought about this sort of thing until I moved to the UK, where the average mindset is deeply anti-Napoleonic/anti-Roman.

Because it is an incredibly common fallacy to ignore boundary conditions and unintentional consequences when proposing a pie-in-the-sky regulation that is supposed to just fix things.

Any regulatory mechanism is essentially a machine that will need to work with every input and minimize some class of error, be it precision or coverage or some other system level metric. Turns out the most interesting part of such a system is indeed around the edge cases, and the difficulty of handling such cases is essentially the bulk of the difficulty of building such a system to begin with.

It is like saying "why don't we build a system that punishes criminals", which sounds very agreeable and popular at that level of construal, but is incredibly complex and sophisticated at the actual implementation level; e.g. to have a process to minimize false positive convictions rather than maximize conviction rates.

> It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring

Not to sound harsh but HN does not owe anyone their favorite type of entertainment and honestly criticisms on those metrics are more trite, predictable, wearisome and boring themselves than anything else. Many find intellectual stimulation and systemic thinking entertaining and thus those comments enjoyable.

Who pays for that? You don't sound like you're an active participant in producing any of that stuff. You sound like you're just an advocate for "more" regulation. How does that help? Don't you agree that bad regulations do more damage than a single bad actor? Like in Soviet Union?

Or it could just be that you're the bad actor in disguise, or you don't realise it yourself. Don't get me wrong here, but your mindset sounds like that of a young child, who wants to control everything, by "regulating" others' behaviour.

That's a pretty expansive view of government; I'll grant that regulations are one mechanism for communicating the implications of decisions, but to say that people can't know the implications without regulations? That just seems silly to the point that I'm unsure if I'm intended to legitimately engage with that viewpoint; is that your actual opinion?

We put regulation on fossil fuels as a practical matter of recognizing the reality in which we operate, and the harms that will come to real people if we outlawed it without a viable solution to the rest of the problems that would create.

> Some industries should stay in the dark unprotected always looking over their shoulder for when they might get caught.

This sounds nice, but the practical implications are that already disadvantaged people are further abused and taken advantage of. No one should want that type of system.

And the first requirement for this is that rules and regulations are followed.

Establish a culture in which there is no consequence for disobeying the rules and regulations and I guarantee that the most regular offenders are not those who's practices you agree with.

The best case scenario here is that there are heavy consequences for those who broke the rules, but the rules are revisited and altered to make things more in line with consumer needs.

Open calls for regulation are not productive. Regulation should be a last resort, not a knee-jerk response. What do you think needs regulation and more importantly, how would you effectively enforce these regulations. A law is policy + enforcement after all, and a poorly crafted AI regulation will achieve nothing except shifting the balance of power to entrenched groups.

Then one should think really deeply how to create regulations that only avoid the problems with the small group, but not make the overall population worse off.

It's also worth acknowledging that having this kind of regulation makes our society more efficient.

I would be capable of informing myself on this issue, but I don't. The are so many issues of this kind that if I were to attempt to inform myself on all of them, I wouldn't be able to get anything done anymore.

Another way of looking at it is that regulation is a form of implicit specialization, which is why it helps us be more efficient.

Specific regulations may have problematic impacts (or positive ones, or some mix).

Statements about "regulation" in abstract are meaningless, except to subtract from the idea that specific insight matters, and add to the idea all one needs to approach any given problem is a general ideological approach.

I think this is possibly a bit naive. Regulations also exist to protect powerful people's businesses, to push personal agendas, and to further political aims even if those are not actually in the interests of any consumers. Also sometimes people think they're making a regulation to protect consumers, but actually it makes things worse.

yes, let's prevent regulators from applying and enforcing no brainer life saving safety regulations without first being required to spend decades studying each individual issue and then litigate each individual issue for another couple of decades, ensuring that nothing ever gets regulated ever

because that's what you're asking for, whether you realize it or not

I think the framing of regulation as a spectrum of less to more is unhelpful. We don't need more regulation, we need better regulation. Some better is more; sometimes it's less.