That’s good and all for things that begin and end within a single state. Some things really should be done at the federal level. I don’t think a single service I subscribe to is based in the state in which I live.
> The question: will companies segregate their customers? Everyone gets to click-to-cancel or is there now a dedicated code path just for the lucky few?
The answer to that is that companies will use geofencing to restrict click-to-cancel to only the states that pass such laws. We've already seen this happen on a national level, when Apple segregated the EU and the rest of the world on the topic of sideloading
> It's absurd that such laws would need to be passed 50 times for all US citizens to benefit from it. It should be done at the federal level.
You're missing an important reason why regulating at the state level first is a good idea: because it allows you to test the implementation with a small fraction of citizens before rolling it out.
Yes, basically everyone wants click-to-cancel, but actually writing good regulation is hard. Ideally, what would happen is that a few states would try things in different ways, and then when they figure out the best implementation, the federal government would pick up that implementation.
The problem here is that it’s testing the implementation details more than the generalized idea.
It’s as if I wrote code to process data in a certain way, write it for an old mainframe and to process a specific set of data. There’s not a ton of generalizability to other data, and how you implement the code on other systems will impact the outcome. Especially because there are few objective measurements to evaluate the success of legislation
> The problem here is that it’s testing the implementation details more than the generalized idea.
Well, the problem is that you can't test the generalized idea either. Even if a law is passed at the federal level, you're still only testing a specific implementation of a regulatory concept you want to implement.
Having a bunch of entities (the states) try implementing the same concept in different ways allows you to explore more of the solution space than if you only have a single entity (the federal government) do it uniformly upfront!
Yes, although this is expensive and harmful, there is little reason to think the bad experiments would adopt the winner, or that we can even measure the best outcome. Plus, for a lot of stuff - we don’t need experiments, we know what works!
As an example, is there any reason to think we need to do experiments on whether children are fed at school for free?
> little reason to think the bad experiments would adopt the winner
What does this mean? Not a coherent sentence.
> that we can even measure the best outcome
So, exactly the same as when it's done at the federal level.
> for a lot of stuff - we don’t need experiments, we know what works
In terms of legislation? Factually incorrect. Legislation/regulation is extremely difficult to get right and it's incredibly rare that there's precedent that is universally-agreed-upon to be beneficial in general, let alone when the states don't try their hand first.
> As an example, is there any reason to think we need to do experiments on whether children are fed at school for free?
Again, what does this mean? This isn't a coherent sentence either.
This is just not an appropriate response, but I'm happy you feel like you made your point. You can chalk up another internet point for p0wnage of someone you'll never meet.
It's entirely an appropriate response given that you made multiple factual claims without providing evidence, and you made several statements that just were incoherent and so I couldn't even understand what your points were.
> I'm happy you feel like you made your point
Factually, I did make my point. I made factually correct statements, and you responded with false claims and fallacies, and eventually realized that you couldn't actually refute my points and so started emotionally attacking me. That indicates that you don't understand the difference between feelings and things that are factually true.
> Was it your intent to shut down a conversation?
No, it was my intent to discover truth. Do you not realize that facts and truth matters and that you can't just lie about things? If you can't justify your positions with facts and logic, you're just a hypocrite and your opinions are meaningless.
Also, Hacker News is specifically about intellectual curiosity. I want to know if what you're saying is true, and engage with points that you make (feelings are not points), and so I ask questions and challenge. Emotional outbursts, like yours, are the polar opposite - they're anti-intellectual, and shut down curiosity.
But it's actually easier to get a law passed at the state level than at the federal level. As you can see, congress has a hard time passing meaningful laws right now, and from people I know who work there, it's largely because there's too much stuff for them to do - they simply don't have enough bandwidth. At the state level, you have fewer signatures you need to get on petitions, you represent a larger fraction of the constituents, your representatives are more sensitive to your demands, etc.
From a greedy/selfish perspective, having the states prototype laws before the federal government effectively offloads some of the regulatory burden onto the states.
And, when the law works, the other states tends to notice - you get political momentum.
