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Comment by mvkel

2 years ago

I feel like there's probably an excellent reason that the order is the way it is, due to the wonderful process of time.

This feels a lot like saying "let's just blow up the tax code and rewrite it!" And we end up generating the same 2 million lines of policy to close all of the loopholes all over again.

This assumes some of the the 2 millions lines weren’t written specifically to introduce loopholes.

> I feel like there's probably an excellent reason that the order is the way it is, due to the wonderful process of time.

But this assumes that the process of time is tending towards the better. Each change that was made was surely made on the basis of experience and created a local improvement, but that doesn't mean that they operate well together.

(Nor, of course, does it mean that they are likely to be so easily fixed that it can be done in a tossed-off HN comment.)

  • > this assumes that the process of time is tending towards the better.

    Yes, this I generally believe, at least as far as societal maturity is concerned. We still have our moments, of course.

    • > Yes, this I generally believe, at least as far as societal maturity is concerned.

      That's probably too big a discussion for here, but, on the institutional rather than the societal level, is that what you observe? Certainly it seems to me that institutions just accumulate more and more cruft over time, and, though "throw it out and re-write it" is, as well documented, rarely the right answer, neither is "trust that things are as they are because time has optimized them."

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