AnthonyMouse

> I never said it was.

Sure you did:

> The problem is convincing comfortable, ambitious middle-high earners to put a cap on their and their bosses' prospects in exchange for the stability (and subsequent ground preparation for innovation) of a higher floor.

The thing about a UBI is that it works regardless of what the amount is, up to any reasonable threshold. If it's small it doesn't do as much but it still does better than the same amount in some other benefits. You can only mess it up by making it excessively large, e.g. you can't do a $100k/year UBI because you'd need to collect ~$34 trillion in tax revenue from a ~$32 trillion GDP. Everything other than that is a trade off which is basically asking the question of how redistributive you want to be.

The amount of redistributive we are right now isn't zero, so converting that existing budget to be a UBI instead is "free" -- it's a net positive to essentially everyone -- no reduction in prospects or bonuses required.

But we can't even manage to do that.

And we could even get a "real" UBI without having oppressive tax rates -- $15,000 for every US citizen comes from a <16% universal tax rate, i.e. a flat tax of <16% of GDP. That's the number with no other government programs, but it's also something that replaces most of them.

> You say "unintended consequences" when you I think you mean "undesirable consequences", but the funny thing is that they're both intended and desirable.

I mean unintended as in you won't like them.

There are a lot of things that it's hard to tax because they're hard to value. How much is it worth to have a job that lets you play with the company's toys, or choose who they hire, or who gets their contracts? How much is a piece of "intellectual property" worth? How about a contract with an unspecified probability of having a large payout in the future? Things like that can all be used to transfer value at a reduced amount of tax, but they bring inefficiency and corruption. Misallocation of resources, nepotism and cronyism, bureaucratic empire building, reduced liquidity, etc. The higher the tax rate you use, the more incentive there is to do these things in order to avoid it.

If you subject people to very different tax rates then they can be arbitraged. Instead of Bob in the highest tax bracket making $X, a dozen family members in lower tax brackets get "hired" to be paid $X/12 so the family gets the same money without paying the higher rate, and now we're incentivizing nepotism and cronyism again.

More than 90% of new businesses fail. That means the remaining <10% need to have significantly better returns for the founders than what you get by working a corporate job or nobody would do it, and if nobody starts new companies then markets consolidate as existing companies fail or buy each other, and the more markets consolidate the more they screw consumers/workers and the more influence they have over the government.

Tax rates have a strong effect on where companies build things. If you invest a million dollars in something that will produce a 15% annual return and there is a 20% tax rate, that's a 12% return after tax. If you make the tax rate 80%, it's a 3% return after tax. Meanwhile if you build it in some other country you get a 10% return after tax, and they're going to do the thing that has the highest after-tax return, so you raise the tax rate and the factory is gone, along with the jobs.

> Let's go back to an exec's lifestyle being tied to his job because he can't extract a huge paycheck without being taxed heavily.

Wait, what? That's basically setting it up so that your boss owns you, and how to set up the economy so that it runs even more on cronyism and favors because there is no tax on the implicit value of a back room deal.

> Well yes but once you're in the US someone owns the machine you're getting hit by and you can make them take it down.

That's not how you get to high trust, since it requires the opposite -- you'd have to ID everyone and ban VPNs and restrict access to general purpose computers lest any fall under the control of a dastardly foreigner etc.

You can't build a high trust society inside of a police state because a high trust society is one where people do the right thing when no one is holding a gun to their head and a police state is holding a gun to your head.

> It's the same thing here, a normal person will never run afoul of this law.

Its terms are so broad and ambiguous that they're already doing it and the thing you're actually relying on is that they wouldn't be prosecuted, which is an entirely different thing.

> It is entirely industry professionals who will be affected and they have legal departments who will figure out where the line is to the millimeter.

"The courts will sort it out eventually" is the worst excuse for drafting it poorly to begin with, and doesn't do anything for you during the decades it takes for that to actually happen.

> Even the horribly contrived borderline examples boil down to "but I should have the right to actively deceive and circumvent security measures designed specifically to keep me out" which is a pretty tough sell.

This seems like the thing where corporations co-opt the term "security" to mean "anyone doing anything we don't like" as if they had any right to that to begin with.

Journalists should be able to investigate misconduct. Customers and customer agents should have bulk access to pricing data. Real people shouldn't have to view the speech of other real people through the proprietary interface of a corporate intermediary that people only use because it has a network effect.

> User agent strings are a sad consequence of websites incorrectly parsing them to enable functionality, resulting in a "every bug becomes a contract" type of situation.

Which is precisely why trying to legislate them is folly. Obviously the reason Android calls itself "Mobile Safari" is so that servers send it the mobile version of the site instead of the desktop one etc.

Which makes "accurate" an unreasonable requirement, since there is already a preexisting non-waivable requirement for inaccurate. When someone is making their "turn a web page into a PDF so you can view it later on the plane" software or whatever, it has to use a user agent string that will cause the site to send the version you need turned into the PDF.

> That being said, if you include GOOGLEBOT in your 1k long query string, alongside a very long page describing your crawlers, how to identify them, how to block them and how to set limits, no judge will find you guilty of concealing your purpose.

First, you're assuming that the person being prosecuted is the entities who are the nominal targets of the bill, when the real problem is when they're not. Because you're proposing a law that says anybody with an inaccurate user agent string is in violation, meanwhile everybody has an inaccurate user agent string.

Moreover, consider what you expect the outcome of legislating something like this is going to be. Sites could then try to either blacklist or whitelist user agents.

If they do the first one, that doesn't work, because the scraping service can change it whenever they want.

If they do the second one, that doesn't work, because now every third party has to start pretending to be a common browser even when they're doing something totally innocent or they get blocked by default for being something else. Which makes the user agent string even less useful than it is now, and subjects innocent parties to arbitrary liability for doing something they have to do or their client is broken.

> As for why the law is written as is instead of banning more specific functionality, it's so assholes don't get any ideas on how to bypass it.

You're describing autocracy. The way you make it so that you always prosecute someone is to make it so that you can always prosecute anyone, which is very bad.

> Someone who is using a residential proxy network, headless browsing, and/or TLS fingerprint manipulation to evade rate limits and other controls to issue large volumes of automated requests under a deceptive UserAgent string isn't difficult to describe and differentiate versus a normal user using a UA.

So then why isn't it trying to prohibit making multiple requests from different IP addresses in a residential proxy network, rather than the thing it actually does?

> The proposed text of the bill is rather straightforward. It turns more on the "stealth" bit than "bot".

Not really, look at the definition of "STEALTH BOT" -- the only thing that nominally distinguishes it from a browser is the word "bot" which isn't itself defined, because the phrase "without prior disclosure of its identity and purpose" is something that a normal web browser doesn't do either.

It can't even get it out of it via "a valid and accurate user-agent string", both because that clause says or and it still fails the second one, and because "a valid and accurate user-agent string" is a nonsense phrase. The Safari user agent strings start with "Mozilla" even though it's not. The Android ones do the same and then include "AppleWebKit" and "Mobile Safari" too. A browser extension uses the user agent string of the browser regardless of what the extension does. When Debian packages their version of Firefox, its user agent string says Firefox and not Debian.

User agent strings don't have a registry. "Valid" has no meaning and "accurate" is contrary to the default behavior of common browsers.

> It could be pinned down more closely to something like a single action that happens quite soon after you press a button

So leaving your webmail open is banned because it will still be checking for new messages three months after you opened the tab without any further human interaction. Likewise RSS readers or really any client which is intended to fetch new posts/messages when they appear.

> It's probably relative to current norms of computer use and what we do or don't automate casually (and thus describe as "by hand").

Which is kind of exactly the problem. A new law would presumably still be on the books in ten or twenty years. Do we expect user agents by then to do only the things they do now, or will they get more capable? Banning them from becoming more capable is the problem.

> There's plenty of sites that operate entirely within the US and it's trivial to hard block everyone else.

It's trivial to block IP addresses listed as being somewhere else. That doesn't block people in other jurisdictions from using a US IP address, either by renting or compromising one in the US or having administrative control over one somewhere else and then setting its metadata to whatever they want.

> the law handles these kinds of things just fine

No, people just like to claim that it does. Meanwhile legal departments are risk averse, so if nobody can articulate where the line is, you're banning all of the things you claim you're not banning. Even if a judge might ultimately come to a reasonable decision, do you want to be the one who pays the legal fees to "win" that case?

> The flesh doesn't know the difference between manslaughter and murder but we humans can figure it out well enough.

The reason things like this aren't a practical problem is that normal people can avoid needing to care about the distinction by endeavoring to not kill anyone to begin with. On top of that, the law actually does have some pretty specific rules about the distinction between manslaughter and murder.

Whereas the trouble here is that we need to distinguish between things that we specifically don't want to deter and something else which is proposed to be prohibited. The type of law that handles that kind of distinction most frequently is the tax code. The consequence is that it has to be made very specific or the result is a train wreck.

> That costs the crawler money

They're for-profit operations. They have money, and it doesn't cost that much. Proof of work is significantly more expensive (but then you put delays on even the users in your own region).

> banning country and AS numbers for cloud companies is pretty effective in my experience

It's the sort of thing that works when the first person initially rolls it out because the crawlers only bother to do something about it once a threshold percentage of people are doing it, at which point they use the workaround.

And then you have people insisting that it works even though it only used to work, and meanwhile you're still blocking actual humans.

> A web browser isn't a bot as long as it's controlled by a human but it becomes one once it's automated.

That doesn't mean anything. All of the code in a browser is "automation" -- normal users aren't hand-crafting the hundreds of HTTP requests the browser makes to render a single web page. Meanwhile there is a human somewhere telling the scrapers what to scrape.

> You are entitled to your own emails, posts, etc

Is that somewhere in the proposed text?

> but you are not entitled to crawl the internet for your own purposes without stating what they are and allowing websites an opt out.

"Stating what they are" buys you nothing when you have no way of verifying it, and you're still not providing any way to distinguish this from investigative journalism or e.g. a new competing search engine.

> Unfortunately, geofencing is becoming more and more common specifically because of the extra bot traffic.

How is geofencing supposed to help? The crawler operated by technical staff in $foreign_country just switches to compromised smart TVs in your own country and you ultimately end up blocking primarily real humans who don't all know how to change their apparent geolocation.

> A journalist anonymously using a crawler is indistinguishable from a bad actor trying to collect data for its own purposes, some of which may actually be against the interests of the company in question.

There is a major way to distinguish them. If you pass a law requiring them to do something, journalists from major publications have legal departments who then order them to follow the law (and then can't do their journalism), whereas the bad actor is either not interested in following laws or is not in your jurisdiction to be subject to them to begin with.

Even the premise seems to not understand what it's trying to require. There are zero humans accessing a website by sending electrical signals to Comcast using a telegraph or pulsing a flashlight into a strand of fiber. Every web browser is a computer program running on a computer.

So is a web browser a bot? What about an ad blocker? RECAP? NewPipe? The default browser opening a link at the behest of some other program? A browser extension that downloads all your emails from your webmail provider?

Their intention is presumably not to ban those things, or equivalently, legally require them to declare themselves to be something that would cause them to be blocked. Or if it is then they're proposing something hostile and malicious. But if that isn't their intention then where is their method of distinguishing that from whatever it is they're actually trying to do?

What good is blocking the ones in your jurisdiction when the internet is global and then they just operate from somewhere else?

> I think it's a sign of the times that people are kind of forgetful that this is an area in which we could advance - either insisting the status quo is somehow the best possible or even completely god-given natural or insisting that the answer is really obvious and doesn't require deep thought, research, and experimentation.

It feels like the actual problem is that the status quo is so entrenched, people have a hard time imagining how to unseat it.

Consider the last few successful Presidential election campaigns. Hope and Change. Drain the Swamp. Biden's uninspired but ultimately successful strategy of running against the incumbent rather than for anything in particular. People keep voting for "we don't like what's currently happening" and the system keeps running them over.

Or maybe the problem is actually this:

> require deep thought, research, and experimentation

These are the things that the status quo robustly impedes.

Tweet firehose social media feeds and fragmented leadership.

Research funded by the entity under study or the politicians interested in manufacturing support for a predetermined policy rather than trying to find out something we don't already know.

Federal laws or even corporate-bought international treaties preventing local governments or private citizens from trying something new because the something new might solve a problem someone doesn't want anybody solving.

You're tasked with changing the system while operating under the system that evolved to perpetuate itself.

Which isn't to say that it can't be done, but it's easy to see why people are nonplussed.

EVs with 300 miles of range are pretty common. The average round trip commute is 42 miles, i.e. you have on average more than 7 days before you run out from a full charge. Turning that into ~5.5 days in exchange for chopping tens of dollars a month off of your own electric bill because you're paying the daytime solar price instead of the nighttime something more expensive price is going to be very popular.

And when you know you're taking a long trip you can still do a full charge without needing to do that the other 99% of the time.