[stickynotememo]

Well, yeah. There are always ways to get around laws. But this is like saying taxes are a bad idea because tax evasion exists.

[permo-w]

It's the eternal hacker news debate:

"let's regulate x"

"but surely we can't regulate x because defining x is complicated"

"plenty of things are complex and are regulated, also here is a definition that covers almost all cases and the rest can be left to judicial nous"

"but people will just evade the law anyway"

Honestly pick a post about the EU at random and you'll be able to find some variety of this chain of conversation. It's so general an argument that it could be made about literally any law that's ever existed, making it entirely null if you believe in any regulation whatsoever

[throwup238]

I once had the idea to create a HackerNews equivalent to tvtropes called hntropes that crowd sources all of these patterns.

[account42]

And you can also up penalties for people who are caught trying to work their way around laws in order to deter most from trying.