alt Hacker NewsBecause American lawmakers are weirdly specific brainless creatures. This is how you get all those laws named after individuals like Megan, and my other specific fave, the Video Rental Records Privacy Act.
Shall we address the general question of privacy, or just close the particular breach that affected a congressman? You know it's going to be the latter.
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I would not be so quick to call people brainless. Generally speaking, I would prefer that congressmen be specific with their legislation and, like a good doctor, try to first do no harm or as little harm as possible and address the problem before them specifically without causing unintended consequences.
As I wrote in a previous comment on this thread I am sure the congressman that passed the law discussed the issue with farmers and ranchers producing all traded commodities and the ones that were not growing onions did not think there was a significant risk of a corner and they preferred to have their goods traded.
Although I do agree with you that privacy protections should be broader. As far as Megan’s law I am sure you realize that it is intended to protect everyone from sex criminals not just people named Megan.
The particular brainless lawmaker behind this act went on to become President. I think that shows Americans love and reward brainless lawmakers for creating these brainless laws.
> weirdly specific brainless creatures
Legislative product management, by committee.
This one is a great example of how a Republic can avoid the worst excesses of direct Democracy
A direct democracy might have just banned all futures.
No, it is because onions (and potatoes) occupy this very weird middle ground in terms of perishability, the seasonality of the harvest, and the size of the domestic production and consumption market, which makes them uniquely vulnerable to market manipulation. A commodity has to be storable enough and/or regularly harvested enough to create a predictable futures market, but when inventory is small, highly seasonal, geographically constrained, and slowly and often unpredictably non-linearly degrading, then it's pretty easy for a big player to squeeze the market.
It is a lot harder to corner the market when you have very non-perishable or very perishable goods and/or much larger domestic and global markets with harvests that vary across geography and time, like wheat and frozen orange juice concentrate. Most goods traded via futures have those properties. Onions is right on the edge of even making sense as a futures commodity, and because of that, it's a recipe for manipulation.
And there were calls to regulate potatoes the same way in the fallout of the onion market manipulation, but those didn't pass, and in 1976 the potato market was almost cornered in the same way.
But sure, govment bad.
narrowly scoped laws limit the blast radius of a stupid law without the political price of opposing a law in the aftermath of a disaster that law would have prevented. imagine if they had banned commodities trading in general!