> here is my proposed solution: every time you improve AD funding you improve legislation
My point is that locking "improved funding" to "improved legislation" is impossibly without a way to usefully measure improvements in legislation. Improving funding has a few ways to measure it, but in the discussion we've been having I took improved to mean "more". As for legislation, I don't think we want more legislation, but any measurement is rife with problems. As a simple example, legislation if perpetual until changed (or created with an expiration), and laws created today with a beneficial effect may have a deleterious effect years or decades from now. Examples of this are abundant, such as patent and copyright laws not dealing with the nuance of the digital age, to privacy laws not taking into effect the ability to store everything that happens in a way that can be indexed and accessed because of computers.
A moderately good law today may become a real problem tomorrow. Given that, how do we measure legislation when the effect time is essentially unbounded?
My point is that locking "improved funding" to "improved legislation" is impossibly without a way to usefully measure improvements in legislation. Improving funding has a few ways to measure it, but in the discussion we've been having I took improved to mean "more". As for legislation, I don't think we want more legislation, but any measurement is rife with problems. As a simple example, legislation if perpetual until changed (or created with an expiration), and laws created today with a beneficial effect may have a deleterious effect years or decades from now. Examples of this are abundant, such as patent and copyright laws not dealing with the nuance of the digital age, to privacy laws not taking into effect the ability to store everything that happens in a way that can be indexed and accessed because of computers.
A moderately good law today may become a real problem tomorrow. Given that, how do we measure legislation when the effect time is essentially unbounded?