Thread by @patio11

Interesting law I just hit: STOP Act, which (to combat, explicitly, fentanyl deliveries from China to the U.S. via postal service) requires Post Office to block all international mail that doesn't have information submitted in advance with sender/recipient/etc electronically.

On the one hand "Let's just ban handwritten address and customs labels and get everyone on the electronic platform" has some pretty obvious efficiency gains.

On the other hand, sigh, sigh, sigh.

"How'd you hit this?"

If you walk into any Post Office in Japan with a handwritten address label for the U.S., containing say tax forms, it will be refused.

(There's a recovery process in place because, go figure, Japan Post thinks sending mail is a fairly core activity.)

"Thanks for putting on an electronically written label for your return address. Next time, can we please trouble you to print the IRS' address as well? We will key it in this time for you but much more efficient if we can just scan it reliably. Sorry, this is 100% the Americans."

So if you were intending on shipping the IRS fentanyl from Japan and thought it would get through because nobody read the "contains fentanyl" part of the customs form because it was handwritten, well your plans have been thoroughly foiled now, haven't they.

I joke a bit here; there is some conceivable law enforcement purpose because forcing The Bad Guys to throw off lots of metadata means you can more easily interdict their operations after you intercept or retrospectively identify any part of their mail stream. I get it.

Still, cost on literally everyone worldwide (that faces the U.S.) imposed to deal with one problem from one country.

You'd think the easiest way to take care of this would have been "Hey, China Post, reduce fentanyl reaching the U.S. via mail by 99% or all packages from China go to /dev/null. We trust that you can be pretty creative here."

There's a principle of social organization I rather like called "subsidiarity" where proper place for responsibility for a problem rests at level of society most local to it which has resources/etc to deal with it, and neither above nor below.

Didn't need to be "entire world."

(Or, what Catholic theology has to say about exception handling in distributed systems. ;) )

(Someday I really want to reply to a pull request "Rejecting attempt to catch database errors in client-side JS due; reference attached papal bull. Will accept override by code owners since it is not flagged as infallible.")

(Cyberpunk would be a very different genre if I were writing it, is what I'm saying.)

*due to subsidiarity