Subject: Another proto-proposal

From: Henry Towsner <htowsner@s...>
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 16:51:00 -0700

After some thought on the subject of self-deleting text, I 
thought the following might be desirable:

Create Statute 4.10, reading

Acts of Parliament are documents consisting of a set of 
instructions, and a time of execution. No creation of an Act of 
Parliament is valid unless it unambiguously specifies some date in 
the future to be the time of execution. An Act of Parliament 
consists of one or more proposals. Each Act of Parliament shall be 
given a unique identifier for reference. The identifier of the first 
Act of Parliament shall be 1; each subsequent Act of Parliament shall 
receive the next-higher integer.
At the time of execution for an Act of Parliament, unless 
that Act has been repealed, the Act shall take effect as if it were a 
bill which had just passed with a majority of votes. Note that Acts 
may not perform things which require a super-majority to take effect.

Amend Statute 4.4 to read, in full

A bill may include one or more proposals. Each proposal is 
an instruction to do exactly 1 of the following:
1) Create, repeal, amend, or change the number of a statute
2) Overturn one or more Rulings of The Court
3) Create, repeal, or amend an Act of Parliament
4) Create, destroy, or alter the state of any object defined 
by the rules provided that no other type of proposal can do such an 
action.

Amend Statute 4.9.1 to read, in full

A bill or bill segment which creates, amends, repeals, or 
changes the number of a rule shall pass if it has received a majority 
of votes in favor. A bill or bill segment which creates, repeals, or 
amends an Act of Parliament shall pass if it has received a majority 
of votes in favor.
A bill of bill segment which creates, destroys, or alters the 
state of any object defined in the rules shall pass if it has 
received a majority of votes in favor unless that object is defined 
as being Private.

Amend Statute 4.9.2 to read, in full

A bill or bill segment which overturns a Ruling of The Court 
shall pass if it has received a two-thirds majority of votes in favor.
A bill of bill segment which creates, destroys, or alters the 
state of any Private object defined in the rules shall pass if it has 
received a two-thirds majority of votes in favor.
-- 
Henry Towsner <htowsner@s...>

Majority, n.: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law

---

From: Henry Towsner <htowsner@s...>
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 22:30:27 -0700

>-Do we already want to talk about private and public artifacts of 
>the game? I'm not entirely sure that we actually need many 
>artifacts for this game.

Given that virtually anything will be an artifact of the 
game, I assume there will be a fair number. In particular, anything 
we use to represent the economy will probably fall into that category.
The idea is that Private things are things we can't mess with 
arbitrarily, so they would require more support to alter.
I don't know whether we'll need it, but I'd rather include it 
now and have that option open then have us decide to do something 
like that later and leave a loophole.

As for amending acts, here are a couple of situations I can 
think of where it might be useful:
A complicated proposal passes which has some sort of delayed 
effect (for instance cleaning something up after a transition 
period). Then a problem is found with the original bill, and a fix 
is proposed. The original transition bill will no longer work 
safely; there are ways around it (having another act take effect 
immediately after), but those are much more likely to lead to 
conflicts.

As another scenario, suppose we write a law with a "sunset 
clause," which causes it to be repealed after (say) six months if it 
isn't reinstated. While, again, a renewal could be accomplished by 
having another Act take effect immediately after, there could be 
problems caused by having the law "blink" in and out of existence.
-- 
Henry Towsner <htowsner@s...>