We absolutely should sunset those laws.

If they are needed they can be voted upon again by parliament, and will no doubt pass.

In fact I would say not only should all laws have built in expiration dates, such expiration dates should be shorter the lower the percentage of votes in parliament it too to pass them!

If you can only get a 51% majority in parliament to pass a law, that law should not exist beyond that election.

You do not remove them. But you should change them when environment changes. Straw bale was decent indicator back in the day. But I think there should be some more modern and even global standard that law could be changed to. And this should be done with reasonable planning, schedule and communication.

If the law is actually valuable and there is political capital for its continuation then surely the legislative body can vote to extend it with minimal fuss.

Nowhere was it implied that all laws should have sunset clauses. Obviously something like “you can’t murder someone” should not be sunset.

Including sunset clauses in many laws requires legislators to review if those laws are still relevant and modify them accordingly. The law in question here is a perfect example. A bale of straw is not the best way to signal to boats that the bridge height is lower.

Anarchy is not a desired state, but neither is a state where outdated rules hamper activity for no reason other than “we are too lazy to assess the relevance of existing rules”

I think you've unintentionally created a great example of how and why public discourse and lawmaking are so broken.

You invoke "safety" in the same manner that peddlers of all sorts of evil invoke terrorism or think of the children and then you cap it off with a straw man, as if there's serious money to be made with or without this mundane and niche law or comparable ones.

Bridge height postings more or less stand on their own merit and probably don't need laws to continue to exist. The fact that they are legislated at all is mostly a reflection of the fact that the state was the only entity positioned to deal with such an issue when they first became of enough value to be worth doing basically all the time.

Criticizing rationally acting rational actors on hn is discouraged because it is "low value" or "uncivil".

When the rationally acting rational actors are pressed for answers about how their vision of the world would work they tend to reply with either examples from science fiction space fantasy novels or something that is just a simple dictatorship.

In order to add to the conversation you should sprinkle some effusive praise about the AI/Crypto/Fintech/Quantum scam du jour (or criticism of Apple) into your comments to throw them off the scent.

Something like:

"Oh boy I really get what you're saying! Here at my quantum fintech startup we're using LLMs to turboencabulate novertrunnions. By the way did you know that safety regulations are written in blood and after years of working effectively the public may forget why they were implemented in the first place but the underlying issue will just return absent the regulation and a newer generation will just have to rediscover why the regulation was created and that's something we should avoid?"

The initial tease excites the techbro-- they start daydreaming about being a billionaire dictator of a mars colony and that floods their brain with pleasure hormones which lower their defenses.

This leaves a small, but existent, chance that you can hammer some reality into their antisocial brains.