Regualtions are created to be broken. Thus, you need to make sure they don't have any loopholes. The FAA at one point made it so that employees cannot work longer than 12 hours in a day. This just resulted in people being scheduled from noon to one minute before midnight and then from midnight until one minute before noon.
In the end, it had to be changed to no more than 12 hours within a 24 hour time frame.