301–310 of 337 posts
Same with academic papers. Most of my efforts go into dealing with constant loss of attention that happens when I have to look up unnecessarily complex words or improperly defined symbols and variable names. I feel stupid until I realize that the paper is actually about a very simple concept. It doesn't have to be this hard to read.
For everyone commenting "laypeople aren't the intended audience", this monstrosity was a recent Texas constitutional ballot proposal, i.e. all voters in the state were asked to vote on it: > The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public school pu…
The assumption of most of the comments here is that bad writing is a matter of incompetence, but in the case of public policy I think Hanlon's Razor no longer applies. Given what we know about Texas politics and American ballot measures in general, it's quite possible that the ambiguity was introduced deliberately to give big landowners (or rather their lawyers) extra wiggle room. If that's true then the only communi…
Not exactly big money interests.
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You can have long readable phrases. The long phrase is bad rule is just beginner helper, nothing more nothing less.
Wrong. A long phrase requires the user to keep the entire meaning in their head until the end. Can you show us some "long readable phrases"?
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> How would you prove that? You don't. Once you sign a written contract, the presumption is that there was a successful meeting of the minds between the parties. If you later want to claim that you didn't have a meeting of the minds with the other party, the burden of proof is on you to show that. The other party does not have to prove that you did understand the contract.
The problem is that many of the contacts are shrink wrapped - there's no way for you to modify the contract and rejection outright is not free.
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It's not even the writing - it can be blatant misinterpretation. There's precedential opinion that states that you can't ignore the letter of the law to pursue it's spirt. Yet there's a law that has "reasonable care" in it, but the precedential opinion on that is that it's a strict liability offense because 'applying reasonable care would frustrate enforcing the legislature's intent'... The judges don't care. They're…
A great example is Measure A which was passed in the last election a few months back in Santa Clara county: > Shall the measure amending the Santa Clara Valley Water District Ordinance 11-01 to limit Board members to four successive four-year terms be adopted? Term limits? Heck yes! Voters agreed: term limits are A GOOD THING. Measure A passed! What wasn't mentioned AT ALL, anywhere in the question put to the voters,…
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Interesting. Here in Washington, an "easy" fix for that is that the initiatives get a column for the "Yes" side and a column for the "no" side, in our voting booklets that we get in the mail with the ballots. But IIRC CA is still in person voting, right?
Yeah the voting booklet has the same design here, and the "No" side called them out on it. But who reads that? (Other than me and you, obviously.) The ballot itself had only the text which I quoted.
WA has been mail-in voting for years, so I vote at home with the pamphlet on the table and a cup of coffee.
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Yeah the voting booklet has the same design here, and the "No" side called them out on it. But who reads that? (Other than me and you, obviously.) The ballot itself had only the text which I quoted.
I suppose I don’t know how in person voting works. Are there pamphlets inside the booth? Otherwise how are people supposed to refer to it? WA has been mail-in voting for years, so I vote at home with the pamphlet on the table and a cup of coffee.
We have vote-by-mail as well, but the number of people who actually read the pamphlet and make an informed decision (rather than just briefly scan the ballot at the last minute) is small enough to matter.
I've been a CTO at companies in various bits of the Anglosphere, and signed contracts in all of the bits (and some other places). I'm also married to an Anglosphere lawyer (which gives me lots more exposure than I might have guessed to the idiosyncrasies of the profession). In my experience, I very much agree with the headline (and abstract) here, but would emphasise that the US is the worst for archaic language, cre…
At my job I have to deal with the structural design part of the building code for US and Canada (ei. calculating loads on structure). Part of my job is to find the differences in each new version to see if we need to implement anything new in our software. For seismic, the Canadian code is easy enough to understand that teachers use it in college instead of manuals or notes. To calculates something (eg. a specific wi…
> It would be a lot safer for the public if the "easy to understand" version of the code came from those who wrote the original. I suspect it's the same in other professions too. Senior engineers probably have their own intuition to what is "safe" based on their experience, which might be more accurate than the horrible mess of a law that you describe.
>which might be more accurate than the horrible mess of a law that you describe
I've had a senior engineer at one of our biggest client accuse us of having a bug in our software. He has dozens of people working for him and teaches other engineer how to design bridges. Turns out he used the arctan function in excel instead of cosine. Her mistake was roughly doubling the shear resistance of the main beams on the bridge. We ere the one to find the mistake in his calculation.
clients often call us with question like "how can I use your software to design XYZ". When we talk with them on the phone, they often don't have a clue how to do it manually and they are hopping that the software will just do it for them.
It's also very common for us for find critical mistakes in client's finite element models when they contact us for something completely different.
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> a bunch of men who had just used guns they had lying around their farms to form militias and overthrow their government. That pretty seriously overstates the case: The American Revolution started out that way, but as time went on, the Continental Army acquired serious artillery and became reasonably professional — thanks largely to Henry Knox; Baron von Steuben; and the Marquis de La Fayette — and the decisive fact…
This is true, but as you say, the revolution started out the way rayiner describes it, and it seems very plausible that the 2nd. amendment was motivated by that specific circumstance. Personally, I think we would have been better off without the 2nd amendment, and the framers of the constitution may not have foreseen the role it has come to play in politics (if so, it would be far from the only case), but I cannot fi…
The Second Amemdent's in there because without it, the states wouldn't have been willing to ratify a Constitution that allowed the federal government to take their guns away. After all, they had just won a war against a monarch an ocean away; they weren't about to give their power of defense to an executive half a continent away. Remember, there was no guarantee a Constitution was going to happen at all; quite a few compromises and curveballs in that document are there because every single state had the option of rejecting the whole thing and being their own country. Many Founding Fathers envisioned defense of the US would look like individual states generally handling their own affairs, and a national army only being mobilized in the event of a national threat (however, practically speaking, that didn't come to pass... No sooner was the Constitution ratified than Washington led the Continental Army to force the citizens of western Pennsylvania to pay federal taxes).
Gun regulation was properly recognized as a state authority for most of the country's history prior to the Civil War and varied wildly from state to state, with many being significantly more restrictive than modern law. It's only with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (and the Due Process clause, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law") that the Second Amendment ties the hands of state governments in the same way it tied the hands of the federal government. This restriction has been re-interpreted over the decades, but broadly speaking that's how we got from a 1700s Philadelphia that banned gun ownership for some immigrants to the modern interpretation where even tracking who owns a firearm might be considered an abridgment of the right of ownership.