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The entire US Code is now online in XML

uscodebeta.house.gov

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Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#231

Post by randallsquared »

rmc wrote: post #230
randallsquared wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, alternatively, you can write the law simply and let people decide for themselves if it's worth breaking. So, no exemptions for anyone, but then part of the cost of running an ambulance service is paying speeding fines regularly. Given the cost of ambulance services without that, the additional expense is lost in the noise, making it obviously a good choice to speed when useful (for ambulances). Trying to figure o…

Some countries do a "penalty points" system where you get (say) 2 points if you're speeding, and if you get (say) 12 points, you're off the road for (say) 2 years. Your proposal of "let people break the law" means that you'd run out of ambulance drivers. You then have the problem of whether someone can be fired as an ambulance driver if they don't speed. Many countries employment law says that you can't fire someone…

Yes, if we changed the laws, laws would be different.

I'm not suggesting that laws should be passed that work this way within a framework that assumes they don't. The solution to a mountain of bad code is not to add another layer that tries to make huge changes; it's to rearchitect. I also understand that this isn't going to happen in a large existing system like the US; I think it's a better way, but there's no easy, incremental path from here to there.

As for your hypothetical: In this system, since the vast majority of penalties would be monetary, or have monetary equivalents, and since the entire damage is (supposed to be) captured by the penalty, ambulance companies would come up with their own rules under which they would pay fines on behalf of their drivers, contractually. The market could then correct via abuse of those rules by the driver, or refusal of drivers to work for that ambulance company, depending on which way the rules erred.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#232

Post by lobster_johnson »

smsm42 wrote: post #208
jacques_chester wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect, only someone who hasn't studied law could say this. Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity. Unlike lawyers, we can simply will some of that away. We can make an enum which smooshes together disparate phenomena, that feeds a dropdown list and require the customers to use it. We can ignore very rare corner cases and include a comments field.…

That's one of the reasons I am a libertarian. Less government means less complex law means less bugs and abuses of the law. If your government tries to say what you can or can not eat, for example, you need complex law to figure out what is cheese and how big the holes in it must be. If you can eat whatever you like and the government couldn't care less, you do not need any of that. So tell me - do we really need a l…

Surely the thing to advocate is less gratuitous regulation and more efficiency. Because no regulation at all is disastrous — without it we would still be living with lead paint, arsenic in our food, rat-filled restaurant kitchens and so on. Libertarianism espouses minimal state intervention, but it's clear that we actually do need a lot of intervention. At the same time it needs to be the good, useful type of intervention that protects citizens against the abuses of the marketplace.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#233

Post by smsm42 »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #232
smsm42 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the reasons I am a libertarian. Less government means less complex law means less bugs and abuses of the law. If your government tries to say what you can or can not eat, for example, you need complex law to figure out what is cheese and how big the holes in it must be. If you can eat whatever you like and the government couldn't care less, you do not need any of that. So tell me - do we really need a l…

Surely the thing to advocate is less gratuitous regulation and more efficiency. Because no regulation at all is disastrous — without it we would still be living with lead paint, arsenic in our food, rat-filled restaurant kitchens and so on. Libertarianism espouses minimal state intervention, but it's clear that we actually do need a lot of intervention. At the same time it needs to be the good, useful type of interve…

You don't need an special "regulation" to not put arsenic into anybody's food. Arsenic is poison, and poisoning one's food is attempted murder. Laws against murder existed well before Iron Age, so there's no need for lawmakers to sweat too much about how to regulate such thing.

If you go to a restaurants where only thing that is preventing them from being rat-infested is government I suggest changing you patronage to a better place. Your home, I suppose, is not rat-infested, yet how often the government checks it? Somehow you manage to keep rats out of your home without the government, don't you? Why do you think everybody else can't do the same? Are they, unlike you, lack some important parts in their brains that allow them to function independently? I doubt it.

>>> At the same time it needs to be the good, useful type of intervention that protects citizens against the abuses of the marketplace.

Marketplace is by definition a voluntary interaction, and participants in voluntary interaction can claim abuse only in one case - when one of the parties were fraudulent and did not deliver their end of the bargain. In this case, indeed, the government needs to step in and enforce the deal - or provide some other satisfactory resolution. But that's not what current law code is doing, it is very far from it. It actually tries to mold the marketplace into the shape and form that politicians prefer, and that's where most of the abuses come from.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#234

Post by TsiCClawOfLight »

eblume wrote: post #22
TsiCClawOfLight wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually have something similar in germany, called the "Bundesgit" ( https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze )

I'm not a native German speaker but that's a pretty clever pun, right?

'Bundes-' means federal. It's not much of a pun, but I like it :)

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#235

Post by lobster_johnson »

smsm42 wrote: post #233
lobster_johnson wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the thing to advocate is less gratuitous regulation and more efficiency. Because no regulation at all is disastrous — without it we would still be living with lead paint, arsenic in our food, rat-filled restaurant kitchens and so on. Libertarianism espouses minimal state intervention, but it's clear that we actually do need a lot of intervention. At the same time it needs to be the good, useful type of interve…

You don't need an special "regulation" to not put arsenic into anybody's food. Arsenic is poison, and poisoning one's food is attempted murder. Laws against murder existed well before Iron Age, so there's no need for lawmakers to sweat too much about how to regulate such thing. If you go to a restaurants where only thing that is preventing them from being rat-infested is government I suggest changing you patronage to…

> Arsenic is poison, and poisoning one's food is attempted murder.

This is a very naive view. Pretty much everything is poisonous at high enough dosages, but there are plenty of poisonous chemicals that are not immediately harmful at low levels.

You can have a restaurant, a food manufacturer, a water utility etc. contaminate (intentionally or otherwise) their product with low doses of chemicals that over time will cause health issues or even fatalities.

The marketplace itself cannot regulate such abuses. Even if such contamination was punishable by law, the time lag would ensure that consumers would not realize the impact until long after, perhaps even after the statute of limitations has expired.

Just look at third-world countries to see how the lack of regulation works out. Or China.

> ... I suggest changing you patronage to a better place.

I don't know whether my restaurant has rats in the kitchen. How could I? The entire point of health inspections is to find out what the consumer cannot possibly find out themselves.

> Why do you think everybody else can't do the same?

Trendy, swanky restaurants are routinely shut down for doing very bad things behind the scenes. So clearly they can't.

Companies don't work for you; they work for themselves. If they have no incentive to be good, they usually won't be good; because, say, it's less expensive to be highly hygienic. You just have to look at the literature of consumer abuses to see how companies will continually, eternally act for their own good, at the detriment of consumers.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#236

Post by smsm42 »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #235
smsm42 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need an special "regulation" to not put arsenic into anybody's food. Arsenic is poison, and poisoning one's food is attempted murder. Laws against murder existed well before Iron Age, so there's no need for lawmakers to sweat too much about how to regulate such thing. If you go to a restaurants where only thing that is preventing them from being rat-infested is government I suggest changing you patronage to…

> Arsenic is poison, and poisoning one's food is attempted murder. This is a very naive view. Pretty much everything is poisonous at high enough dosages, but there are plenty of poisonous chemicals that are not immediately harmful at low levels. You can have a restaurant, a food manufacturer, a water utility etc. contaminate (intentionally or otherwise) their product with low doses of chemicals that over time will ca…

I don't understand, what's "naive" here? You say something may be poisonous, even at low doses. Poisoning people is a crime. I don't even see the question here.

>>> I don't know whether my restaurant has rats in the kitchen. How could I?

Ever heard of reviews? Critics? Certifications? Yelp? Zagat? Michelin stars? It is fascinating that a grown adult obviously having access to the internet, in 2013, can sincerely claim he doesn't know how to figure out if a restaurant is any good. There's a huge industry built on doing just that. People are complaining they have to many apps on their phone to do that and get confused.

>>>> Trendy, swanky restaurants are routinely shut down for doing very bad things behind the scenes. So clearly they can't.

Successful, prominent politicians are regularly busted for infidelity. So, clearly, spousal fidelity needs government regulation.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#237

Post by atombender »

smsm42 wrote: post #236
lobster_johnson wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Arsenic is poison, and poisoning one's food is attempted murder. This is a very naive view. Pretty much everything is poisonous at high enough dosages, but there are plenty of poisonous chemicals that are not immediately harmful at low levels. You can have a restaurant, a food manufacturer, a water utility etc. contaminate (intentionally or otherwise) their product with low doses of chemicals that over time will ca…

I don't understand, what's "naive" here? You say something may be poisonous, even at low doses. Poisoning people is a crime. I don't even see the question here. >>> I don't know whether my restaurant has rats in the kitchen. How could I? Ever heard of reviews? Critics? Certifications? Yelp? Zagat? Michelin stars? It is fascinating that a grown adult obviously having access to the internet, in 2013, can sincerely clai…

You are missing the time component. Reviews don't matter if the effects take a decade to show themselves.

> Ever heard of reviews?

You missed my point: Transparency. A restaurant may get rave reviews and still have a filthy, dangerous kitchen. It's what we, as consumers, don't have access to that matters.

> So, clearly, spousal fidelity needs government regulation.

This is a ridiculous non sequitur. I was arguing that companies obviously could not self-police, since they are doing bad things all the time even with state policing; how is your reply relevant?

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#238

Post by genwin »

anigbrowl wrote: post #201
genwin wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity. True, yet I'm convinced by obvious ambiguity that it's on purpose, to feed the legal industry. That conviction is bolstered by all the "work" Congress does on reviving sunset clauses on laws that had no good reason to sunset.

True, yet I'm convinced by obvious ambiguity that it's on purpose, to feed the legal industry. Yes yes, and all crime is caused by the police, doctors make people sick, and weather forecasters hold people hostage to the elements.

Well, police get jobs and pensions from the law industry, like marijuana laws. Doctors in the US promote unnecessary procedures. (I was a potential victim of that just last week.) No shenanigans I'm aware of in weather forecasting, though.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#239

Post by smsm42 »

atombender wrote: post #237
smsm42 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand, what's "naive" here? You say something may be poisonous, even at low doses. Poisoning people is a crime. I don't even see the question here. >>> I don't know whether my restaurant has rats in the kitchen. How could I? Ever heard of reviews? Critics? Certifications? Yelp? Zagat? Michelin stars? It is fascinating that a grown adult obviously having access to the internet, in 2013, can sincerely clai…

You are missing the time component. Reviews don't matter if the effects take a decade to show themselves. > Ever heard of reviews? You missed my point: Transparency. A restaurant may get rave reviews and still have a filthy, dangerous kitchen. It's what we, as consumers, don't have access to that matters. > So, clearly, spousal fidelity needs government regulation. This is a ridiculous non sequitur. I was arguing tha…

Companies can't self-police. But other people - that care about what companies do - can find out what they do. Just as politician's affairs are found out, for example. So your claim that government coercion is necessary to either find out the information or disseminate it is obviously false - there are existing systems for doing both, and they work quire well - at least, not worse than government ones - where they are applied.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#240

Post by lobster_johnson »

smsm42 wrote: post #239
atombender wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the time component. Reviews don't matter if the effects take a decade to show themselves. > Ever heard of reviews? You missed my point: Transparency. A restaurant may get rave reviews and still have a filthy, dangerous kitchen. It's what we, as consumers, don't have access to that matters. > So, clearly, spousal fidelity needs government regulation. This is a ridiculous non sequitur. I was arguing tha…

Companies can't self-police. But other people - that care about what companies do - can find out what they do. Just as politician's affairs are found out, for example. So your claim that government coercion is necessary to either find out the information or disseminate it is obviously false - there are existing systems for doing both, and they work quire well - at least, not worse than government ones - where they ar…

First of all, in many cases this requires that such entities have interior access. If you can't inspect facilities but only the end product, you become very limited in what you can do.

Secondly, even then, all you can do is disseminate information. You can't enforce anything; you can only try to convince people to vote with their feet.

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