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North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
61–70 of 129 posts
Re: North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
#62Apparently one fake mineral was flagged and removed but these two made it through to the law: > The fake minerals are friezium and stralium, apparent references to Christopher Friez and David Straley, attorneys for North American Coal who were closely involved in drafting the bill and its amendments. > Bjornson said a Legislative Council attorney flagged and removed a fictional mineral, “docterium,” earlier in the se…
Remove it!? But that's the only evidence of something fishy! You shouldn't just silence an error without knowing how it came to be there.
Someone against the lobbying may have intentionally left the names in, or added them.
Re: North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
#63It's ridiculous how much of our bills are completely written by interest groups like the coal industry. I'm surprised they even reviewed it enough to catch it In 2010 Arizona passed an anti-immigrant bill written by the private prison company Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic). We know it was written by CCA because they literally left the logo on the bill
“Due to the Legislative Assembly being a biennial legislature, with the House and Senate sitting for only 80 days in odd-numbered years, a Legislative Council oversees legislative affairs in the interim periods, doing longer-term studies of issues, and drafting legislation for consideration of both houses during the next session” [1].
Did this come out of the LegCo?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_Legislative_Assem...
Re: North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
#64I find the fact that nobody seems to know how those names got into the bill particularly frustrating. Lawmakers really need to learn to use version tracking properly. It's shouldn't be possible for a single line of text to make it into a bill without a digital trail leading back to whoever added it.
> Lawmakers really need to learn to use version tracking properly Not how reconciliation-based negotiations work. Behind every material lawmaker you’d have redlines circulating among their staff. Each industry group would have them circulating among its members. Each citizen group, too. These will be haphazardly combined among the groups, sometimes transparently, sometimes strategically. It’s still traceable. But not…
Nothing you write here is not compatible with regular version control systems
Re: North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
#65My interpretation of what happened here is that a legislator who opposed the bill inserted the names of the lobbyists as a joke against the bill, which has now paid off. The article says that the original list did not include the names, they were added during the legislative amendment process by a legislator.
While corporate authorship of bills is a concern, I don’t think this particular mishap is a direct result of that and in fact seems to have been an attempt to subtly criticize it.
Re: North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
#66So... does it mean that nobody reads the law? Is it good or bad? What is the takeaway?
That often happens. Some bills are released to lawmakers without enough time to read them.
Re: North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t want to pick on you specifically, because this is just one example of a very common pathology, but this is such an “HN-brained” comment. “They didn’t use version control” is ten million miles from the real problem here, and adopting version control would improve literally nothing about this situation.
I deliberately didn't say version control (which would imply git or similar, and we know they're not going to learn that). I said version tracking. They use word processors to write the things, they could at least learn to turn on "track changes". I genuinely do believe that a law that says "all laws must be able to show author tracking on a per-line basis" would improve democracy. Convince me otherwise!
Enabling version tracking would not be any different from learning Git if both require passing a law. The real problem is that those people are clueless and there is no one to guide them. It's probably a decent startup idea, software for lawmakers.
Re: North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
#68Wasn't there a joke about this happening in some movie when an English soccer team manager wrote the team name on the back of a box of cigarettes. Later he had to include the inclusion of two unknown players in the selection: The players names were Benson, and Hedges.
Re: North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many Judicial opinions are done in the same manner. An attorney from the winning side prepares a draft opinion and a judge reviews/edits it and away it goes. The edits in the couple I've personally seen are incredibly light - more or less a rubber stamp with the judge's name on it. I imagine this holds true (via chatting with insider friends) for many such "industries" including lawmaking, scientific/academic papers,…
I'm not sure this is true. I've payed attention to a few high profile cases and I've not seen anything like that come up. The closest I can think of is when jury instructions are issued. But in that, the two sides ultimately work with the court to hammer out the details of how those instructions should look. And often, they are based on a more or less standard template with minor revisions.
I was watching the Abrego Garcia case. It was done routinely by Garcia's lawyer. They would write an order for the judge to sign then ask them to sign it.
Re: North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Lawmakers really need to learn to use version tracking properly Not how reconciliation-based negotiations work. Behind every material lawmaker you’d have redlines circulating among their staff. Each industry group would have them circulating among its members. Each citizen group, too. These will be haphazardly combined among the groups, sometimes transparently, sometimes strategically. It’s still traceable. But not…
Even being able to credit a line to an individual lawmaker's office would be better than what we have now.
They'll just negotiate who does what off the record and trade around like they do with votes.