Also the states themselves can’t update their own laws. In Nevada the code (NRS) from Nevada’s website is out of date. Very embarrassing imo and hard to get it to work bc AI can’t have a trusted source of data.
The answer is probaly embedded within the concept of codification of acts. Legislatures pass acts, which are kind of like diffs for statutory law. But there is no base document, just a series of diffs from the beginning. Somewhere along the way, someone did a lot of work to “codify” the law, and when you go look up 18 USC 1001, and then click “next,” you are taking advantage of the codification process.
But the person who did the codification has some rights thereto, meaning that while NV can post every act that passed the legislature, they can’t publish someone else’s codification of the statutes.
This matters very little because everyone just has Westlaw and no one uses the state legislature’s website to cite statutes.
I would argue it does matter because the public has to know all the law as ignorance of the law is no excuse. If Westlaw is limited or an unreasonable monetary burden on the populace (or possibly, depending on your argument, costs anything at all) then the argument kind of evaporates of how you can prosecute someone, because an essential part of law is that the party under criminal penalty must be put under clear notice of what is illegal.
IMO, this should also extend to opinions -- if there is precedent that guides what the law is, it needs to be publicly published free of charge so that the public is put under notice what the law is. (someone might mention something like PACER is free in small quantities, I would counter it would cost you a gazillion dollars to be fully informed of all the precedent that forms the full common law meaning of the laws.) This is especially important in mala prohibita crimes since there's no way to even guess through moral/ethical deduction.
> argument kind of evaporates of how you can prosecute someone, because an essential part of law is that the party under criminal penalty must be put under clear notice of what is illegal.
I reckon that’s why the sixth amendment exists but if you want to make a free PACER, go for it.
The codification needs to become part of the process of passing acts. The government should be required to publish the updated code themselves along with any act that changed it. The whole concept that a commercial entity can have rights to the fully assembled text is terribly broken.
If anybody is worried about the jobs those businesses created, then tell them to pivot into publishing commented editions of the codes (add cross-references, references to relevant court decisions, etc.).
The codification happened hundreds of years ago, though.
But you could do it too! The Congressional Record is a thing, and it publishes all the acts of Congress, all the way back to the beginning.
The problem is that after you were done, the first thing someone would ask you is to cross-cite everything into the West Annotated code because no one else has your code and no one cares about it, because we all have Westlaw.
(Which publishes commented editions of the codes, with cross references, references to relevant court decisions, etc.)
It's all a little bit antiquated but it works fine. Someday it will change. I too thought it should work the way people are describing upthread when I was a computer guy but it is what it is.
I would imagine you either start with the first acts of your legislature and codify it from the beginning, or you start with some version of the code you figure you have rights to and go from there. It seems like it would be insane to do that job halfway, but that's not my area of expertise.
I have no idea whatsoever what is going on in Nevada.
If you're wondering this you should look at Icechunk too, which was open-sourced just this week. It's Apache Iceberg but for multidimensional data (e.g. Zarr).
I don't see any real benefits, as it feels like using the tool you already know even though it's not quite right. Iceberg is maybe geared towards slower changing models than this approach?
head is a bit discombobulated today, but i’ll give this a shot
when i say ‘blob’ data, a good example to think of is a set of really long 1080p video files.
tl;dr version
* throw data into dvc when unstructured ‘blob’ data.
* throw it into iceberg when you’ve got structured data.
benefits of dvc over iceberg:
* not forcing ‘blob’ data into a tabular format and all the “fun” (read: annoying) processing steps that come with doing that
* don’t have to have to run some processing step to extract ‘blob’ data out of what is basically a parquet file, dvc pull (?) will just download each file as is.
* edit files locally then run three-ish (?) commands to commit changes, without needing to run a data ingestion pipeline to force ‘blob’ data into a table
* completely schema less, so don’t have to worry about ‘blob’ data being the wrong type, just shove it in the repo and commit it
* roll back throughout all of commit history, not just to the last vacuum/checkpoint
basically, tabular data formats and ‘blob’ data shoved into them is a recipe for pain.
shoving ‘blobs’ into a git like repo is much faster and easier.
especially if you need full version history, branches for different outcomes etc.
trying to have different branches in Iceberg for your set of really long 1080p video files where you have applied different ffmpeg filters in different branches and want people to be able to access all of them, and the history of them sounds nightmare-ish.
in dvc, that’s ^ easy.
basically, it’s like creating a data lake which won’t turn into a data swamp because everything is version controlled.
eating less meat seems like the biggest thing individuals can do here. Animal waste/fertilizer runoff/agricultural waste seems like the biggest contributor.
I'd caveat this by saying eating less industrially raised and processed meat would help. The same goes for industrial produce though, they cause a ton of damage that few people ever see or think about.
If we want realistic solutions, they'll all be incremental like using less plastic or Turing lights off when you aren't home. If we want recommendations that would actually help, we would need to completely reorganize societies and our daily lives.
We don't need cars, air travel, grocery stores, or even air conditioning to survive. Those are all modern inventions on the order of decades old. People aren't going to do that willingly though, including me. I live a very different, and more simple, life than the average American but the idea of throwing out so many things that we have today only because we've enslaved natural fuel sources is scary as hell.
Whatever the solutions are, let's not push burden on the individual. Resources are like highway lanes: even if you don't drive your car, someone will use it just.
Regenerative agriculture. No till, no spray, cover crops. Managed grazing of ruminants and poultry on the same land that crops are grown on to build top soil and serve as pest control.
Regenerative ag is a ton of work, and at least in my anecdotal experience I didn't see any meaningful gains from it.
We rotated our cows once or twice a day, carefully tracking how much space they got each day based on the animals' weight and quality of forage. The animals got by okay, but honestly they seemed to act more like prisoners than cows. It shows even when you watch some of the biggest names in regenerative move their animals - the animals dive past the line into the space. Those animals are hungry and stressed by being so densely kept that they feel they need to eat before it's all gone.
Today we keep our cows in what anyone else would consider a much too low stocking density. We move them occasionally between 3 different pastures, on the order of weeks or months between each move. The animals seem less stressed, they're definitely happier, and they've created familial bonds and hierarchy that wasn't obvious when we kept them in closer quarters with frequent moves.
Just because you learned some random fact in your bar prep class doesn't mean "The bar is bullshit" as you claimed. It means your bar prep class included information that wasn't strictly necessary.
The bar is still bullshit that example is one of many. For instance I never want to touch divorce, why should I need to know community property? Same goes with personal injury.
An open book test or one that’s all MPT (the essay part) I could get behind, memorizing what’s basically 200 pages of dense information is (upside down smiley face)
imo fitness & character is absolutely necessary, rote memorization tests aren't. (ofc you want your lawyer to go off the top of their head instead of looking things up when you explain your problems /s)
