Yes, that .. but also - heat map activity tracking.

It's often not so much what's in the three thousand pages of filler and bumf, rather more what's in the several paragraphs that get the bulk of the rewrites and horse trading - that and the last apparently unrelated change that kicks a proprosed Bill over the line to pass.

> Lawmakers really need to learn to use version tracking properly.

Why in the world would they want to do that? For you and the rest of the public to figure out who to blame for things?

It's not a matter of ignorance. Forcing them to use version control could be a good idea in theory. You can't force them to do anything though, because they make the rules.

> 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 necessarily in one go, and probably only through a lawmaker who doesn’t want to look duped.

There was a good article on the immortality of Word recently that addressed this.

Does not give you any insight in the provenance, but Philip James has an awesome talk[0] where he uses Datasette to collect city government documents to be in a more structured format for analysis. Lots of clever automation to extract data from PDFs. Really some amazing work for surfacing civic decisions.

[0] https://pyvideo.org/pybay-2024/automate-your-city-data-with-... "Automate Your City Data with Python"

I was under the impression that the majority of all bills (laws) are written directly by the lobbyists and think tanks. The staff just copy/pasta the requests all together.

There are records of who introduced and voted for each version of the bill and each change to it; individual responsibility for edits leading up to those actions are internal matters for the individual members offices, who is responsible for the content of the bill is unambiguous. The mystery being invented here is a distraction from that clear line of responsibility, and you are falling for it.

This being highly embarrassing, I assume enough people can make a good guess at who it was, and won’t admit it on the record. It would beg the “why”, after all.

> 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.

Counter-argument: there are GOPers afraid of standing up to Trump because they fear that doing so would trigger violence from MAGAland. E.g.

* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/violent-threats-pile-u...

People used to vote for candidates in elections in public, and there was all sorts of intimidation and violence until secret ballots were rolled out.

I'm generally for political/politician transparency, but let's not ignore some of the trade-offs.

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.

> legislators that voted must pass an automatically generated comprehension test

Congratulations, you’ve transferred legislative power to the test administrator and granted them a de facto veto to boot.

Better: laws are subject to up-down popular veto. (Counterpoint: you’ll wind up with omnibuses.)

Why not make it a condition of the vote in the first place? Don't understand it? No vote for you. If your constituency wanted a say, they can let you know what they think about that.

Just a default sunset in 10-20yr for every law not passed by a supermajority would do wonders.

This is a good example of “not fixing the whole problem”. Once a “fake” mineral was discovered, a good idea would have been to demand an expert reviews the entire list.

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.

Hanlon’s razor.

There's not many things more "Stereotypically American" than legislation with a corporate logo on it.

In the interest of full transparency, it would be nice to stamp all laws with the logos of the companies that write them, so we at least know who our real legislators are for any given law.

In a former job I worked on a tech co's policy response to a major piece of California AI legislation a couple of years ago and was stunned to learn that nonprofits (at least, I'd be shocked if this didn't also include companies) basically sponsor bills and just find lawmakers to introduce and champion them.

“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...

> I'm surprised they even reviewed it enough to catch it

Maybe they forgot to tack it onto 5000 pages of unrelated legislation at 10pm the night before the vote.

This might be a measure against LLM scrapers, which is something I can get behind despite disliking websites that pointlessly require JavaScript.

Not very useful, since Grok, Gemini, and ChatGPT could decrypt it.

They pass massive bills not knowing what they contain, and even worse amend them at the very last second with verbal votes to amend containing god knows what. During the budget bill McConnell just rammed through what is effectively a hemp ban amendment which no one seemed to know about up until the point Massie forced a vote to on whether to take it back out, at which time a large number of people who had at all times been vehemently against anything like a hemp ban bizarrely voted the exact opposite for reasons that they've made almost entirely opaque.

None of it makes any fucking sense. The fact things wrapped up in mega bills basically breaks any semblance of a democratic system; either you vote for the entire package, or the entire government breaks, or your competitor gets to slam you for hating on the children because you had to defund them in order to avoid doing some other terrible thing.

It's broken because for the past ~70yr there was scant if any scrutiny of what they were up to because half or more of the country "trusted the process" (or whatever you want to call it) if not the people. They were free to write, write, write and expand, expand, expand with no serious pushback and so of course a lot of it was garbage. When you write loans to anyone with a pulse too many of them are gonna be sub prime. When you just let legislatures legislate and bureaucracies bureaucrat too many of the results are gonna be shit. And now that bill is coming due.

> does it mean that nobody reads the law?

It means every lawmaker isn’t a geologist. That’s fine. It also means there clearly wasn’t enough public input from geologists that someone would have noticed a name they’d never seen in a group they were familiar with.

That often happens. Some bills are released to lawmakers without enough time to read them.

I think the answer to those questions are pretty self-evident.

There is 20 separate paragraphs/major sentences.

Why should they be embarrassed? They got the law that they wanted passed. Not a single one will lose an election over this. Even if a challenger brings it up, they have a very grateful industry behind them (and now with even more money to throw at elections).

If there is any embarrassment to be felt, it would be on the part of their constituents, who voted for this legislature and came out behind because of it. But I strongly suspect that they will re-elect the incumbents.

You've literally described most state legislators and federal Congress.

The Affordable Care Act was 906 pages long (nevermind the accompanying 11,000 some odd pages of regulations typically quoted).

You can bet very few Congress critters actually read all 906 pages.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (the year is part of the name) was over 5,500 pages long. Definitely none of the people in Congress bothered reading any of it- there wouldn't have been time to do so.

This is the standard way of lawmaking, as far as I'm aware.

A lobbyist presents a bill to a congressional sponsor, and the congress critter more or less forwards it to committee for vote. Perhaps a staffer or two skim it and suggest edits.

Exceedingly few bills are actually initially drafted by elected lawmakers.

If I don't clearly read the code Claude commits under my name I have done a bad. And yet. Making rules that will affect everybody?

HAHAHAHAHA LGTM SHIPIT!

I would like to opt out of your theocratic ideocracy

If you're a more equal animal and have the right relationships with the power structure you can do that and make money hand over fist while it goes through the courts. If an upstart tries it the state will have law enforcement all over them in short order.

The misdirection attempt failed! It was not very effective!

The claim that Canada banned firearms “that only appear in video games” is a popular internet talking point, but I couldn’t find evidence supporting it in the official Canadian firearms ban lists. What actually happened:

1. The Government of Canada has banned more than 2,500 makes and models of assault-style firearms since May 2020.

2. The 2020 Order in Council (OIC) banned approximately 1,500 firearms by name, expanded in 2024 and 2025. These are predominantly real-world firearms – AR-15 variants, AK-47 variants, the Ruger Mini-14, various shotguns, and many specialized rifles.

3. Critics have raised legitimate concerns about the ban’s logic – some firearms that were banned were “never designed for the battlefield, and never adopted by any military in the world, nor ever used in any battlefield” – but that’s different from being fictional.

4. Some rifles were banned “that probably came into Canada in insignificant numbers; indeed, there may be none of them in-country,” like obscure variants or rimfire lookalikes. Rare or uncommon isn’t the same as fictional.

Sources used:

https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/cntrng-crm/frrms/index-en...

https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/sor-98-462/f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_Canada https://ottawafirearmsafety.ca/firearms-ban/ https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/more-illogical-gun-bans-... https://www.chroniclejournal.com/news/national/fact-file-ame... https://rcmp.ca/en/firearms/firearms-reference-table

Interesting. Is there a link about this? I did a search and of course it’s all trash about “no Canada didn’t ban video games.”

Which one isn't real? https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/campaigns/fire...

I can't find a source for this at all... Any reporting on this?