What topic inspires a spirited debate within your profession, but isn’t cared for outside it?
In law I think that would be jurisdiction. I’ve never met a non-lawyer who cared, but most lawyers have well thought out ideas about the subject. That’s because the average person doesn’t care which court decides the issue, just the answer to the issue. But for lawyers it obviously matters who does the deciding. There might be exceptions when it comes to being held liable outside your state, but other than that no one really worries about it.
Controlled vocabularies, and “aboutness”, and folksonomies and such. Even though it affects their finding experience more than anything else, library patrons don’t give a shit.
If possible, could you guys explain why these things are important in your professions.
I have no clue what the above three posts are about. I guess that’s a natural consequence of this kind of thread, but I’m sure there are curious minds that would want to know.
Even worse that that is the debate about whether RDA is better than AACR2. (For outsiders: they’re the rules about how to construct a record in a library catalogue. Non-librarians probably won’t notice the difference).
Jurisdiction is huge in law enforcement, as well as fire & ems. Especially when you get into urban areas. Many city boundries can be the centerline of a roadway. So when you call that accident in, and the dispatcher is asking you whether you are going east or west, or if you were turning right or left, it is for a valid reason. If you just don’t know, we have to guess. 99.999999% of the time we will “guess” wrong and send the wrong agency. Not a huge deal except for the fact that now you have waited for the wrong car to get there and now you have to wait even longer for the correct officer to get there.
Same goes when you own a house that is on a boundry line. We have homes built on city boundry lines. The house may be in one city, but their garage may be in another city. If something is stolen from the garage, you have to call that city. So many people don’t understand why, and always suspect lazy officers. While that may be partly true, it also come down to statistics. If you live in city “A” and had something stolen in city “B” but report it to city “A”; you raise the crime statistics of city “A”. If this happens enough, this will start affecting your insurance rates, because city “A” suddenly starts looking like a hot bed of crime.
Recently an intense debate arose other whether our light rail trains are allowed to trail through (basically like merging from 2 lanes into 1, only train tracks) a spring switch located outside an interlocking at 15 mph instead of the implied 8mph, and how two sets of rules contradict each other on this (one rule implies 15 mph, another says 8).
They’ve been going on and on about this. If I told a real life person I think their eyeballs would melt out of their sockets in boredom. The other night my fiancee was having trouble falling asleep so I started telling her about work (above paragraph) and she conked out halfway through the first sentence
With my one traffic accident in the U.S., while we were waiting for the police to arrive, I looked at a map and was really confused at how the city boundary wandered around the intersection where we were. However, the police officer told us that it didn’t matter, and that they could deal with issues outside their jurisdiction.
For the book I’m working on, I had a prospective chapter on nationalism and vampire folklore. Though the problem of nationalism is absolutely paramount in Balkan historiography, which is my area of formal training, I’ve come to realize that no one buying a book on vampires cares about the meandering of Vuk Karadzic and Milos Obrenovic, so I cut the chapter.
That was exactly what popped into my head after reading the title. We will debate and sometimes litigate jurisdiction in excruciating detail, where a layman would rather watch paint dry.
In Oakland, there was a person claiming that the Berkeley police were harassing them by following them into Oakland and pulling them over.
The cops replied that they have a state charter, and so can ‘be police’ anywhere in the state. After reading about what it takes to establish your own state police force, this appears to be correct.
How does this affect legal jurisdiction? If a Berkeley cop makes an arrest in LA, what is the jurisdiction?
In defense, a big concern is ‘insourcing’ right now. That’s where your company, for example, has won a contract to provide a service to the Government, but the Government decides that it’s a job that should be done ‘by Government employees’, so they take the positions away from you, and in many cases hire your own employees to sit in Government positions, so you lose the work AND often lose your best employees at the same time with zero compensation. The employees may take a small cut in pay, but in exchange they get the world’s greatest benefits and a very secure job in exchange, so it’s a wash for them. It can destroy a small business overnight, however.
Insourcing has become big in the acquisition field right now with lots of financial and planning types getting sucked up by the Government. It tends to be a bit of a risk for non-engineering type jobs, but is a concern all the same.
There is also a concern about the closing of the Joint Forces Command and where all those jobs are going to go both for contractors and Government folks. You can bet that some of those will be filled through the ‘insourcing’ phenomena.
Depends. What was the crime? Where did it happen? Who or what was the victim? Were state lines crossed, or anything sent through the mail? Are there co-defendants? Pending charges from other jurisdictions? Is the cop serving a warrant, or intervening in a crime he’s witnessed?
Normally, criminal jurisdiction exists in the geographic location where the crime was committed, regardless of where the defendant is actually arrested. It may also exist in other locations depending on a number of variables.
Who wants to hear about long tube vs. short tube stethoscopes? Draining abscesses? How about making a bed with a person in it? The differences between a subcutaneous syringe and a TB syringe?
Nah, I didn’t think so.
(Except maybe the abscesses…)
