In Mexico City they have sewer divers. As far as I know, that idea hasn’t caught on. If you tried getting me into one of those diving suits, I’d want you to be damn sure you couldn’t just roll a giant wooden ball through it instead.
While we’re at it, the idea that lawyers intentionally write obscure laws to make more work for lawyers is a canard I would love to see die. The goal of good legal drafting is clarity, not obfuscation. Why would I enter into a secret agreement to make my job as difficult, tedious, and incomprehensible as possible?
Come to think of it, I think I’ve said that before. For at least five years. Or maybe six years.
I’ll take it one step further. I have worked for three Fortune 500 companies and two smaller ones. I have never seen a flat database in anything other than Excel for any business use at any of them. Web Backends, relational systems, off the shelf purchased stuff and the like, sure, those are SQL or some rough equivalent. But just flat-format lists of records? Always Excel. Always.
Most people just roll their eyes and sigh when I use my trademarked “You know a spreadsheet is not a database, right?” line. This happens even after they’ve just munged the “database” by sorting some columns and not others, or spent an hour doing copy-and-paste sorts because they want to (gasp) search on more than one field at a time, or failed to notice that a given “record” is in the “database” multiple times but only one version was updated.
I’m not sure this is so much “antiquated” as just a substandard practice that’s caught on, though.
pravnik explained this view to be fallicious far better than I, but do you want to take a crack at any of my other questions? Do you seriously suppose that (in your view) overpaid clerks extend court procedings for their own personal profit?
Do you think that lawyers, judges and the like do all their work in front of juries, and stop, down tools and head for the bar the minute juries are dismissed? Would it be reasonable to assume (although I know it to be true and so do you from previous threads) that judges, lawyers, court workers, and clerks do work outside hours that you are in fact in a jury panel?
I think you misunderstand the complaint. The laws are alleged to be written to be obscure to non-lawyers. Thus, in order to understand the laws one is required to either have legal training, or pay for the services of someone who does. (I’m not saying this claim is true, just that I believe it to be the claim that is being made.)
Its taking longer then you thought?
No, I understand the complaint perfectly (having had several years to ruminate on it). If the law were somehow drafted so as to be incomprehensibly beyond the grasp of the uninitiated, the law is going to be unnecessarily complex, confusing and time consuming for the initiated who have to use it daily as well. It’s not a secret language, and there’s simply no secret agreement among lawyers to keep laws as complicated as possible.
After a couple of millennia, you would think someone would have come up with a more efficient way to lay bricks. There were changed about 100 years ago as a result of early ‘efficiency experts,’ but otherwise we still lay brick wall the way we always have.
I work with microfilm and microfiche. When I tell people this, I get “Wow, and you DO that? I wouldn’t…I’d just wait for it to be digitized and then search through it with Ctrl+F.” First of all, you will probably be waiting a while–although slowly, slowly, SLOWLY, major newspapers are getting digitally archived, the stuff I’m looking at (“East Bumblefuck Tri-Weekly Gazette”, in business from 1894-1901") is not going to be digitized for a very long time, if ever. Yes, the microfilm machines are forty years old. But there isn’t another way to do my research, so I’ll suck it up and deal with the headaches.
I’ve said before and will say again now: the entire process of physical signatures being needed to authenticate things is absolute bullshit. I can’t believe that in this day and age, with everything gone digital, we still need to sign on checks, receipts, etc.
That was a cool link. Thanks. I found it interesting that the cities biggest problem is the citizens seem to expect the sewer to take all kinds of refuse other than water, piss, and actual crap. You’d think they would run some kind of public service annoucement campain to PUT YOUR TRASH in the trashcans, not in the street to end up in the sewer and clog it up.
They did come up with a machine to automate layinmg cobblestonesthat is pretty cool.
For tables my issues were twofold:
- I had lots of trouble getting things to center vertically in the table cell. Doing that is non-obvious and a huge pain. Something that Word does reasonably easily
- Creating and if need be editing the code for the table is also very difficult. It is just so hard to keep everything lined up and sensible. I do my data processing in Excel, and so what I used to do was lay out the code in excel, and then just paste that into the Latex document. Hardly an elegant solution. It also meant that to do most changes I had to find the excel file, change the code in the excel file, and then paste it back in again. Being able to just paste data into a Word table from excel or orders of magnitude simpler.
Images were also a problem getting the right formats for things. I work in Microsoft Windows (and no, I can’t switch to Linux. I use programs that are Windows only), and the postscript support in Windows is poor at best.
FWIW, even though the equation editing in Word is much better in 2007+, I still think that Latex offers the best environment for creating equation laden documents. However the other areas are so bad, now that Word is better at it I think the advantages of Latex are fast disappearing. If I had to write a paper that was all text and equations I would think about going back to Latex. Anything else and I think Word is the best option.
Calculon.
The whole domestic building industry seems incredibly mediaeval to me. Somehow we can build cars by machine and still include some individuality, but each house is custom-built by hand*. Utterly bizarre.
- yes, I’m aware there are kit and pre-fab houses, but (my impression is, anyway) these are a tiny minority.
Then why was Stoid told repeatedly that she had to get a lawyer to argue her case? Why was she told that, as a non-lawyer, she was incapable of understanding the law?
You don’t need a conspiracy. Just an outlook that says that the above is acceptable. You are clearly writing for an audience that does not include the layperson. It happens in any field. The difference is, the law affects all of us, and it often winds up bugging people when they can’t figure it out.
If the goal were to be clear to everyone, then all these plain language movements wouldn’t keep failing. It’s not that your prioritize being obtuse, just that you don’t prioritize not being so.
Anyways, what’s your opinion on case law? It sure sounds to this layman as being inefficient, having to go look up how a judge responded in many different times, rather than just having it all available simultaneously with the law, all nice and summarized to how it is currently being enforced.
It has always sounded like, again to this layman, that lawyers have to do a lot of work that could be simplified.
Last year I was applying for evening courses in education at a nearby school and I had to request transcripts from my previous schools. At Vanderbilt University I was able to fax in a request. At Harvey Mudd College I had to send a request through the mail. It’s as if they are unaware of this thing called the internet. And they’re allegedly the world’s best college of science and engineering. Academia is the most backwards institution on the planet.
One thing that I’ve run into is corporate definitions/responsibilities. Databases were considered a tool, and thus creation and maintenance of them were done by the group that handles all of the various internal tools.
So if you want a database, you have to go through an intake process, detail all of the requirements, submit it to the group, who then prioritize it, and depending on that priority, might give you back the results in a few months.
Or you can just whip up a spreadsheet.
Qote:Why would I enter into a secret agreement to make my job as difficult, tedious, and incomprehensible as possible?
Answer: BILLABLE HOURS! ($$$$$$)
I’m a nurse. One of the requirements of our job is to check the Schedule 8 drugs at each change of shift. There’s a large, maroon coloured book in each medication room with a separate page for each S8 drug. One nurse has to write up the book, using a red pen, while the other counts each drug: “morphine 10mg/ml - 32, oxycodone 5mg - 78, Fentanyl 500mg/10ml - 95 …”
This happens three times per day. It’s slow and extremely tedious and I can’t believe that there’s no better, more efficient way to keep track of these medications.
I’m sure this sounds incredibly trivial, but am I the only one bothered by pencils that require sharpening?
If I’m not sketching, why use such a thing?
ducks out of thread