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I 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Proposed constitutional amendment: Within 30 days after a bill is made law, legislators that voted must pass an automatically generated comprehension test of the legislation at a 6th grade level. On failure they lose voting privileges for 90 days. On three strikes they leave office and a new election for that seat is called.
> 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.
Apparently 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 session from an unofficial draft of the same bill before it became part of the legislative record.
> Anderson recalls joking about finding docterium, a reference to Rep. Jason Dockter, during a committee hearing. The lawmaker said he noticed the term in an unofficial draft afterward and immediately asked Legislative Council to remove it.
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.
They don't even know the difference between a mineral and an element contained in the mineral. I could see only two proper mineral names in the list: barite and bauxite. Fluorspar's generic name is fluorite. Almost the entirety of the list is fake. It is indeed relevant to name the minerals correctly since it by its definition asserts a particular concentration of a constituent element.
My 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.
Hanlon’s razor.
It'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
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.
Nearly as bad, this website encrypts it's text using a simple cipher intentionally breaking it for those that don't successfully run all of their untrusted third party code.
>kAm%96 :?4=FD:@? @7 7:4E:@?2= DF3DE2?46D :D 36:?8 42==65 2? 6>32CC2DD>6?E 3J @?6 DE2E6 @77:4:2=[ 2 A@DD:3=6 AC24E:42= ;@<6 3J 4@2= :?5FDECJ =6256CD 2?5 >JDE:7J:?8 3J E96 =2H>2<6CD H9@ H@C<65 @? E96 3:==[ E96 k2 9C67lQ9EEADi^^?@CE952<@E2>@?:E@C]4@>^a_ad^`a^`h^?@CE9\52<@E2\=2H\244:56?E2==J\=:DED\72<6\4C:E:42=\>:?6C2=D\32D65\@?\4@2=\=2HJ6CD\?2>6D^Q E2C86ElQ03=2?<Qm}@CE9 s2<@E2 |@?:Ek^2m@C C6A@CE65]k^Am... etc
That's the first time I've encountered this particular affront. Nasty stuff. We should not be giving them web traffic. https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/12/19/north-dakota-law-a... is much better in that it actually has readable text on the page.
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.
Broken country with a broken governments all the way down. It's clearly common practise to pass bills without knowing what they contain. Horrible.
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.
The list also includes astatine, which (although a real element) has basically no use, is highly radioactive and only exists for a few hours before becoming either polonium or bismuth. And of course, you can't mine it because there are no ores of astatine nor minerals containing it.
Apparently some clever person was mocking bills written by industry shills. Put that guy in charge.
So... does it mean that nobody reads the law? Is it good or bad? What is the takeaway?
On mobile: does this article really consist of a single paragraph of text and a single illegible small screenshot, buried in an avalanche of ads, including things like "More >" links that open more ads?
> 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.
> “It would be kind of embarrassing for the rest of the country to look at us and say ‘Really? Do you guys even know what you’re doing?’”
> Anderson said the amendments were prepared by a group of attorneys and legislators, including representatives from the coal industry.
So that is not embarrassing? You aren't embarrassed that ... you were clearly not doing your jobs, but just letting industry mark up the bill... And then didn't even read it?
Any embarrassment there? Any?
Bueller? Bueller?
Wasn'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.
I was actually looking for cool lawyers names to name the new minerals I discovered, but these came up.
I would like to see a nation whose laws are limited to what people can remember.
Ie. In a court, a jury makes their decision about if the accused has broken the law simply on their recollection of the law.
In turn, this means all rules must necessarily be far simpler and less precise.
Lawmakers wouldn't write laws so much as advertise what they think the law should be, and if the population remembered and agreed with the new law then it becomes the law, since that would be what the courts are enforcing.
Are there any practical effects of this? Could I name an existing mineral stralium and get goodies?
It's probably a good guess that whoever wrote it was a lawyer and not an industry expert, and presumably used these as placeholders for an industry expert could fill in that nobody ever actually replaced.