You ever lived in Mississippi? Otherwise, I’m calling bullshit on you, right here and now.
But…everyone uses building codes, assuming that you use buildings. It’s not like they have some specific benefit to only one individual component in the building process/use cycle. We have engineers that work on other projects, like roads/parks etc., and they seem to get along fine with plain old taxes. I don’t really see why city codes shouldn’t work the same exact way.
Along those same lines, I think it would be awful if every road was a toll road, or city parks had an admission fee. The freedom of interstate road travel has been a large contributor to promoting business, and a benefit to the average person.
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The systems have already been built and are in place. Github being just one of the many options available. Someone is already typing the codes into computers in the first place. The ability to see who is making what edits would be a solid move forward in accessibility to the inner workings of government and make legislative corruption more difficult to get away with.
Public.resource.org doesn’t need to wait to smash the current system. If anything, it would have been nice if they had smashed it earlier.
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Right, but that’s MS. I referred to the change made in GA only because someone else had brought it up.
As to the actual subject of the BB article - obvious. The MS AG is an obvious idjut. The state is quite capable of updating and publishing the codes on their own. If they want any further budgeting support for that effort, they could impose minor surchages for permits related to the codes, and be done. But they DO handle other law and regulation, and they pay staff or contractors to get it done. Or any other system they may choose - none of which has any bearing on the fact that laws have to be published, EOS. Hats off to those getting it done!
Everybody in the state is a user of the code, because it doesn’t just apply to builders and architects, it applies to home-owners, home-renters, and people who want to make changes to their house, apartment, or business building, and people to whom it may not have occurred to make changes from the building but would actually be in violation of the code if they don’t make changes to the building to bring it up to code.
Back when I lived in New Jersey in the 80s, and owned a house in a small town, the rules for electrical work were that homeowners could do their own work inside a circuit box (as long as they did it according to code), but moving or adding a box or any wiring not in a box required a licensed electrician and approval by the town building inspector, and if you wanted to sell your house, all the work had to conform to code (or be grandfathered based on when it was installed.) As far as I know, we were only constrained by the current National Electrical Code, and there weren’t any extra-special rules for my town or New Jersey. So replacing a switch or socket or dimmer switch was fine, putting 43 connectors inside a 4x4 box wasn’t, ripping out old knob&tube wiring would have been fine (done by previous owners, fortunately), installing new knob&tube wiring would have been Not Fine.
At least in the case of the UBC, it’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. Various sections and versions or edits of that code get adopted locally by various jurisdictions. So, there’s not really a single source for all, nor a single version for all.
That’s awesome, but it still doesn’t address the question of who should pay for it? Maybe it should be free, because freedom, but it’s written by actual people who want actual paychecks, those dirty mercenaries.
Think that this principle in relation to any law should be self-evident. I hadn’t even really considered the effects of secret law until the last g20 that had been held in Canada. Then I found out about this: http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/g20/2010/06/25/g20_law_gives_police_sweeping_powers_to_arrest_people.html . This is fascism in a nutshell - I don’t thats an unfair thing to say, or a leap to any conclusion. laws passecd in secret with specialized means and needs are no different from the legitimation of use of military force to achieve any goal in society and culture.
The state requires everybody to obey the code. The actual people who write the code and want paychecks for doing so might be state employees, or they might be experts that the state hires to write a code for them, but either way it’s work for hire, not something that’s privately owned.
The standards organizations developing these codes are notoriously slow to adapt. That might very well be a result of their very large, slow customer base-- too many revisions when municipalities are already habitually behind in adopting new codes means that extra resources poured into development don’t pay off. Outside of that, standards bodies have no real constituency to prod them except for somewhat ineffective glares from major industry players or government organizations.
If code development were more directly paid for by government or industry, revisions might actually be faster in coming as customer and constituent input would now have some relevance to the process. On the other hand, direct control by political appointees or industry hacks might head things into an unhealthy direction.
Anyhow, I don’t really see the current system crumbling just because of a bit of transparency. At the very least, the major sources of income for standards organizations will be intact since most of the fee paying institutions aren’t so much paying for the information in the big fat book but for membership and certification. It will mostly likely settle into the same sort of system as university degrees-- all the information is freely available, and useful to more than just academics but paying the fee grants necessary certificate.
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