No, it isn't. That is, it isn't something that "should be", it's the actual rule U.S. courts are bound to follow.

And elsewhere in this topic I've posted the actual language of the bill. These alarmist scenarios I have seen under this topic today have pretty much nothing to do with what the bill actually says. It's pretty darned "reasonable".

Where do you get the idea it changes nothing?

The current proposed rulemaking by the EPA, regarding CO2 emissions, is based on claimed "science" which ISN'T:

(A) identified AT ALL, much less specifically,

(B) "publicly available"

(C) available AT ALL for independent analysis, much less attempts to reproduce.

There is an actual reason the bill is titled "secret science". Because that's what EPA has been doing. And which does, in reality, have to stop. This bill is a direct reaction to EPA's unilateral actions which it is not able or willing to show are based on ANY actual science.

I have a feeling I'm going to have to repeat this several times to different people:

Elsewhere in this topic I've posted the actual language of the bill. Given what it really says, these scenarios are completely unrealistic stretches of the imagination.

Following is the relevant text of the actual bill:

=======
The Administrator shall not propose, finalize,
or disseminate a covered action unless all scientific and
technical information relied on to support such covered ac-
tion is--
(A) specifically identified; and
(B) publicly available online in a manner that
is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial
reproduction of research results.
(2) Nothing in the subsection shall be construed as
requiring the public dissemination of information the dis-
closure of which is prohibited by law.
=======

It does not say personal or medical details. It says "sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction".

There is NOTHING sinister or unreasonable about this, except apparently in the imagination of alarmists.

That isn't in the bill itself. That's what one person said in response to Morganstein's stated opinion about the bill.

The law is not subject either to Morganstein's interpretation, or what a single Representative said about it. That idea has been solidly settled by the Supreme Court.

400-year-old Common Law, still in effect in this country, says that the meaning of the law rests on one thing: what a reasonable person would conclude Congress intended when passing the law. That's why, for example, they have debates about bills in Congress.

I hardly think a reasonable person would conclude that study subjects could not be anonymous. That's an extreme interpretation, not a reasonable one.

And also as I stated up above: that's why the Court challenge to Obamacare is not about "4 words". It's about what Congress intended when passing the bill. There is A LOT more evidence of Congress' actual intent than just those 4 words.

Only if you completely missed my point.

Yep. Bullshit, and bullshit.

The law must be enforced as read by reasonable people. That is a principle that goes back over 400 years in our legal history. No reasonable person would interpret the law that way. You can't read it any which bizarre way you see fit and say that's what the law means.

As for Obamacare, that's pure propaganda. It isn't "just 4 words". It's what Congress INTENDED in writing the law (just as I wrote above) which rules the day. And there are far, far more than 4 words about this in the Congressional record. It is very clear that the sponsors of the bill, and the debate surrounding the bill, intended any subsidies to be distributed ONLY via State exchanges.

If you read the debates and the emails, it's more like 4000 words, and they all say the same thing.

I read Morganstein's letter. I will repeat what I wrote above: what the bill calls for to be publicly available is the science (i.e. the methodology) and the data. Personal details are not part of the data!!! Those are administrative details.

Just as Morganstein says, simply stripping names is not always enough to de-personalize data. But other methods are easily available.

This is a non-issue.

Please show us exactly where it says this.

In a medical study, your SSN, DOB, and (non-anonymized) medical information are not data. In fact they are mostly irrelevant to the actual DATA of the study. Your approximate DOB may be important, and your medical history (and I very highly doubt they would require a complete medical history) might be relevant, but your name or SSN? Fucking hardly.

This is really reaching, by anybody's standards. I read the article, and Morganstein's letter.

The language of the bill calls for "publicly available science". It does not say that the subjects of any studies cannot be kept confidential. That's just malarkey.

As I wrote above: such studies or surveys, by their very nature, are presumed to be repeatable. The idea is that anyone else who conducted such a study, with a similar but separate sample of individuals, would come up with the same results. After all: that's what the studies are for.

To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't anywhere say that study subjects cannot be anonymous. The only thing that can't be anonymous or secret are the authors and their methodologies.

I don't mind honest debate about the issue, but the idea that the statement "publicly available" could reasonably apply to study subjects is a pretty long and thin stretch of the imagination.

What's also not common sense is that this would keep EPA from using health studies from confidential sources. By their very nature, such studies are presumed to be repeatable; if not, then the researcher(s) are using questionable statistical methods at best. Like biased sampling methods, for example.

There is nothing in there that would preclude using decent studies which used non-controversial methodology. Whether the subjects of the studies remain confidential, or not.

The language of the bill is very clear. It is intended to do what it says: make sure our regulatory bodies (employees of The People) are making their decisions based on publicly available, sound science.

Why should they be able to keep their "science" secret, as they have? That's obviously a non-starter. Especially when they're attempting to shove the most expensive regulations in history off on the public.

Verhoeven completely misunderstood the book, was the thing, and made a parody of it. What he missed, what Heinlein's reader's often miss, is that Heinlein doesn't write utopias. None of his books are some imagining of an ideal society. The point of Starship Troopers was to explore in depth what life would be like in a militaristic/fascist society from the point of view of someone who knew nothing else. It was subtle and powerful as a result: the point-of-view characters are fully adapted to their society, and don't point out all the ways it's batshit crazy. Heinlein trusts the reader to make that call, to see how easily people get used to even such a harsh society and accept it as normal, if that's all you know.

Verhoeven missed all of that, saw it as an endorsement of the society in the book, and parodied it, turning the really interesting point the book was making into trite anvilicious crap.

Moon is the same - exploring an ultra-libertarian society in the same detail, in the same way from the point of view of people adapted to it. I expect the same Hollywood treatment: making a satire of it since they see the society as unwanted, not realizing it wasn't an endorsement in the first place but a critique.

Wow, auto-correct had a blast with that code. "Monuments" indeed!

Tech debt is like credit card debt: the interest is a bitch. I worded for a while at one company that nearly folded because the time required for emergency bug fixes grew to, then past 100% of development time for the team. Horrible code doesn't just require more bug fixes in the first place, each change grows progressively more expensive and unsafe.

10k lines of shipped, production code is only of value if it's working bug free and without complaint. 10k lines of buggy code, that you have to add a week to any project that modifies in any way, that has negative value.

That being said, if the code is "cleaned up" by the same team that wrote it in the first place, you likely don't come out ahead. The only reason that company "nearly" folded was monuments willingness to hire about 10 senior guys like me to rescue what we could - 6 of them quite within a few weeks, but the 4 of us who stayed managed a few core fixes that kept it limping along for enough time to find a buyer for the company before it went under.