[neverhome]

Dreaming this up tells me I have been sitting at home way too long ;-)

[gwilhelm56]

***in the process of writing all this massive, mindless legislation, they invariably create a brand new mess of problems.

And of course, they now feel the need to write yet more laws to solve the new problems (that they caused), and the vicious circle continues.**

OH, like the Microsoft SERVICE PACKS????

[smith288]

I beg to argue with this. I know when I enter:
if(budget <= expenses){
break;
}

politicians don’t understand simple logic like that

[fr_freak]

I still say that we should have a constitutional amendment that restricts all legislation to a certain number of words, such as 100. If you have a complicated problem, you'll simply have to pass more than one piece of legislation to get it addressed, but all pieces of legislation must be voted on individually. So, if you want to, say, build a bridge, you might have to pass bill to authorize the building of the bridge, with the whens and wheres, and another bill to authorize money for the project. This would avoid the monstrosities such as the healthcare bill which are designed specifically to be ambiguous and indecipherable so that the legal class can then claim that it says whatever they want it to say, and who would know better?

The programming analogy works perfectly - the 100 word limit would be modular programming vs. spaghetti programming. Any programmer knows that when a segment of code gets too long it becomes unwieldly and, if long enough, will be almost impossible to debug if it is all one module. Break it down into modules, and it becomes far more manageable.

[Longhair_and_Leather]

Hockey Moms make he best legislators!

[OneWingedShark]

I agree with you... the big problem in DC is that apparently nobody there thinks in terms of “cause -> effect” (ie logic) or “if X happens, what caused X?’.... *sigh*

[concentric circles]

Okay, wait just one minute. What’s the monetary pay off for the body odor, junk food left overs, and over all gender neutral whateverness of the coding world?

[meadsjn]

Not a bad idea. Programmers could also code in referential integrity for any new law (or old law) such that it would have to comply with the US Constitution.

That right there would diminish the US Code to a very small stack of paper.

[dfwgator]

My proposal:

public class Gridlock {
    static class Friend {
        private final String name;
        public Friend(String name) {
            this.name = name;
        }
        public String getName() {
            return this.name;
        }
        public synchronized void bow(Friend bower) {
            System.out.format("%s: %s has bowed to me!%n", 
                    this.name, bower.getName());
            bower.bowBack(this);
        }
        public synchronized void bowBack(Friend bower) {
            System.out.format("%s: %s has bowed back to me!%n",
                    this.name, bower.getName());
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        final Friend alphonse = new Friend("Alphonse");
        final Friend gaston = new Friend("Gaston");
        new Thread(new Runnable() {
            public void run() { alphonse.bow(gaston); }
        }).start();
        new Thread(new Runnable() {
            public void run() { gaston.bow(alphonse); }
        }).start();
    }
}

}

[MortMan]

Neverhome has been spending too much time at home?!? ;-P