difference between anarchy and the state: an anecdote

being a generalist developer, I'll do work with one technology, then go for several months without touching it again, sometimes a year or more. often things have changed, sometimes drastically, since my last experience. or it could be just that my memory (in my brain, not on my hard drive) is going bad.

whatever the case may be, I got a TDD job recently which specified Selenium for the unit tests. I'd used it before, but hadn't run into this problem until now. while I was able to solve the problem, oddly enough while in the process of complaining about it, I felt that the documentation was horribly misleading and would discourage many who could otherwise use the software to good advantage. hence the complaint linked above.

strangely enough, one of the developers, Dave Hunt, accepted the criticism and offered me an opportunity to do something about it. while busy with the job that required the library in the first place, I figured it was the least I could do to make a stab at it, so I forked the repository and attempted to clone it.

it was huge. after 1GB, I realized I didn't have enough hard drive space left, and was about to give up. but then I read up on sparse checkouts, and was able to just fetch the py subdirectory and do as Dave had suggested. a little back-and-forth later, and Dave had merged my pull request, and now the Python Selenium documentation gives much more correct information.

all told, about 3 and a half days from complaint to resolution.

now let's talk about the "state", in this case, the city of Petaluma, California. their city ordinance 10.56 converts a Constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms into a privilege, by first revoking the right altogether in 10.56.010, and granting it back in 10.56.020. this is, particularly since the McDonald decision incorporated the Heller decision against the states, exactly the type of unconstitutional behavior the SCOTUS slammed in Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham: "A law subjecting the right of free expression in publicly owned places to the prior restraint of a license, without narrow, objective, and definite standards is unconstitutional, and a person faced with such a law may ignore it and exercise his First Amendment rights."

though the Petaluma ordinance doesn't impose a fee or even a license, it imposes a burden of proof, and thus gives officers of the law reasonable suspicion to deprive an otherwise law-abiding person of their 4th amendment rights. the ordinance cannot stand, and I tried to find a way to address this without going to tedious city hall meetings. but Petaluma doesn't much participate in social media. what they do share is one-way, from above to us peons below, and any feedback is simply unacknowledged. I did get Mike Harris, a former councilmember, to take it up with the city attorney a few years back, but I haven't gotten any followup from either.

so this is the difference, and most of us know it. however, for some unknown reasons, most people reject anarchy, under which they thrive, and embrace government, under which they suffer, at least to some small measure, almost every day. you got some 'splainin to do, Lucy.

from my blog.