Lennart Thornros <lenn...@thornros.com> wrote:
> I do believe you have a house inPA and that it is welluilt following rules > from 1790. > Actually, the guy who rebuilt it said that the stonework in the barn was incompetent and did not meet the standards of 1790. He said "whoever did this should have been ridden out of town on a rail." (The town being Gettysburg.) But it did hold up. He jacked up the building and rebuilt the inside wall with stone taken 100 yards away. So whoever did it in 1790 could have done it right, as he pointed out. > I did not read much of your other examples of poor regulations. I actually > try to say that old obsolete laws are still in the law books as there is no > interest of implement changes. > You are completely wrong about that. Laws governing industrial standards are frequently updated to keep up with technology. The ASME, the ASTM, NIST and other organizations issue hundreds of revised and modernized standards every year. That is why computer plugs plug in without shorting and burning up the equipment. (In the 1970s I sometimes plugged in cables which *did* short out and burn up the equipment.) Let me put it this way: I am not nostalgic for the RS232 standard. Without such standards, modern technology would be impossible. > The degree of freedom one generation compared to another is hard to be > categorical about. > That is completely wrong! It is dead-easy to be categorical about, or to compare. Just read the laws and newspaper accounts from the past. Read any novel about the past, or diary. You will see that we are living in the golden age of personal autonomy. In no previous era, in no nation, were people as free to live and do as they please as we are. Just the fact that homosexual couples are allowed to marry would be mind-blowing to anyone in 1980. In 1968 there were many places where heterosexual couples could not divorce. Until the Loving versus Virginia judgement, people of different races could not marry in many states. Not just black and white people; in some states I would not have been allowed to marry a Japanese American or native Japanese. I would have been arrested for checking into a motel with a person of another race. Under the Cable act of 1922, anywhere in the U.S. I could have been stripped of my citizenship and forced to move to another country. See: http://civilliberty.about.com/od/raceequalopportunity/tp/Interracial-Marriage-Laws-History-Timeline.htm > If basic needs were not met then the freedom was not real. Rules 150 years > ago could often not be enforced so the reality was the same . . . > They were most definitely enforced. These were not dead letter laws at all. You have no knowledge of history if you think that laws relating to race, sex and so on were not enforced. - Jed
