Saturday, March 18, 2017
More ambiguous grouping
Continuing the theme of ambiguous grouping...
Article at Quartz describes a labor lawsuit that turned on a badly positioned comma. The court decided in favor of truck drivers against a dairy.....
On March 13, a US court of appeals determined that certain clauses of Maine’s overtime laws are grammatically ambiguous. Because of that lack of clarity, the five drivers won their appeal and were found eligible for overtime. According to state law, the following types of activities are among those that don’t qualify for overtime pay: The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods. Is packing (for shipment or distribution) a single activity that is exempt from overtime pay? Or are packing and distributing two different activities, and both exempt? If lawmakers had used a serial comma, it would have been clear that distribution was an overtime-exempt activity on its own. But without the comma, wrote US appeals judge David J. Barron, the law is ambiguous......so the judge ruled in favor of the drivers. They were working overtime hours, and the law didn't clearly exempt them from overtime pay, so they deserved overtime pay. Problems like this could be resolved at the start if legislatures hired some programmers to write parallel versions of the code. In Python:
# = = = = =
def IsExempt(activity,product):
ExemptActivities = [
"processing",
"preserving",
"freezing",
"drying",
"marketing",
"storing",
"packing for shipment",
"distribution"]
ExemptProducts = [
"Agricultural produce",
"Meat products",
"Fish products",
"Perishable foods"]
decision = 0
if (activity in ExemptActivities) and (product in ExemptProducts):
decision = "No overtime"
else:
decision = "overtime"
return decision
# end definition of function IsExempt
# = = = = =
# Test for a specified combination.....
activity = "distribution"
product = "Perishable foods"
print "for %s of %s, %s" % (activity, product, IsExempt(activity,product) )
# = = = = =
(The above is real code. You can copy it and run it.)
The programmers could then test all of the potential activities and products to see if the result was as intended. Later on, courts could use the same code to resolve questions reliably without using arguable and changeable grammar rules.
The best part: You don't even need a computer. After testing, the Python version can be read with perfect reliability by humans.Labels: Aptronym Alert, Patient things
¶ 4:42 AM
