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Comment by mark_edward | Hacker News Reader

People like to say that, but in practice it's not true and hasn't been for over a century.

People like to say that, but in practice it's not true and hasn't been for over a century.

It depends on the topic. When it comes to things like interstate commerce, you are correct -- the states don't each have treaties with each other.

But when it comes to other things, like education, that's very much a local function. The feds set minimum best practices (enforced by the threat of removing funding), but it's up to the tens of thousands of local school districts to decide what to teach their children.

Some of those local school districts are huge, on the order of 10's of thousands of students. Others can be as small as 15 or 20 students, or even one individual school.

When it comes to the topic at hand -- GIS information -- It is pretty much a county situation. There are numerous competing GIS standards and products, and each county or municipality chooses the software that works for its needs, and budget.

So, yes, there is creeping federalism in the United States. But claiming "it's not true and hasn't been for over a century" shows a lack of understanding of local civics.

Assuming that to be true, I would expect there to be localities within the US where laws differ so vastly that they resemble different countries when juxtaposed. Yet, I’ve traveled enough of the US that this would surprise me. (It would be very interesting to experience those two, though!)

I think the US shows itself to be pretty homogeneous, with some differences between the rural, suburban, and urban areas, but not much.

Go to Las Vegas and then a dry county in Kentucky and note what you're allowed to buy and what you're allowed to do on the streets.

I can smoke weed legally for recreational purposes where I am here. Where I grew up I'd be thrown in jail.

Texas has no zoning laws of any kind. You can build any kind of building for any purpose anywhere (I'm sure there's still restrictions, but there's no zones per se.)

States have wildly different speed limits on highways. Different levels of allowed alcohol.

This is just off the top of my head without googling, I'm sure there's probably even bigger examples as well.

Take a look at the US Census Bureau's methodology page for the Building Permits Survey.[1] They statistically impute the numbers from a subset of 20,100 building permit issuing authorities, because they cannot collect all of the distinct authorities in the country with different data collection and storage policies.

Federal databases of postal addresses don't really have any reason to maintain data on the structures.

Some fire fighting authorities have building layouts for recently built buildings. They may all have their own methods for storing the data, and the coverage is confusing enough that the bodies and budget authorities responsible for fighting any long lasting wild fire frequently change.

Properties lines are usually recorded and maintained at the county level, and enforced by a county court and sheriff at their direction, but this too is not the case everywhere.

It is not outlandish to think that there are multiple federal databases that include all of the data on buildings in the US, whether at the Department of Defense, or at multiple agencies within the Department of Homeland Security. However, it seems common that only data collected as a side effect of the regular course of doing government business are released to the public, but data sets created as part of some form of security-related goals are not released to the public.

[1] https://www.census.gov/construction/bps/how_the_data_are_col...

I sadly agree that federalism is de facto dead as a framework of policy and ideology. But as a legal and bureaucratic infrastructure, it has quite refused to die, for better or for worse. City, county, and state governments still do their thing, and anybody dealing with property, construction, zoning, etc in any capacity will still need to negotiate through each of those layers separately.

I have to disagree. For sure, there is a lot stuff that is centralized at the federal level, but there is still a great deal of data managed at the county municipal level and there is a wide variety in how this data is managed (or not managed) and what format it is in. In the town where I live, they looked up my birth record (in order to provide me with an official birth certificate) in a large bound book. Most permits for construction are managed (at least in part) by the town, who knows where that data is stored. Hopefully most of it is submitted up to the state level.

Yep. As an example, higher level governments will attach stipulations to grants or other types of funding in order to “encourage” lower governments to do as they’d like them to. Our tax system is such that this almost always works.

> it's not true and hasn't been for over a century

We just had a Supreme Court ruling affirming states’ anti-commandeering rights [1].

[1] http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/05/opinion-analysis-justices-...

I know building permits do seem to work like this in the US.

There is probably a separate db (if its even a db) for each county. It is very much a data cleaning nightmare from my limited experience.

Way more granular than at the county level. Building permits in my village at at the village level. Dozens of villages in my county.

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