Nobody lives here: Nearly 5M Census Blocks with zero population (2014)
tumblr.mapsbynik.com
tumblr.mapsbynik.com
The Zone of Death is the name given to the 50 sq mi (129.50 km2) Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a result of a purported loophole in the Constitution of the United States, a criminal could theoretically get away with any crime, up to and including murder.
The area is very remote and while in the park not often visited. Its very beautiful with meandering rivers through large grasslands as well as some canyons with the Tetons in the distance.
Nice try, murderer.
Given the makeup of the federal courts and all the way up to SCOTUS, this would be a dangerous case for the state to take to trial through the appeals process before closing the loophole.
I feel like you are partially right about conservative judges. I do think they tend to be more 'tough on crime', especially at lower levels. But it also seems that at the higher courts they tend to apply the law as it was written. In this case, if it is applied as written, then the defendant would be dismissed or not guilty.
I don't know. Based on my recent experiences, the system is a sham.
In this specific case, it's already possible to move jury trials to other districts for difficulty of finding impartial jurors, so it's almost certain that the courts would similarly rule that doing a similar change of venue poses no constitutional issue whatsoever.
“District and state” was intended to provide a fair trial of your peers. Simply not having a trial would not be a fair trial, however choosing a nearby venue would likely pass the fair and reasonable test.
That doesn't matter. As the maxim goes, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
It is if the law is not defined. You can't be in violation of a non-existent law. As the maxim goes, innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Just because a crime may be universal, doesn't mean tha people can have their rights violated.
The easiest fix for all of this is to have the legislature do their job and amend the law.
You're arguing that we should use a civil law legal system... but you're several hundred years too late for that debate... and it has no relevance to this question.
So back to the interpretation: If this case went to the supreme court, why do you believe they would say: welp guess you're free? They also have the ability to say: Since the constitution says what it says, the court districts must be redrawn, and therefore the defendant must be tried in the redrawn Idaho district court. That's the way it would be solved by the legislature, and that's the way the court is going to force it to be resolved if the legislature doesn't.. because at no point did the legislature intend for a piece of land to be outside of our laws. An oversight is not intention.
I think you are right about the redistricting decision. I still think it's wrong and lazy for the legislature to have the courts handle it. This sort of indifference is sloppy and leads to inefficiencies and injustices, such as appeals, retrials, or misinterpretation. The courts really shouldn't be doing much interpreting. The system is supposed to use hundreds of representatives to be the voice of the people, not 1-9 judges.
I also see that you are saying that people should be guilty if they violated the spirit of the law. This doesn't currently happen. Look at the tax loopholes in wide use. My opinion is that you can't expect someone to know that something is wrong if the statute says something contrary.
Luckily most of these go the other way.. like in Jacobellis v Ohio where the judge says "I'll know it when I see it" to describe his threshold for obscenity... overturning his conviction. [Edit: On the other hand, obscenity is only illegal because it was ruled it's not covered by the first amendment (even though the exception isn't listed in the first amendment)... allowing the legislature to pass laws restricting it.]
The Constitution is filled with more examples: Point to where in the Constitution it says you have a right to privacy, which is the basis for Row v Wade. Or point to where it says "beyond a reasonable doubt", a standard set in Winship.
The reason it's supposed to go that other way is because you are to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. Any benefit of doubt or uncertainty is supposed to go to the defense.
This is exactly what a common law system expects you to know if what the law literally says is ridiculous. It is ridiculous that murder is legal if you get your intended victim in this area, and the law would expect you to say "hah, that's funny it says that, but I'm still not allowed to kill people"
Maybe if you had a Napoleonic system you could get away with it.
So to clarify further, assuming no precedent had ever been recorded on this or a similar matter, the common law interpretation would probably be that you were expected not to murder people in this situation even though literal interpretation of the law would seem to state it was allowed.
It's one thing to have a defect. It's another to use it against someone, especially is that dev met the requirements.
He and they knew it would go to court, and the whole "land ownership" debate would finally come to the forefront. It went on for a decade before they did finally charge him, and of course it was his land (he knew that), so the charges were eventually dropped and that first nations tribe is now recognized as the traditional owners of the land.
My immediate curiosity is why our purported murderer couldn't be brought up on charges to conspire to commit murder/transit state lines in the commission of a crime/etc.
It'd seem from my layman's perspective you'd almost have to simply have a crime of passion (or at least no premeditation outside this zone) happen - e.g. a pair camping in this area of the park and one murdering the other in a fit of rage.
I disagree with this on the basis that rule of law needs to be followed. The government can't expect people to telepathically know what the laws are. People only know what they are based on what is documented. Basically ignorance of the law should be an excuse if one could not have known the law or the law clearly stated something that supported their position, like in the elk case.
Some years ago we lived in an off the grid cabin in the mountains of Veracruz (Mexico) and the lack of connectivity was by far the main reason we left. We now live on the outskirts of a small city but I still really miss the absolute silence of living away from civilization.
It's beautiful because it is empty.
I think we should fill up all the vacant lots and surface parking in the cities before we needlessly trample nature any more.
There's like SO MUCH empty land. Growing up in the US, I thought the most empty things got was Ohio. But turns out, we're more like Russia - with the empty siberian frontier - than we are like the UK or something.
If everyone were evenly distributed, we'd still have <100 people per sq mile
(if you do physical work 10 hours a day maybe not, but walking a couple miles is a smallish breakfast)
That being said, I work from home, but I live in downtown to have easy access to activities, restaurants, and supermarkets without needing a car. The difference in rent is dwarfed by not having the cost or hassle of a vehicle.
I live about an hour outside a major city. I definitely will drive in (normally) for activities like theater. With a self-driving car--even just on the highways--I'd be more inclined to go in for an early evening get-together. But I wouldn't be popping in multiple times a week even if I didn't mostly need to drive myself.
And what "extreme and unexpected weather" are you talking about? Climate change has increased the severity of hurricanes but I've heard nothing about tornados which is all you would have to worry about. The western parts have to worry about fires to some extent, but that's not a problem for the eastern parts (even intentional fires put themselves out). Also even in the western parts, it's hard to create a firestorm without trees, a simple fire break can stop many grass fires.
I had interpreted a "census block" to be an arbitrary unit, but it seems to have originally designated actual city blocks. In 1990 they decided to divide the whole country into blocks. [1]
"An automated computer process looks for all visible and nonvisible features in our geographic database (MAF/TIGER) that should be a block boundary and creates a block each time those features create a polygon." [2]
Kind of an interesting extension of the "block" concept. It would seem that population density should be more of a factor. Automatically generating 5 million unpopulated census divisions seems a bit like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_block
[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2011/...
You can see them in NYC here: https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/#11.61/40.764/-73.991...
Things like parts of Central Park and Piers are there own blocks. So, unless they capture homeless people living there, the population is zero.
My guess is in places like SD there are still plenty of farm areas, commercial areas, schools etc which have no people.
South Dakota looks like it has 80k census blocks and 800k people.
In the context of the census, land use is distinct from land habitation.
The BLM is the federal department that oversees most governmental land that isn't managed by some other department. Broadly speaking, this is land which isn't run by a local/state/tribal government, may not have any particular use designated, and is (usually) uninhabited - or at least intended to be.
The BLM simply functions as the kitchen sink of land management at the federal level, catching everything that is not explicitly assigned to other agencies.
I just want normal websites, none of this mobile f*kery we have today.
Although I'm not sure about a place that is a perfectly legal primary residence (the resident owns the title to the land, the resident lives in a permanent dwelling on the land), but that lacks a postal street address.
Firstly, from the numbers given, it seems that the average size of a block is a little less than a square kilometer.
In some places, major highways show up as thin ribbons in the high-resolution display [1]. One example that I am familiar with is Interstate 84 across the Poconos in North-Eastern Pennsylvania. I located one section of this highway in Google maps [1]. Using the distance-mearsuring tool to mark out a square kilometer, it was clear that, if these blocks were square kilometers, or some other compact shape of that area, the highway would not appear as thin as it does, and one would not be able to pick out the wiggles in the highway's route, which actually show up in considerable detail.
Maybe these roads (and also streams, which show even more detail) are additional features on the map, unfortunately also colored green, but if so, the selection of which ones to show seems rather arbitrary.
Regardless, there are also several sections where it seems implausible that there is any dwelling within a kilometer's distance of the highway - for example, either side of I-84 at [2], yet, on the census map, the highway threads through here as a thin green line on a white background ([3]; south-east quadrant.)
At the very least, it seems unlikely that the blocks are arranged as a uniform square grid.
[1] https://mapsbynik.com/maps/census0pop/
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/41%C2%B020'59.2%22N+74%C2%...
[3] http://mapsbynik.com/maps/census0pop/tiles-140420/TileGroup1...
Historically census blocks were determined in the field as an early stage of enumeration based on local conventions, but today they're defined semi-automatically from GIS data. Still, what exactly defines a block and what is typical of them varies widely from place to place.
Blocks are the lowest level of the hierarchy in which census data is organized, next being block groups and then tracts.
IMO this is a big mistake by US zone planning. Having lived in Japan for a while, the ability to live in any zone and let the market figure it out has big benefits. Rents are comparatively low, even in Tokyo. We were able to live 10min from my campus as a family of 3 for $1k/month. There are small commercial centers everywhere in walkable distance, even 1h away from the center by commuter train. Everywhere you go there is life, people to meet, things to buy, festivals to attend, conversations to be had.
Back in a past lifetime I created numerous land-use models that allocated all sorts of things to "zero-pop" blocks: sewer capacity, revenue, spending, pollution generation. While allocation could use any polygon Census Blocks were convenient.
- physically restrictive (lake, swamps, mountains, deserts...)
- legally/socially restrictive (commercial/industrial/military... zones)
Interesting..
It appears that you need 1/4 acre to be able to grow enough food to support a family and with nuclear power for heat...it seems like a lot more population growth is possible.
Am I missing something?
> Commercial and industrial areas are also likely to be green on this map. The local shopping mall, an office park, a warehouse district or a factory may have their own Census Blocks. But if people don’t live there, they will be considered “uninhabited”. So it should be noted that just because a block is unoccupied, that does not mean it is undeveloped.
I would value more a map of differences between this and the previous census, showing which areas somebody had moved out of or into.
What about agricultural land, forests, water, forests, wild life ?
>Update: On a more detailed examination of those two states, I’m convinced the contrast here is due to differences in the sizes of the blocks. North Dakota’s blocks are more consistently small (StDev of 3.3) while South Dakota’s are more varied in area (StDev of 9.28). West of the Missouri River, South Dakota’s blocks are substantially larger than those in ND, so a single inhabitant can appear to take up more space. Between the states, this provides a good lesson in how changing the size and shape of a geographic unit can alter perceptions of the landscape.
> I’m convinced the contrast here is due to differences in the sizes of the blocks. North Dakota’s blocks are more consistently small (StDev of 3.3) while South Dakota’s are more varied in area (StDev of 9.28).