Another interesting uninhabited zone is in Idaho. Summarized by Wikipedia:
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.
I worked in that area on a SCA trail crew in 1996, in the Bechlor ranger district, and its nothing we discussed then but looking as the ref it seems this loophole was only noted in 2008.
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.
Good luck getting the government to honor that. I can't even get a local court and state trooper to follow their own rules of procedures defined in code or basic civil rights.
The poacher who shot an elk there and went to trial had a pretty decent argument citing this particular hypothetical. The judge dismissed the argument but his attorney pressed on; the poacher eventually took a light plea bargain contingent on not appealing and using this line of argumentation.
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.
Law is not like code or math: you don't follow an inexorable algorithm in law to arrive at the only possible interpretation of the law. When you do this kind of analysis and arrive at this kind of absurdity, more often than not, courts will find that the law actually doesn't permit this absurdity.
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.
Yeah, I agree, courts are made up of people are designed to deal with the gray area as best they can. Courts deal with complex cases all the time. One thing they often look to in these gaps is intention.
“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.
But how do you explain that one knew what they where doing was unlawful? How can they if the law clearly states they cannot be prosecuted? If the law states that you cannot be fairly tried in that location, then to put them on trial would be a violation of rule of law. The people explicitly spoke through their representatives. If it was not specific or too specific, then the law needs to be changed by the legislature. This 'interpreting' the law to the detriment of the defendant is generally bullshit. If you use the basis of reasonable doubt and innocent until proven guilty, then it should result in defendant being dismissed. You can't expect people to telepathically know the law means something contrary to what it literally says.
The US uses a common law legal system.. meaning the law isn't just what it says.. it's also how it's interpreted by judges and how it has been interpreted in the past.
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 understand that it's a common law system. But there's also no precedent or prior ruling about this, thus not existing in common law.
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.
I agree with that... except the last part. You can be guilty of violating the spirit of a law. See for example Wickard v Filburn that forced Filburn to pay a fine for violating limits on wheat.
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.
In my opinion, the only thing Wickard v Filburn should be used for an example of is government overreach and misguided inclusion of n-order impacts. Growing food for your family should not be a crime. What a racket. We might as well find people guilty of conspiricy to commit murder simply because they didn't report a murderer when they saw them speeding prior to the crime. It could have stopped it!
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.
It likely depends on the crime. If the crime committed is obscure and jurisdiction dependent, that argument might hold weight in court. If it is something like murder, the court will likely rule that that is a crime everywhere and it was unreasonable to assume you could get away with murder .
But how would they rule on the defendant's rights? If the law says that the person has the right to be tried by a jury in the same state and district, then it seems to be a blatant violation.
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.
As discussed above, the ability of a court to change a venue because an impartial jury can't be obtained is well established. A judge would order a change of venue, the defendant would likely appeal, and the appeals court would find that changing the venue isn't an infringement of the defendant's rights.
>You can't expect people to telepathically know the law means something contrary to what it literally says.
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.
ok, sure, but I am going to be very surprised if anyone can find a high up precedent saying if you murder people in a tricky way it's ok.
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.
But the real question is whether the defendant's rights were violated. Even if one knew they weren't supposed to murder, would a prosecution contrary to what's written in law violate their rights? At the least, it seems like a due process violation.
You forgot the second sentence for context: How can they if the law clearly states they cannot be prosecuted?
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.
I sort of agree. What I find appalling is that the legislature is aware if the issue and refuses to fix it (do their job). If it's really that clear cut, then surely the people can speak through their representatives to fix this issue.
When the local first nation wanted to be recognized as the traditional land owners in this part of BC, Canada, one of them would shoot en Elk every year illegally, then goto the Police station and try to get them to charge him.
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.
I'm not sure I undertstand the courts argument. I guess you're saying that the disproportionately republican justices would be more amenable to a civil liberties reading of the law. But in fact the truth is the opposite: conservative courts have a long and very consistent history of being very friendly to police powers.
I think the argument is that lower courts are supposed to follow the rulings from higher courts, either due to precedent or just consistency. Lower courts can be hesitant to rule on novel cases, and seem to side with 'guilty until proven otherwise' instead of 'innocent until proven guilty' when these technicalities come along.
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.
Interesting. Now I have to add this paper to my reading list.
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.
My guess is the feds would say that because no one lives in that state within that district, that the defendant's rights would not be prejudiced by using other people in the jury since the defendant themselves are not from that area.
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.
I wonder if Starlink will eventually have on impact on this, maybe 10 years from now.
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.
Yup, that will be one less reason to live in a city. I've also theorized that work from home and self-driving vehicles are other trends that may counteract the trend towards urban living. If you have a self-driving vehicle (on the highway at least), longer commutes may be less of an issue if you can work, read, or watch tv (we're not there yet.) If you work from home, commute doesn't matter at all.
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.
If the population is truly zero, I wonder how many other infrastructure concerns will come first? Primarily road connections, but also electric grid and potable water. There are alternatives to the latter 2 but it is a significant impact
Climate change will have the opposite effect. Both worsening extreme and unexpected weather and the high carbon cost of geographically remote living will consolidate people to where the infrastructure is.
If you're going to live remotely I think it would be an easy choice to install solar. The US is very good for solar in general, compared to Europe. Also many of these wide open areas are also great for wind power.
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 am betting that Starlink will have an impact on where people live. We have tons of beautiful empty land in this country but, modern life requires broadband and that's not well distributed yet.
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
You should take a trip to Australia sometime. The desert is sparse. Australia is more like an atoll, with everyone living on the edges. I've been in parts of the outback where my workmates and I were the only people for 10 to 100's of km's in every direction.
Isn't Perth the city that's farthest away from any other city in the world? Obviously that depends on the criteria which I can't remember, but the people I know from there have all complained that if you're bored of the city it's almost as easy to go to another country as it is to go to another city in Australia.
If you're still so far apart that you can't see your neighbors it's still "empty". The amount of space available in the United States boggles the mind when you actually go out there and drive for hours seeing almost no one. The damage to nature comes from large industrial activities like farming (fields or trees) or strip mining. Simply living there would actually help preserve that wilderness.
i use to wonder how you could detonate a nuclear bomb and no one notice, then I drove through New Mexico. The shear amount of nothing is hard to put in words. I spend a lot of time in far West Texas and Brewster county seems like beehive of activity compared to New Mexico.
My knee jerk reaction was to comment that modern life also requires other things like healthcare; but then I thought twice in that maybe some of the lifestyle diseases that drive in some measure the important placed on healthcare availability, maybe those core maladies and deleterious choices are encouraged by living in close proximity to large numbers of folks.
Which "lifestyle diseases" are you thinking of? Both obesity and diabetes are markedly more common in rural America compared to urban America, but there is a confounding factor of poverty.
Poverty is one thing. In a rural location, indeed, even in many suburban locations, you also sort of have to make yourself go out for a walk/run/hike because you're not going to just organically walk from place to place. (ADDED: Aside from house/yard work/farming/etc.) I live in a semi-rural location (nothing like what we're talking about here) and there is basically no reason that I have to do more than a minimum level of walking on a given day. (Leaving aside how big a difference that makes in the scheme of things.)
Yeah, I think there is no question that there are ways to integrate physical activity into your life in a rural setting, especially if you are going to make gardening, animal husbandry, or forestry integral to your routine. But, if you think that Starlink is a big inducement to move to the great deserts of western America, where you will sit with your laptop and your wifi, then it seems likely to be a net reduction in your physical activity, as you won't be walking a mile each way to the office, or to the café, or whatever.
Driving a couple hundred miles twice or once a year for dentist appointments isn't that hard. Yeah if you injure yourself badly you're just going to die, but that's kind of expected.
Highly likely. I do wonder what impact this will have on mail ordering. Currently rural deliveries are subsidized by the more densely populated areas. Because the ratio of subsidized rural dwellers to densely populated area dwellers is so lopsided in favor of density, the subsidy doesn't matter much. If that ratio changes, so might the economics of companies like Amazon being able to deliver anywhere, usually by piggybacking on the USPS's rural delivery infrastructure. That said, I've seen Amazon's own delivery vans in some pretty low density rural areas so maybe it works out somehow.
I doubt it. Most of the blocks near me are not areas you could legally inhabit (.e.g. state and federal lands) and in some of the other places I understand it looks like large ranches that are far from the nearest grocery store (or paved road) and are marginal farm land.
I wondered why they would create so many unnecessary blocks.
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.
Incorporating them into neighboring blocks can cause problems. The current approach does well at giving us local population density, even if it is zero in these cases. Merging all these blocks together would result in inaccurate numbers for density in many small rural towns as their land areas are artificially inflated.
The thing is, if you do the whole country through some uniform process, you don't get into an endless discussion about how you should do it - what's in and what's out? What is the appropriate size and shape of this block, and this one and this...
I literally do not believe the map they posted with this article. Take a look at North Dakota on Google maps, satellite mode, labels off. It's still a grid of farms and roads just as the rest of the midwest, just bigger blocks. Uninhabited? Not so much.
Because there are no residents in those blocks. Literally no one lives there. That doesn't mean no one makes use of the Land, such as for farming, mining, etc.
In the context of the census, land use is distinct from land habitation.
For anybody not super familiar with US government departments and confused by reading this after seeing other headlines coming out of the country in recent years, BLM in this context is "Bureau of Land Management" and not "Black Lives Matter".
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.
While a lot of BLM land is uninhabited, it is not all like that and not necessarily intended that way either. For example, the entirety of California's coastline is BLM land.
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.
This is a very misleading statement. The area off the coast of California constitutes the California Coastal National Monument. The actual land mass involved there is a mere 8800 acres and nobody lives there. The other national monuments in California add up to 2.5 million acres. BLM's total holdings in California are about 15 million acres, of the state's 105 million acres. Most of what the BLM holds aside from national monuments are grazing lands that they lease out.
Indeed, for reference, truly vast swathes of the rural western states are federal government land. Not all is BLM, some is national park and such, but same concept applies for zero population in a census block.
Same as iPhone. I just moved from Android and after trying for 1min I couldn’t figure out how to get desktop mode in Safari. Sometimes I find myself fighting things like that in iOS. I’m just supposed to guess.
I miss how websites used to work with the original iPhone. Websites looked like normal desktop sites, and you could double-tap on a block of text and the browser would zoom into that area.
I just want normal websites, none of this mobile f*kery we have today.
For whatever reason the "Request Desktop Site" option is hidden in Safari behind the icon in the address bar that suggests it should just be about controlling the font (small-cap-A, big-cap-A). I think it took me two years to finally remember that consistently instead of just being frustrated that I couldn't find it.
It was also a long press on the refresh icon (because you'd reload the site into desktop mode, which actually made a bit of sense) but now it's in the generic overflow menu that for whatever reason is "ᴀA".
Yep. And I had finally gotten used to that when they moved it. At least the "share" button in iOS is a bit of a catch all (sharing with messaging apps, email, make a bookmark, print it, add to home screen, copy, and more actions), so it at least made some sense. Moving it behind a font control button makes no sense.
This may not be accurate at all, but my first thought was I think I've seen people living in some of those no one lives here on the Alaska TV shows. Specifically, http://www.kavikrivercamp.com with Sue Aikens. Not sure how her river camp would be statistically measured.
It's census data, so it's measured by what each person in the country states is his/her primary residence. So if Sue Aikens wrote down her river camp in her census form, it should be included in census data.
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.
Census blocks are divided approximately equal by geography, and they're pretty small - NYC's Central Park census block has a population of zero, for instance.
And people (try to) live there. Just not officially. So some some blocks might contain people which e.g. "secretly" live at their working place or similar.
I have a question about the allocation of blocks and the definition of "inhabited".
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.
Census blocks are intentionally bounded by geographical features such as roads and are not intended to be of uniform size. Census blocks are intended as an organizational unit for census data and not necessarily for any comparative use, such as this website makes, since it's clear that the demographics of blocks will vary widely depending on location, size, etc.
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.
> Commercial and industrial areas are also likely to be green on this map.
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.
Census Blocks aren't just used for population, for instance in traffic modeling the number of employees in a block is often non-zero - think of commercial or industrial areas.
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.
People talk about over-population but I've driven across America numerous times and there appears to be TONS of room for more people.
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.
This is kind of poorly done. Zoom in on my city (Philadelphia). Look at South Philly. It's half green! shocking until you realize this is the giant I-2 Industrial zoned sectors for shipping, the shopping centers, warehouses, etc.
I don't think it's poorly done, so much as it isn't what you expected it to be. The text below the image pretty clearly explains the effect that you're seeing:
> 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.
Looks like the author updated the article to address that:
>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).
Because census blocks are geographic divisions of equal area. The rivers are likely chosen to be separate blocks because nobody lives in them, similar to Central Park or the blocks in National Parks.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone)