8 ms·
North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names
- randycupertino 10mo agoApparently one fake mineral was flagged and removed but these two made it through to the law: > The fake minerals are friezium and stralium, apparent references to Christopher Friez and David Straley, attorneys for North American Coal who were closely involved in drafting the bill and its amendments. > Bjornson said a Legislative Council attorney flagged and removed a fictional mineral, “docterium,” earlier in the session from an unofficial draft of the same bill before it became part of the legislative record. > Anderson recalls joking about finding docterium, a reference to Rep. Jason Dockter, during a committee hearing. The lawmaker said he noticed the term in an unofficial draft afterward and immediately asked Legislative Council to remove it.
- Y_Y 10mo agoRemove it!? But that's the only evidence of something fishy! You shouldn't just silence an error without knowing how it came to be there.
- mmooss 10mo agoSomeone against the lobbying may have intentionally left the names in, or added them.
- TheJoeMan 10mo agoThis is a good example of “not fixing the whole problem”. Once a “fake” mineral was discovered, a good idea would have been to demand an expert reviews the entire list.
- toomuchtodo 10mo agohttps://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/12/19/north-dakota-law-accidentally-lists-fake-critical-minerals-based-on-coal-lawyers-names/ https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/12/19/north-dakota-law-a... https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/05/02/lawmakers-pass-bill-promoting-rare-earth-mineral-development-in-north-dakota/ https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/05/02/lawmakers-pass-bil... https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/69-2025/regular/bill-overview/bo1459.html?bill_year=2025&bill_number=1459 https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/69-2025/regular/bill-overview/b...
- poplarsol 10mo ago[flagged]
- Waterluvian 10mo agoInteresting. Is there a link about this? I did a search and of course it’s all trash about “no Canada didn’t ban video games.”
- SapporoChris 10mo agoOf course not. There might be a social media article but nothing verifiable.
- Pxtl 10mo agoI assume he's referring to failed prototype rifles that never made it into mass production but appeared in videogames. Ask H&K for a list of the all the military rifles they ever made and dump it onto the list and you get some cool-looking failed experiments made to bid for a military procurement contract that have only been seen in Call of Duty.
- comrh 10mo agoWhich one isn't real? https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/campaigns/firearms-buyback/individual-lists-firearms-lower-upper-receivers/list-firearms-individuals.html https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/campaigns/fire...
- mothballed 10mo agohttps://rcmp.ca/sites/default/files/dam/pfl-1229-a.pdf https://rcmp.ca/sites/default/files/dam/pfl-1229-a.pdf #144117 on page 30 -- "AR15.com" "ARFCOM" That's a website and the company registered under that name does not have an FFL to manufacture firearms. There is no such firearm.
- comrh 10mo agoThey use to make AR15s. https://www.mpnnow.com/story/news/local/victor/2013/12/08/business-blames-safe-act-for/41607062007/ https://www.mpnnow.com/story/news/local/victor/2013/12/08/bu... Also not "multiple" and not "from a video game"
- bschmidt25014 10mo ago[dead]
- readthenotes1 10mo ago[flagged]
- collingreen 10mo agoThe misdirection attempt failed! It was not very effective!
- readthenotes1 10mo agoRight? It's almost as if they didn't read the bill before passing it...
- majke 10mo agoSo... does it mean that nobody reads the law? Is it good or bad? What is the takeaway?
- csb6 10mo agoI think the answer to those questions are pretty self-evident.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> does it mean that nobody reads the law? It means every lawmaker isn’t a geologist. That’s fine. It also means there clearly wasn’t enough public input from geologists that someone would have noticed a name they’d never seen in a group they were familiar with.
- NewJazz 10mo agoAt least not geologists who don't also work for coal companies.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo agoI’ll go out on a limb and guess that none of the industry groups found this funny. They want to replicate this law in other states. The lawyers who worked on it, on the other hand, only work in North Dakota. And calling a spade a spade, I guess if I needed something in front of that legislature I’d at least know they’re competent and crafty.
- mmooss 10mo agoThat often happens. Some bills are released to lawmakers without enough time to read them.
- 3eb7988a1663 10mo agoWouldn't the obvious answer to be vote against? If you do not know the terms of the deal, maintaining the status quo seems superior.
- ctoth 10mo ago> The fake minerals are friezium and stralium, apparent references to Christopher Friez and David Straley, attorneys for North American Coal who were closely involved in drafting the bill and its amendments. > “It would be kind of embarrassing for the rest of the country to look at us and say ‘Really? Do you guys even know what you’re doing?’” > Anderson said the amendments were prepared by a group of attorneys and legislators, including representatives from the coal industry. So that is not embarrassing? You aren't embarrassed that ... you were clearly not doing your jobs, but just letting industry mark up the bill... And then didn't even read it? Any embarrassment there? Any? Bueller? Bueller?
- ctoth 10mo agoIf I don't clearly read the code Claude commits under my name I have done a bad. And yet. Making rules that will affect everybody? HAHAHAHAHA LGTM SHIPIT!
- jfengel 10mo agoWhy should they be embarrassed? They got the law that they wanted passed. Not a single one will lose an election over this. Even if a challenger brings it up, they have a very grateful industry behind them (and now with even more money to throw at elections). If there is any embarrassment to be felt, it would be on the part of their constituents, who voted for this legislature and came out behind because of it. But I strongly suspect that they will re-elect the incumbents.
- zdragnar 10mo agoYou've literally described most state legislators and federal Congress. The Affordable Care Act was 906 pages long (nevermind the accompanying 11,000 some odd pages of regulations typically quoted). You can bet very few Congress critters actually read all 906 pages. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (the year is part of the name) was over 5,500 pages long. Definitely none of the people in Congress bothered reading any of it- there wouldn't have been time to do so.
- GuestFAUniverse 10mo ago
- OutOfHere 10mo agoThey don't even know the difference between a mineral and an element contained in the mineral. I could see only two proper mineral names in the list: barite and bauxite. Fluorspar's generic name is fluorite. Almost the entirety of the list is fake. It is indeed relevant to name the minerals correctly since it by its definition asserts a particular concentration of a constituent element.
- culi 10mo agoIt's ridiculous how much of our bills are completely written by interest groups like the coal industry. I'm surprised they even reviewed it enough to catch it In 2010 Arizona passed an anti-immigrant bill written by the private prison company Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic). We know it was written by CCA because they literally left the logo on the bill
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- atlasunshrugged 10mo agoIn a former job I worked on a tech co's policy response to a major piece of California AI legislation a couple of years ago and was stunned to learn that nonprofits (at least, I'd be shocked if this didn't also include companies) basically sponsor bills and just find lawmakers to introduce and champion them.
- phil21 10mo agoMany Judicial opinions are done in the same manner. An attorney from the winning side prepares a draft opinion and a judge reviews/edits it and away it goes. The edits in the couple I've personally seen are incredibly light - more or less a rubber stamp with the judge's name on it. I imagine this holds true (via chatting with insider friends) for many such "industries" including lawmaking, scientific/academic papers, industry RFCs, etc. More or less credential washing.
- cogman10 10mo agoI'm not sure this is true. I've payed attention to a few high profile cases and I've not seen anything like that come up. The closest I can think of is when jury instructions are issued. But in that, the two sides ultimately work with the court to hammer out the details of how those instructions should look. And often, they are based on a more or less standard template with minor revisions.
- ocdtrekkie 10mo agoIt's probably a good guess that whoever wrote it was a lawyer and not an industry expert, and presumably used these as placeholders for an industry expert could fill in that nobody ever actually replaced.
- decimalenough 10mo agoOn mobile: does this article really consist of a single paragraph of text and a single illegible small screenshot, buried in an avalanche of ads, including things like "More >" links that open more ads?
- pests 10mo agoThere is 20 separate paragraphs/major sentences.
- decimalenough 10mo agoStill not working for me, even on desktop: https://imgur.com/a/IXrOFmh https://imgur.com/a/IXrOFmh Fortunately archive.is uncovered the actual content: https://archive.is/TCjMy https://archive.is/TCjMy
- llacb47 10mo agoDo you have any content blocker extensions?
- delichon 10mo agoProposed constitutional amendment: Within 30 days after a bill is made law, legislators that voted must pass an automatically generated comprehension test of the legislation at a 6th grade level. On failure they lose voting privileges for 90 days. On three strikes they leave office and a new election for that seat is called.
- georgefrowny 10mo agoWhy not make it a condition of the vote in the first place? Don't understand it? No vote for you. If your constituency wanted a say, they can let you know what they think about that.
- adgjlsfhk1 10mo agodo you want to incentivize introducing bills that are intentionally incomprehensible.
- trhway 10mo agofor anybody who can't pass the test on understanding - default "No" vote. That would incentivize the opposite - straight to understand bills.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> legislators that voted must pass an automatically generated comprehension test Congratulations, you’ve transferred legislative power to the test administrator and granted them a de facto veto to boot. Better: laws are subject to up-down popular veto. (Counterpoint: you’ll wind up with omnibuses.)
- potato3732842 10mo agoJust a default sunset in 10-20yr for every law not passed by a supermajority would do wonders.
- VerifiedReports 10mo agoApparently some clever person was mocking bills written by industry shills. Put that guy in charge.
- Kapura 10mo agoBroken country with a broken governments all the way down. It's clearly common practise to pass bills without knowing what they contain. Horrible.
- potato3732842 10mo agoIt's broken because for the past ~70yr there was scant if any scrutiny of what they were up to because half or more of the country "trusted the process" (or whatever you want to call it) if not the people. They were free to write, write, write and expand, expand, expand with no serious pushback and so of course a lot of it was garbage. When you write loans to anyone with a pulse too many of them are gonna be sub prime. When you just let legislatures legislate and bureaucracies bureaucrat too many of the results are gonna be shit. And now that bill is coming due.
- mothballed 10mo agoThey pass massive bills not knowing what they contain, and even worse amend them at the very last second with verbal votes to amend containing god knows what. During the budget bill McConnell just rammed through what is effectively a hemp ban amendment which no one seemed to know about up until the point Massie forced a vote to on whether to take it back out, at which time a large number of people who had at all times been vehemently against anything like a hemp ban bizarrely voted the exact opposite for reasons that they've made almost entirely opaque. None of it makes any fucking sense. The fact things wrapped up in mega bills basically breaks any semblance of a democratic system; either you vote for the entire package, or the entire government breaks, or your competitor gets to slam you for hating on the children because you had to defund them in order to avoid doing some other terrible thing.
- simonw 10mo agoI find the fact that nobody seems to know how those names got into the bill particularly frustrating. Lawmakers really need to learn to use version tracking properly. It's shouldn't be possible for a single line of text to make it into a bill without a digital trail leading back to whoever added it.
- defrost 10mo agoYes, that .. but also - heat map activity tracking. It's often not so much what's in the three thousand pages of filler and bumf, rather more what's in the several paragraphs that get the bulk of the rewrites and horse trading - that and the last apparently unrelated change that kicks a proprosed Bill over the line to pass.
- mschuster91 10mo agoOr we could limit the size of laws? No more "omnibus" bills, no more horsetrading, no more bullshit. If it is too long to read and comprehend in a single day in full, it needs to be broken down into smaller laws, or contents be cut entirely.
- Analemma_ 10mo agoI don’t want to pick on you specifically, because this is just one example of a very common pathology, but this is such an “HN-brained” comment. “They didn’t use version control” is ten million miles from the real problem here, and adopting version control would improve literally nothing about this situation.
- simonw 10mo agoI deliberately didn't say version control (which would imply git or similar, and we know they're not going to learn that). I said version tracking. They use word processors to write the things, they could at least learn to turn on "track changes". I genuinely do believe that a law that says "all laws must be able to show author tracking on a per-line basis" would improve democracy. Convince me otherwise!
- superkuh 10mo agoNearly as bad, this website encrypts it's text using a simple cipher intentionally breaking it for those that don't successfully run all of their untrusted third party code. >kAm%96 :?4=FD:@? @7 7:4E:@?2= DF3DE2?46D :D 36:?8 42==65 2? 6>32CC2DD>6?E 3J @?6 DE2E6 @77:4:2=[ 2 A@DD:3=6 AC24E:42= ;@<6 3J 4@2= :?5FDECJ =6256CD 2?5 >JDE:7J:?8 3J E96 =2H>2<6CD H9@ H@C<65 @? E96 3:==[ E96 k2 9C67lQ9EEADi^^?@CE952<@E2>@?:E@C]4@>^a_ad^`a^`h^?@CE9\52<@E2\=2H\244:56?E2==J\=:DED\72<6\4C:E:42=\>:?6C2=D\32D65\@?\4@2=\=2HJ6CD\?2>6D^Q E2C86ElQ03=2?<Qm}@CE9 s2<@E2 |@?:Ek^2m@C C6A@CE65]k^Am... etc That's the first time I've encountered this particular affront. Nasty stuff. We should not be giving them web traffic. https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/12/19/north-dakota-law-accidentally-lists-fake-critical-minerals-based-on-coal-lawyers-names/ https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/12/19/north-dakota-law-a... is much better in that it actually has readable text on the page.
- ale42 10mo agoThe list also includes astatine, which (although a real element) has basically no use, is highly radioactive and only exists for a few hours before becoming either polonium or bismuth. And of course, you can't mine it because there are no ores of astatine nor minerals containing it.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo agoAre there any practical effects of this? Could I name an existing mineral stralium and get goodies?
- potato3732842 10mo agoIf you're a more equal animal and have the right relationships with the power structure you can do that and make money hand over fist while it goes through the courts. If an upstart tries it the state will have law enforcement all over them in short order.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- optimalquiet 10mo agoMy interpretation of what happened here is that a legislator who opposed the bill inserted the names of the lobbyists as a joke against the bill, which has now paid off. The article says that the original list did not include the names, they were added during the legislative amendment process by a legislator. While corporate authorship of bills is a concern, I don’t think this particular mishap is a direct result of that and in fact seems to have been an attempt to subtly criticize it.
- garciasn 10mo agoHanlon’s razor.
- detectivestory 10mo agoWasn't there a joke about this happening in some movie when an English soccer team manager wrote the team name on the back of a box of cigarettes. Later he had to include the inclusion of two unknown players in the selection: The players names were Benson, and Hedges.
- londons_explore 10mo agoI would like to see a nation whose laws are limited to what people can remember. Ie. In a court, a jury makes their decision about if the accused has broken the law simply on their recollection of the law. In turn, this means all rules must necessarily be far simpler and less precise. Lawmakers wouldn't write laws so much as advertise what they think the law should be, and if the population remembered and agreed with the new law then it becomes the law, since that would be what the courts are enforcing.
- rpigab 10mo agoI was actually looking for cool lawyers names to name the new minerals I discovered, but these came up.