It looks like the gaps are because they're progressively updating the handbook, so "Sections" are chapters that have yet to be updated and "Parts" are chapters that have been updated:
> Many technical references are available to help NRCS engineers prepare conservation designs, e.g. industry design references, professional publications, academic textbooks, and market literature. NRCS design engineers with accumulated empirical experience have worked with academia, industry, and other government agencies to develop technical references and procedures that are specific to conservation work. This knowledge base is housed in the National Engineering Handbook Series, Technical Releases, and Technical Notes:
> General Manual, Title 210 - Engineering, Parts 600-659 are grouped together to form the National Engineering Handbook (NEH) Series. These Parts can be found at http://directives.sc.egov.usda.gov/ under the browser search column as “Handbooks - Title 210 Engineering.”
> The filing system for National Engineering Handbook Series was updated in 1998. As a result, old NEH Sections are posted with the new NEH Parts. As the old NEH Sections are updated, they will be filed as Parts under the new NEH Series.
[0] https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/ND%20S...
A lot of US departments, publish books like this.
I’m a non-American, but i still often read books published by your government :D , they are certainly very cool. I wish our government had something like this.
An interesting sidenote i wanted to mention the US Military also publishes books on various combat skills and guides on making defensive weapons for your public citizen to defend their communities incase of an invasion or government collapse[1].
I’ve come to realise that a good portion of your government sure as hell cares deeply about protecting your citizen’s right to defend themselves whether by carrying arms, or publishing books on guerilla tactics, and home making arms to protect oneself in the event of a crisis
I get the right to carry arms is controversial in your country, It’s not allowed for common citizens here either unless they can prove a risk of life to themselves, but I always come across moments in history, where governments choose to genocide their own people [2] and it makes me think that maybe, what the american constitution creators thought of, which is now characterized as extreme civil liberty wasn’t a bad idea after all. People sometimes forget how unstable our freedoms truly are, and how often governments across history and in each country have betrayed their own people.
- [1](https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3APentagon+U.S...)
It's very dramatic to say, but do you have evidence of that? It sounds like a fantasy of the American gun rights crowd (like most of this discussion).
> Gun deaths and mass shootings are horrible but the solution is not to abolish the 2nd amendment.
Is that the only way to regulate guns, to recind the amendemnt?
I do believe you are living in a bubble, whereby your viewpoints are selectively backed up by "world events" that actually do not walk the line between democracy and tyranny.
This is a little dated, 4-5 years maybe. There are 30,000 gun related deaths per year by firearms, and this number is not disputed. The U.S. population is 324,059,091 as of June 22, 2016. Do the math: 0.0000925% of the population dies from gun related actions each year. Statistically speaking, this is insignificant! What is never told, however, is a breakdown of those 30,000 deaths, to put them in perspective as compared to other causes of death:
• 65% of those deaths are by suicide, which would never be prevented by gun laws. • 15% are by law enforcement in the line of duty and justified. • 17% are through criminal activity, gang and drug related or mentally ill persons – better known as gun violence. • 3% are accidental discharge deaths.
So technically, "gun violence" is not 30,000 annually, but drops to 5,100. Still too many? Now lets look at how those deaths spanned across the nation. • 480 homicides (9.4%) were in Chicago • 344 homicides (6.7%) were in Baltimore • 333 homicides (6.5%) were in Detroit • 119 homicides (2.3%) were in Washington D.C. (a 54% increase over prior years)
So basically, 25% of all gun crime happens in just 4 cities. All 4 of those cities have strict gun laws, so it is not the lack of law that is the root cause. This basically leaves 3,825 for the entire rest of the nation, or about 75 deaths per state. That is an average because some States have much higher rates than others. For example, California had 1,169 and Alabama had 1. Now, who has the strictest gun laws by far? California, of course, but understand, it is not guns causing this. It is a crime rate spawned by the number of criminal persons residing in those cities and states. So if all cities and states are not created equal, then there must be something other than the tool causing the gun deaths.
The point of rules like this is usually to make the government very afraid of it’s own people and to make sure they (the government) serve them (the people) well.
There are a 110 ways to kill people, if someone wants to kill you on the streets, not having guns aren’t what’s holding them back. It’s far easier to buy fetanyl in your streets, and just inject someone with a high dosage and leave.
> I'm not too concerned with a Cambodian genocide happening in the US.
I wouldn’t cast the concern aside that freely if I were you, I don’t think its productive to look down on Cambodians as less civilised or believe in a sort of American exceptionalism, where things like the Cambodian genocide is not a possibility.
As an example, I’d like to show the time when the government of California, was actively sterilising perfectly healthy american citizens for “eugenics” purposes [1][2] (a precursor to what could constitute genocide if those policies were nationalised)
This is however just one example, you could argue they are linked to racism and a race superiority complex from those times, but reasons and causes can change across different times, the communities targeted may also change, the outcome (the potential risk of a government turning its back on its own people) is always present.
The great governance (in comparison to nations across the world) that america benefitted from in the last century, was earned and paid for in blood, ideas and sweat by you’re previous generations of citizens, constitution designers, policymakers, independent organisations, and right groups (on both aisles).
I would say the concerns of a gov fallout is always ever present and the duty of every citizen in any democracy across the world to keep an eye out for, and put in all sorts of protections against such fallout whenever possible.
- [1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXn3IzQTDOg) - [2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zCpRVP1DgQ)
First off I love Jeff Atwood's take on it https://blog.codinghorror.com/do-certifications-matter.
But I recently just passed my CISSP, had to for work, and it was one of the most obnoxious and pointless exercises I ever engaged. Most of the test involved questions about information that is hopelessly out of date, or incredibly pointless whose only value is for ivory tower PhDs to argue about in white papers whose only actual security experience is putting in their password to their laptop.
I used to be sympathetic to an extent about the value of having a professional certifying body for software engineers, or something like that. Especially after having to debug JS by "full stack developers" who had just become "software engineers in 6 weeks". But after the CISSP racket I am enduring, I've realized a certfying body won't make software developers any more capable, it will only allow those who are the least qualified, to force arbitrary and capricious requirements onto people who actually care about the craft and are capble.
/rant over.
My wife used to work as a nurse, her interviews were usually: do you have your certification paperwork? When can you start? No white boarding, no " tell me about a time you had to deal with a very difficult patient".
Yeah yeah jobs are different but ffs, if I had a freaking paper to show that would save me 4 rounds of interviews I would be so happy.
And yes, "innovation" may suffer. That's the usual argument, to which I say: good. I think we've reached a point in the history of technology where we need to chill out, take a deep breath and untangle the f ing mess we've created over the past decade.
That's if you already had the paper. You are discounting the cost of getting the paper in the first place.
