
A bot has successfully appealed $3M worth of parking tickets in the UK - dpflan
http://www.businessinsider.com/joshua-browder-bot-for-parking-tickets-2016-2
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patio11
There used to be a few companies which did decision-tree style disposal of
debts via the FDCPA and FCRA, which basically involve sending letters
according to a flow chart and hoping one's counterparty is not as well-
organized as oneself on the same flow chart. They worked. Very, very well.

The credit agencies, without any legal rationale for doing so as far as I am
aware, started to simply ignore letters which they believed were being
generated in an automatic fashion. The decision tree is still the same -- it's
the law! -- but to be effective at using it you have to phrase your request in
a way which doesn't suggest that you are an expert at writing that request
(unless you are a lawyer).

The chief objection to decision-trees-as-a-business-model seems to be that the
credit dispute industry was crooked-as-a-barrel-of-fishhooks (welcome to
consumer credit, hope you enjoy your stay) and successful in getting people to
accept terms like "Pay me $2,000 and I will successfully get you off the hook
of $8,000 in debt. Although not particularly relevant to you, this will
require writing three letters and waiting a bit."

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pjc50
Hang on, if it's legal for them to ignore letters if they feel like it why
would they ever accept a letter which causes them to lose money?

(Or is this just "consumer protection in the US does not work", again)

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tfgg
I think it's more that the letter only holds sway in the first place by the
implied threat behind it. If the letter is from a bot, there is nothing to
back up the threat.

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wangarific
Can't the bot account for this by stating that if there's no response, call
your local attorney and bring them this summary of facts?

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johnpmayer
Sure, but then you're paying an attorney, not a bot.

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rmason
Anyone willing to get this to appeal property taxes for the poor in Detroit?

The city after the 2008 crash hasn't automatically revalued property values.
It isn't unusual to be paying $8000 in property taxes on a $25,000 house.
Investors are buying the houses at tax foreclosure sales, renting them back to
the owners and then getting the property tax bill slashed.

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jacquesm
'investors'? Predators would seem to be a better term. Has there been any
investigation of whether or not there are links between these 'investors' and
the authorities? It seems altogether too easy a way to screw people out of
their property and I can see how having a few friends in the right places to
deny a reduction at one stage of the process and to expedite it in another
could be of use.

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maxerickson
The sale of the property automatically triggers an adjustment of the taxable
value towards the sale price, so you don't need anybody greasing the wheels on
the back end.

Detroit is in dire financial condition, so it would not be surprising if there
is reluctance to aggressively adjust assessments. Which isn't meant to justify
them not fairly valuing properties, but there is no need for collusion for the
situation to arise.

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CyberDildonics
Would it makes sense then for someone to buy the house for $1, sell it back
for $1 and have the property values adjusted?

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maxerickson
The assessment takes more than just the last sale of the property into
account. It is supposed to reflect the market price of the house, so you'd
only get a silly $1 assessment if that was in fact the typical price of
similar homes.

(The main point of my first reply was that the sale of the home automatically
triggers the change in taxable value, the buyer doesn't have to do anything)

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CyberDildonics
I was talking about triggering a change in taxable value, not a house being
assessed at $1

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maxerickson
My bad. I don't know the specifics but I'd bet against that working. The
values are anyway adjusted from time to time (I think each year, but that
would probably be mostly formulaic), and can be appealed. Detroit publishes
this:

[http://www.detroitmi.gov/Portals/0/docs/finance/Assessment/R...](http://www.detroitmi.gov/Portals/0/docs/finance/Assessment/Residential%20Assessment%20Information%20Packet%20for%20Taxpayers.pdf?ver=2015-04-27-170753-133)

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Gratsby
We have one of these in San Francisco. I got an advertisement on my windshield
along with my ticket, funny enough. Brilliant advertising. I signed up
immediately.

Now I don't even need to scan my ticket in the app. It searches court records
and auto-appeals for me.

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shiftb
I think you're referencing [https://www.fixed.com](https://www.fixed.com)

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sjg007
Plot twist: meter maids make extra cash advertising for Fixed.

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illumin8
This seems like a huge conflict of interest. The meter maids are essentially
being paid "extra" for every ticket they write now. How is this not the
equivalent of a meter maid not writing you a ticket if you give them some
cash?

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jrockway
Sounds like a great idea, and the screenshot of the transcript looked very
fluid. I'm interested in seeing how governments react once this goes live. I
feel like parking tickets and that sort of thing are really a desire to tax
driving, by not levying a real tax (unpopular!) and instead picking unlucky
people to "win" the lottery and pay for the infrastructure. I don't drive so I
could be wrong, though.

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0xf1ff9
As an actual driver, I'd say that parking tickets are typically fair, and easy
to avoid. If somebody complains about parking ticket issues, it's a red flag
that this person is either honestly incapable of understanding and following
simple rules, or this person is just so entitled that they believe the rules
should only apply to other people.

I do get a parking ticket now and then, but every one of them was because I
ran into a scheduling issue and consciously decided to risk the ticket. And in
every case, I could've paid more in advance to eliminate that risk.

I live in New York, and parking tickets make up right around 1% of our city's
entire budget, which doesn't seem like a terribly burdensome stealth tax.

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cgriswald
I'm not convinced this is true in general, even if it is often true. Signage
is unclear or absent. Certain departments are probably corrupt or inept.

There are also times when avoiding tickets is basically impossible. My local
(and relatively large) community college brilliantly decided to do all three
of these things at the same time:

1\. Close down the third largest lot on campus. 2\. Lease out half of the
second largest lot on campus to local businesses. 3\. Oversell permits for the
remaining parking.

As a result, students began parking on the city streets. But the local
residents didn't like that, so the city made those streets permit only (and
only gave permits to local residents)* . The college's response was "get here
early," which at best is not a solution and at worse, exacerbated the problem
by making parking even less available in the early parts of the day. Later
they added a meager shuttle solution which they didn't even keep for an entire
semester (the parking situation lasted for YEARS rather than months because of
theft, lawsuit, and resident concerns about the job site).

Frankly, I would be impressed with anyone who didn't get a ticket over that
time period and still managed to make it to classes.

Looking further, the local downtown simply has inadequate parking. The
downtowns of other nearby municipalities are the same. It certainly makes
political sense to keep parking prices low and just ticket the hell out of
violators rather than raising prices to keep demand in line with supply and
making consumers and businesses unhappy. I'd be very surprised if these
municipalities hadn't worked out the math and figured out which results in
more money for them.

*Those roads are still (and probably permanently) permit only, so the only ones really suffering are going to be the short-sighted locals.

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sokoloff
Why would the locals be suffering if those roads stay permit only? Resident-
only parking permits is a very common system and seems to work well (living in
Cambridge, MA that has such a system).

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cgriswald
There is no purpose to parking on these roads except to visit the local
residences. The college is the closest non-residence to these neighborhoods
and even that is a hike; students only parked there out of desperation and
then walked a long way.

There wasn't even a parking crisis for local residents. The homes there have
multicar garages and driveways. They simply didn't like people parking on
"their" street. The streets are wide and the parking space is ample.

They've effectively banned visitor parking in the entire neighborhood. And for
families with teenagers and multiple cars, they've got to shuffle cars or keep
permits updated for no benefit of any kind.

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TruthSHIFT
My first thought: Apple should buy this company and integrate legal advice
into Siri. "Hey Siri, I've just been pulled over by the police." "OK. Here are
your rights:"

~~~
jacalata
More like "OK, where are you exactly, what is your citizenship, what is your
race?"

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eru
And depending on location, religion and gender. And obviously, how rich do you
look?

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oliwarner
Court? Parking tickets (penalty notices) in the UK have their appeals handled
by the issuing organisation. Most commonly a city-, district- or county-
council.

If you end up in court you've done something very wrong.

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TheOtherHobbes
It's a little more complicated in the UK.

Street parking is managed by councils. There are legal requirements for
signage and for waiting times before you get a ticket, and you can appeal on
either basis.

Off-street parking is often managed by third party businesses, which are
various kinds of shady. In some situations there's no legal obligation to pay
a fine to the third party. They rely on drivers not knowing this.

There's a separate criminal track where you commit a parking offence, such as
obstruction. You can make an informal appeal, but if you want to challenge
this seriously you need a very good reason, a good idea of the law, and you
may need to attend a hearing.

A bot is ideal for dealing with shady businesses and may make some headway
with the council. I can't see it being much use for criminal track appeals.

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elaineo
Can self-driving cars use bots to automatically fight traffic/parking tickets?

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ptaipale
I don't suppose self-driving cars are ever supposed to get traffic/parking
tickets?

A more relevant question would be, can the owner/renter of a self-driving car
fight the company who sold/rented the vehicle that got a ticket for him/her?

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gambiting
Well, I guess that long before truly automatic cars come to life, we will have
cars that you can set to a certain speed and it will just continue driving
forward(much like Tesla's Autopilot, but working on any road anywhere). You
might ask "well, why don't we make the autopilot follow the speed limits
then?". Mostly because in some countries it's not easy to tell when a speed
limit ends and in my experience GPS maps are not always 100% accurate.
Basically in most of EU the speed limit begins with a sign and ends at a
nearest intersection, without any visible sign indicating so. So the car would
need to recognize what is an intersection and what isn't - which is difficult
even for human drivers, sometimes you have a paved road going off the main
road to someone's house, but it's not an intersection so it doesn't cancel the
speed limit. Again, it could be solved by having very very detailed maps, but
then it doesn't help with roadworks which set up temporary speed limits.

Anyway, my point is that until we have truly, 100% automatic vehicles which
take all liability for their actions, vehicles in semi-automatic modes will
continue getting speeding and parking tickets.

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walshemj
Or you get out and set your automatic car to keep driving round and round the
block when you need it again you send it a command from your phone.

Back in the 80's at my employer if the traffic wardens where seen one of the
messenger boys would be told to drive the partners cars around the block until
they had gone

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majewsky
This is an absurd waste of energy.

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walshemj
Yes but that is what will happen

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gambiting
You say it with absolute certainty, just like people 50 years ago used to say
with absolute certainty that we will have flying cars. Well, flying cars are
also a huge and unnecessary waste of energy and they didn't happen at all.
Automatic cars will probably park themselves in huge automatic multi-story
parking lots, like in Japan, why the hell would they be driving around,
whoever owns them wouldn't want to put extra miles on them unnecessarily. Even
if the electricity to run them was free, you are still using up tires and
wearing out bearings , shocks and other elements, it makes no sense.

~~~
walshemj
Human nature tells me that this will happen in crowded cities no one is going
to want to pay though the nose for the limited car parking avaible.

Exactly how are dense and expensive Citys like London and SF going to build
those "Huge automatic multi-story parking lots".

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gambiting
Tokyo is much bigger and denser than either one of those yet it has them
everywhere. I hope you know that I mean those vertical car lifts which pack
many more vehicles than your regular car parks, and which can be relatively
easily build underground. But you only need to look at Lisbon - a city which
had a monumental problem with parking, and they managed to build dozens of
huge underground carparks all over the city, under city squares and such,
sometimes 10-15 levels deep.

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apo
Reminds me of TurboTax. Different output, but the same basic idea. Reduce
legal code to software.

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Namrog84
This is super cool. And even if the parking aspect may have an coming
expiration with the rise of more autonomous vehicles. I hope he and others
continue to expand this out to a lot more areas quickly.

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meshr
"Programs such as this one do not, at least in my humble opinion, threaten the
legal profession writ large" Is there someone who has opposite opinion? Where
can I read about it? I believe that in ideal world programs should make court
decisions and people (like coders) should just translate real cases to
universal legal language so that court-bot can make decision.

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newman314
Ideally, yes.

However , I don't think you can code something to solve the trolley problem.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem)

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meshr
Thanks for the link. Here is good article about it
[http://www.nature.com/news/machine-ethics-the-robot-s-
dilemm...](http://www.nature.com/news/machine-ethics-the-robot-s-
dilemma-1.17881) IMHO, trolley problem is too theoretical. Firstly, these
binary events are far from reality based on probabilities and context (like
why could this situation occur?). Secondly, the answers to those questions
highly depend on the society laws. These problems are missing crucial
information what punishment should you expect in both cases. If you don’t know
anything how the society will treat these cases then you shouldn’t do anything
(for ex., Is it allowed to act like a policeman in this society?) Thirdly it
depends whether you are a donor or donee in this society (can you compensate
consequences of the damage of your actions?).

I found the titles that I was looking for:Universal moral grammar: theory,
evidence and the future;Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong

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rogerthatt
I wonder if you could do this as a business venture. At what point would you
have to be a certified lawyer?

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chillydawg
In the UK, you no longer need to be a lawyer to own a law firm. You will need
a lawyer somewhere in the mix, though.

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rogerthatt
That's interesting is that a new change?

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jchomali
It would be awesome if this kind of inventions start working here, in Latin
America.

