I had a discussion with someone recently about how tech is enabling enforcement of laws/policies/etc at a scale never before possible and how that is a bad thing. The problem is that people can't conform perfectly and the tighter we force people to conform the more likely they are to 'break' and disconnect from society. Basically, if 'acceptable' is so narrowly defined that you can't achieve it 100% of the time, why try even a little to conform? In companies there is somewhat of an off-ramp, quit (which isn't always a realistic option obviously), but these enforcement abilities are invading areas that we can't avoid and that is a real problem.
Happines in society lives in the slack - that is, having rules, but not having them too tightly enforced and with a lot of leeway and context.
The modern mindset prevents that - it's beaurocratic, rigid and extremely oppressive. Technology just helps with that, but if you look at even posts online you'll see that it's the mindset that DEMANDS punishment for any rule breaking no matter how small and how stupid it is.
A lot of Americans are way too into punishment. It's seriously like a fetish for them. They tend to want the most extreme and sick punishments too, at least when they want any at all. It's not consistent.
They are outraged anytime they think "the wrong kind of person" might be getting away with something, while they are mostly fine when people they view as being "higher status" somehow gets away without punishment. They feel like the poor person shoplifting should be shot on sight, but the rich CEO who commits wage theft and illegally hides money in overseas tax havens is a smart business person who deserves to get away with it. I don't know if it's a mental sickness or a moral one, but it's gross and way too common in the US.
This is a ridiculous generalization, and not a common way of thinking in the US. It's an extreme way of thinking that the majority of people would be ashamed of.
Do you have any non-fictional examples (by which I mean factual accounts rather than fictional portrayals) of these beliefs being generally accepted that we can actually have a conversation about? Even some personal anecdotes they could be a useful lens into your perspective?
Or is this an opinion born from listening to the media gone into overdrive during the current political season in the US? If that's what you're referring to, I think you may want to reexamine how much credulity you're giving those sources.
> Do you have any non-fictional examples (by which I mean factual accounts rather than fictional portrayals) of these beliefs being generally accepted
The entire US prison system for one example. Many people will see that prisoners are allowed to rape or beat each other, that they are tortured by solitary confinement, that they are often forced to eat rotten and maggot infested food, that they are used as slave labor by for profit corporations, and those people will insist that these are desirable features and they will even argue that prisoners have it too good/easy and that prison conditions should be worse.
There are countless comments all over the internet demonstrating this, I've even seen them on this website, but if you need evidence that a large number of the population feels that way you can look at the fact that those things continue to be allowed to exist and that reform efforts have been unsuccessful for decades.
Probably not a good approach to take here because there are plenty of examples of everything he said. However there are simultaneously plenty of counterexamples. For example certain west coast cities where shop lifting has been de facto legalized due to non-enforcement rooted in the name of the social cause of the day.
Actually what he wrote appears to match a certain political stereotype in the US while being the opposite of the other one. So I guess it says more about his view of the US than anything else.
> > at least when they want any at all. It's not consistent.
This is because you are treating Americans as a monolithic group, failing to differentiate between various major clusters.
However I will say that at least
> > A lot of Americans are way too into punishment. It's seriously like a fetish for them.
As an American who hungers for punishment, it's in fact a hunger driven by not punishing people (see SF, Chicago), allowing crime to persist, slaps on the wrist.
I've had my vehicle stolen, come time with the PROSECUTOR called me they tried to convince me to let them off the hook - like, is this the prosecutor speaking or the defense? That was DC. Never heard anything from that case, no justice provided.
And so that generates a certain hunger.
As far as our punishments, we are very lax. Look at illegal immigration in Singapore. The punishment is a literal beating with a stick. Not a soft beating, a leaves-lifelong-scars beating. Then, deportation. Imagine if the US did that. Singapore also has beatings for many other crimes. They are a "scrappy" country that probably couldn't afford room & board for prisoners, so beat and release it is, more economical. Not to mention anything to do with drugs is a death sentence. If the US believed in punishment like that there'd be a lot less problems. And that punishment system is very humane compared to Sharia law i.e. if you steal, you get your hands cut off. So I personally would support some extreme punishments by way of our punishments being too weak presently.
When George Floyd was killed news stations, independent journalists, and everyday people were trying to find any and all crimes he MAY have committed in the past that would justify his public execution.
As if any past crime could justify a public execution. This is the US, not revolutionary France.
Europe always seemed to be tougher on crime than America. Like, you get caught doing or even dealing hard drugs in the states, 9 times out of 10 nothing will happen, especially in west coast cities. But do that in France (or more intense, Switzerland)? The police are plentiful and they come down fast so that small things (like shoplifting) don’t turn into big things. America is just weird, we actually are really permissive to a lot of smaller crime and aren’t putting someone in jail until they actually kill someone. It’s law and order but not really, definitely when compared to Europe.
It really is weird. Some little things are let go, but ultimately the "Land of the Free" locks more of it's own population behind bars than any other nation on Earth. A lot more. It's not even close. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...)
There are certain pockets where some drug offenses and low value shoplifting don't go as harshly punished, but others where they will destroy a person's entire life over it. Only a few states have legalized or decriminalized certain drugs. There are even states that legalized marijuana but left people behind bars who were locked up for doing what anyone outside of prison could now do freely.
Massive crimes tend to go unpunished or punished very lightly compared to minor crimes. Companies like Philips Respironics and Johnson & Johnson are literal serial killers who continued to sell products that they knew would give their customers cancer. They even tried to hide what they knew from the public so that more people would buy the dangerous products and die. Many people were involved in that, and there's no doubt about the guilt, but no one ever saw a single day behind bars for that.
Same with Purdue after they knowingly and intentionally hooked millions on deadly and addictive drugs, or the countless data breaches that go unpunished, or DuPont which managed to pollute the bodies of every last human and animal on the planet. Even the CrowdStrike incident (which resulted in multiple deaths) didn't end with a single person being punished to the extent that a person committing a minor crime would, for example, the purse snatcher who got 45 years in prison (https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/extreme-sentencing)
You know, I think we (the USA) are just messed up: we don't really have as much law and order that we think we do, and while countries like France focus on reforming people earlier by coming down hard on small crimes, we don't, and so we have a lot more people in prison for heavier crimes because we don't believe in fixing problems before they start.
I can't say about France. But in Switzerland, there is a "three strikes" system where if you are caught with drug, the first time you have a $100 fine; Then a higher fine, called "Day-fine" which is proportional to your income; Then maybe, just maybe, a jail sentence.
Comparing that to the US, where if you get caught dealing marijuana, you get a 5 years minimum sentence. That seems disproportionate to me. Maybe police in the US is more compassionate than some militants make it seem, and that's why they don't like catching people for that kind of crime?
Looking at Wikipedia[1] it appears the number of policemen per people is two times higher in the US than Switzerland, and about the same as France. If it is true that "the police are plentiful and they come down fast" in Switzerland (which I would not agree with), it is twice as true in the US.
> Comparing that to the US, where if you get caught dealing marijuana, you get a 5 years minimum sentence.
That is literally no state in the USA, discounting the states (like the one I live in) where marijuana is legal.
I had Switzerland swat come down hard on me just because I wasn't registered correctly in the apartment I was living in when I was staying in Lausanne. You don't screw around with swiss cops.
Few weeks ago I took the bus; my bank card didn't work and I didn't have quite enough cash for a ticket. Bus driver took what I had and said it was okay. Closest ATM to where I live is about 7km.
This is the sort of basic compassion and humanity that needs to exist. Anything else would be cruel. This has always existed, and is increasingly made difficult by implementing systems that don't allow for these kind of exceptions. This is stripping regular normal people like that bus driver from their autonomy, and by extension, their humanity.
That the bus driver could possibly maybe perhaps be racist and wouldn't have extended that kindness if I had been non-white is an entirely separate matter. Forbidding kindness because some people could possibly maybe perhaps be racist is far far worse, and will affect everyone negatively.
In the UK there is a very large chain of shops called Timpsons. They cut keys, fix shoes, dry clean etc.
1) They are famous for employing people straight from prison
2) Their tills are just calculators, no electronic connections, no stock control
3) The staff are allowed to give out freebies. Fix shoes for free for people who look like they need it. They will give you free dry cleaning if you have a job interview
4) They still somehow manage to be profitable and growing. There are at least 3 in my town alone.
5) The MD is a great prison reform campaigner, who just got given the job of UK prisons minister.
6) The one kpi they measure is an index of employee happiness.
You can be successful without strict rules. He has only two.
This is exactly right and one of the reasons why I hate computer software.
If you think about manual processes like standing in a line and talking to a clerk, you don’t necessarily have to start again from the beginning if there is a hiccup- the clerk can allow you to leave the line and go get the thing you need and then come back to the front, meanwhile serving other customers.
Computer software almost never even has this basic concession. If you spend 10 minutes filling out a form, and you get to a piece of information that is mandatory but you don’t have, the vast majority of systems will make you start over (sure you could just leave the window open but that logon session is gonna time out).
Flexibility makes the world a much more pleasant place even if it occasionally invites abuse. As a society we typically allow a small baseline of abuse in exchange for this flexibility, and we punish severe abuse to make sure the level stays tolerable.
But the other aspect is that flexibility is often pro-social. If you want flexibility you are strongly incentivized to be easy to deal with. If you are a jerk to everyone you will find a remarkable lack of flexibility.
Conversely, Japan seems to get by fairly well without said slack whatsoever and a largely conformist society as a whole. Case in point, restaurant menus. Changing anything about your order is practically non-existent outside of maybe some Western chains. If it's not on the menu, you simply can't order it. All burgers come with tomatoes? Too bad. McDonald's Japan will not even sell you a large water. Even if you offer to pay full soda price, or even if you tell them to pour the soda out and then fill it with water (which is otherwise free), they simply refuse.
The same situation with the bus driver would also never happen, they could easily get fired for allowing it. Train conductors even have to apologize for being early. There's also a lot more open racism and discrimination in various ways (example: drinking bar admittance or apartment rentals) and in various parts of their society that goes completely unpunished.
There is a LOT of slack in Japanese society. Using umbrellas while riding bicycles. Not wearing a helmet. Just two examples off the top of my head.
Lots of slack granted to foreigners who aren’t expected to know the rules. Lots of slack granted to Japanese people who are free to be normal, hikikomori, nerdy, NEET, sporty, etc. Slack to be and do whatever unless you bother someone.
It’s just slack you don’t really notice immediately unlike the menu stuff.
I wouldn't call those slack in the same sense of the word because rules aren't being bent or ignored. Helmets and umbrellas are things that are simply too widespread to have adequate enforcement on, same for seatbelts in most countries... so I don't consider that actively letting it happen or "slacking" the same way.
Foreigners might have some slack in some ways but in many ways it's quite the opposite... so there's both good and bad IMO.
"Free to be normal etc." I don't consider that slack either, that's just having a generic free society to me.
I think slack as well as rules can be systematically introduced to the system. Software lowers the cost to support "slack rules" (1 ride is free per year per human face).
This is ridiculously complex, and thinking you can encode every possible eventuality in law or code is frankly not a serious suggestion. You need the "slack" exactly because it's just not feasible to do so. (Also: so many things can go wrong with your "facial detection" suggestion: internet not working, error in facial detection, broken equipment – never mind the privacy implications, or the cost of building and maintaining all of this, which would certainly be far far higher than any corruption, and still won't actually prevent corruption because drivers could still just let their mates pass without paying).
And yes, giving people autonomy also means they can do bad things. And that's something we can live with, and it's far better than forbidding them from doing good things. Your distrust of people borders on the misanthropic.
I mean yes, it'd be a safe job to have for decades. You could get paid literally doing nothing.
But also no, this is lunacy. Not only 'itake would like to strip people of their autonomy, they'd also like to strip them from their capacity to do good? That's wishing us a fate worse than death.
Not that it's possible in practice anyway. It's a AGI-complete problem, and any lesser attempts are... well wake me up when any software system implements exceptions and slack around their rigid rules.
To truly disrupt the outdated notion of 'kindness' and to introduce the sorts of efficiencies only a market can deliver you really need VC-funded Kindness As A Service.
Ideally with some LLM tech (though I'm old enough to remember when Blockchain would have solved this problem)
Yep, we've had great luck with zero-tolerance laws. Why do we even need judges or juries; the law is the law and if you step one millimeter over the line, straight to jail.
In my, somewhat limited experience it's that predominantly black schools have far more rule breaking AND slack, but it eventually leans to such egregious offenses that severe punishment results. Everyday common occurrences at black schools would be practically unheard of and result in immediate suspensions at white schools but wouldn't even be acknowledged.
Yep, you're demonstrating exactly the problem GP was talking about.
These demands to eliminate any possibility of discrimination are shutting down institutions and gridlocking the society.
There's always someone that'll feel they're disadvantaged somehow - not just because of race or gender (the big, flashy topics), but also because the district they live in, or some minor accident, or any other reason. You try to equalize all that, you get systems that are hell to live through and don't even give you much for the trouble.
Also, you can hardly talk about kindness or other good traits and behaviors, in a world where you eliminate all space for showing it. Without slack, kindness is meaningless.
Rules won't help you with discrimination. You can't write rules that won't be weaponized against you no matter how authoritarian you get.
The trick to fixing discrimination is to have people not wish to discriminate and exert social pressure on others who might try. Trying to box in people who do evil with more bureaucracy and tighter and tighter rules is not sane.
Rules can only ever be effective if they reflect the culture of a community.
Unfortunately, I think that uncompromising, inflexible rules are ultimately not a sustainable solution to that problem, either. Even when you're actively trying not to be discriminatory when writing such rules, you're nearly guaranteed to either make them so broad that they catch people who are genuinely doing nothing wrong or so narrow as to fail to catch a lot of obviously bad cases.
No; the long-term solution, hard as it is, is to gradually push society toward a point where that sort of systemic discrimination is viewed near-universally as anathema to justice and to the health of the society as a whole, and make more rules of the type where a clear principle is outlined, a rule is stated with the principle as its foundation, and the people identifying and enforcing rule violations are assumed to be able to use reasonable human judgement.
You are correct, but we would have to dramatically decrease the number of rules, which would be great but appears to be a non-starter with just about everyone who has a say.
You would have to dispense with a lot of rules that seem like obviously good things because of the unintended consequences.
It's like rolling stops at stop signs, a majority of people do it, it's socially accepted! Could we use technology to prevent it? Yes. Should we? I'd hope not.
Do you know how many times I've almost been hit by a car doing a rolling stop while running? We should absolutely use technology to prevent this.
I'm honestly not convinced by this line of reasoning at all. Most laws exist for a reason and should be followed. Or if they're bad laws, they should be changed.
The pressure on the law to break it -- compared to stop lights, where almost no one does -- does reveal that there is something bad about the law. The positive effects are:
- encourage turn taking
- help pedestrians in the 1% of urban areas where there actually are any
- bright line rule that's easy for police to enforce
- keep people from getting complacent about cross traffic
The negative effects are
- a complete stop takes more time than is needed to ensure the intersection is clear, which is a constant daily time drain and a reminder that you are following the rule because others will punish you and not because it's a good idea.
Being lax on the rolling stops and just doing enforcement around those busy areas and high-speed stop sign ignorers seems like a nice equilibrium to keep the good effects and minimize the bad ones. Maybe nicer than we could achieve by letting the kind of people who participate in politics revisit the issue.
Do you live in an urban area so dense that you can't wait for cars to clear the intersection before you run out in front?
> Do you live in an urban area so dense that you can't wait for cars to clear the intersection before you run out in front?
Every now and then I bump into someone like this who realizes that they're breaking the law and in the wrong, then tries to tell me I should still change my behaviour because they might kill me anyway.
I bet you do bump into them, by not taking common precautions to keep out of their way. But I was always trained to behave as though cars couldn't see me, not because they might decide to break the law but just because you never know.
It's striking to me that the difference for you between "my time is too important to stop" and "I was always trained to stop anyway" is just whether it's you or someone else that would get hurt from your actions.
No, I think stop signs are a horrible design flaw that we have to live with, and rolling stops are the least bad way to work around that urban design flaw.
It is asinine to force arbitrary stops at random intersections that have no time-of-day or traffic sensitivity (i.e. am I alone on the roads at 2AM, or are children walking to school at 8AM). Or to put them at intersections with clear cross visibility (what exactly is the stop for?). Or the 4-way stop sign mess.
It is totally reasonable to require full stops in the latter case, but silly in the former. Unfortunately, stop signs make no distinction between the two.
The only reason to fully stop at stop signs is actually the a pillar / b pillar blind spots, or obstructed view from the road. If you were hypothetically driving an open top car in an open neighborhood (or a motorcycle, bike, scooter, moped), there's no new "information" you'll gain by fully stopping rather than slowing down (where as if you have an A/B pillar blind spot, a full stop can give someone time to appear from behind it).
> - a complete stop takes more time than is needed to ensure the intersection is clear, which is a constant daily time drain and a reminder that you are following the rule because others will punish you and not because it's a good idea.
A minor inconvenience to increase safety. It's also a time drain that your speed is limited but you see clearly the benefits of that, you are just against completely stopping because of a perceived sense of lost efficiency with your time.
> Being lax on the rolling stops and just doing enforcement around those busy areas and high-speed stop sign ignorers seems like a nice equilibrium to keep the good effects and minimize the bad ones.
This is what creates complacency over time, a driver gets used on doing rolling stops because they judge the intersections they cross as not so busy, over time they keep pushing that and normalising it, until complacency sets in and one day they do a rolling stop at the wrong time/place. If one is strict about doing it as often as possible it just becomes second nature and not a conscious decision.
It's unfortunate that America needs to drive so much and educate its drivers so little, traffic in the USA is just a little bit better than places like Brazil, and absolutely nowhere close to the civilised traffic I experiece in Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Germany, etc.
Germany and its very car-centric society does a much better job on educating responsible drivers than the USA.
> .. a reminder that you are following the rule because others will punish you and not because it's a good idea.
It's a bad idea according to you. Do you have actual data that proves rolling stop provides sufficient utility that a stop sign is supposed to provide?
There does not exist a single society today or in history where every single member of the said society agrees with every single rule governing them. If you are only prevented from following your society's various rules because of 'fear of punishment' then you sir are a frustrated anti-social. It's not supposed to be because of "fear".
> time drain
Ridiculous. Traffic safety is more important that your illusory 'loss' of whatever handful of minutes per day.
Near is a high visibility T junction with 3 stop signs. A couple of blocks down the smaller street (off the main street) is a school, and the junction is where some kids cross. There is ALWAYS a crossing guard with a giant hand held stop sign and reflective vest that will walk out into the junction so the kids can cross. This happens roughly 4 hours a day (2 in morning, 2 in mid afternoon) for, usually, 5 days a week, about ~9 months a year.
There is absolutely no reason what so ever to even stop at the stop sign during the __off hours__ when on the main road with the right-a-way. It shouldn't even be there if not for school hours. There are 2 main 4-way crossings a few streets to either side of the main junction for anyone wanting to cross at a cross walk in a sleepy suburb on the outer edge of a metro area. A rolling stop is more than generous at that time.
My experience of driving in the US is that stop signs are used a lot, so people get numb and treat them as Give Way/Yield signs (where you don't need to come to a dead stop, but must give way to any oncoming traffic).
In the UK, Stop signs are only used when there is limited visibility/blind corners, so if you see one, you know that you definitely need to stop. Once you step and creep forward, you'll realise why a stop sign was needed.
> Do you know how many times I've almost been hit by a car doing a rolling stop while running? We should absolutely use technology to prevent this.
Technology that enforces full stops at every stop sign won't be smarter than human drivers. It won't know if you're not stopping because you need to get away from a tornado/serial killer/car accident/literally any other hazard, or you need to rush through in order to get a hospital/save a life/keep your bus above a certain speed or else it will explode/etc.
Brain-dead enforcement of any rule is a disaster waiting to happen. Life is complicated and full of edge cases. People should be allowed to use their brains when it comes to operating cars just like they should be punished when they fail to. Don't be so quick to give up everyone's freedom just so that you can feel a little more safe when jogging.
It's hard to drive in the US without rolling at stop sign because they are everywhere. EU and the rest of the world use two different signs: yield and stop. Yield tells that you need to give way but can go without stopping if it is safe and stop tells you must stop (used rarely, mostly in places with poor view).
IMHO yield sign is a better solution then lax enforcement of stop signs. And all-way stop can be replaced by roundabouts and mini roundabouts (I'm not a fan of high traffic multi-lane roundabouts but in places with low traffic, where all-way stops usually are used they work great).
Then why they are so rare on the road compare to stop signs? I haven’t seen stats but my impression that in EU/UK there are at least 10x more yield signs than stop signs.
Because the US is obsessed with 3 and 4 way stops whenever they can (as opposed to a roundabout).
It's trivial to make a roundabout have yield signs. Some roads here are like that, where every 4-way intersection of stop signs is now a yield + roundabout. You can theoretically get all the way through without stopping.
But you can't have yields at a 4-way stop. Connecting 2 perpendicular roads at low speed is an incredibly common problem - the US chooses to do it in a stupid way.
I'm not convinced that coming to a complete stop is any safer than just slowing to 2-3 mph before continuing.
The real danger is from proceeding without looking around, but there's no way to enforce looking around. Coming to a complete stop doesn't change it. Someone who's going to proceed without giving proper attention is going to do so whether or not they come to a complete stop.
Why do people roll through stop signs? Complaints about acceleration and uselessness.
I easily see two fixes for acceleration. Make stopping and starting less jarring on occupants and reduce the need for the driver to switch from gas to brake pedals.
Uselessness can be resolved by a number of ways, make the area around the stop more open for better visibility, but we can definitely use technology to prevent people from rolling through stop signs. Set up sensors so that only one roadway has an active stop sign, when the sensors detect a single vehicle the stop sign on their way can be disabled. When the sensors detect intersecting vehicles both stop signs are activated.
Because coming to full and complete stop at a four way intersection when the area you are in is entirely deserted and there are zero other cars or people is stupid. We know why stop signs exist. They are very useful when there are other cars and people around. They keep people's behavior predictable and that makes us safer. They are pointless when nobody else is around though. It's still good to slow down just to be safe, but there's no reason to come to a full stop.
I see people rolling through stop signs when pedestrians and o5er cars are plentiful. Obviously the way people drive has changed in the last 20 years, especially since police aren’t really writing tickets anymore.
> And yet people still get hit rolling through stop signs.
Not when there aren't any other people around they don't.
Stop signs are good things to follow when they are needed, and pointless to follow when they aren't. People who roll through when they shouldn't are just as bad as people who don't stop or slow down at all and laws do and should exist to punish them. There's no need for enforcement in all cases though. Consideration of context is justice. Brain-dead enforcement regardless of circumstance or outcome is just oppression.
That's what slowing to a crawl is supposed to minimize. Not even coming to a full stop can prevent all accidents. There's no cure for the the blind/drunk/distracted/texting driver. They'll change lanes into other cars on a road with no stop signs, and on roads with them they can fail to see the sign entirely.
But if you've stopped and turned your head to look down both sides of the street instead of relying on your peripherals that suck at detecting changes in motion, you've done yourself a huge service in not getting hit.
depends if you live in neighbor hood laid out on a grid like I happen to, having a 4 way stop at every cross street on the grid is annoying and lead to starting and stopping every 200-150 feet it's stupid as there is virtually no traffic. but building a roundabout in the middle of every one of those intersections would be massive overkill and waste of space as it would take out each corner house on said grid. the best approach would be a low speed limit replace the stop signs with yield sign and turn the streets into alternating one-ways so you only have to check one direction for on coming traffic at each intersection
Interestingly enough, I lived in a part of Quebec City called Limoilou which is laid out exactly like you describe. Low speed limit, alternating one ways, very few stop signs. I think there are some boroughs in NYC that are like that as well.
I have turned the wrong way down a one way street one too many times, even after living there for several years:) surprisingly easy to do when not on GPS (not all one ways are properly marked)
I find whole concept of 4-way stop extremely weird. Either you have yield sign or you have equal crossing. STOP signs are only used in cases where there is a reason, like poor visibility or greatly different speeds.
A portable bandsaw, and discovered by the Brits (they're covertly fighting back against some pretty invasive automated monitoring), also makes short work of metal poles.
Just to be clear, I don't like red light cameras either, but if you are gonna put on a mask and fuck some shit up, why don't you wait outside of a bar and wait for drunk drivers?
I don't think it's speeding itself that causes crashes, but aggressive driving, and speed merely exacerbates aggressive driving. It is possible to speed without being aggressive, and in those scenarios, I don't consider speed to be a significant risk.
The German Autobahn have HALF the driver fatality rate as USA highways despite have wide sections with no speed limits.
Speed is fine. Keep right except when passing and you won't force faster drivers to constantly change lanes to get around you.
> but if you are gonna put on a mask and fuck some shit up, why don't you wait outside of a bar and wait for drunk drivers?
because one is damaging equipment that shouldn't exist, and the other involves ambushing a person on baseless suspicion. Presumably by force, given we're trying to fuck some shit up...
I'm going to pretend to ignore the whataboutism distraction
Try this on as a thought experiment: stopping drunk driving (including via physical force) is community self defense. Someone choosing to drive while intoxicated is an assault against everyone else in the area, and it is morally acceptable to use various means, including violence, to prevent that behavior.
this isn't a thought experiment, it's a simple rhetorical argument. But does calling it a thought experiment as if it was something wearable normally work?
But to answer your argument, I already agree that it's ethical to use force, even if it rises to the level that causes harm. But only if you're correct that you're preventing impaired driving. Humans are famously bad at making solo judgments like this to the standard I'd require to consider it acceptable. I wont advocate for someone to do something when I believe a negative outcome is more likely than a positive result.
But given violence means physical force with the intent to cause harm, I strongly disagree that the ethical way to behave involves intentionally causing injury. unintentional injury as an unfortunate byproduct is permissible in the is permissible in the "thought experiment" you propose, but only when it is actively avoided never when it's intentional.
I.e. I think you meant to say physical force not violence.
Driving is the most dangerous thing we all do on a regular basis. You do not own the roads, you are not the center of the universe. Drive safely and try giving a crap about other people.
Well yeah, it'd be extremely myopic to invent technology to solve this intermediary problem of rolling stops, rather than addressing the outcome via technology which we do all the time.
In addition to standard car safety features, there are cars that will engage breaks automatically if they detect imminent and unavoidable collision.
Also we have technology like traffic lights and red light cameras if stop signs are not good enough for the scale.
In the case of this Amazon thing, what I hope is that the inefficiency of it strangles itself to death. For example, if I tried to start a restaurant and I decided that the people working in the kitchen had to keep their mouth closed or get fired, then my restaurant would quickly go out of business.
> The modern mindset prevents that - it's beaurocratic, rigid and extremely oppressive
I don't think it prevents it, the modern mindset encourages more individualism, individualism is the final frontier of slack
> that DEMANDS punishment for any rule breaking no matter how small and how stupid it is
I think small and stupid is sort of the point. And I don't think there's anything modern about it. In the middle ages, people were getting burned at the stake over super niche differences in Christian doctrine
Imho more worrisome is that governments can find easy justification to lock up or punish everyone “at will”; because HAVING data to jail someone doesn’t mean the government will uniformly ACT on it :-) they can be picky - and will be as we are seeing across Europe these days/months/years. Certain laws and offenders are rigorously enforced; others not so much…
Oh yes, we did learn this lesson in eastern Europe, didn't we? I guess our friends across the Atlantic will need to torture a generation to learn as well.
My current best guess, for the last decade, is that we will have to radically decriminalise things and reduce punishments for the remaining crimes.
If you catch every road traffic offence, the only people who will still have a licence will be people like me who don't have a car.
If the UK tried to fully enforce its drug laws, it would bankrupt itself with all the extra prisons it would have to build.
Even if the governments of the world don't care to use surveillance tech to catch all criminality, blackmailers will use it because it's already cheap and getting cheaper, which forces the governments to change anyway. (Though perhaps GenAI will get good enough fast enough that any image will be assumed fake by default).
But I really do mean radical decriminalisation (civil law offences are not criminal offences) not merely the illustrations of decriminalising hard drugs and reducing the penalties for speeding.
Or maybe not - and you just punish the people that don’t agree with your political stance. It’s a bit surprising imho to see how people get locked up in UK for 15 months over Facebook posts whereas offenses/violations/crimes that may justify actual jail time go unpunished. If everyone could get punished at any time - governments may be very picky about WHOM to punish.
Indeed, any government can go down a very dark path very easily and very quickly if they let themselves.
If they go down the route of "everyone is guilty, let's find out what for when they cause problems for the elite", it's often (but not always) followed by rebellion and uprising — I think not usually the people themselves (though that can happen) but rather because the elite don't necessarily agree with each other and build factions of supporters. Even the Stasi fell, despite all their efforts.
When failure can be graceful instead of painful, I think that's better. I hope I'm right and that's not just wishful thinking.
how would blackmailers have any better luck than anyone else weaponizing the laws the cops often wont even go after criminals when you hand them video evidence and the criminals location found via tracking device on the stolen property.
Blackmail is about a threat to publish information that could damage reputation — criminal conduct would be such information, especially for an otherwise "upstanding citizen".
If they get as far as actually publishing whatever it was, that means they never got paid.
The UK also allows private prosecution, but that's going to be more of "personal vendettas between non-elites also get prosecuted" rather than "blackmail" given the latter is also a crime.
Scale and cost are definitely neglected aspects of these decisions.
I think this is a huge issue with respect to both enforcement of the law as well as surveillance and privacy. Sure, in the 1960s, a cop could sit on the side of the road with binoculars outside of town and watch for a half dozen blacklisted plate numbers associated with known criminal suspects. But today, automated license plate readers can do that 24/7/365 on every major road into and out of an entire city, tracking millions of people with an opex of just a couple kilowatts of compute.
When laws and norms written before computers say that certain activities are searches of private information and require warrants, while other activities are just observation of public information like your face and license plate, that implicitly granted a high probability of anonymity and privacy because of the cost of that observation and low value of the information relative to its cost. In the past couple of decades, those observations have become so much cheaper that the information can now be worth more than the cost of gathering it.
Amazon employee monitoring has a similar cost: Sure, human managers could discipline employees who were less productive; if someone has a problem with taking excessively frequent or long smoke breaks, lunch breaks, or bathroom breaks eventually an attentive manager will notice and talk to them about it, but it's not normal to track KPIs to the second. I suppose these aren't "key" performance indicators, they're barely relevant performance indicators, but when they're cheap to scale Amazon can monitor them.
Economics, not regulations, guaranteed your privacy and freedom: it was somewhere between irrational and impossible to employ an army of human observers to do what computers now do cheaply and easily. When that economic landscape changed, we should have made those regulations concrete.
Wow thanks for sharing. The time flew by when I was reading. This is the fundamental lesson that humanity must learn. We must reject the impulse to give away our creativity to a mystical/technological sky daddy that incorporates us into its machine. And we must accept that might does not mean right.
