3 ms·

Honestly, as someone who blackrides (being defined here as using public transport without paying for it, which has a low probability of being caught + massive p

Honestly, as someone who blackrides (being defined here as using public transport without paying for it, which has a low probability of being caught + massive pain if I am caught, up to and including prosecution and a criminal record in some cases), this isn't really a deterrent. There's also studies on this subject - raising the penalty of being caught isn't what stops people from doing things, it's the certainty of being caught. Really, the main problem is that landlords will raise rent to match the new income levels of their tenants and everybody will be left in more-or-less the same place, except with a wider gap, not a narrower one.

donw 6y ago
> There's also studies on this subject - raising the penalty of being caught isn't what stops people from doing things, it's the certainty of being caught. Yes and no. There's a balance between "severity of punishment" and "certainty of punishment". And also proportional to the damage caused. Also, the goal is not to prevent all bad actors! Merely to keep enough people on the honest path to prevent systemic collapse. If you are certain of being caught, the punishment only needs to be high enough to be undesirable. Imagine that you had a 100% chance of being caught shoplifting, in which case, a reasonable punishment would be to have to compensate the store owner an additional 50% for the stolen goods. If you only have a 10% chance of being caught, then the punishment needs to be (financially) severe enough to make that dice-roll very, very unappealing. There's likely minimum and maximum thresholds for both; e.g., beyond some severity, punishment stops being meaningful, and below some certainty of capture, rolling the dice "feels" safe. Not sure what those numbers are. Also, regarding punishment, we really need more options, and I'm not a fan of criminal records -- debts to society should not be infinite. Proportional punishment is one tool -- a $200 fine means something very different to "a kid from the projects" than it does to "Jeff Bezos".
- vertex-four 6y ago
  Of course, what's the cost of getting to, let's say, a 30% chance of catching anyone.

donw 6y ago

> There's also studies on this subject - raising the penalty of being caught isn't what stops people from doing things, it's the certainty of being caught. Yes and no. There's a balance between "severity of punishment" and "certainty of punishment". And also proportional to the damage caused. Also, the goal is not to prevent all bad actors! Merely to keep enough people on the honest path to prevent systemic collapse. If you are certain of being caught, the punishment only needs to be high enough to be undesirable. Imagine that you had a 100% chance of being caught shoplifting, in which case, a reasonable punishment would be to have to compensate the store owner an additional 50% for the stolen goods. If you only have a 10% chance of being caught, then the punishment needs to be (financially) severe enough to make that dice-roll very, very unappealing. There's likely minimum and maximum thresholds for both; e.g., beyond some severity, punishment stops being meaningful, and below some certainty of capture, rolling the dice "feels" safe. Not sure what those numbers are. Also, regarding punishment, we really need more options, and I'm not a fan of criminal records -- debts to society should not be infinite. Proportional punishment is one tool -- a $200 fine means something very different to "a kid from the projects" than it does to "Jeff Bezos".

vertex-four 6y ago
Of course, what's the cost of getting to, let's say, a 30% chance of catching anyone.