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This illustrates a problem with current penalties - they're too harsh if you have 100% exact enforcement. Violating auto speed limits is a good example. Societ

This illustrates a problem with current penalties - they're too harsh if you have 100% exact enforcement. Violating auto speed limits is a good example. Society can't enforce speed limits 100% of the time if it relies on the occasional state trooper with a radar gun. Therefore society sets the penalty very high so that the small risk of a citation isn't worth the benefit of speeding. 100% enforcement should have much lower penalties. There are other problems with 100% strict enforcement, in that we don't even know what laws we have.

PaulHoule 4y ago
My uncle got a job as a repo man and quit on the second day because somebody pointed a gun at him.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Its awful that your uncle had to experience that. It's a dangerous job and I don't think they give the repo folks enough information. I recently had to run one of them off as the former property owners had renters that stopped making payments on their vehicle. The repo guy was highly aggressive and was yelling at my family members. I assumed he was just some nutjob and had no idea he was a repo guy aside from the fact he was driving a tow truck without any company logo. I assumed he was trying to steal my tractor since it's is an antique.
notch898a 4y ago
Virtually every serious speeder I know runs laser jammers, radar detectors, and cell phone based monitoring and religiously is alert to the warnings. Short of aircraft enforcement (oh they monitor that too) it's about impossible to nab the most dedicated speeders, so most the tickets are going people like the soccer mom who went 10 over, etc. I feel like speeding enforcement is one of the biggest example of how these enforcement are designed as tax and not designed as population level risk mitigation.
- bediger4000 4y ago
  Speeding was just a convenient example. Shoplifting would work just as well. So would jaywalking, or loitering or disturbing the peace. Penalties are set high because in the US they're enforced only irregularly. If the US moves to some kind of near universal enforcement, problems will occur because of that.
logicalmonster 4y ago
Whether or not 100% enforcement is ever possible, I think speeding is penalized only because it's an easy thing to objectively measure, even if you can't get 100% of it. This is sort of the McNamara Fallacy in action. But the really dangerous people on the highway aren't typical speeders who might go say 85-90mph when the speed limit is 55-65 mph. In traffic that isn't dense and clustered, high speeds in and of themselves are not a big problem. The really dangerous people on the highway are those who aggressively change lanes in dense traffic, weaving in and out of traffic trying to find the narrowest possible gap to slip through where no safe passing gap exists. This is much harder to objectively track and measure unless a cop happens to sneak up on the dangerous driver and sees them firsthand. Counterintuitively, I believe that the highways are made far less safe from speed limits because this tends to cluster up all traffic together so impatient people (who are going to exist no matter what) are compelled to dangerously weave in and out of dense clusters of cars which is the most likely thing to cause an accident. If you made one or two lanes available with no speed limit so the aggressive drivers could be free to have their way and don't have to interact through slow drivers, I'd bet that most problems on the road would be solved. You want to create a situation where impatient people don't have to interact with the slower drivers.

PaulHoule 4y ago

My uncle got a job as a repo man and quit on the second day because somebody pointed a gun at him.

LinuxBender 4y ago
Its awful that your uncle had to experience that. It's a dangerous job and I don't think they give the repo folks enough information. I recently had to run one of them off as the former property owners had renters that stopped making payments on their vehicle. The repo guy was highly aggressive and was yelling at my family members. I assumed he was just some nutjob and had no idea he was a repo guy aside from the fact he was driving a tow truck without any company logo. I assumed he was trying to steal my tractor since it's is an antique.

notch898a 4y ago

Virtually every serious speeder I know runs laser jammers, radar detectors, and cell phone based monitoring and religiously is alert to the warnings. Short of aircraft enforcement (oh they monitor that too) it's about impossible to nab the most dedicated speeders, so most the tickets are going people like the soccer mom who went 10 over, etc. I feel like speeding enforcement is one of the biggest example of how these enforcement are designed as tax and not designed as population level risk mitigation.

bediger4000 4y ago
Speeding was just a convenient example. Shoplifting would work just as well. So would jaywalking, or loitering or disturbing the peace. Penalties are set high because in the US they're enforced only irregularly. If the US moves to some kind of near universal enforcement, problems will occur because of that.

logicalmonster 4y ago

Whether or not 100% enforcement is ever possible, I think speeding is penalized only because it's an easy thing to objectively measure, even if you can't get 100% of it. This is sort of the McNamara Fallacy in action. But the really dangerous people on the highway aren't typical speeders who might go say 85-90mph when the speed limit is 55-65 mph. In traffic that isn't dense and clustered, high speeds in and of themselves are not a big problem. The really dangerous people on the highway are those who aggressively change lanes in dense traffic, weaving in and out of traffic trying to find the narrowest possible gap to slip through where no safe passing gap exists. This is much harder to objectively track and measure unless a cop happens to sneak up on the dangerous driver and sees them firsthand. Counterintuitively, I believe that the highways are made far less safe from speed limits because this tends to cluster up all traffic together so impatient people (who are going to exist no matter what) are compelled to dangerously weave in and out of dense clusters of cars which is the most likely thing to cause an accident. If you made one or two lanes available with no speed limit so the aggressive drivers could be free to have their way and don't have to interact through slow drivers, I'd bet that most problems on the road would be solved. You want to create a situation where impatient people don't have to interact with the slower drivers.