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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 thin

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.

izacus 2y ago
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.
- morkalork 2y ago
  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.
  - jjk7 2y ago
    Automated speed enforcement cameras make me want to don a mask and sneak out at night with a drill and a can of spray foam.
    - gretch 2y ago
      Why wouldn't you direct this same sense of vigilante justice toward people who speed excessively and hurt other people? Speeding does happen and it does kill people - https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813473.pdf https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... 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?
      - grayhatter 2y ago
        > 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
        SauciestGNU 2y ago
        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.
        grayhatter 2y ago
        > Try this on as a thought experiment: 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.
      - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
        I take a different attitude about speeding. 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.
    - neuralRiot 2y ago
      Not giving ideas but a paintball gun works wonders.
    - falcolas 2y ago
      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.
    - yowzadave 2y ago
      Alternatively, you could just drive slower
    - blactuary 2y ago
      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.
  - gretch 2y ago
    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.
  - abfan1127 2y ago
    I'd argue we should convert almost all stop signs with YIELD signs. Locations that actually require a STOP should probably be enforced.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      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.
  - chrisfosterelli 2y ago
    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.
    - Noumenon72 2y ago
      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?
      - limit499karma 2y ago
        > .. 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.
      - blactuary 2y ago
  - undersuit 2y ago
    Should we use technology to prevent it? YES 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.
    - mathgeek 2y ago
      Traffic circles work wonders for these behaviors.
      - smegger001 2y ago
        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
        medvezhenok 2y ago
        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)
        2y ago
  - diediediei 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - citrin_ru 2y ago
    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).
    - blactuary 2y ago
      It's actually incredibly easy. There's a pedal called the brake, you apply pressure to it until your car comes to a complete stop.
      - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
        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.
    - WrongAssumption 2y ago
      The US has yield signs. The yield sign was in fact invented in the US. The first one in the world was installed in Tulsa Oklahoma in the 50s.
      - citrin_ru 2y ago
        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.
        2y ago
  - cafard 2y ago
    There are stop-sign cameras in Washington, DC, and there is a lot of complaining about them on the neighborhood listserv now and then.
- itake 2y ago
  "slack" is the breeding ground for discrimination. Some races, genders, etc. will give more or less slack to each other. immutable rules that apply to everyone reduces that discrimination (but obviously, the rules themselves can also be discriminatory)
  - rythmshifter 2y ago
    Immutable rules can’t be perfect and are always at risk of being weaponized by whoever is in power at the time.
  - efitz 2y ago
    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. https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8101289/school-discipline-race https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8101289/school-discipline-race
    - itake 2y ago
      > Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students Are Black 3x more likely to break to rules or do white students get 3x more slack?
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - hattmall 2y ago
        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.
  - banannaise 2y ago
    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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- matrix87 2y ago
  > 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
- autoexec 2y ago
  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.
  - mionhe 2y ago
    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.
    - autoexec 2y ago
      > 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.
ben_w 2y ago
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.
- looping__lui 2y ago
  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.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    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.
- smegger001 2y ago
  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.
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
They invented the thing from the sci-fi story 'don't invent the thing'. In this case the 'don't invent the thing' story is Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- eureka-belief 2y ago
  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.
jameskilton 2y ago
Justice without mercy is cruelty. Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution. - St. Thomas Acquinas
langcss 2y ago
Reminds me of the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
LeifCarrotson 2y ago
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.
looping__lui 2y ago
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…
- izacus 2y ago
  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.

izacus 2y ago

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.

morkalork 2y ago
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.
- jjk7 2y ago
  Automated speed enforcement cameras make me want to don a mask and sneak out at night with a drill and a can of spray foam.
  - gretch 2y ago
    Why wouldn't you direct this same sense of vigilante justice toward people who speed excessively and hurt other people? Speeding does happen and it does kill people - https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813473.pdf https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... 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?
    - grayhatter 2y ago
      > 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
      - SauciestGNU 2y ago
        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.
        grayhatter 2y ago
        > Try this on as a thought experiment: 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.
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      I take a different attitude about speeding. 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.
  - neuralRiot 2y ago
    Not giving ideas but a paintball gun works wonders.
  - falcolas 2y ago
    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.
  - yowzadave 2y ago
    Alternatively, you could just drive slower
  - blactuary 2y ago
    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.
- gretch 2y ago
  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.
- abfan1127 2y ago
  I'd argue we should convert almost all stop signs with YIELD signs. Locations that actually require a STOP should probably be enforced.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    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.
- chrisfosterelli 2y ago
  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.
  - Noumenon72 2y ago
    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?
    - limit499karma 2y ago
      > .. 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.
    - blactuary 2y ago
- undersuit 2y ago
  Should we use technology to prevent it? YES 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.
  - mathgeek 2y ago
    Traffic circles work wonders for these behaviors.
    - smegger001 2y ago
      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
      - medvezhenok 2y ago
        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)
      - 2y ago
- diediediei 2y ago
  [flagged]
- citrin_ru 2y ago
  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).
  - blactuary 2y ago
    It's actually incredibly easy. There's a pedal called the brake, you apply pressure to it until your car comes to a complete stop.
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      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.
  - WrongAssumption 2y ago
    The US has yield signs. The yield sign was in fact invented in the US. The first one in the world was installed in Tulsa Oklahoma in the 50s.
    - citrin_ru 2y ago
      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.
      - 2y ago
- cafard 2y ago
  There are stop-sign cameras in Washington, DC, and there is a lot of complaining about them on the neighborhood listserv now and then.
itake 2y ago
"slack" is the breeding ground for discrimination. Some races, genders, etc. will give more or less slack to each other. immutable rules that apply to everyone reduces that discrimination (but obviously, the rules themselves can also be discriminatory)
- rythmshifter 2y ago
  Immutable rules can’t be perfect and are always at risk of being weaponized by whoever is in power at the time.
- efitz 2y ago
  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. https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8101289/school-discipline-race https://www.vox.com/2015/2/24/8101289/school-discipline-race
  - itake 2y ago
    > Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students Are Black 3x more likely to break to rules or do white students get 3x more slack?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - hattmall 2y ago
      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.
- banannaise 2y ago
  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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
matrix87 2y ago
> 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
autoexec 2y ago
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.
- mionhe 2y ago
  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.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    > 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.

ben_w 2y ago

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.

looping__lui 2y ago
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.
- ben_w 2y ago
  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.
smegger001 2y ago
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.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

They invented the thing from the sci-fi story 'don't invent the thing'. In this case the 'don't invent the thing' story is Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

eureka-belief 2y ago
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.

jameskilton 2y ago

Justice without mercy is cruelty. Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution. - St. Thomas Acquinas

langcss 2y ago

Reminds me of the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.

LeifCarrotson 2y ago

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.

looping__lui 2y ago

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…

izacus 2y ago
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.