Edit: for those of you saying 'yes': who decides what is "fair"?

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-...

Otherwise, there is no real financial disincentive to the rich (who can hire lawyers with chump change), as is obviously demonstrated today.

Finally, it is extremely difficult to drive perfectly enough to avoid violating the speeding limit. Signs are often missing or covered. Limits change at unexpected locations, sometimes nasty ones (at the end of descents, etc). There is very little culture of speed change warning (varies state to state, but nowhere like, say, the UK).

The poor and the downtrodden have to apply a significantly larger effort to maintain speed limit compliance in their driving, because the downsides of getting a speeding ticket are so financially devastating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

This applies to basically everything that a society does. Even in small local elections you have decisions where a significant portion of the voters don't get their way, and those sorts of elections tend to be over things that people largely agree on (paving roads and plowing snow and ...).

I completely agree. Couldn't we say, then, that the current system of traffic fines (or at least the one that applies to the woman in this article) is something that has been approved by our society...rich and poor alike?

I don't think so.

The point of the quoting of the speeds ("43 mph in a 35-mph") was to point out that the ticket she got was part of the trend of local American governments of turning traffic enforcement into unchecked taxation and exploitation of poor people by abusing traffic rules to the hilt to hand out as many bogus tickets as possible in order to turn a profit. This has come up many times on HN.

In this case, it sounds like it was part of a speed trap where a sign is put up to lower the speed on a very short stretch of road by 10mph or so and then a cop can sit there and harvest the traffic; there's one of these where I live, and it makes me furious because aside from being transparently bogus a highly regressive tax/revenue trick, it actually makes everyone less safe because the flow of traffic along that road is always faster than the dip section and if everyone complied with it and braked, that would endanger people and encourage rear-endings. Similar to the abuse of red-light cameras.

These backdoor taxes on the poor exist for only one reason: concentrations of wealth work very successfully at avoiding most taxation.

And with municipalities steadily losing revenue (see corporate tax avoidance above) signage is commonly foregone, making it far from a settled issue as to knowledge of speed limits.

The word "choice" belongs in different situations than this.

First off, the speeding ticket. You're in an RV, how do you go 15 over the limit? Doesn't make sense to me. You're wasting gas and painting a big red target on your back for the cops. If I were in her situation, I'd have already trained myself to keep to the speed limit no matter what. It's possible, don't tell me it isn't. Even more possible in an RV with limited acceleration. I found it harder to speed in my 20 year old truck than I did to not speed.

Second, the busted water pump. With all the time she had on her hands, surely she could have done some research in the library on how to repair these things and done it herself as opposed to spending hundreds / thousands on paying someone to do it for her. There was no rush, she was able to take her time finding someone, why not take that same time to save even more money?

I say these things because I used to be really hard up for money and resources, and I was able to get resourceful in return. The human brain is amazing, it finds a way. You just have to listen to it and be willing to try stuff out that's outside your comfort zone. For me this kind of resourcefulness is never too far from my mind, as comfortable as my dev lifestyle is right now, if economic circumstances forced me onto the street, I'd work out a way to thrive pretty quick, I simply cannot abide the slow degradation of self-worth that other people in these sorts of situations seem to experience.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize she's already being as resourceful as she can. It's a reminder that deep down, people really do differ vastly in ability, and that we need to be compassionate and generous to those caught in nasty situations with no way to pull themselves out.

But at the same time we need to encourage the kind of inventiveness and resourcefulness that made America great. Times are tough, but we can be tougher.

She was doing 43 in 35, or just 8mph over the limit. That's not impossible.

Why does that need to be trotted out whenever a story about someone's misfortune or bad circumstances is written about? It would be nice if people could just be happy with what they have because they aren't living somewhere else, under worse conditions, but unfortunately that is not the way the majority of people think and in fact it wouldn't necessarily be healthy if they did. [1]

I don't wake up in the morning (and don't know anyone who does) and think "wow I am so lucky to have a job and to earn a decent income that slow driver in front of me shouldn't annoy me so much!". If I get a meal that was expensive but was "bad" in a restaurant I don't think "thats fine at least I am alive and can afford to eat here how lucky am I".

You compare yourself to your peers and what your expectations are growing up and what you experience.

Of course life for anyone alive today is better than almost anytime in human history but people's baseline is today and where they are not another time period or where someone is living in a third world country.

[1] Because for only one reason it would also prevent people from striving and trying to make their life better in some way.

Life is much easier if you don't have that mindset.

I, in fact, do wake up every morning thankful for what I have, even if it's not as much as my neighbor.

Why? Striving for something is actually fun for some people. (Unless I am not getting your point exactly.)

Should she go to the dentist, or take a guided tour of buildings designed by her favorite architect, Frank Lloyd Wright? Each cost $100. She picked Frank Lloyd Wright. Her teeth could wait... The biggest blow came in 2013 when she faced $8,000 in charges for emergency dental work and rig repairs.

So it sounds like she would be fine if she decided to spend her life/money differently, but she's set on spending money on things she can't really afford, so we get this article...

I'm all for basic income, redistribution of wealth, etc, but I don't think we have enough resources to finance everyone's aspirations via taxation.

And they individualize all of those bad policies and make individuals pay for it, as if it's their fault. It's not.

Is there a website that does the accounting for this? Do you have a link?

[ Serious question, has anyone done an analysis. I keep hearing "boomer ripoffs" but I'd like an impartial analysis. Also, I don't think the 80 year old in the article is a "boomer"; more likely she's a "boomer's" mother. ]