Re:Retirement Nomads: Too poor to retire and too young to die
by gwern on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @04:05PM
(#11022582)
> are induced by her own choices (expensive dinner, speeding ticket)
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.
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.