With things like Project2025 being embraced, it's horrifying what the future may hold if checks and balances aren't in place.
A large enough change in scale manifests as a change in kind.
As a topical example, SpaceX is trying to reduce launch costs by 20x with Starship, which just had its 4th test flight this morning. Some don't see the point: there's not nearly enough demand to launch thousands of tons into orbit per year. But 20x is a lot cheaper, so they're banking on induced demand expanding the kinds of projects that send things to space.
It's certainly a gamble that there will be a million people willing to spend $200k to do this, which… well, I think it's not entirely impossible, as the idea was something I liked until Musk's own personality put me off the idea of being stuck on a planet with only his sycophants for company.
Which is a bit of a shame, but still, I'd give it 50-50 odds of being a product-market fit just for that.
Elon is undoubtedly great at getting folks to commit money and talent to his companies, and talking about plausible-ish things like becoming a multiplanetary species is one way he accomplishes that.
"Dying on Mars, just not on impact" is Musk's final bucket list item. Almost everything else he does is to enable that vision, either directly by creating the tech, or indirectly because he knows this is expensive.
He may well fail, nobody's ever done this and we don't know how many surprises there will be.
But the ship working well enough for $200k tickets is plausible.
(The idea that banks will give people loans for that, not so much: without multi-planetary trade, nothing that happens on Mars can repay a debt on Earth, and I don't see Mars as having any special economic benefits to make such trade worthwhile).
This is just marketing hype.
That money is a thing he needs for the very expensive bucket list item.
They won't make a satellite but they will demand things which middlemen can solve with a satellite.
> You have to find the customers, it is not like you make a product and everyone changes their desires to conform.
Once smartphones were invented, people found within themselves the desire for a smartphone.
Although there's a lot of debate about this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law
So-called "induced demand" is just a dumbing down of the more fundamental notion of supply and demand, for people who aren't comfortable thinking about math, calculus, dynamic equilibria, etc. If you read the wikipedia article on it, you'll see they constantly describe it in terms of supply and demand. The term was originally "defined" in 1999 in a paper that was not written by economists. It's not an economics term.
in terms of transportation planning, a better way to think about it is, "misery distributes itself throughout the system".
[1] https://merics.org/en/comment/chinas-social-credit-score-unt...
Like I've lost count of the number of times people will comment on videos of bad drivers or whatever "what do you expect from someone driving a [brand] car financed at 28% with no money down." Like yeah maybe our credit score system here doesn't officially have a shaming mechanism, but that's the only real difference and it isn't like we don't bolt it onto the side ourselves just because we fucking hate poor people.
To be clear, not meaning to defend the social credit score, both of these systems suck and should be abolished. I just think it's hilarious how many people are like HURR HURR SOCIAL CREDIT SCORE when it was designed after America's credit score system. We prototyped it.
The “added shit about public shaming” is not a trivial issue, and also Americans aren't particularly fond of actual credit scores or the broader credit reporting system they are part of, either.
Like, there is nothing hypocritical about viewing extra negatively another society that has taken a disliked element of your own and made it worse.
I think it could be considered trivial given how much of your life can be made an utter hell by a bad credit score. Things like not being able to finance a house when you already spend more per month on rent than a mortgage, being forced into predatory financial products because you lack the ability to get regular ones, refusal for companies to hire you for work based on your credit score, your credit history just being wrong and being saddled with the task of probably hundreds of hours of work and god knows how much money to fix it because none of the providers give a shit about helping you, the risks with identity theft, on and on and on.
As someone who has had to unfuck my credit due to idiocy in financial institutions that was completely, 100% not my fault and yet fell solely on my shoulders to handle, I assure you it is a special circle of bureaucratic hell that would easily stand toe-to-toe with the worst any governments have to offer.
Is it GOOD that it has mechanisms for that? No. But again, I emphasize: we add that ourselves to it all the same. And yes it's definitely worse when it's inscribed in the law's text, but I wouldn't say it's that different either.
> Like, there is nothing hypocritical about viewing extra negatively another society that has taken a disliked element of your own and made it worse.
Oh sure, 100%, but that presupposes that the commenter in question thinks credit reports are bad. And yeah, a fair number of Americans hate them, but like with a lot of things Americans hate, they'll also say shit like "well that's just how it is." But apparently such status-quo allyship doesn't cross into China.
The scope of damage increases, rather than decreases, the significance of expanding the set of inputs that can contribute to the damage.
Without working?! I thought that power was unique to project managers.
Landlords are part of one of the bourgeois (petit ot haut) classes, elite minorities. Their interests are not those of the median American, and are in many ways opposed to them.
And as a small landlord, renting a second house, hoping to pay for your retirement in old age, or maybe a good school for your kids, you're even more cautious.
The alternative is a year's rent in deposit, because first and last barely covers a damaged carpet, let alone a trashed place.
And that's just the damage side of things.
One of the landlords I spoke to, said that while he understood why renter protections had become so strong, it took forever to kick out a tenant not paying rent. So naturally, he was scared of renting to anyone with money troubles before.
You may disagree with these reasons, but people aren't reducing the market they can rent to for no reason.
Times were easier when most people lived in smaller towns. You knew who you rented to, and didn't need a credit bureau to vouch.
If you want to make money in a risk-averse manner, might I suggest a job instead of an investment property? You know, like the people who's money you want to take are required to prove to you they have, so you can take a nice chunk of it so they can not freeze to death? One of those. They're all over the place, according to the landlords.
> One of the landlords I spoke to, said that while he understood why renter protections had become so strong, it took forever to kick out a tenant not paying rent.
Did he happen to mention why the tenant stopped paying? Because that's probably pretty relevant to why renter protections were stopping him from throwing him out onto the street. Like, I'm sorry it's bit of a bureaucratic fuckabout to KICK SOMEONE OUT OF THEIR HOME but you know, the landlord in this scenario has the economic backing to, in some way, own an extra residence that they don't need, and the tenant they're trying to evict (probably) doesn't. So on the whole I'm okay with renter protections making that hard. One of these people is acutely more vulnerable to houselessness, and it isn't the dude with 2+ houses.
Again, if this is a problem, maybe said landlord should get a job.
This won't get far with me, and seems to me to be a pointless response.
Are you seriously of the thought that owning more than one home is wrong? And renting it to someone that cannot afford to buy a home is wrong? If so, why?
Do you get mad if that person just leaves the money in the bank, and the second home isn't built?
Are you mad people may make more than you? Do you believe everyone should just be given all the same stuff?
This is essentiall your argument.
How does that function, societally? Magic?
Wrong. My entire argument is that one of these people is already advantaged heavily in society and doesn't need further help being more advantaged, and that all business, including the "business" of renting property, has risk. Of course you're allowed to minimize risk. I suggest you get out of the business entirely, can't get more risk-free than that.
> This won't get far with me
I cannot express to you in words how little your opinion means to me.
> and seems to me to be a pointless response.
On that point however, we agree.
> Are you seriously of the thought that owning more than one home is wrong? And renting it to someone that cannot afford to buy a home is wrong? If so, why?
Because you are artificially restricting the supply of an essential good for life or business and charging for access to it. Not ownership, merely access. Numerous, well-thought of economists decry the practices of rent seeking for this exact reason: you are not adding value, you are using your financial position to restrict access to things others need and then charging them for that access.
In fact the dictionary defines rent-seeking behavior as such: "Rent-seeking is a concept in economics that states that an individual or an entity seeks to increase their own wealth without creating any benefits or wealth to the society. Rent-seeking activities aim to obtain financial gains and benefits through the manipulation of the distribution of economic resources."
> This is essentiall your argument.
No it isn't, your straw-man is pathetic.
The post you originally responded to, simply explained the risks involved in renting, and why a credit check is often used to reduce that risk.
As a response you went on a rant about, essentially, "screw landlords" inline with "because they have what I don't". This is effectively what you said, and you've doubled down here.
No matter what, you're blaming the wrong people. If you have an issue with how certain aspects of our free economy works, I'll listen. But blaming landlords is akin to blaming car dealerships because a car is expensive. It's finger pointing without cause.
I came into this argument sympathetic to your point of view, and I think I might have flipped my position.
OP's arguments are far from straw men.
Please review the HN guidelines before commenting further.
Thus the negative press in the US was specifically about that, with fear that if you ever, say, criticize the wrong person or expressed an unpopular opinion you'd end up paying a premium on your loan or even be unable to get a mortgage.
Since there's a fairly high opacity to the US credit scores I wouldn't be surprised to find these things added to the US credit score too as an opt-in mechanism to save money similar to how we can now choose to get a key fob to prove to our insurance companies that we drive within the speed limit.
nobody thought there was a problem when you stuck up a wanted posted and asked a community 'do you know who this is'? but if you stick that poster into a computer and ask, all of a sudden people complain that it's a privacy issue.
i really struggle to see how they're different and the only thing i've been able to some up with is that people feel the only counterweight to abuses and biases of policing is to build in random inefficiencies
Given how much crime currently goes uninvestigated because the backlog is so high, is automating some of the coincidence-sniffing a bad thing?
If in the past you’d have to hire more local policemen, they’d need more police vans made, they’d need more uniforms made, more wear on police vans means more work for the mechanics, etc etc etc, now you just pay Protector Co. once for your new surveillance software. Now you haven’t dissuaded people from crime with good plentiful local jobs (as a gross oversimplification, but hopefully you can see this would still apply to a more realistically complex economy)
If there was, like, a club devoted to organizing the sort of informal observations of who was where and trying to track everybody the old fashioned way, I’d think everyone involved was a real creep there, too. Although, of course, this would be a bit impractical.
And the paparazzi weren’t some beloved people, and they mostly targeted public figures!
There’s something to be said for the inefficiency I guess. But, I think it is also to a large extent a proxy for the idea that normal people only went on the hunt for somebody for a good reason.
1. Wanted posters were only hung up based on human witness reports and for a very limited number of suspects. With face recognition, you can hunt automatically for hundreds who happened to be around a specific place at the wrong time.
2. Reach, and therefore likelihood of false-positive face matches.
3. Investigators wouldn’t blindly believe a random community member reporting a match, they would check if the reported suspect really matches the description and the circumstances. With face recognition and AI, people tend to just assume that the computer is correct.
When you look at a punishment which is set up as a “deterrent” or you hear about someone “throwing the book at you” it’s because of all the perceived inefficiency. They caught “you” this time, and they’re accounting for all the times “you got away with it” (statistically).
If you go from 10% efficiency to 100% efficiency without changing the punishment, observant people will, I believe correctly, take issue with the fact the punishment has now become “10x more drastic” when taken as a whole society.
There is also something about this inefficiency that makes us more free. Everyone bends the rules to some extent in an area they feel is worth the risk. Maybe you changed an outlet without consulting a licensed electrician / inspector.
To that end, the inefficiencies are built into our economies. Would people be safer with every electrical change being measured? Surely. Could the economy support every electrical change being measured? As in, can the average American even afford to pay an electrician every time they want to change a fixture? I think the answer is realistically no. If everyone has enough free cash they don’t mind spending it on an electrician, 100% efficiency and compliance might be reasonable and good.
You’ll see this phenomenon while traveling, there are things like traffic violations, sketchy wiring, eyesores, etc that you’d say “that would never fly in $HOME_COUNTRY” and it’s commonplace there. They may even still be illegal there. But the standards of enforcement change to meet what are in principle the ideals of the people, but in practice what’s possible for the economies to support. You might go back in 10 years and find their economy is stronger, the enforcement has increased, but people are not unhappy with the change and life goes on. The people who did the sketchy wiring have probably had time and an influx of cash from the stronger economy to pursue better training, and are now the ones doing good to-code work.
The way technology throws this out of balance is to give enforcement the ability to expand without incurring the traditional economic penalties for doing so. Those economic penalties would’ve grown the economy in other areas. If you follow the line of thinking, it leads to a significant increase in the wealth gap. Of course, there’s enough evidence to support that this is exactly what’s been unfolding. My thought is, if this natural economic balancer is reduced, we should seek to add another.
Now it's easily hidden. Somebody can monitor you just by accessing information systems without the people collecting the data even knowing. You can now do the surveillance alone, no pesky accomplices needed.
Take something like speeding. We have speed limits and fines set based on the idea that cops won't catch most speeders and that cops can give leeway based on the situation (driving 10 mph over the speed limit on an empty straight highway is different than driving 10 mph over the speed limit weaving in heavy traffic).
We set a relatively low max speed and a high penalty, because you are only going to be pulled over a fraction of the time.
Then we roll out speed cameras which can catch people EVERY time they speed. It doesn't make sense to have the limits as low and the fines as high when every single person that goes over the limit can be fined. We have to tune the laws for perfect enforcement.
This is true for a lot of laws... most are designed based on the enforcement capabilities of the time. We need to adjust for technology.
I don't think there is any truth to this at all.
> We set a relatively low max speed
We made the mistake of mixing vehicle and pedestrian infrastructure. Our speed choices have way more to do with this than with imagined enforcement outcomes.
> because you are only going to be pulled over a fraction of the time.
Many cites engage in "zero tolerance traffic enforcement" programs. This is where they patrol a single stretch of road and stop every single person who is even 1mph above the limit.
> most are designed based on the enforcement capabilities of the time.
Most are "designed" (a.k.a rapidly created and pushed into existence) in reaction to disasters that occurred and people broadly feel could have been prevented if there was a law curtailing the behavior that led up to the accident.
We didn't make speeding laws based upon "enforcement capabilities" we made them in response to "wasteful deaths."
>Many cites engage in "zero tolerance traffic enforcement" programs. This is where they patrol a single stretch of road and stop every single person who is even 1mph above the limit.
Searching this all I find is Virginia where over 80 is an automatic reckless driving, but the highest speed limit in the state is actually 70. I've never heard of anyone being pulled over for 1mph over the limit.
FWIW, that's the opposite of how citation requests work. Support your claims
Who is "we"? Vehicles and pedestrians mixing is something that predates recorded history.
> who is even 1mph above the limit.
Neither the radar gun, not the speedometer on a car are accurate enough for that.
The collective "we."
> Neither the radar gun, not the speedometer on a car are accurate enough for that.
You have a radar gun. You clock a car. The gun says 30mph. You clock the next car. The gun says 31mph. In the latter case you write a ticket.
You're free to argue the vagaries of measurement systems in court. Good luck.
Won't need much luck, the first time this shows up in court it will be thrown out and officers told to stop writing false tickets.
There's a reason cops don't ticket anything less than 10mpg over - the tools they use are not just that accurate. It's a fake number.
This is incredibly common [1].
[1] https://www.findlaw.com/traffic/traffic-stops/can-i-challeng...
Hikvision, in China, has a comprehensive system for this.[1]
Hikvision has other monitoring tools. Here's their Behavior Analysis Server data sheet. It's a 1U server for monitoring people.[2]
Hikvision Behavior Analysis Server
Based on the latest intelligent algorithm of deep learning, Behavior Analysis Server with a high-density GPU architecture supports the detection of behavior events in the perimeter, street, densely populated areas, indoor and other places, and triggers alarms in a timely manner, which can effectively improve the security of various places.
Behavior Analysis Server can detect the specific behaviors of individuals and groups in the perimeter, street, densely populated areas, indoor and other places, and provide professional video intelligent analysis applications:
* Perimeter Protection -- Real-time detection and alarming of events such as line crossing, area intrusion, region entrance/exiting, loitering, parking, unattended baggage or object removal.
* Trend Analysis -- Real-time detection and alarming of people density, real-time people counting statistics and people counting statistics.
* Street Behavior Detection -- Real-time detection and alarming of events such as fast moving, physical conflict, people gathering or falling down.
* Indoor Behavior Detection -- Real-time detection and alarming of events such as getting up, key person getting up, climbing, absence or sleep on duty, abnormal number of people, overstaying, sudden change of sound intensity, regional overstaying, physical conflict, standing up, sitting, or people counting.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh8DBYuDZyo
[2] https://www.hikvision.com/content/dam/hikvision/products/S00...
I'm in the US and speeding is a leading cause of death. Driving deaths are increasing so I don't know if having less or no cameras is a good thing.
Collision energy and thus damage increases with the square of speed (or ~speed^4 for head-on) so there is still an interest in controlling speed.
Most drivers (especially those over 35yo) will auto-regulate their speed to the optimal (safety vs throughput) for the road design. The problem is the ones who don't. Speed limits are set lower than this optimal speed, partly to make it easier to stop and charge drivers that can't auto-regulate well. Most of the time you will be ignored for going 5-10mph over. If you are over that, it is seen as deliberate defiance and "you are asking to be pulled over".
Automatic enforcement turns this de facto road law on it's head however.
During the 1970's oil crisis, highway speeds were capped at 55 mph nationwide. It took several decades for this to reverse and only after safety studies showed that differential speeds (those obeying and those going the optimal natural speed for the road) is a significant contributing factor in crashes. Unfortunately, speeds limits are still often below optimal because of an assumption that every driver will always go at least 5mph over the limit (which is incorrect).
On 70 mph interstates away from urban/commuter traffic (where time pressures often affect driving), It's not unusual to see some cars going 5mph below the limit. That is a sign that these Interstate segments have the optimal natural speed.
Also the safety of speed for a given environment should include pedestrians. Many advocates for urban areas rightfully push for 25 mph limits for exactly that reason. If you want to successfully convert in town urban roads that are wide and have high speeds to 25mph there are two good options: speed calming measures or speed cameras.
https://www.chp.ca.gov/CommunityOutreachAndMediaRelationsSit...
They aren't enforced (nor does it feel like any traffic laws are enforced anymore)
Hmm... seems like they're enforced here? Perhaps we need to up the fines though.
The energy adds, not multiplies. Multiplying would change the units
In my state, everyone speeds 10-15mph above the posted limits on highways. But the people that cause everyone around them to maneuver aren't the speeders, it is the people driving the posted limits and creating a bottleneck on the highway. And the number of rear end collisions caused by distracted drivers looking at screens instead of paying attention to their driving is the type of driving incident I see most often.
Talk to anyone on a motorcycle, especially in states where they're allowed to lane split. Almost everyone is on their phones. Almost all the time.
People will not put down their devices with the current no consequence state we find ourselves now.
5-10 years should do it.
i.e. "We used to believe lies about how people drive, but thanks to the presence of more concrete evidence we are disproving those false assumptions."
One of the things Alphabet discovered early on in the Waymo experiment that was an eye-opener to the whole industry is that auto accidents were probably underestimate by a factor of three. When they started rolling out vehicles on the road, the best numbers available for accidents-per-mile were insurance reports and NHTSA incident records. Having vehicles with cameras on the road continuously revealed that there were 300% more accidents than those numbers suggested because humans are bumping into each other due to mis-estimates at stoplights all the time, but nobody wants their insurance rates to go up so they just don't report those incidents.
What if ubiquitous mass surveillance is good actually because it forces us to come to grips with realities we'd rather pretend are otherwise?
Base rate matters though; for example if literally everyone is speeding because speed limits are too low then every accident will involve someone speeding.
is that really the case though, or is it people are so self involved that they feel they are too important to have to move that slowly? Just because everyone else is speeding does not automatically mean that faster speed is safe. It could also just be that people are assholes and they do what they want.
The tongue-in-cheek way it was explained to me once was "the highway isn't 70 because you need that. It's 70 because the trucker driving sleep-deprived in a light rain who doesn't know his left tire is about to blow needs that."
Then it still isn't good. The downsides outweigh the upsides.
A few decades ago the NYS Thruway caused a bit of political controversy because they started issuing speeding tickets if you traveled between two tollbooths faster than would be possible going the speed limit.
That's actually only true per population. If you measure per miles driven the US does better then Europe (although Europe is large, and numbers vary in different countries).
US road death rate: 12.9 per 100k inhabitants, 8.3 per billion vehicle-km
France road death rate: 5 per 100k inhabitants, 5.8 per billion vehicle-km
UK : 2.9 per 100k inhabitants, 3.8 per billion vehicle-km
Sweeden: 2.2 per 100k inhabitants, 3.3 per billion vehicle-km
etc
The numbers aren't close, US roads and drivers are just much more dangerous
There are also some differences in data methodology US vs European countries, and when checked the rates from a different source (it was a while ago, I'll have to try to dig it up) the US came out better by comparison.
I think the difference had to do with what counted as a KM traveled.
This is honestly the biggest issue. So, so, so many drivers are so utterly shit at driving, and because our infrastructure is completely 100% car-centered, they HAVE to be permitted to drive unless their infractions add up to a degree where it becomes untenable to let them continue. And even then, due to the same pressures, they will probably still be driving because in many places in the States, there is simply no public transit whatsoever. They'll just then be driving without a license, and be subject to an extra fine on top of the fortune they already owe.
I work remotely but make a drive down to my employer for various reasons very regularly, usually once a month or so, and it takes me about three hours, and never, ever am I able to make that trip without seeing dozens and dozens of boneheaded, brain-dead maneuvers out of people. Traffic weaving, left-lane camping, people merging onto highways doing 40 mph, people who don't understand roundabouts, people making illegal U turns, crossing several lanes so as to not miss an exit. The state of driving in the US is an utter disgrace. So many drivers have absolutely no business behind the wheel ever again.
Pedestrian fatalities are at an all time high in the US and this trend is not present in other countries that also have smartphones.
Rates per capita are much higher in the US, but the average American drives more than the average European so even if American drivers and European drives were equally good drivers we'd expect a higher death rate per capita in the US.
It is generally more useful to look at rates per vehicle per kilometer. By that the US is still higher than most of Europe, but not all. The Czech Republic at 9.8 is higher than the US at 8.3. Second in Europe is Belgium which is about 13% less than the US, followed by Slovenia at 16% less than the US. The rest of Europe ranges from about 30% below US to 64% below US.
I think you are already doing subconciously what i am talking about; you are thinking of speeding, but I doubt you are thinking of someone driving 50 mph in a 45mph zone. That is not the type of speeding that kills, but would be the type that could be caught with perfect enforcement.
I know you're pulling this up as an example of a small infringement, but there are studies that quantify the fatality rate as a function of velocity. The numbers you picked are right in the steepest part of the increase. Using equation 2.3 from [0] (with conversions from mph to kph), there's a 64% chance of fatality at 45mph, but a 83% chance of fatality at 50mph.
[0] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
Speeding/speeds would be reduced if they simply designed roads to be harder to drive above the speed limit on, like being narrower and less straight. They don't do this.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...
Obviously this is an oversimplification, Switzerland and Spain are 120 km/h (75 mph), Germany often has no upper limit, a few places are 140 or higher. But in general it seems like most of Europe sets the limit at the speed Americans actually drive.
In towns it’s 30 and there’s plenty of cameras, for speed, red lights, bus lanes etc.
The world doesn’t end.
The cameras are established to clock you at position X1 at time Y1. Then the next cameras a handful or more miles down the road clock you at position X2 at time Y2. You get a ticket if (X2 - X1) / (Y2 - Y1) > Limit + e.
You can speed all you'd like between those cameras, but unless you're exiting before the next set, you'll have to pull over and wait the amount of time necessary to bring you back to the speed limit for that area, achieving zero reduction in total trip time.
This also doesn't really touch on the perverse incentives when implementing automated fines. Want to make a stop light intersection safer? Increase the yellow light time. It's been proven to work, over and over and over again. Sometimes we see cities shorten yellow lights, increasing accident risk in an effort to get more revenue.
https://www.koaa.com/news/news5-investigates/news-5-investig...
We know we can better control driver speed through road design. That's been effectively demonstrated through studies. Yet our "solution" to speeding is to make the roads as straight and wide and clear as possible and then give you a fine for using them as they have clearly been designed.
Surely this is only reasonable for large, out of town roads. Within cities, you definitely still want low speed, high fine.
We haven't redesigned our cities to be non-car centric, with good public transportation and street design that favors lower speeds. But we've got a bunch of people running around wanting to severely punish anyone breaking the speed limits (because "fuck cars" means holding individual people responsible for being born in a car-centric society). The result will be that one morning they'll wake up and have to deal with how much they've punitively hurt the working poor in this country. I guess that'll be okay though because that "in this house" rainbow flag in their window means that they care.
But not breaking the law when driving is something people are in full control of themselves. I don't buy the premise that it's a regressive tax. Yes, some laws disproportionately hit certain demographics, but not speeding is not one of those.
> I guess that'll be okay though because that "in this house" rainbow flag in their window means that they care
I'm not sure what you mean by that? Are you conflating lgbt stuff into a comment about cars and technological advancements in enforcement, or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
The poorest may not, but the working poor are likely to be highly dependent on some cheap, old vehicle.
> Yes, some laws disproportionately hit certain demographics, but not speeding is not one of those.
WFH software developers are probably going to be hit a lot less than someone who needs to drive from where the cheap rents are to the job site every day.
And that was a comment on performative liberalism.
And the "if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class" aphorism applies.
This is the kind of thing that's only repeated by slumming upper-class children, the same ones who live in Brooklyn, have leftist podcasts, and think it's actively good when you see someone smoking crack on the subway because it's "cool".
Actual working class people don't like it when other working class people speed near them or commit crimes!
Survey 100 working class Americans and ask if they think another working class American should receive a ticket for driving 65 in a 55 on an Interstate.
I’d be shocked if even 5% of them wanted that outcome.
50 in a 25? Sure. 100 in a 55? Sure. But I doubt they want perfect enforcement, which is the topic being discussed here.
I was not saying there is anything special about being behind the wheel that makes it ok to break a law. I used that example because it fits with the 'low enforcement rate but a high penalty to make up for the low enforcement rate' combo.
How about an example like playing poker for money with friends? Illegal in most places where gambling is illegal, but people do it all the time. The laws might make sense if we think casinos are bad for society and want to prevent them, but think occasional gambling amongst friends is fine.
The current laws don't carve out home poker games because there was never a need to; there was no way to enforce the law against small friend groups gambling. If there suddenly became a way, we would need to re-write the laws to permit home games.
One other example for me could be something like drinking alcohol in a public place. It's never enforced if people are just enjoying a beer quietly during a picnic and bother no one. However if sound equipment mounted in trees could detect the opening of a can and write a ticket, I would feel the law obviously would need to be amended.
In fact, the reason most national highways have a speedlimit of 50mph, even out in the boonies in Kansas where everything is flat and straight, is because of the fuel crisis of the 70s.
When I was a child, I was curious why highways were 50mph but the interstates had a speedlimit of 65-70mph, so I went and found out instead of assuming it was a disingenous revenue grab.
Most interstates were generally built after the fuel crisis, and they modified the national speed limit in 1988, setting the speed to 65mph, again for efficiency reasons. It was repealed in 1995. Perhaps 65mph is what was considered safe for the road and vehicular technology at the time, and no one has had the political or municipal capital to do a new study ever since.
You want that speed limit changed, contact your reps, I guess.
Wouldn't this be an argument for a higher EV speed limit?
The efficiency loss at speed still applies to EVs due to friction and laws of momentum.
We adjust for technology 100% of the time when technology has made enforcement harder.
We adjust for technology 0% of the time when technology has made enforcement easier.
For me, I live in a quiet neighborhood. The residential street outside my apartment has speed limit signs of 20mph. People are trying to walk their dogs and kids. 9 out of 10 cars go 40-50mph. Part of that is road design. The road is new, straight, barrier and speed bump free. Worse, if you try to obey the law and go 20 the person behind you will get road rage and then illegally pass on the left (going into the opposite lane) or pass on the right and swerve around to get to the left turn lane.
That said, a street a block over is 25mph with speed bump and at least 1 of 3 cars races to each bump. And 1 of 20 just flies over the bumps.
This is a street with apartments and condos one one side and a park and elementary school on the other.
There might be some roads that don't need enforcement (somewhere in Nevada) but even in outside of the city, say LA to Vegas or SF to LA there's enough traffic that speeders cause accidents.
There's also a great video I stumbled across yesterday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3D7XYQExt0
Summary: Kinetic energy = 1/2 * mv^2
So if have a car going 70mph and they slam on their breaks to avoid an accident. When they stop they'll have expended 4900 units of kinetic energy. Another car, same weight, going 100mph slams on the breaks. When their car has expended 4900 units of kinetic energy they still have another 5100 units to get rid before their car will stop because 70^2 = 4900, and 100^2 = 10000. In other words, after they've applied as much stopping force as the 70mph car required to come to stop they're still going over 70mph
The point being, speeding issues scale exponentially, not linearly.
Look at the level of road fatalities [1] in the US - comparable with developing world countries. I vividly remember travelling on the interstate in the US in the 2000s, and seeing a couple of burnt out recent wrecks (most likely fatal) by the highway side every hour or so. That's incredibly shocking to someone from the EU. For contrast, I've driven by the site of a serious accident perhaps twice in my life here in Ireland - which has a road fatality rate 1/4 that of the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Being a driver or passenger on a roadway in India is much more risky, but people in India are far less likely to die in this scenario because they spend so much less time in those situations than Americans.
Suppose drivers are perfect though. Things happen. You can't account for every kid, dog, ... running out in front of you. You don't know when there will be gravel on the road greatly increasing your braking distance. Top speeds of 15-25 are reasonable in a residential area in the sense that anything more greatly increases the chance and severity of pedestrian injury.
Oh it makes sense alright...for police departments mandating a ticket quota and receiving direct revenue from speed camera fines.
This is why every government serious on surveillance would turn its citizens into snitches
Sure, in the 1970s the cops could follow you around any time you were out in public. But they needed 6+ cops to provide round-the-clock surveillance, with an annual cost in the high six figures.
So the average citizen's privacy was protected not by law or high-minded ideals about privacy, but by simple numbers. There weren't enough cops to follow even 0.1% of the population.
But in the modern age of smartphones and license plate recognition and credit reference agencies? I think there's a strong argument to be made that we need new laws and new rights to reflect the new reality, where tracking people around the clock is several orders of magnitude cheaper.