Increasing the precision of enforcement makes a lot more sense for direct-harm laws. You won't find anyone seriously arguing that full 100% enforcement of murder laws is a bad idea. It's the preemptive laws, which were often lazily enforced, especially when no real harm resulted from the action, where this all gets complicated. Maybe this is the distinction to focus on.

If a law being enforced 100% of the time causes problems then rethink the law (i.e. raise the speed limit, or design the road slower).

Isn't this the point of the whole conversation we are having here?

Laws on copyright were not created for current AI usage on open source project replication.

They need to change, because if they are perfectly enforced by the letter, they result in action that are clearly against the intend of the law itself.

The underlying problem is that the world changes too fast for the laws so be fair immediately

People don't want the letter of the law enforced, they want the spirit. Using the example from above, speed limits were made for safety. They were set at a time and surprise, cars got safer. So people feel safer driving faster. They're breaking the letter of the law but not the spirit.

I actually like to use law as an example of the limitations of natural languages. Because legalese is an attempt to formalize natural language, yet everyone seems to understand how hard it is to write good rules and how easy it is to find loopholes. But those are only possible if you enforce the letter of the law. Loopholes still exist but are much harder to circumvent with the spirit of the law. But it's also more ambiguous, so not without faults. You have to use some balance.

For their inhabitants, maybe not pedestrians though. Speeding laws are in part for protecting pedestrians

American trucks are an interesting counter example but that's a more complicated issue. (The source has a comment that you can infer this being a concern with trucks but there's also a lot of sources on this that you can easily find)

[0] https://www.fox7austin.com/news/data-40-year-high-auto-ped-d...

There are numerous cases, both in history and in fiction, that demonstrate as much.

>only to allow targeted enforcement in service of harassment and oppression

That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign. And me driving 120 km/h out of complete disregard for human life. Should I get a fine for driving 90? Yea, probably. Is it a first time offence? Was anyone else on the road? Did the sign get knocked down? Is it day or night? Have I done this 15 times before? Is my wife in labour in the passenger seat? None of those are excuses, but could be grounds for a warning instead.

Why? Plenty of people drive in areas with speed cameras, isn't that exactly how they work?

> That's absurd hyperbole. A competent policeman will recognise the difference between me driving 90 km/h on a 80 km/h road because I didn't notice the sign.

I'm not sure it is hyperbole or that we should assume competence/good faith. Multiple studies have shown that traffic laws, specifically, are enforced in an inconsistent matter that best correlates with the driver's race.

[0] https://www.aclu-il.org/press-releases/black-and-latino-moto...

[1] https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl...

If you find it impossible to follow a simple speed limit, then getting you off the road is the ideal outcome.

That is precisely why traffic would effectively grind to a halt. Because going even 0,0001 over the limit is so easy, you would have to turtle through traffic to get anywhere while making certain you never go above the limit. 50km zone is now 30km, and you didn't decelerate quickly enough and were going 32km at the threshold. 60km zone, but you accelerated too quickly and hit 61km for a moment. And sometimes, rarely, but sometimes you have to accelerate yourself out of a dangerous situation.

Honestly if you are arguing for this idea, I strongly suspect you have no experience driving. I've driven for about 25 years. I've received two speeding tickets. One in Germany (I'm danish), where I got confused due to unfamiliar signage and got dinged for going 112km in a 100km zone. And once here I got a ticket for going 54 in a 50 - my mom was at the hospital, possibly about to die (she didn't). Both of those were speed traps.

> 50km zone is now 30km, and you didn't decelerate quickly enough and were going 32km at the threshold.

Is the argument that you and others would be unable to safely achieve the posted speed within the speed limited area? For example, if you feel you can't drive more precisely than 40-50 when you are aiming for 45, in the above scenario, you could start with your goal being 45, then in the 30 zone aim for 25, knowing that you'd be going no faster than 30 when your intend to drive 25.

> 60km zone, but you accelerated too quickly and hit 61km for a moment.

Should you aim for 55, if for example the most precise you can do is +/- 5? Or adjust correspondingly for how precise you are able to keep within a desired range.

And of course:

* In a world where enforcement was more consistent, we might expect speed limits to eventually be adjusted - i.e. are speed limits currently set lower than what is technically safe because we assume that some portion of people will currently break the law?

* With self-driving, or at least automated speed-keeping (but not steering) there will no longer be the issue of someone having the problem of being unable to stay within x km/h of the speed they're targeting.

>automated speed-keeping

My car displays what it thinks is the speed limit on the dashboard, and it gets it wrong all the time. If I relied on that in this hypothetical, I would be broke and homeless - possibly in prison, after it once said the limit was 110km on a narrow residential street.

Isn't that like saying "What would the effects be if time travel existed" but assuming that doesn't then prompt any changes in human behavior, laws, other technologies, etc. from what people were doing everyday and what existed before it? When discussing "What if x changed", I think we need to also take into account the other changes in laws, behaviors, etc. that one expects that to then prompt - whether big or small.

> perfect enforcement

Isn't consistent enforcement of the law far better than the current inconsistent and unequal enforcement, where people already face unequal enforcement for 'driving while black', where if an officer is having a bad day or doesn't like you they can already cite you strictly, and where other people are regularly able to get away with 20 mph over a limit, where every driver and officer guesses/decides for themselves about whether the current limit should be strictly enforced vs allow 5 over, 15 over, etc etc?

> I usually set speed limiter to the posted speed +3km. Measured with GPS, this hits the desired speed accurately.

So instead of aiming for 33 in a 30 km zone, couldn't you aim for a slightly lower number in order to avoid the scenario you expect for yourself where if the law was consistently applied you would be "would be broke and homeless - possibly in prison"?

It is perfectly possible to drive and obey all speed limits. It is even technically easy. Us people choosing not to do so, because we are impatient, feeling competitive against other drivers or because we just think we can get away with it now does not make it impossible.

Of course technically option a is violating the law but no sane police officer will give you a fine in this case. Nor should they! A robot will, however. This is stupid.

The point of terryf's example was to point out that for practical reasons, existing laws don't capture every relevant variable. I (but not everyone, it seems) think that visibility obviously influences safety. The point I want to make is that in practice the "precision gap" can't be perfectly rectified by making legality a function of more factors than just speed. There will always be some additional factor that influences the probability of a crash by some small amount -- and some of the largest factors, like individual driving ability, would be objected to on other grounds.

A road without pedestrians and intersections in it should have a speed limit that reflects the reality of its use (70-80)

Variable 1: The Cayenne is on a train track

Variable 2: The train behind the Cayenne is going 35mph.

You painted with too broad of a brush with that statement.

The point is that whether you drove dangerously is not a strict, machinistic "if-then" assessment. Automatic enforcement of speeding is ridiculous when viewed in this context.

And the people saying "yes but there is more energy in a faster vehicle" have clearly not felt the difference between driving a car with drum brakes vs modern brakes.

It's very easy to come up with thought experiments to show that technically illegal scenarios are not necessarily more dangerous than some legal scenarios.

The law is often made to be easy to apply, not for precision. Hard to see how anyone could see otherwise.

That's not say that the laws are necessarily problematic. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Ideally, for a lot of things we want to punish people who knowingly do bad stuff, not people who do bad stuff because they thought it was good.

In fact DUI should be a mitigating circumstance, because when you're drunk your ability to make decisions is impaired -- but the opposite happens, DUI is an aggravating circumstance.

Likewise if act in a way that makes someone feel that you're going to hit them that's assault regardless of whether you actually ever touch them.

etc. Many such cases.

So, in the case of speeding:

- Speeding on its own would only automatically "warrant" the police to stop you / interview you / tell you off, and perhaps to follow you around for a while after they pull you over, to ensure you don't start speeding again (and to immediately pull you over again if you do.) I say "warrant" here because this doesn't actually give them any powers that private citizens don't have; rather, it protects them from you suing them for harassment for what they're doing. (Just like a "search warrant" doesn't give the police any additional powers per se, but rather protects them from civil and criminal damages associated with them breaking-and-entering into the specified location, destroying any property therein, etc.)

- But speeding while in the process of committing some other "actual" crime, or speeding that contributes to some other crime being committed, may be an aggravating factor that multiplies the penalty associated with the other act, or changes the nominal charge for the other act.

We might also then see a tweak for "threshold aggravations", such that e.g.

- Speeding while also doing some other dumb thing — having your brake-lights broken, say — may be considered to "cross a threshold" where they add up to an arrest+charge, even though none of the individual violations has a penalty when considered independently.

This would, AFAICT, translate well into a regime where there are little traffic-cop drones everywhere, maximizing speeding enforcement. If speeding is all they notice someone doing, they'd just be catch-and-release-ing people: pulling them over, squawking at them, and flying away. Literal slap-on-the-wrist tactics. Which is actually usefully deterrent on its own, if there are enough of these drones, and they just keep doing it, over and over again, to violators. (Do note that people can't just "not pull over" because they know there are no penalties involved; they would still be considered police, and "not complying with a police stop" would, as always, be a real crime with real penalties; if you run from the drone, it would summon actual cars to chase you!)

---

Oddly, I think if you follow this legal paradigm to its natural conclusion, it could lead to a world where it could even be legal to e.g. drive your car home from the bar while intoxicated... as long as you're driving at 2mph, with your hazards on, and avoiding highways. But miss any of those factors, and it "co-aggravates" with a "driving recklessly for your reaction speed" charge, into an actual crime.

Or perhaps people will not be able to just "not pull over" because the police drones will be given the power to remotely command their car to stop. Heck, why even have the drones? Just require that the car monitor speeding infractions and report them for fines. Serious or repeat offenders can have their throttles locked out to the speed limit of the current road.

I personally happen to think this is a terrible idea, just one cyber attack or regime change away from crippling everyday Americans ability to get around and live their lives, but that probably won't stop it from happening.

(That is: it's not just that motorcyclists themselves are more aware that they could be fatally T-boned (and so drive more defensively / keep more distance to avoid that outcome); it's also that drivers of heavier vehicles who encounter a "trolley problem" where they can either veer to hit a car, or to hit a motorcyclist, are aware that there's far less metal protecting the motorcyclist from the impact — so they are very likely to choose to veer to hit the car instead.)

And because of this, I would expect that we would never truly see the elimination of speed-limiter-less road vehicles, even if all cars were mandated to have them. There's just too many other things on the road (motorcycles, ATVs, tractors and construction equipment, e-bikes, etc) that are designed with these different safety trade-offs, such that they would likely never end up having the speed limiting imposed on them.

And that's enough things still on the road that could be dangerous if they hit someone, that would need to be pulled over for speeding, that I wouldn't imagine we'd see "off-board" speeding enforcement go away any time soon.

I would imagine that if, say, 95% of vehicles on the road were incapable of speeding, there would be very little reason for the police to attempt to stop the other 5%. You'd probably still have token speed enforcement, but without the revenue raising potential of frequent speed tickets, it would likely make sense to direct enforcement resources elsewhere.

Imprecise law enforcement enables political office holders to arbitrarily leverage the law to arrest people they label as a political enemy, e.g. Aaron Swartz.

If everyone that ever shared publications outside the legal subscriber base was precisely arrested, charged, and punished, I dont think the punishment amd current legal terrain regarding the charges leveraged against him would have lasted.

But this is a feature, not a bug.

https://www.fxleaders.com/news/2025/10/29/code-is-law-sparks...

Additionally, law is not logical. Law is about justice and justice is not logical.

Example: the Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States in 1922 that a Japanese descended person could not naturalize as a US citizen despite having white skin because he was not technically Caucasian. The next year in 1923 they ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that an Indian descended man could not natural despite being Caucasian because his skin was not white.

Why did the court give two contradictory reasons for the rulings which would each be negated if the reasoning were swapped? I wouldn't say it was for justice. It was because America at that time did not want non-white immigrants, and what 'white' is, is a fiction that means something completely different than what it claims to mean, and the justices were upholding that structure.

Because of that (or rather, to sort out the mess), I always felt that citizens should have a right to be informed of every law that they are expected to obey so that at least in principle, they'd be able to comply (to be effective, plain language explanations would need to be included).

Imagine an app that told you, whenever you cross state boundaries, what is different in the law now from your previous location.

To make this more practicable you might be able to drastically narrow the context of the information, e.g. to the current task. So you could have an app that watches everything you do and tells you if you're (possibly) about to break a law. The extreme version of this looks like wearing a body camera at all times and having a little ‘voice of the state’ in your ear that tells you what your legal options are on every circumstance. Maybe a little dystopian, especially if it starts reporting you if you don't follow its guidance.

You cannot have precise enforcement with imprecise laws. It’s as simple as that.

The HN favorite in this respect is “fair use” under copyright. It isn’t well specified enough for “precise enforcement”. How do you suggest we approach that one?

Neoliberals and the far left, when forced to work in the real world, both tend to prefer putting power into rules, not giving people in authority the power to make decisions.

The upside is there's less misuse of power by authorities, at least in theory. The bad news is, you now need far more detailed rules to allow for the exceptions, common sense, and nuance that are no longer up to authorities.

The worse news is, that the people who benefit from complex rules are the upper classes, and the authorities who know how to manipulate complex rules.

"Don't be evil" requires a leader with the authority to enforce it.

A 500 employee manual will be selectively implemented, and will end up full of exploits, but hey, at least you can pretend you tried to remove human error from the process.

> Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power

This is by design, in an American context of building a free society. By default, you are allowed to do whatever you like to do in a free society. To constrain behavior through law, first a legislator must decide that it should be constrained, then they must convince their legislator peers that it should be constrained, then law enforcement must be convinced to attempt to constrain it de-facto, then a judge must be convinced that you in particular should have a court case proceed against you; a grand jury must be convinced to bring an indictment, a jury of 12 peers must be convinced to reach a verdict, and even afterwards there are courts of appeal.

The bar to constrain someone's freedom is quite high. By design and by wider culture.

I think there’s a difference between the marketing brochure and reality.

Maybe my YouTube algorithm just shows me a lot of it, but there’s no shortage of cops out there violating people’s rights because they think when they ask for something we have to comply and see anything else as defiant.

I think we need perhaps less laws so people can actually know them all. Also, I think we need clarity as to what they are and it needs to be simple English, dummy’s guide to law type thing. But there’s a lot of issues that simply stem from things like 1) when can a cop ask for your ID? / when do you have the right to say no? 2) similar question as to when do they have a right to enter/trespass onto your property? 3) as every encounter usually involves them asking you questions, even a simple traffic stop, when and how can you refuse to talk to them or even roll down your window or open your car door without them getting offended and refusing to take no as an answer?

I don’t think we generally have any understanding of what our rights actually are in these most likely and most common interactions with law enforcement. However, it’s all cases where I see law enforcement themselves have a poor understanding of what the law and rights are themselves so how are citizens to really know. If they tell you it’s their policy to ID anyone they want without any sort of probable cause then they say you’re obstructing their investigation for not complying or answering their questions or asserting you have to listen to anything they say because it’s a lawful order; it’s just common ways they get people to do what they want, it’s often completely within your right to not comply with a lot of these things though.

Teaching this as a requires HS class would be an incredible benefit to society, because, on the flip side, many police encounters escalate to violence because the citizen has an incorrect understanding of where their rights end/don't exist.

The most obvious rule to follow is that you should always assert your rights (correct or incorrect) verbally only, as soon as you involve physical resistance, the situation will deteriorate rapidly (for you.) Any violations of your rights will be argued and dealt with in court, not on the street. Confirm requests/demands from officers are 'lawful orders', and then do them.

Civil disobedience can also be a useful societal force, and with perfect law enforcement it becomes impossible.

If the police had been able to swoop in and arrest the "perpetrators" every time two men kissed, homosexuality would have never been legalized; If they had been able to arrest anyone who made alcohol, prohibition wouldn't have ended; if they had been able to arrest anyone with a cannabis seedling, we wouldn't have cannabis legalization.

If everyone knew they would be immediately arrested the second they sprouted a cannabis seed almost nobody would try.

The present system in many countries is that criminal and civil codes are too large to be comprehended by a single person, too large to be changed rationally, and the processes too subject to corruption to be changed all at once.

But it only happens because you got to know Mark originally. If he was already labeled a 'very dangerous person' and was arrested early on, there's a much better chance you wouldn't have gotten to know him, and the extent you would question the law would be very differently.

This is difficult to talk about in theoretical, because most examples are obvious cases of bad law (people already recognize the issues) or cases of good law that how dare I question (laws people don't recognize as an issue). People spend a lot of time thinking about a law that has already soured but hasn't been removed from the books, but rarely catch the moment that they realize the law originally soured in their mind (and any real world modern examples that might be changing currenlty would be, by their nature, controversial and quite easily derail the discussion).

Put shortly, those people are only obviously innocent (not deserving to be punished, but technically guilty of what the law stated) because the law was imperfect in enforcement and you got to know some of them before the law caught them.