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Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze

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Re: Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze

#41

Post by zamalek »

kafkaesq wrote: post #40
jmcdiesel wrote: post #3

Funny how for the longest time now, cities and counties take more and more money from public parks citing their underuse... then when they get used, they cry out legally to stop the use. Part of the costs of a park is cleaning up after people, its already in the budget. So is the landscaping. So is the coverage for wear and tear in general. Its also funny to see the difference. National Park Service embraces Pokemon…

then when they get used, they cry out legally to stop the use. The parks weren't just being "used", people were littering, staying after hours, trampling on flowerbeds and stuff. Or did you miss that part of the article? So many normally sedentary people were getting up and going out and doing shit and getting exercise .. and people still went out of their way to be dicks about it... I don't get it. Say what you want…

> The parks weren't just being "used", people were littering, staying after hours, trampling on flowerbeds and stuff. Or did you miss that part of the article?

These are problems that any park that has high traffic has to deal with. The judge offered reasonable solutions that didn't involve dissuading people from using the park.

> But my no means was it in response to "normally sedentary people getting exercise."

From the article: "Requiring Candy Lab to secure insurance, portable restrooms, security, clean-up, and provide a timeline for an 'event'"

That is very directly a response to normally sedentary people getting exercise - the city wants them out of the park.

Re: Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze

#42

Post by dragonwriter »

minikites wrote: post #24
barsonme wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand the issue. It's the government's job to keep up public infrastructure regardless of how heavily it's used—that's something the left _and_ right can agree on.

The right does their best to cut government revenue via lower taxes, so how do you propose maintaining infrastructure with less income?

A common method supported by the right (especially the libertarian right) is to sell off the (non-defense, non-law-enforcement) infrastructure, so that it is no longer a public thing that government needs to maintain.

Re: Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze

#43

Post by johnny_and1 »

DanBC wrote: post #7
jmcdiesel wrote: post #3

Funny how for the longest time now, cities and counties take more and more money from public parks citing their underuse... then when they get used, they cry out legally to stop the use. Part of the costs of a park is cleaning up after people, its already in the budget. So is the landscaping. So is the coverage for wear and tear in general. Its also funny to see the difference. National Park Service embraces Pokemon…

> And the fact that so many normally sedentary people were getting up and going out and doing shit and getting exercise A minor nit, but Pokemon go did not increase activity levels for most players. http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/12December/Pages/Pok%C3%A9mon-no... http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6270

It just increased general phone usage by ~16% per day. Daily path length stayed the same. (Source: study on 2800 phone users that played Pokemon GO. Data collected for at least 4 weeks having the first gaming session in the middle. Data was collected through an app that monitors your phone usage, no self-reported data. Will be presented at MobileHCI '17)

Re: Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze

#44

Post by chc »

jmcdiesel wrote: post #35
Paul-ish wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is not to place blame, the point is to find a solution that works best for everyone.

Blame in the juvenile sense is useless. Blame in the sense of figuring out who is the person responsible for the offense is very important. If you don't know within who lies the responsibility, you don't know how to fix it. IF the problem is littering, you fine littering people more. IF the problem is trampling flora, then rope off areas or add signage to prevent walking in certain areas and ENFORCE those rules...

Isn't this basically the philosophy that gave birth to the US war on drugs? Blame-and-punish is not necessarily a better policy than prevention and mitigation.

Re: Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze

#45

Post by gozur88 »

Sharlin wrote: post #36
jmcdiesel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staying past park hours for the most part is dumb... as far as being a big deal, its not. People walking around trying to play a game after hours is no something that needs policing in the first place... Is the game responsible for people littering? Or tramping grass (seriously, its grass... lets get over ourselves) or flowers... Is the game responsible for that, or are the people who do the wrong thing responsible?…

The idea of parks having opening hours is so completely alien to me that I don't even know where to begin...

If you leave parks open at night you have to provide quite a bit extra policing. Otherwise they get taken over by hookers and junkies, and normal people won't go there. That kind of policing is the first thing that gets cut when cities run out of money, at least in my area, so they close the parks at night.

Re: Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze

#46

Post by ecnahc515 »

syshum wrote: post #37
minikites wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right does their best to cut government revenue via lower taxes, so how do you propose maintaining infrastructure with less income?

Make people that use the resources pay for them. the national parks are almost fully funded by the people that visit them. I do not use any of the Local Parks, I do not pay Pokemon Go, I do not have a use for either People that use the parks should pay for them, then if there is an increase in activity from something like Pokemon Go that means Revenue also increases to pay for the increased costs to maintain the asse…

Unfortunately, if parks were mostly paid by the people using them, we would have no parks. Most people won't pay to use a park, and would instead just no go. Additionally, it's often extremely difficult to force people to pay to use your park. It's different with national parks which people travel to for the sole purpose of going to the park, but local parks, lakes, etc will have a much more difficult time making people pay for it.

Re: Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze

#47

Post by salesguy222 »

badgers wrote: post #11
jmcdiesel wrote: post #3

Funny how for the longest time now, cities and counties take more and more money from public parks citing their underuse... then when they get used, they cry out legally to stop the use. Part of the costs of a park is cleaning up after people, its already in the budget. So is the landscaping. So is the coverage for wear and tear in general. Its also funny to see the difference. National Park Service embraces Pokemon…

For some background into the phenomenon that was Lake Park last summer, there was a large concentration of Pokestops around Lake Park in a relatively small area. In Pokemon GO there are geographic boundaries that make up biomes in the game which determine which Pokemon to spawn, for instance if you're near a source of water there is a high chance you will encounter water Pokemon. Lake Park appeared to not have any bi…

This is a good explanation of "how" the people in charge of these ordinances came to their judgment...

but not a good explanation of "why we must" have these ordinances.

Boston Common and the Public Gardens had a massive number of Pokestops. Last summer, the benches were overflowing, easily many hundreds more people in a small area than there ever would be.

And to my knowledge nobody cared or complained. And this is arguably the most expensive part of the city, with home values of 10M and etc.

Good on the judge for this ruling.

Re: Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze

#48

Post by URSpider94 »

Paul-ish wrote: post #39
jmcdiesel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame in the juvenile sense is useless. Blame in the sense of figuring out who is the person responsible for the offense is very important. If you don't know within who lies the responsibility, you don't know how to fix it. IF the problem is littering, you fine littering people more. IF the problem is trampling flora, then rope off areas or add signage to prevent walking in certain areas and ENFORCE those rules...

Why not both? It seems inefficient to give citations to the waves of newcomers every day. What if we found that a simple change by app developers could drastically reduce property damage. Wouldn't it be in everybody's interest to have that change implemented?

I think you are buying in too much to the city's legal arguments, which by definition are hyperbolic.

The locations of Pokestops and gyms in Pokémon Go derive from crowd sourced locations used in Ingress, Niantic's earlier AR game. These locations are generally in publicly accessible places. The geofencing on pokestops is also not that tight - there is never really a good reason to stray off of paths in a park to reach a Pokestop. You might have to walk on the grass if the Pokestop were, say, a statue in the middle of a field, but it's a park, that's what you do.

It's worth noting that in cases where pokestops are located in particularly sensitive locations, like inside hospital wards or at church altars, Niantic has indeed de-activated or re-located them.

My main point is, people trampling flowers are acting badly, either that or the flowers are growing in a place where people are allowed to walk ...

The location in question is a public park that's normally quiet, but people decided it was a good area for Pokémon hunting. It's a public park, thats well within their rights. Ita not at all obvious that Niantic CAN do anything in a case like this, nor SHOULD they be expected to.

Re: Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze

#49

Post by PeterisP »

wfunction wrote: post #8
jmcdiesel wrote: post #3

Funny how for the longest time now, cities and counties take more and more money from public parks citing their underuse... then when they get used, they cry out legally to stop the use. Part of the costs of a park is cleaning up after people, its already in the budget. So is the landscaping. So is the coverage for wear and tear in general. Its also funny to see the difference. National Park Service embraces Pokemon…

>> City officials were aghast at large numbers of individuals playing Pokemon Go who visited parks, littered, trampled grass and flowers, and stayed past park hours. This seems like a legitimate issue though. How do you propose it be solved?

Large numbers of people visiting part sounds like a success - the only purpose why the park exists in the first place is so that the residents can go there and visit, so if they're doing it more than before then the park is achieving it's goal and it's great!

It would be reasonable to expect that the job of these city officials should be to (a) encourage the people to visit parks even more; and (b) maintain the parks adequately to their usage - if people use the parks more then it obviously costs more to maintain, but it also obviously means that people are getting more benefit from the parks and they want them to be maintained more.

Enforcing the rules about littering and trampling flowers is part of maintaining the park; but if people are routinely staying past park hours (the whole concept of park hours is a bit strange to me, I'd expect parks to simply be unserviced but otherwise available 24/7), then likely that's a sign that these hours should be extended - the purpose of littering restrictions is obvious but the only legitimate purpose of restricted hours is that the population wants the hours to be restricted for safety reasons or whatever; if now it turns out that the population doesn't want that restriction anymore, then it shouldn't exist.

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