>This will ruin lives, even if they're eventually let go. Jobs lost, evicted from homes, cars towed, pets surrendered and put down.
Yes. That's exactly the point. Comply with every little thing, no matter how absurd, or else your life will unravel.
Look through a historical comment (especially from back when "big data" was the buzzword) thread on any subject where HN is pro regulation and pro government. This is EXACTLY what the useful idiots want.
They want some NYC liquor store owner to pay a hundred grand to the state because that one time he visited NH he loaded up his van with tax free henny to sell back home.
They want that exurban undeveloped lot owner to lose their house for letting their buddy with a tree service dump there and fill in a few hundred square feet over the course of half a decade.
They want some random industrial employer that makes nuts and bolts or something to be fined millions of dollars because their maintenance employees spray painted a piece of equipment in the parking lot without the PPE and pollution compliance measures befitting a commercial paint operation.
They want the jackboot on the throat of everyone who steps out of line on any axis that they care about.
They see the way the banking industry tries to stay away from weed, porn and guns because the upside isn't worth the risk of being combed over by the enforcers. And instead of seeing it as cautionary, they see it as a model that needs to be scaled down to the small businesses and the lowly individual peasants.
Of course they don't lay it out so plainly. They use words like "negative externality" and "antisocial" and "dis-incentivize" to whitewash it but that doesn't change what it is.