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Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

texastribune.org

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Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#281

Post by marcosdumay »

zimpenfish wrote: post #231
huimang wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay: It's astonishingly easy to not get shot from committing crimes specifically home burglary or stealing expensive things from people. Other things may still befall you, because life is random like that, but if you don't do those specific things, I guarantee you won't get harmed as a result of doing those specific things. I make no other guarantees. Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, does it? > If anything, it's a…

> The country has a population of 349,000,000 people. There will be crazy incidents. By that logic, any country with a similar (or larger) population should have similar (or larger) gun deaths per capita as the USA, right? Take India - population 4.3x but 15x fewer gun deaths per capita. Or Japan - 0.35x the population and 1500x fewer gdpc. (Admittedly Brazil scuppers my counter-argument slightly - population is 0.6x…

Brazil has entire areas within the largest cities dominated by para-statal organizations that often are in shooting wars within themselves, with the government, or just decide to go on a terrorism spree against the civilian population.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#282

Post by tencentshill »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #271
1970-01-01 wrote: post #235

The only mistake Flock has made in terms of general acceptance is leaving them closed-access. The right way to build this empire is to set all the cameras as public. When they're wide-open and everybody is free to watch (along with ads, of course) not enough will care about the privacy because they want to track their cheating boyfriend, Amazon delivery, and get live traffic and weather info.

That's a terrible idea as it'll be used/abused by stalkers etc. Women will never feel safe again.

Strange how that works

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#283

Post by ceejayoz »

derektank wrote: post #279
NuclearPM wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas cops? The ones that stop parents from saving their children during school shootings?

The Uvalde police department exhibited both cowardice and incompetence, but can we stop pretending they are representative of cops everywhere? Just a year later during the mall shooting in Allen Texas, cops took down the white supremacist, neo-nazi perpetrator in under 5 minutes, probably saving at least a co couple dozen lives (he’d already killed 9). You can watch the bodycam footage from that event if there’s any…

> can we stop pretending they are representative of cops everywhere?

"Here's another outlier anecdote!"

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#284

Post by giardini »

Scrapemist wrote: post #100
earth-tattoo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All lives are not equal. The value of the life of a thief whose only impact on the society is negative, cannot be compared to e.g. a doctor.

So why would someone risk his live and become a thief instead of a doctor?

Med school.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#285

Post by smelendez »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #147
smelendez wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like it's a mistake for the legal code to distinguish between what are fully interchangeable terms in the language the code is supposedly written in. I’ve thought about this too. They often vary from state to state as well. But the alternative would be to create new legal terms, which would be more confusing, or use just use numbers, which would be hard for laypeople to discuss.

> But the alternative would be to create new legal terms, which would be more confusing, or use just use numbers, which would be hard for laypeople to discuss. Well, compare homicide, which in popular culture is divided into "murder in the first degree", "murder in the second degree", and "murder in the third degree" alternately known as "manslaughter". It's not clear to me whether you consider those "new legal terms…

First degree, etc. murder isn’t just a pop culture distinction. It’s in the law in various states, notably New York, from where it’s found its way into TV cop shows.

New York also has five degrees of arson: https://ypdcrime.com/penal.law/article150.php

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#286

Post by simonsarris »

mancerayder wrote: post #276
fg137 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly that's very common on HN today. I commented under a post about some skill claiming to unleash the superpower of Claude Code. I asked, is there any evidence aka benchmark that shows it's any better than vanilla Claude Code that is statistically significant? Dead silence. But not downvotes -- easily got to -4. SMH.

It seems like HN got more 'Reddit-like' in the last year or two, at least it resembles that platform in the way people use voting not as a way to encourage good argument style and punish bad (eg. ad hominem) but rather to vote with their feelings. There are also a ton of one-line comments now, some that get upvoted to the top. That's 100 percent Reddit and 0 percent intellect.

I've been active here since 2009 and it started to get worse around 2016, and much worse in the last 2 years. Before 2016, any flippant, pointlessly cynical comment would be downvoted to oblivion. There were almost none that didn't get dead'd quickly. Now on political topics, those are the top half of comments.

There were always negative objection comments (like the famous dropbox one), but those are different. Many of these new cynical comments are not objecting, they're concurring with a poisonous cynicism.

I remember making this topic in late 2016 regarding it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13016237

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#287

Post by exabrial »

jrflowers wrote: post #56
exabrial wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to live in a world where thieves feared for their lives.

You want thieves to be armed?

Escalating petty theft into attempted murder charges, with the possibility of capital punishment? Um...

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#288

Post by pibaker »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #251
budman1 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I kill you over a $2K catalytic converter, my sanity is gone. I could never sleep at night without thinking about what I have done.' A life is worth a lot more than $2k for my sanity.

This thread is the living, breathing American dream.

Your daily reminder that many people don't see lethal self defense as an unfortunate last resort. They active want to be put in a situation where it is justified so they get to enjoy killing another human, as seen on TV.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#289

Post by avidiax »

naijaboiler wrote: post #243
phoghed wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to defend my vehicle and the tools within it This is a very normal commercial insurance problem. Sure, you can supplement it by buying a gun and staying up all night defending your truck, but the family ain’t gonna be happy if you bought the gun in lieu of insurance, especially if you lose that gunfight.

I agree. Insurance is generally a better solution for this than engaging some burglar

I would like to agree, but that's not how insurance works, at least in the U.S.

You get your catalytic converter stolen, and you will pay for it three times. The first is you paid for the original one. Then you paid for insurance to cover its theft, and likely your payments over the years have already paid for the catalytic converter a second time. And then after it's stolen, your insurance rates will raise such that you are paying for a 3rd (maybe fourth) converter, just on a monthly plan now.

Now, of course, shooting the thief is only cheaper if you don't invest much in your weapons and training, and don't face any legal scrutiny afterwards and need to hire a lawyer.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#290

Post by disposition2 »

aqme28 wrote: post #214
alex43578 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Right to privacy" isn't a specific right in the US. Furthermore, being in the middle of a public roadway in a registered vehicle shouldn't confer the expectation of privacy, per Katz. Probably the closest case law is Carpenter, which only covers cell data and was specifically meant to apply narrowly to that type of info.

> being in the middle of a public roadway in a registered vehicle shouldn't confer the expectation of privacy And this is where US caselaw and my personal beliefs about privacy start to differ. Why can't we expect some level of privacy in a public place? There are some countries that confer that, to certain levels.

> Why can't we expect some level of privacy in a public place? There are some countries that confer that, to certain levels.

The US used to be one of those countries, then 9/11 happened and the loudest folks (or at least the folks with the most money to influence law) started eroding privacy and now more folks just accept our current state and views like OP’s.

It’s really interesting…you can even watch a TV crime drama series, like Law & Order, and see the privacy erosion in the TV show. That transition is basically a reflection of what happened in the US.

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