81–90 of 90 posts
Imagine what would happen if we had technology that made breaking the law impossible. I don't mean top-down Orwellian-style tech, but bottom-up. Behold, the Legal Singularity. Cops would probably start shooting babies in the streets.
I'm pretty happy about this because I don't drive. I ride a bicycle, and the two times I've been involved in a genuine aggressive altercation with another vehicle, the car had stolen license plates.
One of those times the police had planned to charge the passenger with attempted murder (We were both travelling south, I was going about 25 km/h, they pulled in close beside me, and opened the car door into me). When it turned out the license plate was stolen/hadn't been registered for 10 years, I was at a loss as to why anyone would want to drive around with stolen plates on their car (me being a law abiding citizen), and the police said it's to avoid speed cameras and to steal petrol (turn up to petrol station, fill up, drive off). Apparently petrol theft is like one of the number one crimes here
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the actual paper, or just Tyler Cowen's blurb? The paper is based on actual data, not just suppositions. It too might be wrong, but the arguments it makes are more compelling than anything in your comment.
The "actual data" is just as problematic, because they took it from the speed limit increases in 1987 and 1996. Fast forward two or three decades and we have much safer cars, which will completely change the injury data. Meanwhile modern cars are significantly more efficient and have far better pollution control systems. On page 4 of the paper Benthem writes, "Perhaps surprisingly, the costs from pollution-induced ad…
Similarly: the 1990s dominate van Bentham's numbers and correspond to the introduction of OBD-x. Cars are more efficient now, but by how much? There are hybrids on the roads, but most people don't drive them, and we won't be outlawing Volvos from 2000 any time soon.
But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about? Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that the other side abuses. Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere. Recordi…
So no, it's not the freedom from having your license plate OCR'd:
> And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier.
It's the freedom from having the government know exactly who was exactly where at all times, which may be important for peaceful groups (if the only possible victims were violent nobody would oppose this) that are against its policies.
The question is not "how can we preserve our privacy by preventing technology from advancing" but "do we want the government or arbitrary private entities to be able to know what we are doing all day every day?"
But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. The freedom to not have your license plate OCR'd? Is that what it's all about? Putting that in there is jingoistic and appealing to the same emotions that the other side abuses. Pervasive, often incidental monitoring (e.g. the growing proliferation of electronic toll roads) is absolutely inevitable. Cameras are everywhere. Recordi…
The "real" solution is to retrain society from top to bottom to break the conflation between what a law is and the outcome a law is intended to produce . As that phrasing implies, I don't think this is going to be an easy process. The purpose of a speed limit is not to make people not go more than 55 miles per hour. The purpose of a speed limit is to make driving safe , and particularly to make driving safe for socie…
Sometimes it seems like the majority of the legal code is archaic if not completely corrupt. I wish there was a way for the public to revoke laws that were ridiculous. Jury nullification? If there is a way they should be teaching it in the schools.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution isn't "lossy" enforcement, at least in the case of speed limits. It's to revise the speed limit to a higher, more realistic figure and then enforce that limit as rigorously as practical. This is what the UK and other countries are doing with average speed cameras. It's been shown that in some cases US speed limits make roads less safe and are lower than the speed limits recommended by the engineers who d…
"Having speed limits where a large percentage of drivers regularly violate them teaches people to break the law casually. (Similarly, COPPA basically teaches kids to lie about their age online.)" I'd suggest that there's also a widespread lack of understanding that there's a difference between having a law, enforcing a law, and potentially even having the capability of enforcing the law. It's part of the reason why "…
I sure wish more people like you had stronger control over the legislative process.
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I thought anyone in public could legally be recorded.
It's a legal gray area because the physics of wave propagation are not good about obeying privacy laws. IANAL, so that's the extent of the opinion I should be giving.
(IANAL also)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fail to understand how it's hypocritical to advocate recording of the people sanctioned by the state to use lethal force while decrying a system that is by all measures ripe for abuse.
Because recording police is justified by "we're both in public, and I should be able to record public things", which justification applies equally well to police using cameras in public.
We pay the bills so we can make some requirements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "actual data" is just as problematic, because they took it from the speed limit increases in 1987 and 1996. Fast forward two or three decades and we have much safer cars, which will completely change the injury data. Meanwhile modern cars are significantly more efficient and have far better pollution control systems. On page 4 of the paper Benthem writes, "Perhaps surprisingly, the costs from pollution-induced ad…
According to NHTSA, the sharpest decline in fatality rate / 100mm VMT preceded 1984, and since 1996 has dropped by something like 6%. What mainstream automotive advances lead you to believe that cars are so much safer that van Benthem's numbers are wildly off? Similarly: the 1990s dominate van Bentham's numbers and correspond to the introduction of OBD-x. Cars are more efficient now, but by how much? There are hybrid…
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
1995 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.73
1996 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.69
...
2010 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.11
2011 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.10
>What mainstream automotive advances lead you to believe that cars are so much safer that van Benthem's numbers are wildly off?
Crumple zones, passenger safety cage, airbags, anti-lock brakes. Better handling to avoid accidents. These things existed in 1996 but weren't present on much of the installed base of cars driven in that year. They were even less common in 1987. And that's just the cars. Light trucks and SUVs were deathtraps on wheels through the 1990s.
>the 1990s dominate van Bentham's numbers and correspond to the introduction of OBD-x.
That's what I'm saying. The new emissions controls had only just been introduced and weren't present on the installed base of cars that were driven on the roads in the years the speed limits were changed.
>There are hybrids on the roads, but most people don't drive them, and we won't be outlawing Volvos from 2000 any time soon.
The problem isn't Volvos from 2000, it's Impalas and Broncos from 1990. Which there were a lot more of on the road in 1996 than there are in 2013. And, once again, if your concern is air pollution, you do better to remove polluting vehicles from the road entirely and replace them with vehicles with modern emissions controls than you do by continuing to operate them at scale and then trying to mitigate the environmental damage of that choice by slowing everybody down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to NHTSA, the sharpest decline in fatality rate / 100mm VMT preceded 1984, and since 1996 has dropped by something like 6%. What mainstream automotive advances lead you to believe that cars are so much safer that van Benthem's numbers are wildly off? Similarly: the 1990s dominate van Bentham's numbers and correspond to the introduction of OBD-x. Cars are more efficient now, but by how much? There are hybrid…
>According to NHTSA, the sharpest decline in fatality rate / 100mm VMT preceded 1984, and since 1996 has dropped by something like 6%. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx 1995 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.73 1996 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.69 ... 2010 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.11 2011 fatalities per 100M VMT: 1.10 That's a fair bit more than 6%. And that's the rate notwithstanding the increases in the speed…