Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras • Hacker News Board

Re: Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

#511

Post by fuzzfactor » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

throwaway85825 wrote: post #506

nathan_compton wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw a constitutional conventions so that the slave owners could get their votes in (not the slaves, of course, though the owners should get to vote FOR them). I understand that the civil war was about a lot of things, but the precipitating issue was slavery. Slavers should be obliterated by war if they aren't willing to give up their slaves unconditionally.

Slavery destroyed the roman republic just like it destroyed the American republic. Slavery and republican government are fundamentally incompatible because it devalues the labor and vote of the citizen. Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government. No longer did the government need to compromise, they could simply do whatever they wished by force. Today millions of new wage s…

Good observation.

Think about how it was in a state like North Carolina in the 1850's where they were building textile mills which could add great value to the cotton before it was shipped.

This was enough of a threat to Northern manufacturing without their factories having to compete with unpaid labor. They were not happy campers, they had always been making way more money per ton of cotton in the well-established Northern textile mills than the plantations had ever been. And banking it just in case.

In the factory it would be a lot higher-skilled labor than down on the farm, it was still unpaid but never without cost. A dollar would go a long way back then but everything was still relative. Imagine that $10000 was the annual cost of having the labor in a factory without any wages. Accommodations, family support, infrastructure and things like that are what makes this total.

1859 rolls around and the guy in the green visor adds it up and shakes his head, "sheesh it's $11000 this year, when is it going to end?"

War comes & goes eventually, slaves are freed like they should/could have been the whole time, the dust settles and after a year of actually paying wages for the first time to laborers, the guy in the green visor about drops out of his seat because his total labor cost is now $15000. All he can say is "when is it going to end?" Where have we heard that before?

Same thing with the guy in the bank in New York whose employer had been raking it in from all their investments in Southern companies. It just wasn't the same and never was going to be that way again.

At least not exactly.

Re: Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

#512

Post by drumttocs8 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:50 AM UTC

Here's a decent map of Flock installations for those interested in doing field research:

https://banishbigbrother.com/flock-camera-map/

Re: Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

#513

Post by rambojohnson » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 2:55 AM UTC

phil21 wrote: post #267

rambojohnson wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is it weird for you exactly? we didn't have masked gestapo thugs before.

It's weird due to the complete lack of second order thinking the majority of people seem to have. You can scream up and down about how building such things is a horrible idea because it can one day be used for evil, and folks will either yawn or call you paranoid or worse. Then the thing actually gets (very lightly) abused/used for something folks don't like and omg it's an emergency no one could have ever predicted!…

I mean you're not wrong, but let's not shy away from the usual pattern we see on here where the YC-brain sees a camera, a cloud dashboard, and a monthly SaaS fee and immediately calls it "the future," then acts blindsided when people notice they funded a suburban panopticon. Every time it is the same script, and then six months later everybody is pretending nobody could have foreseen the obvious abuse case.

I was always anti-IoT for this exact reason.

Re: Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

#514

Post by 0_____0 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 5:56 AM UTC

palata wrote: post #497

0_____0 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invisible wavelengths can absolutely hurt your retina, but as wavelengths go farther beyond visible, your eye begins to not focus them properly on the retina, so the risks change. E.g. with 1550nm IR (common in telecom, sometimes in LIDAR) the risk of eye damage is to the surface of the eye rather than to the retina. Short wavelengths like UV will be absorbed by the lens at near-UV, and then eventually just be absorb…

Very interesting, thanks a lot! I assume CCTV surveillance cameras are usually fine because people cannot go and stare at it from very close then :-).

i went down a rabbit hole doing max permissible exposure calcs for the light you linked and basically i personally wouldn't worry about it. the energy is low and distributed among many emitters. by the time you're far enough away from the light to focus on it, you're receiving max a couple hundred microwatts/cm^2 at the cornea from each led.

Re: Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

#515

Post by roger110 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 7:07 AM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #353

roger110 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how some banks even disallow you from copy-pasting your routing and account numbers to make it harder to manually set up payments that way

Which banks do that?

I don't remember, but Chase used to until a couple of years ago

Re: Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

#516

Post by palata » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 10:48 AM UTC

0_____0 wrote: post #514

palata wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting, thanks a lot! I assume CCTV surveillance cameras are usually fine because people cannot go and stare at it from very close then :-).

i went down a rabbit hole doing max permissible exposure calcs for the light you linked and basically i personally wouldn't worry about it. the energy is low and distributed among many emitters. by the time you're far enough away from the light to focus on it, you're receiving max a couple hundred microwatts/cm^2 at the cornea from each led.

I don't know if you ever write blog posts or anything like that, but I would love to see explanations about how you made those estimations. I honestly wouldn't know how to even start :-).

Re: Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

#517

Post by throwaway85825 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 11:17 AM UTC

fuzzfactor wrote: post #511

throwaway85825 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery destroyed the roman republic just like it destroyed the American republic. Slavery and republican government are fundamentally incompatible because it devalues the labor and vote of the citizen. Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government. No longer did the government need to compromise, they could simply do whatever they wished by force. Today millions of new wage s…

Good observation. Think about how it was in a state like North Carolina in the 1850's where they were building textile mills which could add great value to the cotton before it was shipped. This was enough of a threat to Northern manufacturing without their factories having to compete with unpaid labor. They were not happy campers, they had always been making way more money per ton of cotton in the well-established N…

I don't understand the point you're trying to make.

Re: Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

#518

Post by ethbr1 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

JuniperMesos wrote: post #490

ABCLAW wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Propaganda works. The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated…

This post is propaganda for the idea that whenever you think that immigrants are causing a problem, you're actually incorrect and are being manipulated by some conspiracy.

No, the post made its point pretty clearly:

> Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than [knowledge workers] are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.

The only thing I'd add is polarization adding impetus to never seeing someone on my side as a liar, whatever they claim.

When democracy becomes a team sport, its collective intelligence lessens: perhaps the biggest hole in the US founder's future vision.

But then again, "voter" had a very different definition in their time. And I don't think you can fault them for not enshrining anti-party ranked choice et al.

Re: Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

#519

Post by ethbr1 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

singleshot_ wrote: post #387

slopinthebag wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax either so I'm not sure how that's a relevant analogy. The response to Covid was far more disruptive to my life than the disease itself, which would obviously not be the case with starvation.

> weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax Have you treated many patients with COVID? I’ve heard the opposite of your claim from those who have.

As the husband at the time of a military critical care nurse who worked local ED in a major US city and deployed to New York -- yes, there were absolutely people who denied they had COVID even as they were being intubated.

Most people tended to accept reality when their body started failing, but there were a non-zero number that refused to believe they were infected with coronavirus to the end.

Politicians and social media click farmers spouting lies do influence people, and not everyone starts with a basic understanding of biology and/or science.

Re: Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras

#520

Post by nathan_compton » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

throwaway85825 wrote: post #506

nathan_compton wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw a constitutional conventions so that the slave owners could get their votes in (not the slaves, of course, though the owners should get to vote FOR them). I understand that the civil war was about a lot of things, but the precipitating issue was slavery. Slavers should be obliterated by war if they aren't willing to give up their slaves unconditionally.

Slavery destroyed the roman republic just like it destroyed the American republic. Slavery and republican government are fundamentally incompatible because it devalues the labor and vote of the citizen. Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government. No longer did the government need to compromise, they could simply do whatever they wished by force. Today millions of new wage s…

> "Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government."

Look, I hate the elites as much as anyone and bemoan their outsized power over regular citizens, but to compare literal chattel slavery to the post-civil war U.S. is wild. Actual, real life, slavery was a deeply integrated part of their culture. Our democracy has a ton of problems, to be sure, but I find it very hard to blame that on the civil war.