Heres further proof the justice system is screwed. Yesterday I was stopped while driving for not having current tags. Registration was renewed but I didn't have the sticker yet. Cop looked at my paperwork said all good be back in 5.
Come to find out, I haven't had a valid license in 5 years.
There was a mistake in court 5 years ago when I paid a fine (speeding ticket). I have a receipt from court saying all settled/money received but court says they never got money.
So, after talking to a lawyer yesterday I will be paying another $250 for lawyer fees + court costs to get out of the mistake made by the court in another state 5 years ago.
I am lucky. I can pay that. It sucks but some people would be out food money if they suddenly had to pay $500 to drive again.
But, I did nothing wrong (except for speeding 6 years ago which I paid the fine and haven't had any issues since) and am stuck paying for the courts mistake.
>I am lucky. I can pay that. It sucks but some people would be out food money if they suddenly had to pay $500 to drive again.
Absolutely, court fees and fines disproportionately punish those with low incomes. Increasing enforcement of low level violations by surveillance tech and/or AI is going to crush a lot of people if we don't change that fact.
Finland, I believe, scales fines proportionally to your income. Not perfect (the rich can more easily hide their income than the not so rich), but a good start.
The problem isn’t so much that the rich can hide their income more easily, it‘s that the value of money doesn’t increase linearly. The more money you have available, the less valuable any additional unit of money is to you and the less it hurts if money is taken away from you.
Proportional fines help, but they aren’t perfectly fair.
I suppose there's nothing requiring the proportion-curve for fines to be linear - but that might get silly and have other consequences. I guess the question comes down to value - finding something that the wrongdoer values (and remove it) that is in proportion to the damage to society they did. I would guess, that for the rich that we're talking about, time and/or freedom are more important than money.
The other end of the scale is interesting too - how do you disincentivise/punish for people who don't have any money and just aren't going to pay any fines you give them (i.e. the homeless)?
Then fine by Net Worth and not by Income. Fine by Tax paid. And made it like the Tax system the more you have the higher percentage.
There are people who just park their car anywhere and paid parking tickets, they really don't care because it was too small amount of money.
If anything, people should realise the level of inequality has become. How unfair and unjust the system has made against the bottom half of the population.
I don't think it's possible to find a fair solution that's purely financially based. On the one hand, the poorest members of society might be unable to feed themselves on even a $50 fine. Unless you propose to bankrupt somebody for a speeding ticket, there's just no way to make any amount of fine sting as much for the richest members of society.
Scale linearly to 5% of gross income before deductions, minus minimum wage/poverty line.
Then someone on minimum wage of $30k will just get demerit points while someone on gross income over $200k will pay $8,500. Given that their “taxable income” after deductions is around $80k they will feel that sting.
Yes - a well-known example was Anssi Vanjoki (former Nokia director) getting a fine of 116,000 euros for driving 75 km/h in a 50 zone. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1759791.stm
I have heard of other countries that have similar systems.
It should be noted that many countries that have proportional fines seem to consider speeding to be somewhere close to the severity the American legal system assigns to drunk driving.
It shocks me a little to think of a 14 days worth of income fine for going 45mph in a 30mph zone, yet when I think of the massive death toll from driving it's very possible my attitudes are not where they should be.
It's a bit of a tangent, but all the roads I've seen labeled 30mph or 35mph would be quite safe to take at 45. The flow of traffic is 5mph over anyway. But this is with residential roads universally at 25mph. I'm not sure what kind of road he was on.
I used to think like that when I was young. Then I learned I was short-sighted, and that every time there are traffic rules (including speeding) they (almost) always make sense. Sometimes they don't, true. If you then have contacts within the (local) government they love to get proper feedback from citizens.
To give an example: there's a school nearby where the sign says 30 km/hour. It is an important road people who live in my neighbourhood, connecting them to their home (commute, shopping, etc). I drive on my bicycle crossing that road. Do I assume people drive 30 km/hour or 50 km/hour? Cause many people drive 50 km/hour there. When kids go to/from school people might drive 30 km/hour, I don't know exactly how that works. Many might not even know there's a school there. Even though the sign says there is, perhaps that gives the mental note: "..but it is Saturday." If we're going to arbitrarily ignore traffic rules whenever we see fit, it is going to lead to chaos.
Urban speed limits aren't set by what speed your car is safe to drive at, but rather what speed is safe that you're less likely to hit pedestrians and other cars.
A road has to be designed a certain way based on the speed. You can't just put up a speed limit sign, and speed limit signs are very often not based on what's safe.
You don't seem to be addressing the criticism of your argument, which is that urban speed limits are determined by likelihood of collision with another car, a bicycle, or a pedestrian in the event of an unexpected need to brake hard. This depends on more than just the physical engineering of the road.
There are lots roads with the same environment or with environments less likely to lead to collisions with cars, bicycles, and pedestrians that nevertheless get lower speed limits.
This isn't the case in New Zealand. It's normal for all rural roads in New Zealand to be posted with a 100 km/h limit, with speed recommendations (not limits) on the corners.
Even winding mountain passes, which wouldn't be possible to take at 100 km/h without a race car will still have a 100 km/h limit. It's up to the driver to make a judgement as to how fast they can safely drive.
How do you determine "safe to take at 45"? Kinetic energy increases quadratically to speed, so your braking distance is much larger and doesn't scale linearly to speed so, no, just because you feel your car can safely take those roads at 5-10mph over the limit doesn't mean it's safe, the environment dictates the speed limit, not the road conditions per se.
> so that's an example of it not helping _at all_.
Not helping at all sounds exaggerated?
Surely that fines scale with your income make them more even?
Of course a fine may STILL hit harder on someone with less income - but surely this is more "even" than if the rich guy also got a fine of say 500 € which is pocket money for him?
Absolutely. Those with less income are going from day to day without any significant savings, those with more may well have enough saved to survive several months.
That just screws the middle class (~$40k to $150k). The cost of waging legal warfare against the ticket will still be greater than the inflated fine while the wealthy will easily be able to afford the kind of lawyer who can get an overworked traffic court judge and the cop who has to take a day off from fieldwork to agree to more reasonable terms.
The solution to fines is to simply get rid of fines and instead use a more aggressive "point" system. I'm not wealthy by any means but the threat of a $200 ticket has zero impact on my driving habits whereas the threat of having my license suspended if I get 2 tickets in a 12 month span (a hypothetical example of possible punishment btw) would definitely change how I drive.
I can't really think of any crime that carries a fine rather than revocation of certain rights where this wouldn't work. The only issue is that of enforcement, you have to make the threat of getting caught a second or third time real enough that the punishment becomes psychologically meaningful.
License suspension is already used a lot. In fact, it's such a deterrent that states started using it for various non-traffic related punishments, such as failure to pay child support or drug conviction: https://www.npr.org/2014/03/10/288587071/reconsidering-drive...
Taking someone's license for not paying child support has always struck me as stupidly counter-productive, if you want someone to work and actually be capable to pay their child support.
If the primary motivation anywhere was to alter driver behaviour, a points based penalty system is all it would take. Monetary fines in traffic infringements are entirely for revenue.
Anecdote time: a friend from one of the nation's major universities was involved in a road authority funded study to evaluate the safety impact of newly installed speed cameras at several intersections.
They found there was none. Said road authority pulled the plug and pretended like the study never existed after that.
Anecdote of my own: In my country, monetary fines in traffic infringements are explicitly not for revenue. They mix into the total state revenue and form a minuscule fraction of it. The police sees none of it.
This distinction is made very clear, for example in a parliament answer by the justice minister: "...it is clear that the purpose of fines is not to increase the revenue of police departments but first and foremost to deter traffic violations and increase traffic safety."
> Anecdote of my own: In my country, monetary fines in traffic infringements are explicitly not for revenue. They mix into the total state revenue [...]
You're contradicting your own claim.
Just because someone in a PR position says the purpose is not to increase revenue doesn't make it so. It doesn't matter where the revenue goes, the fines generate revenue. If they didn't care about revenue, they'd use penalty points - with the added benefit of not fucking over the lower and middle classes.
Just because something is revenue doesn't mean that the purpose is entirely to increase revenue. That is the claim you made. I have presented a counter-example to that, where revenue increase is clearly not the only reason for monetary fines. We have the stated purpose of the legislation -- you can call that PR or whatever you'd like but the stated purpose is not revenue increase -- and you have the fact that these revenues do not benefit any police departments or anyone directly. Instead they make up an absolutely tiny fraction of the total revenues of the state.
Just for fun, I calculated this fraction for a given year. The revenue from all traffic violation fines accounted for a whopping 0.1% of the total state revenue.
So apparently the only purpose of these traffic fines are to raise the state revenue by 0.1%, despite the explicit stated purpose of the legislation and any evidence to the contrary. Does that make sense to you?
Is this one of those things where you just know you're right because you feel it in your gut and nothing can ever convince you otherwise?
>The solution to fines is to simply get rid of fines and instead use a more aggressive "point" system.
The points system disproportionately advantages the working poor. Speaking from experience, we have a mixed points+fines[1] system in Poland.
A wealthy person can easily weasel his way out of the points by either having a lawyer argue in court, or - especially in case of automated enforcement like speed traps - simply pay a third party (usually poor person who drives little or not at all) to accept the blame & penalty points in his stead by formally admitting to having been driving during the infraction. I've seen many ads for such exchanges.
Since several kind of jobs directly depend on being able to drive, the law customarily provides a way to shed the points in an expedited way. Typically it involves taking part in road safety courses and/or extra examination. You pay, you attend - or not, if you pay a little extra on the side - and your points get cancelled out. This is much more doable for somebody with expendable income and ability to shuffle work schedule around.
Absent such ability to shed or cancel out the penalty points, any working poor or middle class person who depends on ability to drive to earn the keep is under constant threat of loosing the job. Not a good position to negotiate with the employer.
tl;dr: The points system is unfairly burdensome for the working poor due to the system being much influenced by money. All the points do is to hide away the fact that money gets shit done.
--
[1] the fine are fixed, and rather mild from middle class' perspective.
We got a point system in The Netherlands. If you get too many points, you lose your license. However it only counts for new drivers. Which doesn't make sense at all, as its elitist towards the older adults.
Until you take a look at statistics on age vs. number of accidents. Young people (<30) and new drivers in general are massively over represented.[0] So this isn't elitist, it's just based some very clear statistics.
I maintain that, for the UK at least, that banning male drivers under the age of 25, would save enough lives and money that the backlash would be worth it. Plus you'd probably get a big upswell in support for public transport initiatives.
If you are driving slightly over the speed limit, it is a traffic violation with a fixed amount fine. If you are driving 10% or 15% (don't remember) over the speed limit, it becomes a criminal violation which then takes your reported income into consideration.
This is something that Melbourne, AU has recently grappled with - do you give public transport ticket fines to homeless people? You can give them as many fines as you want, but they're not going to pay them, and will just end up making it harder for them to get out of the cycle they're trapped in. I believe homeless no longer get fined for not having a ticket here. You can argue technicalities and loopholes all you want, but at both extremes (very rich and very poor) the 'normal' system of fines just doesn't make any sense.
I take your point, but there is a big difference between being homeless and being without income. Retirees are the most obvious example, but there are plenty of 'normal' people who don't have an income that basically get to speed and park illegally for free under this sort of system. Unless of course, we put in a minimum fine for everything and charge extra based on income beyond that. But this does nothing to help the poor and ends up just being a punishment for having a good job.
I also think people imagine the super rich having to pay huge fines under this kind of system, but it's the same problem as with taxing the super wealthy. Their income is actually very low relative to the wealth they are accumulating.
Retirees still have an income (public or private pension), as do (in civilised countries) the unemployed (in the form a dole/unemployment benefits), but yes, a minimum charge + extra seems to make sense (perhaps with an exception for homelessness.
> ends up just being a punishment for having a good job.
No; it's a punishment for breaking the law, with (ideally) the punishment scaling to create a similar deterrent to everyone in the society.
I think if it scales to a maximum amount its fine especially for driving related violations. For example nobody needs to be paying 25 grand for a speeding violation thats absurd regardless of income. But its interesting. I believe in Mexico its based on your hourly wage and x amount of hours. So if you have no job and you get a ticket you owe nothing, at least thats how it was when my sister got a ticket in Guadalajara in '07.
It's not based in hourly wage, it's based on daily minimum wage.
If you have no job, you still get a ticket, unless the police officer let's you off the hook or you bribe him (which is very common). I'm not condoning bribing police officers.
Isn't socioeconomic oppression kind of the point of all this, though?
It's not just the implementation of the justice system that needs correction; it's working exactly as designed. We have to change the entire design, not the little implementation details.
NOTE: not specifically about jaywalking, but about fines/fees being disproportionate punishment in general
Jail disproportionately punishes those who are working. (they lose their income source, then they can't pay bills, then their house gets foreclosed, etc.)
Ditching punishment entirely means free-for-all anarchy until somebody takes that opportunity to impose a government with punishments.
What options are left? Torture? Execution? Ignoring the masochists and the suicidal, those don't disproportionately punish people.
In the case of jaywalking, the answer is simple. You just make it legal. Cars can slow down. For routes that need to be able to move at high speed, you build in grade separation.
Jaywalking was just a "growth hack" that needs to be reverted. Society needed fast transportation, and it was developed at any cost. The cost is now too high, so we just roll it back. No torture required....
> In the case of jaywalking, the answer is simple. You just make it legal. Cars can slow down.
Mmmm I dunno about that. Drivers have minimum reaction times and cars have stopping distances. Giving pedestrians the right-of-way in every situation seems like a recipe for a lot of collisions.
It could work, but I think it would involve re-designing countless intersections to provide higher visibility of pedestrians for drivers--not a bad goal, but I think a pretty unfeasible one.
UK has never had jaywalking laws. Most countries don't. We have crossings too, of course, which are optional, but sensible to use when it's rush hours etc. There's no sign that our collisions or injuries are disproportionately high.
A pedestrian crosses when they feel it is safe to do so, and anywhere along the road they choose. Having started to cross they have priority over traffic. Lately some drivers are less inclined to give way to pedestrians, but the law hasn't changed, and they are still legally obliged to do so. Motorways, of course, have no pedestrians.
The word was originally from jay-drivers. Which was a forgotten American term of abuse for carriage drivers who did not stick to the correct side of the road! Once cars arrived the industry lobbied and jaywalking became a term of abuse for pedestrians, and eventually a law.
I googled this quickly, and I'm seeing the UK has 36 deaths per billion miles driven [1] and USA is 1.7 [2]. Can you cite your sources that the UK isn't disproportionately high? I could be reading the numbers wrong.
That disparity is unbelievable. Even allowing the 15 year difference. The UK consistently comes surprisingly well toward the safest end of global road safety stats, and has as long as I can remember. By way of sanity check, it would mean walking in the USA is safer than driving a car in the UK (1.9/bn m). That's not credible. :)
Sourced from gov.uk [0] (ods spreadsheet file), pedestrian fatalities, in 2016, are 7.1 per million population in the United Kingdom; 470 pedestrians killed, and 18.5 in the USA; 5,987 pedestrians killed, confirmed for USA by NHTSA[1].
For overall road traffic deaths, in 2015 UK 2.9 per 100k population (1,770 total deaths) 22.9% pedestrians, USA 10.6 per 100k (32,719 total deaths, approx 5x the UK population, 18x the total reported deaths) 14.1% pedestrians, source WHO, table A2 [2].
Every international comparison and US source I found prefers per 100k or million population and agrees with the above. I stopped there, so can't compare the gov.uk doc you linked, or why the US data in BMJ differs so markedly.
> UK has never had jaywalking laws. Most countries don't... A pedestrian crosses when they feel it is safe to do so, and anywhere along the road they choose. Having started to cross they have priority over traffic.
That's really interesting! I wasn't aware of that.
What happens when a driver hits a pedestrian? Is there an investigation into whether the driver could've stopped in time?
Loosely the presumption of guilt lands on the car driver for failing to stop in time, just as it would if you ran into the back of someone, or hit a cyclist.
There are of course circumstances where a driver has little chance, like a kid running from between parked cars after their ball, someone not looking, or a cyclist running a light.
The police generally investigate the scene and assess what happened, measure out distances, skid distances to assess driver speed, and seek witnesses etc if there's reason to think circumstances aren't straightforward or there's serious injury or death.
There's also some degree of marshalling on busiest roads by putting up railings in some places to encourage crossing at safer spots, or the crossing a few yards away.
Super interesting. I have to admit my bias is to say that it seems difficult to assess when the pedestrian became visible to the driver (which would affect whether they could've stopped in time), but I'm also totally willing to admit that I might be nitpicking and it's a fine system.
The point here, though, is that it doesn't matter whether the driver could've seen them, because culpability rests with the driver by default (except, as mentioned, in situations such as motorways, where pedestrians aren't allowed).
In very general terms, as a pedestrian in the UK, you have no particular right to step into the road other than at marked crossings, but as soon as you do, you have total right of way, no matter how stupid it was of you to step into the road.
There are various crimes in the vein of 'obstructing a public highway' and so forth, so you aren't completely free to be an asshole, but even if you are, it's still on drivers to avoid hitting you; in my experience, this tends to make drivers more careful and aware of nearby pedestrians, so I'm fully in favour of the status quo.
If you're driving a car and someone walks in front of the car you'll slam on the brakes.
This is independent of legality. I'd hope that it'd be the case even if laws were passed that explicitly punished braking in such a scenario.
Anyway, in the UK, it's illegal to walk down the side of a motorway. But basically anywhere else is free reign for pedestrians.
People don't generally walk out in front of (fast moving) cars because they're not suicidal.
In a place like London it's fun to watch (and take part in) the stand-off between cars and pedestrians though.
I womble through crossings all the time. The lights are advisory for pedestrians. They're designed that way; the green man exists for the elderly and children.
When I said "can", I meant by the rules, not the laws of physics. The car is morally obligated to try not to hit anyone no matter what, but that's not what I'm talking about.
And the picture I have in mind isn't someone suicidally leaping in front of a car, it's someone taking one step to order the cars to stop. This would be fine if there was a "reasonable stopping rate" clause, but it doesn't sound like there is.
So what? People don't do this deliberately very often because there's always the risk that the driver doesn't stop. If you try edging into the road you'll get honked at.
The concept of jaywalking has never made any sense to me as a Brit; it's like that joke sign meme of "Danger of death and £20 fine".
If your response to "this works but is not ideal" is "people don't abuse it very often" then I think we agree. I'm not arguing for any particular change.
That's pressure not to jump in front of cars. You don't have to jump in front of a car to trigger this rule, you just have to put one foot into the road.
Are you picturing bored teenagers doing this as a joke or something? In practice this is incredibly rare.
Such 'feral children' will be causing way worse problems elsewhere anyway.
If you're driving in London and someone gets a bit close to the edge of the footpath and looks like they might walk out, yes, you slow down and get ready to stop. If you actually think they're walking out, you brake hard.
Because you don't want to hit them.
But on a very basic level pedestrians have right of way in old world cities anyway.
There are junctions in Central London whereby cars often struggle to pass even when the light is green (Kings Cross station is a good one, taxi drivers like to "push" people out of the way by edging closer)
That's why I said I'm sure it's fine in practice in my first post.
>If you're driving in London and someone gets a bit close to the edge of the footpath and looks like they might walk out, yes, you slow down and get ready to stop. If you actually think they're walking out, you brake hard.
>Because you don't want to hit them.
You don't want to hit them.
Entirely separately from that, if they force you to slam on your brakes, when you are not being reckless, they should be chastised.
> It's unclear to me what the problem is, here.
Giving someone right of way when they're going to cross the road is fine. But it should not be absolute and instant, forcing cars to brake at 100% power.
Someone on a footpath, giving no signs of wanting to enter the road, could do so in one second. It takes longer than that for a car to stop.
To solve the problem, give cars enough slack to stop at medium braking intensity before the right of way kicks in. That's all. Lack of right of way isn't permission to hit them. It just means they're wrong to be sprinting across the street.
> it's someone taking one step to order the cars to stop. This would be fine if there was a "reasonable stopping rate" clause, but it doesn't sound like there is.
Rest assured, no car driver ever stops in this situation unless the pedestrian is at a zebra crossing.
Living in a major city myself, I can think of several intersections where one could be traveling the speed limit and paying attention but be completely unable to stop in time for a pedestrian crossing unexpectedly.
There are numerous streets and corners that are really poorly lit because of scaffolding/debris/etc.
If there was poor visibility for the driver, there's almost certainly poor visibility for the pedestrian too. Most are sensible enough to walk a little further to where they can get a bit better look at what traffic is coming.
If I did hit someone at a visibility blind spot I'd expect to be shouted at by the cop too for not slowing down to a speed suitable for the visibility, and that the speed limit is a maximum sir. In that special sarcastic voice, common to all British cops. That might be later reflected in my fine or penalty. :)
For some reason I'm imagining the worst-case scenario of a pedestrian completely oblivious to what's going on around them and just crossing without looking on a busy street, which I realize is pretty unlikely.
Yeah, that's not how it goes. If it does go that way (some people for example might have mental issues and go into the street, or be disoriented etc), it's not usually held up to the driver if they are hit, except if it's shown that they could have realistically prevented it.
At least in my country, there are two forbidden concepts in traffic law of "excessive speed": one is driving over the defined limit, another is driving at an inadequate speed for the conditions. If you get into an accident because you couldn't stop, but could have if you had been going slower, you're guilty of the latter (that's the gist, exceptions apply).
Basic Rule Of Speed: Only go so fast you can stop within visible distance. If there is not enough room for oncoming traffic, make it half the visible distance.
> It could work, but I think it would involve re-designing countless intersections to provide higher visibility of pedestrians for drivers--not a bad goal, but I think a pretty unfeasible one.
"Having started to cross they have priority over traffic"
- Not true and potentially dangerous misinformation.
Jaywalking controls are stupid because:
1. They restrict the freedom of pedestrians.
2. They encourage extra pedestrian crossings, which increases the number of hazards to drivers.
3. They move responsibility for pedestrian safety from pedestrians to drivers.
As a Briton, it always feels like living in some authoritarian, ultra-controlled future to be at a roadside in another country, with no cars within range, and not to be allowed to walk across to the other side.
Also more generally. See Road users requiring extra care, Pedestrians (205 to 210).
The onus is on both to take adequate care, and on drivers to stop in time. The presumption of fault is on the driver. Which is not the same as saying pedestrians have free reign to leap into the path of oncoming vehicles, anywhere they like, expecting traffic to stop on a sixpence. Even though that sometimes seems the done thing in London. After all, pedestrians are expected to only cross when it's safe to do so.
So I'm not quite sure what the GP is getting at, except it's often unwise trying to provide a few sentence summary of anything lengthy on HN. :)
>>In the case of jaywalking, the answer is simple. You just make it legal. Cars can slow down.
> Mmmm I dunno about that. Drivers have minimum reaction times and cars have stopping distances
Actually in many countries like the Netherlands and the UK, inside the city pedestrians have priority (right of way) over traffic everywhere. If a pedestrian crosses you stop, no jaywalking BS.
That's dangerously wrong. No, pedestrians do not have right of way over traffic everywhere inside cities in NL (though you could be forgiven to think it is that way by observing traffic).
Pedestrians do have right of way inside 'woonerven'.
Now, the fact that pedestrians do not have right of way does not mean cars are going to flatten people with impunity, of course every driver will do what they can to avoid an accident with a pedestrian. But if you step out in traffic on a busy Amsterdam street there most certainly will be an accident, even if everybody will do their best to avoid you, and you will be liable in that case, even if you're part of the mess.
Probably "right to cross" would be a better term. What I'm getting at is pedestrians can cross the road in cities, without it considered jaywalking/illegal, and cars will generally just stop for them if they see them wanting to cross.
Of course if you just jump into traffic in the last minute you'll be hit, and it will be on you.
You wouldn't except this to happen to the equivalent of the
New Jersey Turnpike, of course. So, on high speed highways, on the other hand, you're often not allowed to randomly cross, except in specific areas.
Note that this is not the case everyone in Europe necessarily. But you can cross outside zebra crossing in the UK, Netherlands, Greece, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway.
In some countries like Italy or France it is legal as long as there's no explicit zebra crossing nearby (e.g. without 50 or 100 meters).
In most of the countries, crossing the equivalent of highways or interstates is illegal (except in designated overpasses and such).
Regarding the question about what happens to drivers, here's an example for what's the case in Belgium "any physical damage to a pedestrian caused by a traffic accident shall be compensated by the insurance of the drivers involved, regardless of the responsibility of the pedestrian, except if that pedestrian is over 14 and wanted the accident and its consequences to occur."
The only issue I have with keeping it illegal is that so many people already do it. I don't commute by car but I drive a couple evenings a week through the city, and in every single intersection on my trip (5 miles) I see people jaywalking. I see people do it right in front of cops, and nobody cares.
What is the purpose of a law that few people follow, and which is never enforced? Shouldn't the laws of a republic reflect the will of the citizens?
I definitely see your point, and I have mixed feelings on it to be fair (for the very reason you noted). I think it's more about establishing right-of-way for me, more than punishing pedestrians for jaywalking.
I don't think it's smart to allow pedestrians the right-of-way at all times, but I'm also learning that other countries do this already so I'm certainly willing to admit I could be wrong here!
> I don't think it's smart to allow pedestrians the right-of-way at all times, but I'm also learning that other countries do this already
I don't think there is any country with a rule like that. I do think many people are articulating a different rule [1] badly, making it appear as-if.
[1] Pedestrians can cross roads everywhere, but only if it's safe to do so and don't obstruct traffic. During the crossing transverse traffic does not have right of way momentarily.
In Germany I think it's different. If you cross when you aren't allowed the car has the right of way. I have actually no idea why this isn't the case in Canada. Seems pretty reasonable; light shows 'walk' symbol and you cross knowing you are in the right of way, but the hand stops flashing and if a car hits you then your dead and wrong. Seems a really reliable system that will safely predict outcomes consistent with obliging behavior.
To be honest, I walk quite often and yet I'm absolutely against pedestrian rights as they are today and I believe it's totally impractical and against any common sense having the laws in favour of pedestrians as they are now, nor do I believe it makes roads safer for anyone. In fact if you apply human psychology/behavior inclusive of a person's ability to focus on multiple obstructions, notifications, etc, I'd be willing to bet that drivers are by far overwhelmed in modern cities and that it's reckless disregard for public safety that pedestrians are given absolutely no accountability for their actions beyond dead right or right.
It's because the streets were originally for pedestrians. Cars invaded the space previously used by people walking. Why does wearing a big box give you the right to own the road? By that logic I should be able to ride my bike on the footpath and blame any pedestrians I hit.
This is not historically correct. Streets exist for carts and chariots and carriages. These are drawn by horses, oxen, mules, donkeys, and stranger things.
Those were probably killing jaywalkers in ancient Rome.
Pedestrians only need paths, which may have staircases and stepping stones.
Also curious as with the other poster: What happens when a driver hits a pedestrian? Do they do an investigation into whether the driver could've stopped in time/was traveling the speed limit/etc?
Here's an article from 2010 saying they hadn't given a single ticket in Boston or Cambridge in years. To my knowledge they still don't give out the tickets. I've certainly jaywalked in front of cops in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Quincy without penalty for decades. So even if it's in the state law it's not enforced around Boston.
I lived in the Seattle area for a couple years and that's the only time in my life I ever saw a person penalized for jaywalking and I was shocked to see it. One of the reasons I'm glad to be back in Boston.
>Also curious as with the other poster: What happens when a driver hits a pedestrian? Do they do an investigation into whether the driver could've stopped in time/was traveling the speed limit/etc?
Yes. And the driver has the burden of proof. They drive in a city, so they should have appropriate distance from anything in front of them, and go slow enough to stop. What if it was a kid running into the street?
> so they should have appropriate distance from anything in front of them, and go slow enough to stop
This doesn't make sense. Crossing pedestrians go across the road, so if you are driving on a lane next to the sidewalk, then you could only go in first gear hovering the brakes, because any pedestrian on the sidewalk could start to cross the road in ~one second or less and would have right of way. Basically all streets would be zebra crossings. Obviously not how it works.
Drivers have no problem avoiding other cars, which move much more quickly, are much less manoeuvreable, and have longer stopping distances. Strikes me that avoiding people on foot ought to be pretty simple.
That's true of other cars, too. They're big, change direction slowly, and are covered in bright lights. Pedestrians are small, can (and do) change direction quickly, and often wear dark colors, even at night.
Cars are also much more predictable. They have lines that show where they're going, (usually) signal before changing direction, and (IME) are much more likely to obey red lights. I rarely see cars simply ignore a red light, but I see pedestrians do it all the time.
Cars don't suddenly become visible unexpectedly unlike pedestrians, so that seems like a strange argument to me--with the notable exception perhaps of right-on-red, which isn't universal for sure (presumably for this very reason). Even then, the moving traffic has the right-of-way there.
This manner of thinking is why we have issues such as black people being disproportionately affected by Marijuana laws or large fines/punishments for relatively benign things such as jaywalking.
The way we doll out punishment in America ends up being a slap on the wrist for the rich and wealthy and devasting for the poor and minorities.
Well, like Anacharsis told to Solon (the lawmaker) in 6 BC Athens:
"[Your] laws are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth".
That's a nice quote -- I wasn't familiar with Anacharsis, so I read up on him. For what it's worth, considering he came to Athens in 589 BC[0], I think your date of 6 BC is a little off.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacharsis
Scaling fines up to higher incomes for things that don't really matter (jaywalking, minor traffic violations) seems antithetical to the individualistic core of American culture. We typically try to equalize society by raising the floor for the many, rather than lowering the ceiling for the few.
If they really don't matter, why forbid them at all?
For things that are worth forbidding, scaling is surely necessary to create a meaningful disincentive for the rich, without destroying the poor by setting very high flat fines.
Depends what you think the fines are for. If they are to discourage behaviour, it makes sense to me to try to make them equally discouraging to everyone, which requires scaling.
The time spent while pulled over is a pretty big discouragement to everyone. Time cost scales with wealth.
But victimless "crimes" don't need punitive discouragement the way other harmful activities might. Jaywalking, speeding, turning right from the left lane, these things happen hundreds of times a day in a city, and spottily enforced huge fines are not likely to address whatever societal harm these activities might cause. There are probably better ways to spread and encourage the small social norms that allow society to function. Leave large fines for large harm.
..the individualistic core of American culture. We typically try to equalize society by raising the floor for the many, rather than lowering the ceiling for the few.
That's what they teach you anyway. The reality - e.g. ridiculously expensive medical bills, widespread poverty - is rather different, so I hear.
It's not just US culture, the Constitution itself prohibits "excessive fines" in the 8th Amendment. The framers were pretty good at predicting future kinds of vigilante justice that people thought up.
Fines could be proportional to income and/or wealth. Court fees could be waived for those who paying is a hardship.
Bail is already often scaled based on wealth, so this isn't unheard of.
You seem to be willfully misunderstanding the point. But I suspect that’s intentional. If you really think this, please do some reading on the subject of how court fees and small-scale civil violations and all the consequences of those things can lead to a vicious cycle of financial destruction for families on the edge of economic self sufficiency.
I'm not misunderstanding it. I'm saying there is no good solution here.
Feel free to propose a punishment that isn't disproportionate to somebody. I don't think such a punishment exists, aside from crazy edge cases like "do not enforce the law".
Go ahead. Try to make a suggestion that won't punish some people more than others.
In case it makes you feel any better about the system of fines, we can say that the disproportionate impact is itself a punishment for the lifestyle choices that lead to being poor. OK, that is awful, but it's some sort of justification.
Arguing over fairness may be a dead end. But what about the practical question of incentives? How can a flat fine provide a significant disincentive to the very rich (without being so high that it would completely wipe out the average person)?
It’s funny but at the end of the day what youre talking about is the realization of idiocracy through our implementation of shitty “automation” using software.
I mean basically you have a computer system where the court system, law enforcement and DMV are all saying your license is expired for failure to pay...when you actually paid. Now you are getting more tickets and basically stuck in an infinite loop of hell.
I’m currently going through the same thing with my Bank (BOA), where my car window was smashed my wallet (credit and debit card stolen) and cards were used by the 2 theives at footlocker for ~$500. The bank software even caught the fraud first and texted me about suspicious activity on the cards before I knew what happened, the cards were reported stolen, I have a police report, but Bank of America keeps denying my claim saying they investigated and the purchase was legit because my “chip was present” even though they know the card was stolen and used by the theives. When I talk to a person it’s always “oh let me reinitiate a new claim and I’ll make detailed notes, you should definitely get your money back, that makes no sense.” Automated claim comes back “denied. Valid transaction, chip present.”
Like you I will probably have to take legal action to sort this out, at least in my case I’m a lawyer and can file a small claims case without paying a lawyer, but i will have to front the filing fees out of pocket and it will still cost me time/effort.
Pretty much. The same exists in the UK in all sorts of fields.
My preferred strategy is repeated escalation mixed with what I'd call some variant of baby language.
"You owe me X, please send me X, your internal processes are broken, please send me X".
"No, I don't care about your internal processes, you owe me X, please send me X."
"You haven't sent me X yet; can you send me X or do I need to initiate legal action?"
So far this has always resulted in me actually getting the X I'm rightfully owed. One day it probably won't. Sigh.
Amazon in particular have been amusing WRT this. "Our internal procedure takes X days..." At that point I usually cut them off and remind them that it's none of my business how they run things internally; what I want is resolution for the issue I'm facing.
I’ve always had excellent, and prompt customer service from Amazon. I’m curious to know what kinds of issues have you encountered where you were unhappy with how they dealt with it?
I recently ordered over £1000 worth of items which on arrival had been replaced (or incorrectly packed) as random household items of low value.
It took almost a month to get a refund whilst Amazon 'investigated'. Yes, it was eventually fixed, but not without a huge amount of 'process says this and that' warbling.
I would never think of banking with BOA after all their shenanigans during the financial crises. A couple years ago I moved all my accounts from another major bank (one that rhymes with 'shittybank') to an online-only bank to avoid just this kind of nonsense. I miss a few conveniences but haven't had any cause to regret it.
In the US we separate attorneys fees from other “court costs”. Typically a winning party in my county would win their costs (in a hypothetical case like mine that would be the initial filing and maybe the cost to serve the court filing on the Bank).
Attorneys fees are more complicated and the general rule is actually that each party bears it’s own attorneys fees, but there are many execrations from statutes authorizing them in certain types of cases and situations or if a contract includes a provision providing for them. It’s possible one or more contracts I have with the bank includes such a provision, I’d have to look at my credit card agreement (it may even require mediation, but that’s part of the small claims process in my jurisdiction anyway). Also It’s typically not allowed that a lawyer representing themselves can be awarded fees.
In my country, there are no lawyers in small claims court, so there'd be no attorney fees. The only cost other than time is usually the amount of money charged by the bailiff you hire to deliver the Summons or whatever the document is called.
So if a client refused to pay you $3000, you take them to small claims court for $3500 or whatever (you have to convince the court that these extra charges for the bailiff fees, your transport to and from court, etc, are just).
It's a shame that costs for fighting issues like that aren't automatically awarded. I have no idea about the relevant laws and how they might be shaped to protect the institutions involved, but it would seem to be a sane way to deal with this type of thing, and provide a small amount of accountability for the institutions (and therefore _some_ incentive to fix systemic issues).
Yeah I was kind of shocked when the lawyer said yesterday I'd be on the hook for more costs. I almost assumed it'd be free or credited since it was taken care of and is probably an honest mistake.
But, I guess that proves what they say about assumptions!
Don't know how it works there. For traffic court here, NJ, I've always taken matters into my own hands. The last ticket I received was for failing to update my address. I argued to the prosecutor that the law only required me to have an address where I received mail. He only cared that I updated it by the time I made my appearance and quickly dismissed. However, the court cost was actually more than the ticket and I made a point to ask him to waive that as well, which he did.
There are other sorts of 'administrative' fees that are nearly impossible to waive. Things like license reinstatement, points surcharges, and costs from MVC (DMV) usually can't be waived by the court as it isn't the court that imposes them.
The office of the clerk of court is hours away in another state. And its been the weekend so hasn't been open. Based on the traffic record I pulled on myself yesterday it shows payment never received from the court, although I have a receipt for $312 bucks paid. Maybe a simple fix but Im paying to have someone take care of it. Since I now have a court date in another city I live hours from during a work week.
I've had two parking tickets in my life - one a few weeks ago and one almost a decade ago - Ive still got both receipts, on the off chance something like this happens.
I assume that it's not a receipt like from a store, but a governmental "receipt" - a document proving payment of fine, which is something I'd definitely save on purpose.
(I'm not from the US, I have no idea how yours look - in Europe we have that on an A4 paper)
Did you not change your address and license when you moved states? That's typically required within 30 or 60 days, although a lot of people do ignore those laws.
fair enough. But that's a pretty adversarial way to think about the state (as an opponent of the citizen). I'd prefer to think that in most democracies, laws are usually designed or at least intended to protect citizens from abuses like that. That said, I think the U.S. has a less-than-stellar reputation for citizen-friendly laws. :(
I don't think a minor clerical error demonstrates that "the justice system is screwed." Mistakes will happen and they operate at pretty high volume.
I was on the receiving end of one of these years ago. Pulled over and arrested for missing payments on a few tickets. The tickets were paid prior and they eventually realized their mistake, but I still had to pay the jail processing fee.
It sucks, and things could certainly be better, but saying that the entire justice system is "screwed" is a pretty harsh indictment.
I was pulled over multiple times in NJ while driving with a valid, registered out of state license plate. Somebody's LPR software is conveniently flagging valid plates as an excuse to make traffic stops.
Hold the government employees liable (monetarily and criminally if they cause a loss of rights) for their mistakes and the problem will fix itself in quick order.
If employees were personally liable for costs of mistakes, no one would do the work - too much personal risk involved. Also, the degree of blaming anyone-but-me would be off the charts, crippling the organization. Having some type of accountability is important - incompetent people should not be allowed to keep their job, and institutions should have some incentive to improve, but not sure putting all the burden on individuals is the right answer.
What if you had to pay the cost of every bug you created? I'm sure a lot of us developers would be digging ditches instead. :)
There are many jobs for which the doer is personally liable. They are required to be bonded and insured so that if anything happens, they don't go bankrupt or otherwise avoid compensating for damages. And there are still people to do the work.
Not sure that's the best solution here, but the assumption that "no one would do the work" is likely not correct.
Good point. Although if they're required to be bonded as part of the job requirements, that means they still don't feel the full effect of the cost of their mistakes which is what I think was being proposed. That said, it's a lot closer along that spectrum because I assume their ability to be bonded/insured will be affected by subsequent claims against the bond.
I'm also not sure exactly how bonding would work in jobs where blame is hard to determine, or not attributable to a single individual (ie systemic issue). Perhaps that's one of the reasons it's not done more commonly.
True. Collective responsibility is a much better solution - then it is in bosses' best interest to create such environment that mistakes have as low impact as possible. And it's up to the whole team to make that happen. Similar to how it is done in (properly managed) software development companies.
Except they are usually granted immunity by statute. It came up in conversation the other day with a group of friends, the question of 'citizens arrest'.
In my state, NJ, anyone can bring a disorderly person in front of a judge or detain someone who's suspected to have committed a major crime. However, it never happens because if we were incorrect then all sorts of civil and criminal claims could be made for injuries and/or false imprisonment.
We scoured the state's criminal law and found out members of law enforcement were relieved from liability if they were wrong about the above.
The other job that was exempt from liability was librarian. Apparently, a librarian can tackle someone suspected of stealing a book and it's ok under NJ law. [1]
That might help. I am no expert on govt stuff so I will defer to those who are. But it does suck I don't have an ID right now. You never notice how often you use it (travel, bars, events) until you don't have one!
Passport card is something I recommend. When traveling in states out of the area, some don't like my license as primary ID. There's a second privacy benefit too, the passport card does not have your address on it for bars that scan licenses and keep the addresses in database.
Can you file a punitive lawsuit against every single person involved? I mean every single person. Scorched Earth approach. Maybe they will be slightly more attentive to their duties in the future.
I dunno. Maybe. But I don't have interest in doing that. Which will probably contribute to this continuing. But its easier for me to just pay and move on. If I were to spend another 10 hours on this there is a time cost to doing so that is not worth it for me.
yep. My sole focus is being able to travel home tomorrow (legally) and go to work. Else, I am going to get on a bus to go home and uber to and from work for the next few days while this is worked on.
This doesn't pass the smell test. If you have a receipt from the court showing that the fine was settled, how can they be saying they never got the money?
As an aside this is a good reminder to keep forever any receipts for settlements with courts, the IRS, or other regulators.
> If you have a receipt from the court showing that the fine was settled, how can they be saying they never got the money?
Because they're the ones with the power to give your license back, so you either do what they say or spend the next year without a license trying to work out what went wrong. They're the court - nothing happens to them when they screw up.
yep. Lawyer informed yesterday these types of cases are low priority and will often be continued for months. So each time I had a court date I would be traveling 6ish hours round trip only to have it continued. Since I have a job and am generally not able to travel for 6 hours during the week I will be paying a lawyer to deal with this mistake.
Ha I kid you not I didn't believe it would pass the smell test either.
However I got a $285 ticket proving it yesterday. Courts aren't open on the weekends so my lawyer will be figuring it out tomorrow.
I will be in the DMV first thing in the morning to try to get a new license so I can travel home (went to parents house for Holiday). I have to pay a $65 reinstatement fee tomorrow to get a new license as well.
If you're in the Raleigh area as your name suggests, I'd advise you to be there 30+ minutes before they open. Our DMVs are a nightmare right now thanks to Real ID. I had go back in September - got my number at 1:45 PM and was the last person called before the office closed at 5 PM.
>If you have a receipt from the court showing that the fine was settled, how can they be saying they never got the money?
I assume the payment did not triggered the right things to mark the fine as payed, or someone made a mistake a number somewhere and something failed. You should always keep your receipt for a while or forever (keep energy/phone bills for a few months)
I received a notice about not paying a ticket, 6+ years after I had paid for it. Lucky for me, I still had the paper receipt and so I went into the SF courthouse to show proof of payment. After reviewing it, the clerk told me that it looked like their IT modernization had erroneously marked my case as being unpaid. I can't imagine how very painful the resolution process would have been if I had not kept that receipt.
People aren't going to trust a receipt over the system they use. It's as simple as someone checking their computer seeing that OP never paid and then forwarding it to the right place. It's not like the cop has the power to override the system because that would be nightmare in terms of accountability and potential abuse.
Yea, it sucks and it's unfair, but there's nothing unbelievable about it. For any set of rules, there are always going to be people that fall through the cracks.
Add to that a justice system also mostly automated and you are quickly caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare you can't get out if something goes wrong. Imagine the justice system run like google support. Even if something is clearly wrong you can't clear it up if you are not a famous person with a big Twitter following.
On the other hand, a justice system which has most of the menial tasks automated might have more resources to do the important tasks well.
Similarly, Google could have a mostly automated system detecting violations and such, and also a good human support system with power to override the decisions of the former; the two are not really incompatible.
> have a mostly automated system detecting violations and such, and also a good human support system with power to override the decisions of the former; the two are not really incompatible.
While that's true in the abstract, I don't think it's true in present society. Both private companies and government are under near-constant pressure to cut costs, and the people who are charged with implementing those cuts will be tempted to under-resource the human override team or cut it entirely. Quality of service isn't the priority.
The exact same argument can be made to those criticizing the use of automation: it doesn't matter, because that pressure means it will be used anyway. And the whole discussion becomes meaningless.
I know an Android dev who had his Play account shut down for an unjustified reason. It took him a very long time to reactivate it. Especially the little guy doesn't get much attention from humans. That was a few years ago. Maybe it's better now.
It's probably worse for a few, and better for a lot. Maybe the Google automation is shutting down a hundred nefarious developers for every one legitimate developer. Without the automation all would be active; with the automation one guy gets screwed and it's hard for him to navigate his way back, but thousands of users are better off
Most justice systems are built on the assumption that it's better to let 100 guilty people go than convicting one innocent person. Once we accept that it's OK to convict innocent people as long as the averages are fine then we are heading into serious trouble.
You're comparing a merchant system with a criminal justice system. Obviously the cost or the downside of false positive is very different between those two, as well as the cost of making the judgement itself, given the difference in scale.
On the other hand, a justice system which has most of the menial tasks automated might have more resources to do the important tasks well.
They said the same thing about banking when we got ATM's. But banking has only gotten worse, more impersonal, and more frustrating and alienating for the average person.
I'm not nearly old enough to remember prior to ATMs. But I love ATMs. I only have to go inside the bank to do things once every few years. Everything else is on the phone or ATM. And the people I deal with on the phone are almost always very helpful and knowledgeable.
I know people have a lot of trouble with some of the big banks like Bank of America and Chase. But those aren't issues with the banking industry but those specific companies. There's plenty of smaller banks and credit unions who don't exploit their customers at every opportunity.
I'm not nearly old enough to remember prior to ATMs.
I am. When ATM's started to become a thing, we were told that with ATM's automating the basics, the bankers and tellers would have more time for more personalized service, Banks would lower fees through cost savings, and we'd all have higher interest rates on our savings because the banks would save so much money.
None of those things happened. Things just got worse.
A couple of years ago I tried to get a loan. A credit union I tried to approach wouldn't let ask questions of someone on the phone, or in a branch, until I'd cleared the computer's online pre-screening.
At another bank (Chase), a banker sat down with me, but was not able to discuss my finances in any way. All he could do was punch my information into his computer, and give me the same information I would have gotten by doing the same process online.
Citibank, at least, let me talk to someone in person who seemed interested in my business. But then I went on vacation, and by the time I returned two weeks later, the offer was no longer valid and I was referred to the web site.
Again, things have gotten worse not better. Just because you're too young to know that things were once better doesn't mean they're not worse.
You're just using bad banks. I have a great private bank in San Francisco (First Republic), where I get personalized service via email, phone, or in person any time I need it. I can use any ATM in the world free of charge, and any time I want to do anything it's a quick email away. (Including opening new business accounts, complicated requests, ordering cash in $2 notes, whatever you could think of).
I'm familiar with First Republic. It's a nice bank. If you never leave the Bay Area, and the most complicated things you do can be accomplished at an ATM.
I'm pretty sure my needs are just as complex as yours. I run a venture fund and have a dozen accounts with them. It's just that anything I need can be done remotely. I've gone in branch (to deposit large amounts of cash or to order $2 bills) maybe 3 times in 10 years.
You are using banks wrong. That's not unexpected, most banks are designed to encourage you to use banks wrong and to in turn make this experience awful.
Last century, when I was a teenager, somebody set up a bank in the UK with an understanding of where all this is going. I have been with that bank ever since for my day-to-day banking needs.
The First Direct bank. They don't have any branches, they pay the same fees as other banks for there to be ATMs that work with their cards, and they own a web site and so on.
Instead of spending money on big solid-looking buildings people rarely visit, they run a massive 24/7 call centre, and all the call centre employees are trained to provide the entire service, since that's all they do. Absolutely every eventuality I've encountered was handled by telephoning them and then talking to a human. I often don't call them for six months at a time, but I've also had period when I called five times a day.
Two examples:
One day, still last century, I lost my wallet. Oh dear. I wanted to go out with friends, but I had no money, no cards. So I telephoned my bank. "Where are you?" they asked, because this was last century, so I was just a random voice with no indication of location. They looked up where I was, located some other bank building nearby and sent me there, then negotiated with that bank to give me cash.
This century, but a few years back, I bought somewhere to live. This involved a very large transaction. I phoned the bank, walked through exactly what I was doing and why, confirmed the transfer details and then they explained that no single employee of the bank is authorised to wave through such a transaction and I should expect to receive a phone call from another employee, who would confirm all the details again and then they could both authorise it. So I spoke to two people, for maybe a total of twenty minutes. Which considering the eye-watering sum of money that was about to just magically vanish from my account seems OK.
I don't understand why people would put up with any other sort of bank. I particularly don't understand people who are too busy to "go to the bank" on week days and then moan about it. This is 2018, I already didn't have to "go to the bank" in 1998. Get a better bank.
It's interesting that none of your examples has anything to do with ATMs, nor with the workers that ATMs replaced (as far as I know, tellers never gave out loans). Are you confident the introduction of ATMs was the reason that led to this reduction in quality of service?
I can‘t defend most banks but (I live in the in UK and) I’ve switch to Monzo who was explicitly built with that in mind: they manage to automate a lot of interactions, save on agencies, etc. explicitly to be able to invest more on services. This allows them to offer a visibly far better service. Thanks to automation, they have been profitable for a couple of months now (with a million customers) and have now switched on growth mechanisms.
Disclosure: I know several people working there but I have never used my contacts for preferential customer service, nor would I expect that the service could be better than the standard one.
Generally, I think that the incredible gains from automation are possible but require a lot of internal changes to make sense; changes that most companies do not have the leadership to conduct. This s why new actors often take advantage of those. I suspect that’s why Google replaced Encyclopedia Brittanica and countless more examples.
They've added (this week) the ability to pay in small amounts of cash through the Paypoint network (https://monzo.com/blog/2018/11/21/deposit-cash/) and I believe they'll eventually add support for paying in thorough Post Office branches too. It's still pretty limited, but it's a start!
How do you order foreign currency?
Honestly I had no idea people even used their bank to do this!
Honestly I had no idea people even used their bank to do this!
I do this all the time. Citibank has a service called World Wallet where you call a number, and they'll FedEx you whatever currency you want anywhere in the world in 24-48 hours.
I used to just use the American Express offices when I traveled, but as my travel got more interesting, AmEx outlets became less common. Also, AmEx started only stocking popular currencies, while the Citi service delivers pretty much any currency that's legal where you are.
I don’t have that use case but yes, they have announced a service to do that.
> How do you order foreign currency?
I would typically use my card at ATMs in a foreign country (which comes with a small fee above a certain amount). In practice, I almost always need cash abroad for reasons covered by work-related expenses, and I keep those transactions on my Revolut account.
USAA has only one physical location in San Antonio but they've never failed to be courteous and helpful over the phone. And their app is a great replacement for a physical location for most of my banking needs.
I wouldn't blame the automation - I would blame consolidation in the banking industry into ever-larger firms, which seldom have the customer's interests in mind.
Not my experience at all. I spent a lot of time in the 80s standing in bank lines with my mom for her to do things that anyone now does with an ATM or a banking app much much more quickly. And as an added benefit, when I do need to interact with an actual human at my bank, the lines are much shorter and the whole thing is just more efficient and far less aggravating.
Has it? I don't know, the people I know never had a good relationship with their banks. Plus, there were other changes; at least in some places, banks were much smaller than today. Is it not true where you live? If it is, couldn't that have the effects you describe?
If the escalation is accessible, everyone will try it. That includes anyone who got handled correctly.
And as detection becomes more accurate, an even larger ratio of escalations will be blatantly wrong.
This explains why slightly inept well meaning companies shy away from such escalation paths.
I wonder about the stats on appeals in court. How many are successful. How many go to an appeal at all. How costly is a single appeal / how costly is the average successful appeal.
"Escalation" implies the first decision is automated; I was suggesting more of a process where the "fact finding" is automated, but the decision is still manual.
That said, even the system you're describing and with a 100% escalation rate should be cheaper than a fully manual process. The problem is that those "well meaning" companies aren't; their goal is to minimize cost, stopping only if it drops their revenue. But no system will be good with such goals.
Another way to look at it is that an organization that is willing to automate everything for the sake of efficiency/profit is probably not too interested in "adding a lot more quality human support to compensate for that extreme automation".
Chances are it wants to automate 100% (or at least 99.99%) of it jobs and will strive to achieve that, while considering any human cost as "friction" or inefficiency that needs to be eliminated.
> On the other hand, a justice system which has most of the menial tasks automated might have more resources to do the important tasks well.
Justice systems are always about exceptions. Computers handle exceptions EXTREMELY poorly.
A justice system should be required to have a human on record for every action taken against another human being. The computers can be used to verify this, but they should not be allowed to be primary.
I don’t know how to compare the US justice system to Google support, but the former is already notoriously difficult, expensive, inefficient, and inaccessible to large groups of people.
The purpose of computers is to enhance the ability of humans who have a job to accomplish, not do their job for them. If we don't figure this out as a society, we're doomed.
Also the operators of a computer system should always be held responsible for any errors of that system. Mistakes by the system are your* mistakes. Any decisions made by the system must be explained by you. All costs rectifying those mistakes must be bared by you.
*Obviously "you" means your organization, company, etc. and not necessarily some random office clerk.
If you're big enough, Google provides excellent support. I was once responsible for a product that generated $30k/month in adsense revenue. It got banned due to adult content and my attempts to clean everything up weren't entirely successful. I ended up on chat with someone from adsense and they essentially held my hand for an hour as we found and removed every bit of porn in the product.
This sounds like a lot of people's experiences with Equifax and Transunion. They make a mistake and it can take you a decade and a lot of money and effort to clear your name.
I just finished reading The Secret Barrister and it already seems to be the case, at least in the UK, that if something is wrong you can't really clear it up.
This is literally the plot to the 1971 George Lucas sci-fi film THX 1138, down to the detail: "set in a dystopian future in which the populace is controlled through android police ... ."
It's one of the least automated systems (ie, employing technology to reduce inefficiencies) of all industry 'niches' in the western world.
Law enforcement might be using technology to dole out punishment/fines more efficiently, but the actual justice system that civilians have to deal with after getting fined or charged (ie, the world of lawyers, judges, and courts) is extremely backwards in their use of humans, paper, fax machines, etc. Not using even basic technology. The justice system is famous for the extreme slowness for the amount of human-time required in processing of even the most basic small details.
By eliminating the amount of human-time (by a hired lawyer or oneself) that each person has to engage the systems (for example by missing work or paying with money instead of time) would do a lot of help the poor better deal with the justice system - and get better and fairer treatment by the system.
This is something ordinary people who haven’t run afoul of the justice system cannot understand. It must be witnessed first hand to be comprehended.
The justice system is a big boulder at the top of a mountain. Once an arrest or accusation sets in it motion, unless you are powerful and or wealthy, it will do what boulders do, it can do no different. It is not cognizant, it just is.
It takes immense resources to stop or avoid this boulder. Resources far exceeding even the well-to-do often times.
The system is there to win cases and incarcerate and my god does it do just that.
Innocent or not, the system moves humans.
Do not pray the jury hears your side, pray you never get so much as accused. Look up the conviction rates for district attorneys across the country. You tell me, does that look justice?
I'd expect conviction rates to be pretty high. It means they are only bringing charges when they have strong evidence. If conviction rates were low I'd be asking why that prosecutor was wasting his time on cases he can't win.
It means they are only bringing charges when they have strong evidence
We would hope so. It could also mean far worse things are happening. We’ve all seen documentaries and news shows of people wrongly convicted. Why do we think the only incidences are the ones reported.
I’ve watched detectives lie on the stand when a guilty verdict was already in hand. Why do that? How do they treat the innocent if that’s how they act when the facts of the case are enough to convict?
How many of us would be surprised to learn that not a single government official can now be auto-charged with jaywalking? There's generalization accomplished in minutes.
Someone could just do that every time that problem occurs; commit a new if-statement, close the ticket, and upper management says "Look at how much work this guy gets done! Now there's our star programmer."
My thoughts too. That is the "beauty" of AI. I don't think they will retrain the model, as you probably don't know what caused this in the first place.
Ironically, the better the AI, the worse this problem is going to get. The error rate will never be zero, but the closer it gets to zero, the more the AI's judgement will be presumed to be correct by the legal system. So if you happen to be one of those unlucky souls who draws the false-positive card in an era where those are rare, you could be totally hosed.
Because our current justice system never hands out false positive cards today.
The real question should be if this is better than the false positive rate we have today, though that’s probably unknowable. At least when AI fails, it fails spectacularly.
No. Sometimes AI fails spectacularly, and sometimes it fails banally (not to be confused with benignly). But when it fails spectacularly it makes the papers. When it fails banally you never hear about it.
Today society has a healthy skepticism of AI because it's new and untried. But some day that will change. AI will get better, and the spectacular failures in particular will be reigned in. Nonetheless, it will still fail some times. Society may forget that if we don't have the spectacular failures to remind us.
> our current justice system never hands out false positive cards today.
Of course it does. The difference is that we know that humans are fallible. At the moment we still know this about machines too. My concern is what happens when the machines start to appear infallible, but still aren't.
It's China. So she's just have her social credit score repeatedly dinged every time the bus ran a red light until she wasn't allowed to travel anymore, wasn't allowed to work anymore, wasn't allowed to have a bank account, or allowed out of her apartment.
Bureaucracy is so much more efficient when everything is automated, and we're all tabulated. We can just let the computers disappear troublesome people. If a few people are disenfranchised for no fault of their own, that's OK. They're just "edge cases." /s
The exact same things are done constantly by big companies (Google, Apple, etc.). The only difference is you have much less recourse when it happens there. At least the government gives you rights you can fight for in court.
That's absolutely hilarious. But at least it was easily fixed.
But to anyone complaining about how this is dystopian: compare it to human police officers who can racially profile and exhibit their prejudices to disproportionately target segments of the population, and which there is absolutely zero easy fix for, especially when we consider how prevalent unconscious bias is.
At least an automated system can be analyzed for bias and, when it's found, corrected. There's a lot to be said (in terms of justice) for fair and uniform enforcement of a law, assuming of course there is due process for appeals (and that the law is democratically legitimate in the first place).
there will always be humans programming and running these systems at the end of the day.
in the best case they will be heavily audited and will not be allowed to make important decisions.
in the worst case biases will be programmed into the systems decision making algorithms, amplifying the power of those controlling the systems
one of the best systems we've come up with for government relies on biased actors fighting each other and compromising to reach fair agreements. giving too much power to one of these branches of government is not a good thing, no matter how much inherent human bias it eliminates from the system
A machine can be tested for bias and measures taken against such bias are certainly followed.
The same does not hold for humans. Detecting the bias (down to the person level) is very hard. Going on to remedy it is even harder. You can't (or at least shouldn't) reprogram people.
In other words, you can change a racist machine, but not a racist cop.
> A machine can be tested for bias and measures taken against such bias are certainly followed.
To what degree? Based on first-order data, some populations really do commit more crime. However, we know that background/poverty is the real, underlying cause.
And even if we fed enough data to an algorithm to avoid that bias, avoiding the bias isn't enough. What you really want to do is tackle the cause. If the AI is a black box, you'd never know.
The problem with AI is almost always a lack of transparency, especially in the specific case, and not the general/overall case. Most training doesn't focus on this. Besides, the AI would limited by how good the bias tests we can come up with are.
Edit: For some use-cases, this general case optimisation is a feature, e.g. token customer service for cheap companies. Also much easier to control people who aren't that different.
We know somehow that current data is biased right? We can quantify that somehow, staying on the conservative side.
Then, we can explicitly correct for that quantified bias. This loses the whole 'AI is mathematics, and mathematics is unbiased' appeal, because we are explicitly adding a bias to counter a pre-existing one.
My point is, this (or more advanced methods) is possible with AI. You can't do anything like this with cops.
i think we all agree that AI/computer based surveillance and law enforcement systems are more flexible and powerful (in a scalability/omniscience sense) than a human-based police force
the disagreement is whether or not we want a more powerful distributed system monitoring and enforcing the law
cops aren't perfect and often have biases but you can't just push some code to a server and make them do whatever you want them to, as you could potentially do with an AI-based system.
if bad people got control of the system they would be able to more effectively impose their will on the population
What I would do is, first list the characteristics that must not be used to make arrest decisions. Then, train an AI to recognise those characteristics. Afterwards, when training the crime predictor AI or whatever, use the first AI to scrub unwanted characteristics from the training data input. If it all works out right, the biases in the AI's decisions will reflect statistical differences between ethnicities, but won't be driven by them. And if it works out really well, you could use it in reverse a-la style transfer: what should the people of group X do differently to not be arrested so much.
The data we have isn't crime data. It's arrest data. Even when the programmers aren't trying to introduce bias, by training on arrest data from racist cops, the machine will learn the racist decisions as well.
And people trust it more because "computers can't be racist"
Most AI systems output a 'confidence' to their result. One could simply set a higher bar for drawing conclusions to counter the bias.
This goes against the idea that 'machines are unbiased because math'. And it is a form of positive discrimination, which not everyone likes, but it is an easy fix.
you're not understanding that the racist cop/politician is the one controlling the machine, telling the programmer how to design its algorithms, and protecting the system from being audited
Racists or other biases at the top level can, to a limited degree, be dealt with through politics.
You can, at the very least, make biased people want to not seem biased.
However, bias at the lower levels is much harder to deal with. Especially if their superiors don't care beyond impressions.
>But to anyone complaining about how this is dystopian: compare it to human police officers who can racially profile and exhibit their prejudices to disproportionately target segments of the population, and which there is absolutely zero easy fix for, especially when we consider how prevalent unconscious bias is.
Now we can automate the biases of people so broad-brush and incompetent in approach, that they would install an AI system that automatically charges people for jaywalking, without it also having been trained on the set of things that commonly exist on roads. Great.
>At least an automated system can be analyzed for bias and, when it's found, corrected.
That sounds expensive. Why do that when you can make something cheap that mostly works and just hit cancel should it accidentally target anyone important?
compare it to human police officers who can racially profile and exhibit their prejudices
It's already been demonstrated that computers can racially profile people. Everything from consumer cameras that tell the users that people in the pictures don't have their eyes open, but in reality are Asian; to chatbots that turn into Nazi bullhorns.
You can at least train a bad cop to be better. Or fire them. How do you fire an AI into which an authoritarian government poured billions of dollars, years of work, and reams of press releases?
AI was made by people, and because of that will always be flawed. It's only in science fiction books that computers and algorithms are perfect and clean and rational.
That however goes both ways, making it also far easier to install a dictatorship etc. because you don't have to replace tens of thousands of police officers with regime loyal ones.
We're walking on razors edge here, it only takes one "election gone wrong" and we might find ourselves in a nightmare with no escape.
Dictatorships have fallen because formerly loyal police officers stopped being loyal. It's unlikely that kind of personal evolution will happen with a machine.
Ceasescu’s fall was mostly caused by part of Romanian Securitate going against him, the same Securitate that was controlling the local police force. So much so that Ceausescu was still in power on December 21st 1989 when the local police was actively repressing the anti-Ceausescu street protests but had to escape by helicopter the following day once the same police force stopped fighting and killing the Romanian protesters.
So nobody had to replace tens of thousands of police officers to change the regime?
In my opinion, that just undermines the point. Nothing would have changed if the Securitate was controlling a bunch of AI sensors and such rather than a bunch of police officers.
Pretty much every single one that fell through internal unrest. For a dictatorship to fall, it's security apparatus needs to stop performing its function of suppressing dissent and revolt.
Humans aren't machines. The police of a dictatorship, at some point, will have to confront an order to gun down protesters and the like to preserve the regime. Even if they're ideologically committed, they might recoil the order to kill and let the regime fall.
> And the use of violence by the regime under challenge, argue both Petersen and Sadiki, acts as a further crucial trigger for escalation by protesters against the regime. It is not simply because the state use of violence - whether in Bahrain or Romania, Egypt or Libya - acts as reminder of its brutal nature at a time when it is more vulnerable than it realises. It is also because the use of state violence confronts those still part of the state with a moral and strategic question: whether to tolerate the use of force and hope the regime survives, or peel away and join the opposition.
> "It is the other side of the story to that of those rebelling," says Petersen. "There are different considerations for those in the military, police or special forces, defined by their role. They are required to make a choice: whether they can switch sides and hope the people accept their new narrative in the new world after the regime, or stick by it to the end.
> "Whether you defect to the opposition depends on these differential kinds of moral calculus. Ordinary soldiers, for instance, have their own calculus. And if they decide not to fire on protesters that sends a signal to the higher-ups in the military. Then pretty soon you might see the interest of the military changing."
> Petersen, however, has one caveat. That this kind of negotiation in an organisation like the military does not necessarily hold true if there is the early and "crushing" use of violence.
AI-driven justice etc is lowering the cost of dictatorship. It's literally lowering the barrier to installing an authoritarian regime, that's what's scary about it. (ref. "The Dictator's Handbook", my favourite political book, as to why this is a problem)
So who is going to analyze the automated systems for bias and correct it? If it is impossible to identify and fix unfair bias in humans, presumably it is impossible to fix in the human overseers of this system. This is one area where technology will not save us.
It could be a matter of scale - being able to improve the bias in a human doesn't mean you can do so for all 900,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the US (or any other country).
On the other hand, you can update 900,000 computer processes in a relatively short time.
The 900k computer processes are unlikely to refuse to follow the updated protocol because it's immoral/fascist/illiberal/undemocratic/whatever too. Cuts both ways it seems.
Good thing they didn't fine her for speeding at the same time.
I find it more than a little bit implausible that facial recognition accuracy is good enough to pluck a face out of a billion people and accurately identify a single individual to the point that a fine would be automatically issued, especially without corroborating evidence that the person fined was even there.
Hilarious, but unfortunately, incidents like these are used to "prove" how incompetent and useless these technologies are, all the while pushing forward their use.
This system seems dumber and simpler than I had imagined it would be. I had guessed the face recognition system would be linked to each citizen's cellphone (i.e. GPS coordinates). How else could it be so certain of any given person's identity, in densely and highly populated areas?
> How else could it be so certain of any given person's identity, in densely and highly populated areas?
I'm pretty sure this is a fake story planted to hype some technology. Facial recognition cant identify in the wild one person among several million possible candidates with enough certainty for sending out fines.
All existing AI (and I mean all, even AlphaGo Zero, etc) is overhyped. With all of these systems the devil is always in the details and it's never as good as presented in a blog post or video. Often, even its creators don't realize about all of its shortcomings.
If you leave your phone at home the automated number plate reader you pass on the way out of your village/suburb/estate stops and locks your electric vehicle and you wait inside for 3 hours. A police tow truck takes you to court. Two days later you're releases by the [AI] judges clerk ... you decide to always carry your government ID enabled mobile device in future ...
That would leave the average citizen at a huge inconvenience, given how much of modern life is tied to smartphone usage. Doesn’t seem worth it just so you can go on a jaywalking/red-light-running spree.
I've managed to survive a few hours without my smartphone.
I now also live in an American city made for cars, not humans, so "jaywalking" is basically required to make any sane progress. So for grocery shopping, it'd take that trade-off.
I once read about a proposed 1$ fee for mistakes like that. For individuals, it's just one dollar. For companies and especially the state, it can cost 1000$ and more in processing fees altogether.
First off, why are the police even reporting this?
Secondly, what can the system even do? I'd believe a system could detect a person jaywalking.
Identifying them is a huge problem though. running facial recognition against a billion person corpus seems impossible (in fact what even is your match data coming from?). (?). Wouldn't you need to narrow it down somehow, perhaps using phone GPS records?
Impressive for sure, but nowhere at the ability of scanning the entire country (which in addition to no algorithm being capable of doing that, you also have the problem that you lack data to even match against the entire country)
That this is possible is concerning, it means the system is not smart enough. Might open the possibility of trolling by holding up cardboard cutouts of people and running across the street. Of course that's easier said than done but still...
Funny what happens when you run before you can walk, but with any such technology, there would be false positives even when this gets improved significantly. At such a nascent stage, this is bound to happen.
Maybe calling a machine that has just demonstrated its profound stupidity an “Artificial Intelligence” is part of the problem. This crappy tech is overhyped and overrated.
"Pattern Recognition" is the most accurate term IMO (at least as far as this particular tech is concerned, and yes it is a subset of Machine Learning), and it doesn't pretend to be something it's not.
Others have pointed out that it doesn't seem possible to identify a single face out of millions with enough confidence to issue a fine with current technology.
And if you win, you pay the lawyer, court fees and administrative costs. The last ticket I had for speeding was rougly $90. The speeding fine was only $30 of that -- the other $60 was not recoverable with a win in court.
Yes, but even hidden, it's probably still going to appear quite significant, and I do believe that at some point, the fine size becomes nonsensical.
But then again, I do not think that who you are or what you have should change the magnitude of the crime you commit. I don't think it is sensible that I should get greater fines because I chose to bust my ass and suffer from stress to gain more for my family, whereas I could get a much smaller fine if I just lived a more laid back life.
Granted, it's supposed to differentiate between the rich and poor, but in doing so it also differentiates between the hardworking and the lazy, punishing productivity and rewarding laziness.
It seems ridiculous to me to assume, as you seem to, that rich=hardworking and poor=lazy. Why not rich=lazy, poor=hardworking? That seems to make at least as much sense to me, to correspond to reality.
No-one mentioned "changing the magnitude of the crime". The point is, if you get a $1000 fine, that could mean absolutely nothing to a millionaire/billionaire, but a lot to someone with $1000. Yet you talk as if fining a rich person more would be grossly unfair. Maybe you think everyone should pay the same taxes too. etc.
This only holds for those that a born rich, or fell upon immense luck.
For those below Dubai princes, the riches come from an entirely distorted work/life balance where you are never really off-duty, and immense responsibility.
I intend to get there one day with hard work so my family can be well off. However, I do not see why it makes sense to punish me for it. Fining me twice as much because I work double the hours is unfair, and it certainly doesn't encourage growth.
Also, for us small countries up in Scandinavia, a lot of business is lost to the US (technological services) and China (manufacturing), which is a big drain on our economy. Having actual local business (rather than just occasional offices of tax-evading organisations like Apple/Amazon/Microsoft that never have any income pass through here) greatly benefits our local economies.
Even for those truly rich, they are usually rich because they know how to handle money (i.e. not wasting it on fines). The dickheads will do it regardless what it costs them, so setting a system to target them, while harming the common population, seems absurd.
By that standard you could also propose that the poor should be fined even heavier because they are the lazy ones and should get punished for that.
There is no actual reasoning in your arguments why the fines should be the same for everybody, instead there is an argument why richer people should not be fined higher, while acknowledging that the height of a fine will impact people with differing levels of wealth in different ways.
Actually we need to think about why we are putting fines on people. The answer is: We want to deter bad behaviour. But if we take parking as an example: Some people do not mind a 25€ fine for bad parking because of their wealth so the fine doesn't work on them, while it works on other people. So our goal was to deter people from behaving in a certain way but we partially failed to do so. Now one option is to increase the ticket price for everyone (but I guess you are not arguing for that option). The other one is to attach the fine to income. The third option of doing nothing leads to a system where people can break the rules by being wealthy. But this is obviously one of the things that we seek to avoid in making rules for people to behave.
There is one more obvious option: make fines not monetary but time consuming. For example you acummulate points and at certain threshold you need to do some public work, attend some courses or get some of your privileges revoked .
> By that standard you could also propose that the poor should be fined even heavier because they are the lazy ones and should get punished for that.
I hope that you also understand how that is absurd on its own, and that I certainly wasn't suggesting this.
However, yes, if we're seeing the entire system (including fining speeding) as a way to adjusting bad behavior, then yes, you could theoretically think of a system that directly punishes laziness.
But, wouldn't such a system already be covered by your salary, which does scale as a result of your work (i.e. you can't improve and risk losing your income entirely if you're lazy, and you're rewarded for productivity)?
> There is no actual reasoning in your arguments why the fines should be the same for everybody,
I stated... somewhere, that the magnitude of your crime does not scale with your income, so scaling the fine that way does not seem logical.
It does serve to make punishments clearer, but it still does not seem logical nor fair to me.
> Some people do not mind a 25€ fine for bad parking because of their wealth so the fine doesn't work on them, while it works on other people.
I will try to put this into a different perspective then:
A person who is 20 years old has more years to spare than one that is 50. Should they therefore get longer jail sentences?
I think that punishment should only consider the crime. Anything else is discrimination. Those with less wealth can buy fewer apples, fewer burgers, and pay for fewer speeding tickets. Such is life.
Fixing differences between wealth becomes an anti-capitalist discussion (which is fun, but a subject for another day).
> I stated... somewhere, that the magnitude of your crime does not scale with your income, so scaling the fine that way does not seem logical.
My favourite way of arguing in favour of fines proportional to wealth/ income is this: wealth is something that gives you the power to buy things: say better food, better houses, better cars, or even things that most people cannot afford, for example a big yacht. Depending on how wealthy you are, some products or services become affordable. However, there is one thing that nobody should consider affordable, and that is breaking the law, which should be equally binding for everybody. But if you set a fixed price for breaking the law, that itself becomes a product, and the price defines a set of people for whom the product is affordable and even worth the price. Is that right or desirable?
It depends on what the law is for. For example you could have a nice solid fine for littering, with half of it earmarked for public cleaning/improvement. If someone violates that and reliably pays the cost, it's win-win. They get to be lazy and the environment is improved.
Since littering means degrading the appearance of a public space for some amount of time, it's hard yo put a price on it: the maximum fine should be the cost of a person assigned exclusively to you, who immediately picks up whatever you throw to the ground and nicely dispose of it in the appropriate way.
What you say would make sense in case of unpaid fares. In the case of speeding, there is no amount of money that can offset the increased risk to pedestrians and other cars.
No amount? I disagree. The speed limit is inherently a balance between safety and time-efficiency. You can convert time-efficiency into money, and figure out a monetary cost of different speeds. Even if it's an absolute mandate to keep safety levels the same, you could cut everyone else's speed by 1kph and make it up to them with a share of the money. Or you could subsidize safer cars with the money.
And at a certain price point you can call in a police escort or start installing express lanes.
> Fining me twice as much because I work double the hours is unfair, and it certainly doesn't encourage growth.
Why on earth should a fine punishing you for a crime try to encourage growth?
> I intend to get there one day with hard work so my family can be well off.
Oh, it's almost as if your kids will grow up with wealth that they didn't have to work to earn, thus not being anything to do with how hardworking or lazy they are. Almost as if they'll be born rich, falling upon immense luck.
So, in your own words being rich does not imply anything about hard work.
Further if you actually look at the wealthy hard work has almost zero influence on the odds of being wealthy. Generally because you can pass wealth from person to person after it’s gained and the source is often just lucky.
PS: I am in my 30’s and have zero debt and six figure savings. By some standards that’s wealth by others it’s practically poverty. It’s the second version that people are talking about becase having even 7 figures in savings does not generate that much per year income. It’s when you start talking about 8-11 figures of wealth that the scale gets broken.
You seem to set income = wealth. The fines are income based, with income scaling with hard work.
That never makes a grocery worker equal a banker, but twice the hours at hourly wage means twice the income, thus twice the fine within income-based systems such as Finland.
Income does not imply wealth, but wealth does imply income.
Eventually, wealth results in income even for lazy bums. So, you can’t defend income by saying they must work hard as many of the largest incomes have nothing to do with hard work.
Wealth does not imply income. You could be a retired with a massive fortune and no income. You could be born into wealth, not actually earning any yourself.
They are different concepts. One can lead to another, by neither implies the other.
Fining me twice as much because I work double the hours is unfair
That is one way to frame the situation - there are many others, but in all your comments you act as if there is only one way to frame these things - yours, and all other ways are unfair, wrong, absurd etc. I'm not sure why.
Then there's your "Life should be unfair because life's unfair" argument:
"I think that punishment should only consider the crime. Anything else is discrimination. Those with less wealth can buy fewer apples, fewer burgers, and pay for fewer speeding tickets. Such is life."
But I guess in your framing of that, it's not unfair, because everyone who has twice the money has worked twice as hard. Maybe that is the situation when you compare yourself with some people you know - I guess that's where that comes from. But using that as if it applies to everyone in the world, leads to strange conclusions, or so it seems.
I guess everyone does the "applying situations in their life to the world" thing all the time, but you sound so far right-wing, I wonder if this it where that comes from - it's not uncommon in the media to hear wealthy people calling the poor lazy, or arguing there should be no welfare etc, sounding totally selfish and heartless. As if because they're ok, everyone else should be also. Maybe they just frame things like you do - "if they had worked harder they wouldn't be poor, if so it's because they're lazy." etc.
For one thing, some people become poor because of dealing with unexpected diseases, or bad accidents, or bad luck, or divorce, or..a multitude of things. Some people become wealthy for equally random reasons. Your model totally ignores all such things, as if "shit doesn't happen" in this world. And as if everyone starts out life with the same amount in the bank.
p.s. I appreciate you writing about your experience and beliefs on this page, thanks.
Hah, well, the life-reducing stress I refer to in other comments were taken from my own experience.
I'm working a full-time job, doing consultancy work on the side to help cover costs, and trying to build a company myself while doing all that.
Apart from the time spent telling people that they are wrong on the internet (which is incredibly unproductive, as it is both stressful and generally a waste of time, but https://xkcd.com/386/), I don't really have spare time. I don't have weekends, and barely lunch breaks. I go home to sleep, and wake up to work.
Many seem to interpret what I said as "poverty equals laziness". This was never in any way what I said.
However, almost regardless of your situation, harder works gives greater results. You'll get significantly more if you work 14 hours a day instead of 8. Whether you're working a shit job and just trying to push up your work hours, you're trying to build your own company, or even if you're managing your multi-billion dollar portfolio, the more hours you put in the more you get.
Should that be punished? I get that a Dubai prince racing at 300km/h through a school zone in his Bugatti Chiron is one case, but what about the guy/girl that took on much more work than average? Should their punishment be directly propertional to the life-shortening stress they're taking on?
Designing laws around statistical outliers seem idiotic. The Dubai prince case is certainly not the norm.
(Using Dubai prince as my general example for "absurd riches+irresponsible behavior" for no reason in particular)
Okay, well I apologize if I misinterpreted what you're saying.
When you say
> Designing laws around statistical outliers seem idiotic. The Dubai prince case is certainly not the norm.
I take you to be implying that outside of outliers, wealth is largely a matter of hard work, and poverty is largely a matter of laziness.
But that's the claim that I'm not aware of any evidence for. The Earth is full of extremely poor people who work nearly every waking hour.
There is no doubt some portion of the variance in wealth that's explained by hours worked after you control for other variables, but if your claim is that hours worked is a strong predictor of wealth, then that requires empirical support. It seems unlikely to me, but I'm not ruling it out.
> You'll get significantly more if you work 14 hours a day instead of 8
That's another claim that it would be good to see some citations for.
If you work in salaried position where overtime is unpaid (as many HNers will) then more than 8 hours of work will bring you no financial gain other than in those toxic workplaces where unpaid overtime is seen as a virtue.
In salaried positions, "overtime" is either rewarded with a raise or promotion.
For the types of job you are thinking of where overtime is entirely uncompensated (such as a lot of developer gigs), you are not really working overtime. You are working exactly what was expected from your employer. Any less, and you'd risk losing your position. Different jobs have different expected baseline work.
However, work above the expectation should still be compensated, and if it isn't, you're also within a group of people that is likely able to quit and find a different position at higher wage, or just a position where hard work will be rewarded. That is definitely the case for the developers here.
If your "productivity" leads you to drive dangerously, you're damn right we want you to be lazier. If you kill someone, or injure a child, the benefits to society from you pushing yourself too hard will be negative. If they aren't already.
Don't want to be "unfairly" fined? Drive within the rules.
Even for those in absolute poverty, if they work twice the hours, they will earn twice the wage. It may be an increase from $5 a month to $10 a month, but it's still double.
The only time where twice the effort gives no gain is if you're doing something that has no gain at all. However, the poor work for cheap, not for free.
You're not being punished for that, you're being punished for a crime. That happens to be proportional to what you can give. What's not fair is fines that barely impact wealthy people.
A fine is supposed to discourage people from breaking the law. Is it fair that wealthy people can ignore the laws because they do not feel any real consequenes?
I have heard drivers who constantly break the rules, because they can easily afford the fine. To them the occasional fine is just the price they have to pay for easy parking, or saving a minute on their drive.
1. Given a problem with people continuously ignoring the law, a simple serial-offender system should deal with it fairly. We already have that up here, with you having three "marks" on your license. Some offenses take a mark, with 3 marks costing you your license. Driving without a license has increasing penalty for repeated offenses, including jail-time after the first or first two offenses. We do not have the absurd concept of "bail", and with lifespans being roughly similar, poor and rich end up with similar pains if they are repeat offenders.
2. Given that very wealthy people being able to ignore laws appear to be outliers, with the average person not being able to do this, I would say that you could create special cases for these outliers. For example, average/rich brackets. Or even poor/average/filthy rich.
3. Just not designing laws that govern entire countries to deal with a few outliers. There will always be outliers, and people with enough money to get out of any situation, whether that is paying fines or paying good lawyers to wiggle their way out. There will also always be people parking illegally, or speeding. Hell, if I recall correctly, the Finnish government had stated that the speeding fines are important income, so you also suddenly end up with fines being necessary, rather than them being only a tool to stop an offense, which is absurd.
(And for reference, for #3, I am talking about outliers within those that violate traffic laws. A serial killer is obviously an outlier which laws should be designed for, but I consider this a very different case.)
Make a fine time/labor focused not monetary. Some community service when you accumulate certain number of points will solve it. Another alternative is public shaming, I think we are too quick to reject that mechanism as society.
What I say is that accidents should not be more expensive the harder you work. Repeat offenses are still covered by jail-time, which is universal for all incomes (we do not have bail up here).
I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea that two people with the same hourly wage should get the same fine. Why do you think pay-per-year is a better basis?
This is assuming wealth/income is cause by hard work; while that's true for some people, many are rich because their parents are rich (would be curious to see stats around this)
I cannot say much about the stats, but I only really know of rich-by-work rather than rich-by-luck.
But I do not think we should design a system to cater for outliers with immense wealth. We should cater for the general population, and I believe that for non-Dubai prince wealth, it is likely that it likely came through work.
You need to add social factors too. If you are born into poverty, it is not simply enough to work a bit harder than the average. The weight of all the factors against you will probably increase the workload by a magnitude compared to someone born into an average family.
I don’t think there is proof that a there is a connection between the salary level and how hard someone works.
A person who works at minimum wage may work as hard as anyone else. Just look at all those who have to work two jobs to feed their family. I would think that if they had the opportunity to work harder at a single job and make more money, they would.
I did not say that salary = work. However, given your salary, increasing your effort increases your reward.
A lazy banker earns more than a productive grocery store employee, but a grocery store employee taking twice as many shifts earns twice as much money as the regular grocery store employee.
And they should not be punished for doing so.
To roughly quantify a salary, it would be something like salary = base salary of trade x negotiation factor x hard work factor. Hard work should not be punished. If you want to equal out various types of work, you could say "based on average income for your position", rather than your income, but then other problems appear.
There's been a memo going around from the higher-ups in Central Services that anyone named 'Harry Buttle' should currently take extreme care, due to minor bugs at Information Retrieval.
Come to find out, I haven't had a valid license in 5 years.
There was a mistake in court 5 years ago when I paid a fine (speeding ticket). I have a receipt from court saying all settled/money received but court says they never got money.
So, after talking to a lawyer yesterday I will be paying another $250 for lawyer fees + court costs to get out of the mistake made by the court in another state 5 years ago.
I am lucky. I can pay that. It sucks but some people would be out food money if they suddenly had to pay $500 to drive again.
But, I did nothing wrong (except for speeding 6 years ago which I paid the fine and haven't had any issues since) and am stuck paying for the courts mistake.