This is a phenomenal application of how fine-based bounties can be used to rapidly improve compliance with the law. Incredible work. I would absolutely use this if I lived in NYC; I'll recommend it to my friends there.
>This is a phenomenal application of how fine-based bounties can be used to rapidly improve compliance with the law.
This type of thing can get out of hand quickly. Without me giving controversial examples, just imagine for yourself the types of things that different states can make a crime, add a fine, then offer to give other citizens part or all of that fine if they turn in others. After that, think of how unscrupulous businesses could use it against competition.
Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law. If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that law and perhaps tear it down. Any "law" that people put up with because it isn't enforced 9 times out of 10 is little more than a tax upon those too honest to get away with it.
As for businesses using it against one another in competition: Same deal, I think that's an excellent thing. If this idling law causes NYC businesses to shift en masse to faster loading and unloading practices because their competitors are watching them like hawks, I don't think that's a bad thing.
>Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law.
Agree. More of my thought is what happens when everyone is incentivized with money to spy on everyone else? How can you misuse this as a government? How can unscrupulous businesses misuse this?
>If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that law and perhaps tear it down.
I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
>Any "law" that people put up with because it isn't enforced 9 times out of 10 is little more than a tax upon those too honest to get away with it.
Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.
> I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
Think bigger. If the activity were really a money-maker, then it will inevitably be scaled and industrialized. A cottage industry of snitching would spring up. If that industry got sufficiently wealthy and politically powerful, we'd see all kinds of "easy-bounty" laws getting enacted to allow these companies to further sponge up fines from the public.
If speeding fines were shared with whoever reported them, I guarantee 100% that companies would buy real estate every 10 miles along every freeway and put up speeding cameras to automate it.
(EDIT: Looks like you also already predicted the speed trap cottage industry in another comment. Oh, well, I'll leave this one up too)
This is exactly the point, yes. You can get arbitrarily close to 100% crime detection rates with any law where there is a financial incentive for private entities to invest in this kind of infrastructure.
The example I like to use is littering. If I lived near a high traffic area, and there was a $200 fine, $100 payable to the first successful reporter, you'd better believe I would invest in some webcams and some software to do nothing but watch for signs of littering nearby 24/7, run the last 15 seconds through AI to weed out false positives, and maybe even file the report automatically on my behalf. That's almost literally money lying on the sidewalk.
At first I would probably make thousands with a $20 webcam and some manual review. Even one true positive pays for itself 5 times over. Eventually other people on my block would start doing a similar thing. The fine can only get paid to one person, usually the person who "gets there the fastest with the mostest". So then there is competitive pressure on me to make my software faster, my webcam higher resolution, my detection methods and ability to prove non-repudiation more reliable.
If you prefer walking through trash I can understand this may dismay you. If you like clean streets, I can think of no better chilling effect to anyone who might be crossing by. You can apply this enforcement mechanism to basically any kind of crime and get similar results - even and especially organized crime, which traditional legal enforcement historically has a very hard time breaking up. Hence why it's already in use by the SEC to break up the highest level of financial crimes, via things like the False Claims Act where often the only way to prove the crime is happening in the first place is to have a man on the inside why can patiently collect evidence for years before making his move. What better way to make something worth a man's time than to pay him?
I'll take a little litter on the streets over mass surveillance and cameras everywhere identifying me everywhere I go. Because it never fucking stops at just litter. Pretty soon all that lovely data about who is where at what time gets sold, just easily tied into a little API, and the developer gets a few bucks of kick back. Gotta support the developer, right? This is just spyware for the real world shrouded in something that appears to be a good thing. Fuck off and no thanks, this is why we can't trust anything.
Besides, we don't have anything like this now, and I'm not walking through trash in the city I live in. If you have trash everywhere, you have other problems.
Not only that, but a society that deputizes its citizens to watch their neighbors’ every behavior in hopes of soaking them for fines, sounds like a pretty miserable society. I don’t want to live somewhere where my neighbor can make $100 by turning me in for having grass one inch too long.
>[P]eople might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in. This would lead us to assume that for most crimes of a personal nature, we would have about as many people losing money due to the law as making money due to it, and so the effect cancels out.
In situations where many more people make money and only a select few are losing big, well... Somehow I feel like that's usually for the best anyway. See my other comments on eg the runaway success of the False Claims Act. Or just consider the class action lawsuit and whether you think it fills a valuable role in society.
>Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.
Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you. Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.
> See my other comments on eg the runaway success of the False Claims Act
Could you link some examples of such comments because I can't find them, please?
> Or just consider the class action lawsuit and whether you think it fills a valuable role in society.
This is an odd one. They are extremely rare in the UK, but in practice I think we have better consumer protection because it's handled through ordinary politics and legislation, rather than litigation.
I had a discussion with gametorch about this topic where I mention the case of Biogen employee Michael Bawduniak. His comments got flagged, but I think he laid his assumptions and concern for the downstream effects on US culture bare, which is commendable. I'll cite some relevant news articles since finding the exact link is proving tough.
You can also find more official information on the SEC whistleblower program, which I think the False Claims Act itself is under but might just be a mirror similarity, at
> I had a discussion with gametorch about this topic where I mention the case of Biogen employee Michael Bawduniak. His comments got flagged, but I think he laid his assumptions and concern for the downstream effects on US culture bare, which is commendable. I'll cite some relevant news articles since finding the exact link is proving tough.
This is the post to which you mention Bawduniak in reply to gametorch:
Algolia doesn't seem to let you search for some comments, not sure if [dead] or [flagged][dead] show up there. I found this via your comments link from your profile. I also have showdead enabled on my HN profile, which is necessary to see these comments on the comment page for a HN submission, but not to view them via a direct link iiuc.
>I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in.
In some cases, which seem like a good idea like corporate malfeasance whistleblowers or government grift whistleblowers. This is because the people paid by our tax dollars would be at a disadvantage compared to an insider in the company. In others, you could see the direction it must go.
>Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you.
Cheers!
>Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.
There might very well be laws like that. However, let me offer a non-controversial and obvious one. Speed limits. Many places have 65mph listed as a speed limit. Everyone knows you are not allowed to go faster. However very few place will pull you over for going 66mph or even 70mph. If they started pulling over everyone going 70 in a 65 there would not be "such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety" because we all know and they all knew they were breaking the law. But it isn't enforced in an authoritarian way because we have different vehicles, sometimes you need to pass, and frankly 70 and 65 just aren't that big of a problem. But almost everyone would agree that we do need a speed limit, although they might not agree on the number and a number has to be picked.
Now, I don't want to assume your political leanings, but I am getting some strong libertarian vibes. And you seem like a nice and thoughtful person, so maybe bad ideas don't even occur to you because you are honest and just don't think that way. But imagine, or go ask grok, some other ways this could work out. And while you are at it, imagine a law that did not effect all citizens the same. Now imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others. In what way could they cause affect a backlash that would quickly get a law repealed in its entirety?
Using money to incentivize any public action on behalf of the government should be a sort of last-resort situation where it makes sense and the people already being paid to do it can't for some reason. This is a very libertarian idea, in fact. A more reasonable idea, although much less libertarian, would be to pass a law that makes it where cars can not idle for more than a specified amount of time in certain situations, but that would come with its own can of worms don't you think? And I personally wouldn't be for such a law. In fact I am against the snitch on idlers law. If someone wants to pay $7 a gallon for gas to set there and idle it away, why shouldn't they be able to? How is it different than them driving the same gas away?
Many countries do enforce the speed limits like that. Try doing 110kph in a 100kph zone in Australia/NZ/CH and you'll get ~500$ fine pretty quickly and lose your licence on the 3rd try.
Re/ the speed limit, I'm afraid I simply don't understand. Why not just raise the speed limit to 70 instead of having everyone lie? If everyone starts then doing 75, why not raise it again? Eventually you'll hit a breakeven point. Considering that most highway accidents happen because two people disagree about the speed they should be driving at, and considering that fatalities and accident severity in such accidents scales with something crazy like the square or even the cube of the speed you're going at, this actually feels like the worst possible way to negotiate that.
Conversely, under an enforcement regime where everyone is genuinely scared to go higher than 65, the worst case scenario is... Everyone does 65. Fewer accidents, and fewer fatalities from those accidents. Best case scenario is they rapidly revise up to 70 - 75 - wherever.
Re/ "imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others", I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them, which requires they have a lot of money to reliably extract in the first place - otherwise it stops being worth the effort to target them specifically.
I guess you could imagine making lottery scratch tickets a fineable offense, and thereby target pensioners unfairly. That's the closest I got after 5 minutes of thinking about it.
Re/ using money to incentivize public action - we have clashing moral intuitions on this, I definitely don't see it as a last resort. In fact I would far prefer it to be the first resort. Money is a much more efficient, scalable, precise, and robust way of handling things than e.g. sending people to prison (which we still have to pay for, by the way, prisons aren't cheap).
Re/ the idler's law itself - You're allowed to be against it personally, that's fine. The people of New York City voted in favor of it, and they probably have good reasons for this that mostly only make sense to themselves. Personally, I've been to New York, and seen how cramped those streets are. It doesn't surprise me that some schmuck holding up half of 6th Avenue should be made to pay for it - they are likely causing thousands of dollars of cash flow loss per second because on who's late for work because of them. But even then, I don't live there. I don't actually have a good sense of this kind of thing. I defer to the wisdom of the locals here. Do as the Romans do.
I know populism is a thing but speed limits aren’t formally set for people’s preference but for safety and environmental reasons. “Most” people choosing to break the law doesn’t change that, and adjusting the law becomes a populist thing.
Accidents on the highway do not happen because people don’t agree on the speed to drive at, more than they happen because “cars exist”. They happen because drivers drive faster than their capacity to avoid danger. This capacity differs from hour to hour and day to day. Agreeing on a speed doesn’t make one less drunk or sleepy or unskilled, and so on. More accidents happen on the day after summer time switch when drivers have less sleep and it’s not like everyone just changes opinions.
You’re missing the elephant in the room. Not everyone is equally capable of buying laws or fighting the enforcement of those laws. When Musk’s datacenter was photographed polluting more than declared it wasn’t an instant fine, it’s a lawsuit that the taxpayer pays for (implicit fine on the taxpayer). He can afford it, but how much of this can taxpayers take? These are the people who can buy a law to make your life harder if you try to catch them red handed with something. They’re the ones who can see that you get fined when you say something that’s false or just inconvenient or not yet decided by a judge (like that most accidents caused by disagreement on speed, or that Musk’s DC pollutes more than declared) while they can afford to keep doing it themselves because for them everything becomes a lawsuit they can drag on forever, can afford, and costs you money too.
Making free money sounds awesome. But coming from a country which in the past “democratized” and incentivized reporting “bad” behavior, no matter how much you think this time it’s a worthy cause, it just opens the door up to abuse against the weaker members of society, and almost everyone becomes weaker as a result. You don’t see where this goes because you’ve never seen it with your eyes and don’t trust reading a book.
Actually, no one is capable of 'buying' a law. Laws are passed via the processes of the legislative system. Sure, you can try to bribe someone like a Congressman into voting for or against certain things, but this is very different from just buying a law outright, and people are constantly watching Congressmen to ensure this kind of behavior doesn't get too out of hand.
"Nobody ever catches those bribes in practice." Gee, it sounds like you have a crime detection issue there. If only there were some decentralized mechanism, trending towards a 100% success rate, by which individual actors could personally benefit by exposing with evidence a Congressman took a bribe. :)
Apropos: The SEC whistleblower program has so far distributed over $2 billion to nearly 400 corporate insiders since 2011, and shows no sign of slowing down. We aren't lacking for success stories here when it comes to stopping shady financial deals, they're actually one of the easiest cases to handle.
>When Musk’s datacenter was photographed polluting more than declared it wasn’t an instant fine, it’s a lawsuit that the taxpayer pays for (implicit fine on the taxpayer).
You sound like you have a lot of knowledge about this case. If you were to share your knowledge with someone else who was pursuing this fine, so they could get a cut out of it, you could probably get paid yourself for doing so. Maybe you could have submitted more photographs, or air quality measurements, or just conversations with people working at the datacenter (who might themselves be getting paid a cut of your cut by you).
In so doing, you would have made the case against Musk stronger, and made it more likely the fine would be levied in the first place. If the crime actually happened, of course. Those are the kinds of strategies a "fine paid to the successful reporter" approach to legal enforcement allows for. They simply have no analogue in other approaches to the law. They operate on self-interest, not fear.
This is also an much, much more powerful way by which the "weaker members of society" you are concerned with can work together at scale to take down and prosecute a much larger entity. One thing the disenfranchised do very well is information gathering. If you're unemployed or underemployed anyway, and you just have this burning passion of hating Musk or Richard Ramirez copycat killers or money launderers or child predators or whatever floats your boat, it would be very encouraging to know you might be able to eke out a living simply by investigating their crimes on your own time and getting paid for it by someone, without necessarily needing to get a JD.
>while they can afford to keep doing it themselves because for them everything becomes a lawsuit they can drag on forever, can afford, and costs you money too.
"Phase 2 of this process is incurably too slow anyway, so we might as well not even worry about optimizing Phase 1" is an engineering issue. It requires you to make a judgment call about whether Phase 1 is already 'good enough' as it is.
Considering that the lawsuit generally happens only after prosecution, the vast majority of information gathering, and back office work, what you are implying here is that you think all of that preceding work is already handled so competently that there's no reason in worrying about it. It's no longer the bottleneck of the system.
Very few people would agree with that.
>coming from a country which in the past “democratized” and incentivized reporting “bad” behavior
As far as I'm aware no democratic country has yet instituted fine-based bounties widely across its executive apparatus. So I don't actually know which country you could be referring to.
If, however, you're talking about a democratic country where this approach is employed in certain areas of legal enforcement, I would point out that, if you live in the United States, you actually still live under such a regime. See the SEC whistleblower's cases mentioned above, or the FBI's Most Wanted list.
The reason you don't hear about them very often is both due to their currently specialized nature, and because they just... Work. Quietly, in the background.
So far I haven't heard anyone complaining about the Orwellian dystopia that the False Claims Act is creating for good honest hedge fund managers who just want to maximize their portfolio earnings, although I'm sure they're out there.
>Actually, no one is capable of 'buying' a law. Laws are passed via the processes of the legislative system. Sure, you can try to bribe someone like a Congressman into voting for or against certain things, but this is very different from just buying a law outright, and people are constantly watching Congressmen to ensure this kind of behavior doesn't get too out of hand.
What unproductive pedantry. I find your comments exhausting because of their wordiness that stands in contrast to the ridiculous assumptions that your verbosity hides.
In this case I have a wonderful bridge to sell you.
Of course they can. It's called lobbying and it's literally aimed at convincing representatives to support certain policies or laws. When a lot of money is involved it's no different from buying those laws.
> As far as I'm aware no democratic country has yet instituted fine-based bounties widely across its executive apparatus. So I don't actually know which country you could be referring to.
Of course you don't. It's why I literally said you "don’t trust reading a [history] book". History isn't limited to what and where you lived. I shouldn't need to nudge you in the right direction.
> So far I haven't heard anyone
Going back to those books, you haven't heard a lot of things. You have such strong opinions despite (or maybe because) showing so little knowledge or understanding of things in the present or in history. On top of the couple of things I pointed out just by skimming your comment, you compare using the public for the apprehending people on FBI's most wanted list with people helping catch the dreaded "engine idler".
>Re/ the speed limit, I'm afraid I simply don't understand. Why not just raise the speed limit to 70 instead of having everyone lie?
Then do you arrest all people going 71?
> I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them
Is suspect everyone can hypothesize a small group they belong to. So make up one that you belong to and imagine a group coming into power in the legislature where you live that makes that kind of law. The money itself doesn't need to be a large amount (what might be "a lot" to you and I might be different for different people) to make it oppressive and frankly a weapon for the police and government to use.
>Re/ the idler's law itself ... The people of New York City voted in favor of it
Correct. I don't agree with it but the local people do. This is the both the blessing and curse of our government and the exact situation where some people can can use this pay-for-snitching technique for good or bad. If it works for them then so be it. I don't have to like it. I don't like a lot of stuff. And some stuff I do like others don't. My original argument is that using money as an incentive to turn citizens against each other is a very slippery slope. In his case it might be great for them. I understand that you and I disagree on this point and there is likely nothing I can say or you can say to make the other suddenly change position and I respect you defending your thought process on this. But it is nice to be able to have a conversation about something controversial without it spinning into something else. Cheers!
> there is nowhere for delivery trucks to park, or extremely limited parking
In most cases, there is room for them to park: the solution is simply for delivery companies to lobby for loading zones where there are currently parking spots for private cars. Drivers will never agree to this though, so here we are.
The fact that there is no truck parking is not an excuse for trucks to park in the bike lane or on the sidewalk.
If an area doesn't support trucks, then deliveries need to be made without trucks. That means parking the truck far away and using a hand truck to make the delivery on foot using the sidewalks.
The shipping companies can either eat the cost, pass it on to consumers or refuse to deliver to those areas.
ah yes. “park far away and simply walk 300 pounds of groceries to be stocked at the only corner store for miles” is a very clean and simple solution only you were smart enough to think of. There definitely aren’t hills or ruts making this impossible because everyone lives in perfectly paved suburbia and I’ve always heard tell of this obvious laziness of checks notes the men and women who actually deliver your prime packages at 4AM.
> just imagine for yourself the types of things that different states can make a crime, add a fine, then offer to give other citizens part or all of that fine if they turn in others
You mean if a red state (like Texas) potentially handing out bounties for snitching on abortions? Texas already passed that law in 2022[1]. We are already way down the slippery slope you alluded.
Yeah, this is the worrying bit. US constitutional law only seems to restrict the government, so they can delegate it to private actors who can then do unconstitutional things. Something similar happened with the book-objecting laws.
You're actually better off if it's a crime because then you can force the issue to go through a court, be made public record, etc.
A lot of civil penalties carry fines in excess of what you get for a first offense for a violent but not professional criminality type crime. It's absolutely insane. NYC's idling laws are just the tip of the iceberg in this regard. And the fact that these are "civil" penalties means the due process requirements are basically nil and when they do exist (like they do for traffic infractions) they basically only exist so far as they need to to keep the racket going.
Like you'd be hard pressed to wind up with tens of thousands of of fines doing actual criminal stuff, they'd just throw you in jail. But a government official can notice (or be tipped off to) some violation then go look back at their info sources and decide unilaterally when the violation started and fine you for presumed months of violation and you often have no recourse but to sue.
One needn't imagine. Texas's strange attempt to twist civil law such that providing or facilitating an abortion is an injury to anyone who claims it is (and is thus a cause of action where the "injured" person can sue the person providing or facilitating the abortion) has taken this discussion out of the theoretical. Regardless of where you stand on whether abortion should be allowed, the idea that anyone who performs one is liable to the first person to notice that they did is an intentional perversion of civil law.
Or if you need to avoid the a-word because of the particular fruit that falls from that tree when shaken, just look at predatory towing.
I think an important wake-up call is that bounties now exist in an ecosystem where people who would normally be indifferent to wanting/knowing how to collect bounties, could be driven by techniques from the predatory-gambling-app world into becoming gamified enforcers.
We’re already sliding down the slope, to be sure, but this is an acceleration that we should expect with our eyes wide open.
Yes, and? It's a good thing to get crimes reported more often, faster, and with more and higher quality evidence. (That last statement doesn't directly follow from bounties in the short term, but it does once you start considering the competitive pressures crime detectors face in such a market.)
You can run a thought experiment to confirm this. Suppose 1/2 of all crimes committed in your area currently get reported. You are offered the option to move to two new places, identical in every way to your starting point, except New Town A has 3/4 of the crimes committed get reported*. New Town B has only 1/4 of the crimes committed get reported. Do you move? Where to?
The important thing to notice is less that New Town A seems like a pretty good deal, than that New Town B seems like a really bad one. Plenty of people would move to New Town A for the obvious additional security. Some of people would elect to stay, for reasons like New Town A isn't guaranteed to be exactly like where you currently are into the future, and home is home. But almost nobody would move to New Town B. The people who would jump for joy at moving to New Town B may even be criminals themselves trying to escape charges or just hedge their futures.
* For the sake of completeness, you can consider this property preserved across different types of crime. E.g. if 90% of homicides get reported in your current locale, 95% do in New Town A, and only 45% in New Town B do. If 20% of money laundering schemes get reported, 60% do in New Town A, and 10% in New Town B. Etc. The general idea of everything being more or less detectable is more important than the specific numbers.
Reminds me a snitchers during communist regime in our country. There was a lot of those who report to STB (state security, like KGB) all kind of misbehaving of citizens that could threat a state.
I'm curious, when there will be apps to report citizens that threat democracy. Like those who wear red hat. Or sleepong on street. Or make weird talks at home...
I wish it was was more common around the world. Not just with parking though, but everything in the context of cars.
Like letting the police install a permanent speed trap on your property or even pay for the privilege of them doing so. I'd bet that'd curb a lot of speeding in short order
There's no need for violence. In fact, the capital outlay would be inefficient.
If you want to curb speeding, the solution looks much the same: Pay reporters some portion of the fines collected from the speeder. You will very quickly see a cottage industry of Internet connected dashcams and on-board AI solutions spring up, because it's practically free money if you drive safely yourself for long enough. Pretty soon nobody will be speeding, simply because you never know who or what is watching.
This is a set of economic-legal policies I've been writing about here and there for a long time. It's great stuff.
Phrased like that, it's indeed problematic. But you should keep in mind that speeding is
1. A safety hazard
2. Causes high noise pollution
3. Measurably increases air pollution
Under these circumstances I feel like a citizen driven enforcement for the law is not quite bad as you are portraying it. I would even call it apploudable, because they increase the quantity of life for everyone in their neighborhood.
The problem here is the anonymity for the tipster. Like if you can't defend your actions by putting your name to them are they actions worth taking?
The guy who reports one person for driving 100mph over the limit can and ought to sleep soundly knowing society more or less agrees with his actions.
The guy who reports 100 people for going 1mph over the limit ought to be be worried. His actions are not something society generally thinks is a good thing.
A speed trap is a kind of violence, yes. Have you ever hit one of those things at high speed before? Ouch.
EDIT: I've been away from the States for too long. I was indeed thinking about speed bumps, not traps. Traps are cameras, and they therefore get a thumbs up from me in the beautiful bounties-on-everything-we-care-about future.
Even ignoring that misunderstanding, speed bumps can be absolutely great. They can‘t be installed everywhere since they also significantly slow down emergency services, but combine speedbumps and a crosswalk and you get a raised crosswalk, which is a great measure to increase pedestrian safety.
a speed trap is a device that measures the speed of cars that drive by it. It's usually on the sidewalk or (as I proposed here) in a property adjacent to the street. You're not supposed to hit them.
You have it backwards. A perfect detection rate for crime makes it much more important that we define conservatively what we even consider to be a crime in the first place, and then what kind of punishment we levy upon it.
You also have it backwards because it already reliably makes society better for you. Take the case of Biogen employee Michael Bawduniak, who spent seven years documenting covert payments that steered doctors toward Biogen’s multiple‑sclerosis drugs illegally. When the United States Department of Justice settled the case for $900 million in 2022, Bawduniak received roughly $266 million, or about 30% of the federal proceeds, under the False Claims Act. It's a very similar mechanism, and anyone you may know who suffers from multiple sclerosis has likely had their treatment options materially improved thanks to Bawduniak's actions. But those kinds of actions only happen when you have the right mechanisms in place, to reward people who do the right thing.
My point is actually that the type of crime doesn't matter. If it's good enough to break up vast financial conspiracy networks, it's probably good enough for your bog standard aggravated assault cases or what have you, where people are a lot less skilled at avoiding detection.
I think the idea is vaguely that the upper-upper class statistically must've done something wrong or have the power to cause extreme harm, therefore it's okay to snitch on them but not your regular Joe.
I'm just espousing the standard American middle class views about freedom here. Not trying to argue they are sound or rational.
Well, I disagree, but I pick my battles carefully and would never risk turning someone against the False Claims Act to win such a small victory. Point conceded.
Modern people are so risk averse. Back in the day we would rob trains. These days society is the equivalent of a HOA - freedom is fast forgotten and trains go mostly unmolested except through that one bastion of liberty: Los Angeles. Society is full of tattletales and stool pigeons. A criminal society is a free society. Order is antithetical to expression.
There always has been some kind of problem with any snitching app there was. I don't see how this will be different. I don't think it will see broad adoption, but there will be "power users", who usually pose a problem as well.
I hate people leaving cars idling, but I don't like any form of bounty app. This is the wrong kind of law enforcement.
Now in addition to hoping the police aren't corrupt, we have to hope this guy is not corrupt, and that everyone who uses his system isn't corrupt. Not great (but our starting point wasn't great, either).
Because it loses nuance. If it was a meat truck trying to maintain temperature of the items while being stuck in a delivery paper work - now potentially being fined for keeping the meat at right temp!
If you read a headline like this and you think to yourself "this is stupid, what if..." whatever you are thinking of has been, more than likely, covered. It just doesn't fit into the headline. As another poster already remarked, this is covered.
> Exceptions include, but are not limited to, when an idling on-road medium/heavy-duty vehicle is: Stuck in traffic or otherwise required to remain motionless. Performing maintenance tasks or powering an auxiliary function or apparatus, such as a refrigeration unit or lift, requiring power from the primary motive engine.
As much as I hate the cops I actually trust a cop to be a more impartial arbiter of what does and doesn't fit that definition than some snooty white collar worker who just has a snitching app on their phone.
> I actually trust a cop to be a more impartial arbiter of what does and doesn't fit that definition than some snooty white collar worker who just has a snitching app on their phone
Arbitration is done by the NYC Dept of Environmental Protection. While it is unknown whether their workers are white collar, no evidence of snoot is manifested.
The meat truck likely has a separate engine for the refrigeration unit that is more efficient that idling the vehicle engine. There are provisions for those systems in place so they are exempt.
Fines not linked to income means it’s legal if you’re rich. I’m all for fining polluters to disincentivize pollution, but until we have income-pinned fines i’m not reporting any car under $50k
poor people idling their engines pollute just as much - or maybe more, depending on average vehicle age, etc. - as rich ones, and poor people are much more likely to suffer the negative consequences of that pollution
It does punish everyone equally, if everyone pays the same fine. Some people having more ability to pay does not make the law unjust.
I think it's important to remember that money represents debt. When someone commits a crime, they owe a debt to society. But if they have money, that means society owes a debt to them, so when they pay the fine it balances out.
The system isn't perfect but the idea is that if someone makes a big contribution to society, like by practicing medicine or creating new technology, society's debt to that person shouldn't be cancelled out by a minor offense like a parking violation. But if they aren't contributing much, then breaking the rules could make them into a net negative.
If I make $10/hour and you take $100 from me you’ve taken away 10 hours of my labour. If I make $600 an hour and you take $100 from me you’ve taken away 10min of my labour.
The $100 is equal but the impact is not. Fines are penalties, they don’t represent the cost of something - and a fixed fine is an un-equal penalty.
Your analogy makes some sense, but since wealth and contribution to society aren’t actually linked in reality - only in theory - I can’t get behind it. The wealthiest people in reality are parasites, not those who contribute the most. Owners not builders, CEOs not scientists, money managers not teachers.
Win-win for who exactly? Maybe we need to decentralize and AI-accelerate construction permit reporting too. Your backyard fence looks DIY and not up to code and your porch light looks like a fire hazard.
They're trialing something like that in France. There's a project that uses machine learning on aerial photography databases to search for objects in peoples' backyards, for enforcement,
Yes, and they're almost exclusively used by the worst type of vindictive chickenshit humans imaginable. I've known people affected by this, whose evil neighbors used 311 as a weapon because they simply didn't like them, and caused them tens of thousands of dollars in forced unnecessary renovations not to mention stress, for trivial violations that are widely ignored.
I lived in China for many many years and this is not a good example. Parking, and driving in general, is chaotic and unregulated. Yes, you have cameras everywhere that detect running on red or taking a wrong lane, but that's about makes it. Speeding, haphazard parking, everything is allowed. Scooters go anywhere. Bikes go anywhere. People go anywhere. Red, green, anything in between, it's a free for all. Like a policeman smoking under "no smoking" signs is totally normal. I'd say, you can get away with mostly anything in China, nobody would care (unless you're non-Chinese, then dutiful neighbors will report your every sneeze).
PS: Yet I do find OP's idea reminding me of China. Having a society that polices itself (just in China it's more about thought, not behavior) is definitely not a thing I would enjoy.
I’ll never understand how people believe bike and pedestrian “infractions” to be the same as that of motor vehicles.
Members of this “get off my sidewalk!” group often fail to realize this: Did you study to become a pedestrian? Did you go to a bicycle driving school to acquire a permit to operate one? Was an exam at all given in order to use public foot or bike paths?
If the answer is no, then you aren’t held to the same standards as cars, which are heavily regulated and require licenses to operate.
Obeying road signs for bicycle and pedestrians are suggestions, rarely enforced, and the worst case scenario is usually you hurt yourself. Your ability to hurt others has an upper bound that society deems acceptable.
It used to be that as long as the vehicle was on the same block as a school or park, you only had to take a one-minute video (versus three-minute). Now there are some annoying documentation requirements if you want to submit a shorter video.
Doesn’t impact the overall usefulness of the program very much IMO — I just didn’t add special handling for school/park reports like I would’ve before they made that change.
Presumably they don't want you taking videos of people who aren't in fact breaking the law and profiting from tickets. NYC regulation requires you to not idle more than 5 minutes.
Although they don't require you to actually take a 5 minute video it is overwhelmingly likely that most people don't pull out there phone every time a vehicle stops in NYC so that most 3 minute videos are liable to be of 5 minute idles.
There are obviously 2 types of problem children cheaters and dummies. It's easier for cheaters to take a 1 minute video since even those who don't intend to idle for any substantial time may pause a moment. For dummies making them actually sit there and film 3 minutes decreases the chance that they will accidentally misunderstand how much time has passed. People are heavily biased towards their own benefits and are liable to miss-perceive 4.5 minutes as 5. Less possible when he pulled out his phone at the 2+ minute mark and now has to wait 3 minutes to have enough.
New York City has different rules from New York State, and commercial vehicles have different rules from personal vehicles. The limit for commercial vehicles in NYC is three minutes, or one minute when adjacent to a park/school: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...
a) They won't use AI to fact check reports submitted when those reports stand to make them money.
b) They can't/wont use the dragnet for daily petty revenue enforcement because then people will complain about it and it'll get reigned in and they won't be able to use it for that and all the other things people don't want them using it for.
Within the last year or so, I discovered my city’s 311 app, which I’ve become addicted to. I don’t drive, so I’m always walking around the neighborhood, and got in the habit of always reporting graffiti, dumping, illegally parked cars, etc.
This had inspired me to try and make a few apps for civic use, but I discovered that many of the accessible web tools for my city have rules against bots. For example, the city maintains a list of locations and dates where parking is temporarily restricted for short term things like construction, but I can’t scrape it.
I really wish that the government (at any level) made more serviced and data available as APIs or digital formats. The government is usually bad at building/buying websites and services, and I’d have done it for free (or for $0.99 on the App Store).
How does your city deal with graffitis? mine is plagued with graffitis and I can't see how they can be fought. It takes too much resources to remove them in a timely manner and impossible to catch the perpetrators.
San Francisco does the sensible thing and fines the property owner. This is the just and right thing. In fact, I strongly support putting victims of drunk driving in jail: this strongly disincentivizes driving near drunk drivers.
It’s just a game of cat and mouse. I dont think there is a way to “win”, because it’s so easy to make new graffiti, and not practical to try and police and catch people in the act. I think they require private property owners to clean their own graffiti, which really sucks, but makes it more manageable for the city to focus on public areas.
The city really just has a queue of cleanup sites and priorities locations that are high visibility or important, like school yards or transit infrastructure. An elementary school nearby had its mural destroyed by graffiti, and it was cleaned up within a day.
Have you ever even had limited conversed with the other people of your neighborhood to find out if they even agree with you? Maybe they think the cars are fine and like that the graffiti keeps the rent low.
Nice. Pricing seems a bit steep for occasional use; does iOS make it easy to do micro-transactions with Apple Pay? (I get the dev may be trying to put bread on the table with this, which is also fine…)
That's a fair point. I have to see how the AI costs stack up, since heavy use can run up the bill pretty quickly with video inputs, and all subscriptions come with unlimited usage.
I don't understand people saying it's dystopian. This kind of thing is empowering people who are otherwise suffering from a lack of law enforcement. Motor vehicle operators take huge liberties all the time. Speeding, parking, excessive noise etc. None of these are their rights. They have just been taken at the cost of the rest of society. With great power comes great responsibility. That's how it should work. Stuff like this is just resetting the imbalance, giving power now to those outside of cars to force those inside to take responsibility.
Using AI to improve enforcement makes sense, but I do worry a bit when reporting turns into a way to make money. If people start watching each other for profit, it feels like we could slowly lose some of that everyday trust. I wonder if there’s a better balance between efficiency and a healthy community vibe.
Since you've mentioned it, that'd be great to give some details regarding the AI mechanism you used. I really find that trend of hiding everything behind "The Divine AI" off-putting. What exactly AI does in the context of the application?
feature request: AI-based risk analysis, with a model of which types of commercial vehicles at that location are likely to be controlled by organized crime
While a deeply problematic solution which pits citizens against each other, idling is also deeply problematic and awareness of the toxicity of internal combustion engines (ICE) needs to grow. While hardly a massive feedback loop, it is at least a bit tragic to see the growth of ICE idling during heatwaves encouraged in part by global warming and also the growth of smart phone usage in cars.
I heard that some of the newer manchild carriers are technically counted as commercial vehicles due to their excessive width. They have to have different lights on the front or something. So you might still be able to report those. Presumably you don't have to prove that it was being used for commercial purposes at the time.
Man, I wish my city would make it possible to report drivers breaking the law. My big issue is cars parking in the cycle lanes. 1830 cars got fined for that in my city in total in 2024. Aka 5 a day. As a single cyclist I see more cars parked in cycle lanes every day on my commute than all those hundred officers give tickets to in total..
What I’d like to see is hard separation of roads and bike lanes. As a cyclist, nothing but a line painted on the road makes me feel unsafe, as a driver it’s difficult to not get nervous when passing a cyclist in the lane, and culturally drivers are generally favored over cyclists which results in things like parking in bike lanes not being adequately enforced. All these things would be solved by bike lanes being fully independent from the road.
Why? I don't get this "gotcha". Is there any actual rational reason for making such rules, or is it stemming from some annoyance from seeing cyclists in the road?
There already exists roads where cyclists can't be: Highways/motorways. If the problem is cyclists in the road, that solves itself by building better infrastructure. Where there's adequate cycling infrastructure, cyclists prefer to use it. Where there's lacking or none, one should of course be able to use the road. Otherwise it would be a de facto ban on cycling, which I'm sure was your point?
> Is there any actual rational reason for making such rules, or is it stemming from some annoyance from seeing cyclists in the road?
It's from a combination of getting stuck behind cyclists going really slowly and with no opportunity to pass them, and from so much blatantly illegal behavior by them like running red lights without even slowing down.
What about blatantly ignoring traffic laws by parking illegally in the cycle lanes, forcing cyclists to use the road and be an annoyance to you? I think lots of drivers have a blind spot for their own traffic violations, because all statistics I've ever seen points to drivers breaking the law more often. And when they do, the consequences are also much greater.
I think that's the base rate fallacy, and that you only see more drivers break the law because there's so many more drivers in general. My estimate would be that I see about 100 good drivers for every driver breaking the law, but only about 5 good cyclists for every cyclist breaking the law. And another part of what makes it unfair is the disparity of enforcement. I see illegally parked cars with tickets under their wipers a lot, and it's fairly common to see drivers pulled over by the police for moving violations, but literally every single cyclist I've seen breaking the law has gotten away with it.
The fallacy here is probably your confirmation bias. Due to motonormativity and you being in the in-group, you notice cyclist mistakes and ignore driver mistakes.
For instance, a Danish study showing that 14 % of cyclists violate traffic laws when there is lacking infrastructure, but only 5 % when it's present. Compared to 66 % of motorists breaking some law. (Yes, if you ever go above the speed limit you have broken the traffic law just as much as the cyclists that grinds your gears. How many drivers speed in the highway each day, I wonder)
Doable, but would probably require bike paths to be wider than they currently are and split into two lanes: one for road bikers and one for everybody else.
I'll have to hunt down a link to the piece but I swear I saw a video about a few people in NYC who muddy go around finding idling vehicles and piece together the fine bounties into full time equivalent work. This could really disrupt their industry.
I like the general idea, and I’ve been surprised this hasn’t taken off elsewhere, eg citizen videos for traffic violations like blocking intersections, it seems these should be ROI positive for the city to implement (lower enforcement costs, more ticket revenue).
I really don't understand why anyone would want this
Do you really want to live in a society where we're monitored for even the slightest infractions at all times and automatically punished regardless of any circumstances that might explain the behavior?
New York City doesn't do this for "even the slightest infractions at all times".
The idling regulations are based on real harm, and the reporting requirements include things like recording video to prove that the car you're reporting didn't start idling in the last 5 seconds, but has, in fact, been doing that for 3 minutes or longer, or 1 minute or longer adjacent to a school.
You have to actually submit a 3:01 (or 1:01) minute video as part of the report for that to be actionable.
And, yes, I would really, really want to live in a society where unnecessary idling is not allowed. And if I was living next to a street corner where that happens regularly, I would be on that street corner recording videos any time I'd have free time, and more, if I had babies, who are especially vulnerable to air pollution, living with me.
> And, yes, I would really, really want to live in a society where unnecessary idling is not allowed
I would really, really want to live in a society where we aren't being monitored by cameras for every single minute of every day the moment we step outside our homes
In Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker showed crime can be discouraged if the expected punishment outweighs the reward. Expected punishment has not one, but two important factors: How big the punishment is, and how likely the punishment is to actually be levied.
Punishment likelihood depends on how likely the crime is to be detected in the first place. Older societies such as medieval Europe or Qing dynasty era China used the death penalty for so many seemingly minor things, and this formula was a big part of why. State authorities at that period of human history had a very low chance of actually detecting something like forgery. So in order to deter criminals they had to ratchet up just how big the potential punishment actually was if you did get caught.
Conversely, as our societies have improved their ability to detect crimes, our stomach for policies like “Forgery is punishable by death” has rightfully taken a nosedive. So, yes, the trend I've seen across the centuries suggests to me I might well prefer to live in a society where the detection rate is higher than it currently is. There's no reason to suspect we've hit upon the optimal point for human flourishing where we are now.
In China, mass and profoundly intrusive State surveillance supports your Social Score and is used by the State to enforce compliance and "desirable" behaviour.
Is maximum law enforcement a power we want any State to have?
There are multiple facets to this question. Would I want law enforcement to catch, for example, every murderer? Yes I would. On the other hand, we have in the US things like the fourth amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.
If these laws are used to sidestep prohibitions on what government is not allowed to do, i'd say they are a bad thing. If they are used to enforce bad laws, we need to get rid of the bad laws. If they are used to help enforce laws we all agree are good, that seems like a good thing.
This isn’t for chewing gum on the Subway. It’s for a specific kind of scofflaw activity that no society would tolerate were it not for the presumptive shield of goodness that surrounds drivers in this country.
Having grown up in the city and gone to a public school where over half of my peers had asthma from the heavy truck route next to our playground, I welcome any kind of financial realignment between drivers (especially commercial drivers) and their behavior.
Well, history shows us that any system that grants a power to government eventually expands beyond its original use. So you will forgive me for thinking it's a bad idea to start
If you follow that train of thought to it's logical conclusion, government should have no power at all, since any government power could be used for bad.
I get your take and agree with the sentiment BUT I don't think this somehow requires "automatic punishment". Also, if the laws are there then I tend to think they should be enforced. Maybe this kind of thing will empower places to drop some of the laws most folks agree are "slightest infractions".
This isn't about constant monitoring of people, it's about cars. I'm all for constant monitoring of cars within towns. They bully and intimidate and generally ruin places for everyone else. There needs to be strong incentives for people to not drive cars right into cities, with appropriate alternatives, of course.
I want to see much better parking on the outside of town with easy and safe travel to inside like light rail and bikes. All of this is possible if we take back what's been given to cars.
The biggest problem with drivers is they don't take responsibility for what they're doing. It creates a status quo where they feel empowered to do what they like and the rest of society bends to that. We have opportunity to force them to take responsibility which will reset that balance. It doesn't take much. When you realise you'll be driving at 20mph max and yielding priority to normal people everywhere driving suddenly won't seem so attractive. None of this is new restrictions on driving, it's just what they should have been doing anyway.
How do you feel about constant monitoring of trains or aeroplanes? If a train driver crosses a red signal it's straight to prison. When your actions can have such an impact on individuals and societies then your individual right to privacy is invalid.
Yes, care must be taken. These kinds of measures should only be taken when an existing power imbalance is already in place. We have laws to stop these imbalances, for example you can't use your might to force and coerce people. Do you think it's wrong for someone to be able to report an assault?
Cars are currently a huge power imbalance that needs to be evened out.
But, sure, some people will want to use the same technology to create new imbalances or further existing ones. That doesn't mean the technology itself is bad.
They always somehow run out of will to continue to harm people after those who can't resist have been harmed but right before the tech bros and out of touch white women who peddled and popularized the policy that lead to the harm start being on the receiving end of it all.
But I also recognize that people are human and make mistakes. I've missed turns before and had to make a decision between a slightly risky u-turn or being stuck going the wrong way for a while. I chose the u-turn after doing my best to ensure I wasn't going to put anyone else at risk
Should I be fined for that?
How about speeding? Basically everyone speeds right? Let's just auto fine everyone for that all the time.
Some countries are already doing this, for example Vietnam and China.
I recall reading about it years ago because some enterprising individuals decided that the revenue from catching random violations in-the-wild wasn't enough, so they started to deliberately create dangerous situations, where breaking a traffic law (which would then be recorded and submitted for a reward) was the only safe option for the victim. Unfortunately I haven't been able to quickly find a source to back this up.
This is why optimal policy design has the fines get paid directly from the violator to the reporter. That brings its own quirks, but they're all surprisingly tractable with other market mechanisms.
There's a whole literature on this topic in economics under mechanism design. They've been a longstanding research interest of mine, I consider it almost like the land value tax of legal enforcement by this point.
>This is why optimal policy design has the fines get paid directly from the violator to the reporter.
Absolutely. And make sure to give the violator full contact details for the person(s) who reported them. Better yet, set up sites in isolated areas for the violators to "pay" the reporters.
It is a low-risk, initial probe, to test the bounds of what currently is considered normal.
If it fails - it it is rejected - it was not controversial (parking fines) and so the cost is low.
If it succeeds, the boundary of normal has been moved, and then civilian reporting of crimes for money will be extended to other crimes.
Given USA now has authoritarian Government of Donald, this is obviously and incredibly bad.
An obvious thought is that it will come to be used by ICE to incentivize civilians to report on "illegal immigrants", as defined by Donald.
In Nazi Germany, Anne Frank was betrayed, revealed to the Gestapo, sent to a concentration camp and died there, because two Dutch brothers accepted the incentive provided by the Nazi party, the reward for doing so, to hand in Jews.
You do not use civilians for law enforcement because when misused it fundamentally and profoundly undermines civil society.
The State defines profoundly unjust new "crimes", and then sets everyone watching everyone, in return for pay, to accuse each other - and this in the "mass deportation", and "due process not necessary" environment now brought into being by Donald.
However, in this case, the idlers are the Nazi's killing people's lungs, and the citizens are accepting the incentive provided by the people to catch the killers?
This line of reasoning makes no sense. It's a slippery slope fallacy.
> An obvious thought is that it will come to be used by ICE to incentivize civilians to report on "illegal immigrants", as defined by Donald.
How would this program lead to that? If this didn't exist why wouldn't it be possible for ICE to make something similar for reporting "illegal immigrants"?
> In Nazi Germany, Anne Frank was betrayed, revealed to the Gestapo, sent to a concentration camp and died there, because two Dutch brothers accepted the incentive provided by the Nazi party, the reward for doing so, to hand in Jews.
Again, besides using money as a incentive what is the relevance here? Are you saying that using money as incentive is inherently bad?
> You do not use civilians for law enforcement because when misused it fundamentally and profoundly undermines civil society.
Everything can be misused. Are you saying that we shouldn't do anything about anything? Do you think that laws and rules would stop the likes of Hitler?
Milking motorists is very profitable. Stopping more problematic crime, not so much.
So we end up with anarcho-tyranny, where 'real' crime is policed poorly, if at all - but loads of resources and tech are deployed aggressively policing+punishing mostly-law-abiding people for the most minor of infractions.
That’s a false comparison. Giving out tickets is a civil law violation. Combating crime is a different matter.
You can criminally cheat civil laws as well at which point it becomes a criminal offense. But the treatment remains mostly civil instead of criminal.
If you want more policing for criminal offenses, then officers need to be solely designated for those offenses. Right now they are bogged down with civil matters.
This has nothing to do with "milking motorists", whatever that means. (The phrase generally seems to be used by people who are angry that they can't speed and run red lights with impunity).
The law applies to commercial vehicles. The aggregate effect of commercial vehicles ignoring the law isn't minor. You can find out more by following the links at the top of the page.
So when actual criminals leave their stolen getaway car idling as they go and loot a store, the owner of the stolen car now gets an extra fully-automated fine with likely no way to appeal it, and the real criminals get away free.
I feel it's Orwellian, or Stalin-esq to have us being paid off to snitch on each other.
Certainly, if you have evidence of murder or something, please do report it.
But for an idling vehicle?
Note that these laws are only targeting idling while parked, rather than during normal use, such as at a traffic light. This is called "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling.
Has anybody considered how much CO2 or other greenhouse gases are actually released by "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling vehicles, either individually or in aggregate? I spent a few minutes researching it with an LLM and couldn't come up with much. Most of the information and numbers I got were for ALL idling, including during normal driving like at a traffic light. My guess based on that is that it (true idling) is a trivially small amount of CO2 compared to the overall.
But it's plenty to earn yourself a nice payoff at the expense of your hard working delivery driver!
> I feel it's Orwellian, or Stalin-esq to have us being paid off to snitch on each other.
Sure, but it's a different kind of dystopia to have commercial vehicles idling and fouling the air outside of normal driving. As described where you have to capture 3 minutes of idling (1 minute near schools) and assuming most people take a while to notice, rather than starting the timer immediately when the vehicle stops, it seems like a reasonable way to enhance compliance.
Idling while parked may not be a large contribution to total emissions, but it's harder to justify than idling in normal operation, and easier to enforce against, so there you go. Sometimes refrigerated transport more or less needs to idle to keep the contents at temperature, not sure if there's exceptions for that or if they just need to retrofit with more insulation or batteries to run the compressor or etc in order to comply.
Idling at lights probably gets reduced by auto start/stop in new vehicles as well as congestion charges reducing traffic and probably dwell time at lights. Auto start/stop isn't a universally loved thing; it makes some cars really frustrating to use, but when done well, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to reduce unneccesary emissions.
I understand the sentiment, but if you accept the premise that idling vehicles harm everyone, which they probably do - via air quality, foreign wars to keep oil flowing, and climate change - then why should we not fine the heck out of anybody who harms
us all?
Don’t like getting reported by randos with apps? Don’t idle.
My only beef with the law itself, is that the fines need to be income-linked - otherwise it’s only illegal if you’re poor.
>Don’t like getting reported by randos with apps? Don’t idle.
a lot of friction is removed from society when we sequester surveillance/reporting/judgement/apprehension to one side of society, the criminal justice system.
a lot of friction is added to society when we bump surveillance and reporting back into the domain of the pedestrian. Social interaction becomes reduced between nodes, new cultural standards emerge, and overall communications between nodes tends to become reduced from the fear that the person you're speaking to candidly is actually a double-agent spy.
We have seen this in literally every society with rules or concepts like this. It isn't experiment psychology anymore, embedding citizen spies ruins societies, more so when they receive gifts for blabbing.
It's one thing applied to violent crimes; "see something say something", whatever -- it's another thing when a bounty-incentivized law produces rogue agents from within the populous that answer the call to become miniature 'bounty hunters' within the new rules. It makes life worse for everyone, and it spawns assholes that game the concept into a personality. The world waits with baited breath for the next 'Dog the Bounty Hunter' car-idler equivalent.
I'm not ever going to report another 'regular ole human being' for their car idling while the administrations of the world move literally hundreds of thousands of tons of metal around the world for military parades and whatever other flight of fancy and Dolly Parton or whoever the fuck is riding her coal-fired train through Tennessee on a whim -- there are so many more impressive fruit to pick from that tree than to step on bystanders that are probably having a crummy day anyway for a few bucks.
Hol’ up just a minute. You can disagree with me, but you leave dolly alone! ;)
I see what you’re saying, but I also somewhat disagree. We offload enforcement to police, which reduces friction for most but intensifies enforcement onto people deemed “suspicious” by social norms. Immigrants, black and brown people, young people, etc.
On the other side, yes if we universalize this to all laws we’d have a police state where everyone we interact with could profit off turning us in. But one of the main problems with that situation is that a ton of laws are BAD and we only are able to ignore them because for most of us they’re minimally enforced. Limit this bounty hunting business to parking enforcement and we’ve stopped the slippery slope from sliding
What makes you think that the set of people prone to snitching-for-profit don’t overlap with the set of people who would intensify enforcement on which ever group you’ve deemed people to have deemed suspicious?
Or that, at the very least, there are likely to be unintended consequences of bounty-snitching that create some other set of strained social pressures you also find unsavoury.
It’s possible that there would be unintended bad consequences. But we can try it out and course correct if that happens. Unless there is a specific bad that will definitely happen, why should we be afraid to try things?
I’ll answer my own question: we are afraid to try new things legally because gov is unresponsive. As an example, the majority of the US has supported cannabis legalization since at least 2012. If it takes a decade and counting for the law to change to follow the will of the people, trying new things risks locking in bad policy for decades / forever.
But this law’s already been passed, so if it’s bad and should be changed we’ll need proof of specific harm
1. the issues lies in the bounty hunting laws not the app. Change the law, the app goes away.
2. I’d rather bad laws get struck from the books, rather than lurking mostly un-enforced in the toolbox of police to weaponize. E.g. jaywalking. A crime made up by car companies to shift the blame from cars+drivers to pedestrians, mostly un-enforced except when cops want an excuse to id/frisk/hassle a young person or visible minority.
These are people spying on commercial vehicles abusing rights of way to avoid paying their fair share of the cost to carry them in the area (parking, in particular). Why are you taking the side of the trucks?
No. Taking the side of people who want to live in a place that isn't Brazil the Movie.
I love watching HN swim outside of technical depth. "Well, what if we put explosive collars on citizens at birth? That'll surely fix the crime problems.."
Well, guess what : it doesn't matter how you apply this concept, it's psychological poison. Incentivizing trivial taddling ruins the world, ruin businesses, ruins schools, it literally ruins any group of people that have to converse and deal with one another.
It's like people totally forgot that the primary methods behind groups like East Germany were to turn the populations in on each other for the sake of the state.
The truck idling problem is closer than ever to being permanently solved -- why is it that NOW we decide to create citizen spies when the problem is as least-bad as we've ever witnessed it since the advent of trucks?
I'm sure it's surely not a stepping-stone to adjust us into our future entirely-surveillance driven criminal justice system that's further bolstered by citizen-spy/tattle-tales, right?
This is like "protecting commercial interests who exploit gaps in law enforcement to save a few bucks at everyone else's expense, but leftistly".
People call in complaints all the time. They always have. It's part of city life. When they're complaining about truck drivers fucking up the streets, they're not rats; they're the good guys. Getting mad that their lives are being made easier seems super weird. But you do you! We're not going to agree.
Not really. He thought the regime would have to use force. He didn't predict that people would line up outside Wal-Mart at zero dark thirty on Black Friday morning to grab the latest, greatest telescreen models, and then fight each other like dogs for the last ones in stock.
You mean when he said “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” or something else?
Noticing a vehicle idling on a street isn’t the same thing as noticing a vehicle idling on a street, taking video evidence of it, reporting it and providing a copy of the video with the expectation of getting a cut of the fine.
Honestly, even without a financial incentive, I've thought about getting a dashcam to record the fuckheads "rolling coal" in my city and reporting them. Some behavior is so anti social that yes, it should be reported.
Why not go into the rough neighborhoods and report the people who are threatening the lives and health of people? You can even join the police force if you wish to work effectively against anti social behaviour.
I would guess the folks having their lives and property threatened are already reporting that, if they think the police will help them. If they won't, I'm not sure how me adding to the reports is going to help.
I've had so many people over the years (nearly all of them the kinds of people who looked like they never had to work a job in their lives) try to surreptitiously record my truck's plates when I was doing fire protection inspections in the city.
Don't worry though, every ticket the company got was billed right back to buildings we were working at in another form. The balance sheet always wins.
I agree. See something, say something if it's "a big one" otherwise being a tattler only helps increase the paranoia we alread have against others and further damages societal cohesion. I don't want to be stasi-lite for city, state, or federal government.
> "You walk against red light and your face gets plastered around billboards as named criminal."
I'm unsure if you were obliquely referring to this, or if you were intending to suggest a fictional idea. But what you described is already a thing that's happening in mainland China,
> "In the southern city of Shenzhen, Chinese authorities have launched a new surveillance system loaded with facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and a big database to crack down on jaywalking as well as other crimes."
> "As a result, photographs of pedestrians caught in the act, along with their names and social identification numbers, are now instantly displayed on LED screens installed at Shenzhen road junctions."
This is incredible sarcasm. It seems like people who like this sort of control always find a narrative to sell it to the people. The US still has the Patriot act on the books, and that's been the norm for some people's entire lives.
This program specifically fines businesses with fleets of commercial vehicles (delivery trucks, buses, et cetera) for illegal idling, and escalates the fines for repeat offenders. You can't report random individuals, nor would I really want to build an app for that. The point is to get businesses to stop polluting.
I see where you’re coming from, but the alternatives are either that the law isn’t enforced, or the state ramps up its own surveillance, which is more dystopian to me.
I see this as in the same vein as SEC whistleblower awards, which I’ve never heard described as dystopian. Businesses just don’t have the same expectation of privacy that individuals do.
you have like 50 comments in this thread whining about the law and desperately wanting businesses (not private individuals!) to idle their trucks next to schools.
Please don't try to game HN like this. We can easily turn off the flamewar detector when the topic warrants it, and users who post excessive numbers of low-quality comments can have rate-limiting turned on.
There seems to be a whole lot of drama about this project and from what I can see there are reasonable arguments for and against.
How about just respecting the merits of open debate about a topic and let other readers decide for themselves, rather than going to war on the project and on HN to try and swing things in favour of your own argument?
I'm sorry that my project caused you this much distress. If you live in NYC and hate the idling complaint law, lobby your representatives to kill it. I didn't make the law or even the service that lets you file reports under it. I just wrote an API client.
People have filed idling complaints for years, long before this app existed. Even if your comments somehow convinced me that publishing Idle Reporter is an "evil" act (as you claim), and I decided to take it down and go become a Tibetan monk, people would still file complaints as they always have.
> I will absolutely act in good faith and not game the system, but only as long as the mods do that too. As soon as the mods do that in a thread, all bets are off. Could not care less if I get banned for defending myself in such a situation.
Yep and I got an upvoted comment dissenting against all the authoritarian bootlickers in every single thread on this post. People agree with me. Even on the comments of mine that got flagged lol
It even pissed people off enough that one of the mods started commenting about my own personal projects that have nothing to do with this lmao
Oh and I guess it did work because now it's down to 28, almost off the front page. Much lower than where it was before
Being about businesses only and no individuals makes all the difference in the world.
Otherwise it should be seen as dystopian also the fact that you can call the police on your neighborhood because "you heard noises".
I bet that the friction in the submission process was deliberately added to avoid abuses, but maybe it's just incompetence. Depending on the reason, this app can be either good or against the spirit of the rule.
it normalizes the process and app though, and reinforces reporting your neighbors to the government. Not something I like to see. It's one thing to report domestic abuse or a crack house; another to report someone double-parked for a couple of seconds or an idling truck via "a simple click on your phone, thank you citizen"
People are certainly allowed to say that. Your comment, for example, hasn't been flagged.
However, a lot of the comments tending in that direction have been (1) generic and (2) flamebait and/or fulminatey, which are bad for HN threads and against the site guidelines.
You regularly spam a generic generative ai ‘art’ thing on this site so of all people it feels like you’d have a broader, less kneejerky and more charitable view of what use of the technology is ‘dystopian’
It’s someone’s show hn for something that’s NYC law, designed to address a specific local problem. Calling this ‘evil’ is, at a minimum, unserious bombast which the site rules ask you to avoid, especially when discussing someone else’s work. You can critique the work without the Savonarola act. It also happens to be more effective that way so it’s in your own interest.
I really am supportive of 99.9% of Show HNs, merely for the sake of the posters actually trying to build something
This is one of the few things I feel very strongly about and I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it. His idea is actively harming what makes America a good place to live in. And his idea is what makes China a bad place to live in. I'm not just going to sit here and say nothing.
I don't care if this negative EV for my own personal interests. I felt the need to speak up and people agree with me. Hopefully his post gets taken down.
Nobody is telling you how and how strongly to feel - just not to be a yelly asshole about it.
This is a valid show hn - if you can’t comment on it reasonably just don’t comment or find a thread where the general surveillance topic is actually the topic.
Maybe a bunch of people just don't agree with your position. (If they're idling and I report them, I'm a snitch. If I don't, I get to breathe the pollution. Why is snitching worse than poisoning people in your city? Why should the snitch be the bad guy in that situation, rather than the polluter?)
This isn't trolls - it's people getting triggered by a provocative topic. For plenty of obvious reasons, different people have different reactions to this kind of thing.
Btw, "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Anything goes. All you need is $10, a few proxies and AI promps for viral marketing. Don't forget to flag posts you don't like with your sock puppet accounts.
Kinda offtopic, but I think this is so dystopian as it's only the beginning. Technocracy at its best. Have a bad starter and don't wanna stop the car? The numbers and rules don't care, no room for benevolence.
My kids asthma wants your commercial car in a service bay, not idling outside a restaurant. I am all for not making a technocratic dystopia but this reasoning seems wrong lol
I understand! But still, I feel like mechanising these things is an issue, especially with the authoritarian people rising (especially in the US) all over the world. I'm annoyed at idling cars (especially taxis here in Germany) as well, but I feel like the pollution is very minor. Still illegal though.
That’s the problem. Major polluters have convinced people it’s the small scale production to attack rather than the giant industrial polluters.
We also allow incredibly inefficient engines that produce lots of pollution.
How about a pollution credit trading program then? If my efficient car produces way less pollution than your gas-guzzling truck, I should get the room to idle until I reach our agreed max.
A technological snitch program is a weird and messed up outcome when we ignore the base problems.
But, cool technical achievement. I’m scared that a similar parking snitch program is all too easy as well. Car parked 3.5 hours in a 3hr max neighbourhood? Get them fined and get a sweet bounty! Thanks I hate it.
Your kid's asthms would appreciate more if there were fewer cars on roads and logistics leaned more on robust public transportation rather than putting the onus on individual household to own and operate multi-tonne vehicles.
New York City has already implemented a congestion surcharge in Manhattan to destroy demand for using personal vehicles, and has a robust public transit system. The only step left would be mandating EVs, and outlawing combustion.
Right now we are in the “laws are seldom actually enforced” regime.
It seems pretty clear that laws will be enforced more in future, the obvious response is to go prune the laws to get rid of the ones that we actually aren’t OK with being enforced.
Laws will be enforced if it's safe and profitable to do so, especially if the process can be fully automated.
Meanwhile, industrial-scale shoplifting, hard drugs, sex crimes, riots. No automated enforcement possible there, let alone profitable automated enforcement.
I feel things like shoplifting should actually be automatable, it’s a question of ROI currently.
One idea I play with is “police 2.0” where you can dispatch a small fast drone to a crime scene, and follow the perp from a safe distance. A lot of crimes could be solved this way (eg car chases, illegal dirt bike gangs, petty robbery etc).
I really don’t want pervasive surveillance, but perhaps there is a middle ground where response times are fast enough that you can be purely reactive to a 911 call/app.
Feels quite slippery-slope though. I think we should expect increased debate on the social contract as these new systems become more capable and the “enforcement gap” becomes larger.
We've got a brand new war in the Middle East, and a big ongoing one in Ukraine.
If we can't prevent wars between nations, there's no hope of the planet coming together to the extent required to manipulate the climate in a meaningful way.
Would you please stop posting like this? Once was fine, but half a dozen is too much. You've made your point, and that's ok, but this is not curious conversation.
Also when the posts start getting dyspeptic-meta like this, something has gone wrong.
> Everybody is stupid but me!!!!! How tireing. Idling is allowed for running a piece of equipment.
No. More so, along the lines of, random people should not be given financial incentives to regulate things they don't understand, especially not without a long checklist. A 2,01m video covers only the most basic thing.
> And this law isn't there for fun either.
Yeah, it's driven by the hippies who made OEMs write in manuals that you should immediately go after starting your car or bike. Scrape the cylinders real good while they're bone dry..
Yes they are. The summons part is essentially what happens when a cop issues you a ticket..
> What happens after I submit my complaint?
> Where DEP issues the summons, you will be informed of the summons number and hearing date. You may need to be available in person or by phone to testify. If the summons is upheld, the respondent must pay the penalty in order for you to receive payment for your complaint, You should submit your request for payment to OATH. If the summons is dismissed, you are not entitled to any payment.
So any random can waste your time severely at no cost to themselves, and you have to prove you were idling legally unless it's a refrigeration truck:
> If you submit a complaint regarding a refrigeration truck, you must document that the engine that moves the vehicle was on and was not being used to run the refrigeration unit.
Where I severely doubt they know which license plates belong to refrigeration trucks to begin with, so you'll likely still have to waste time.
It leads to a hearing date with you on the hook for up to 18000$ the first time and them risking nothing after investing 5 minutes to get in that joyful situation.
The more I read about it, the more it seems like a great scam, though. Film trucks, make them appear to be running for a couple of tokens and drown your competition in fines. Once a day on some trial will likely be enough even.
> Yes they are. The summons part is essentially what happens when a cop issues you a ticket..
They are reporting, not regulating. You don't get a ticket from a random person.
> The more I read about it, the more it seems like a great scam, though. Film trucks, make them appear to be running for a couple of tokens and drown your competition in fines. Once a day on some trial will likely be enough even.
This rule is in place for a long time. It isn't a scam nor is what you dreamt up happening.
Wish my California city had this attitude that you can report people via an app. So many offenses “run with the driver”, i.e. they will not prosecute unless a cop sees it happening and positively identifies the driver. They won’t even prosecute red light running from a video with the license plate clearly visible.
A motor vehicle cannot receive a citation. If law enforcement cannot ID the driver as a particular individual when the infraction or crime occurred, a citation should not be issued.
Yes, that is the rationale, even though in the specific case I cite, said red light runner caused an accident and left their insurance info and produced a driver’s license. The police don’t care.
It doesn’t have to be like that. Why does New York not need to ID the driver to cite for idling? “The owner of the vehicle may not be the one driving it.”
Awesome. Offer tech that helps people more easily become arbitrary snitches on activity in ways that's absurdly easy to manipulate or take advantage of, all while further moving forward a culture of spying on those around you just in case yo can snatch up something worth reporting for some personal gain.
This is a phenomenal application of how fine-based bounties can be used to rapidly improve compliance with the law. Incredible work. I would absolutely use this if I lived in NYC; I'll recommend it to my friends there.
>This is a phenomenal application of how fine-based bounties can be used to rapidly improve compliance with the law.
This type of thing can get out of hand quickly. Without me giving controversial examples, just imagine for yourself the types of things that different states can make a crime, add a fine, then offer to give other citizens part or all of that fine if they turn in others. After that, think of how unscrupulous businesses could use it against competition.
Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law. If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that law and perhaps tear it down. Any "law" that people put up with because it isn't enforced 9 times out of 10 is little more than a tax upon those too honest to get away with it.
As for businesses using it against one another in competition: Same deal, I think that's an excellent thing. If this idling law causes NYC businesses to shift en masse to faster loading and unloading practices because their competitors are watching them like hawks, I don't think that's a bad thing.
>Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law.
Agree. More of my thought is what happens when everyone is incentivized with money to spy on everyone else? How can you misuse this as a government? How can unscrupulous businesses misuse this?
>If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that law and perhaps tear it down.
I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
>Any "law" that people put up with because it isn't enforced 9 times out of 10 is little more than a tax upon those too honest to get away with it.
Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.
> I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
Think bigger. If the activity were really a money-maker, then it will inevitably be scaled and industrialized. A cottage industry of snitching would spring up. If that industry got sufficiently wealthy and politically powerful, we'd see all kinds of "easy-bounty" laws getting enacted to allow these companies to further sponge up fines from the public.
If speeding fines were shared with whoever reported them, I guarantee 100% that companies would buy real estate every 10 miles along every freeway and put up speeding cameras to automate it.
(EDIT: Looks like you also already predicted the speed trap cottage industry in another comment. Oh, well, I'll leave this one up too)
This is exactly the point, yes. You can get arbitrarily close to 100% crime detection rates with any law where there is a financial incentive for private entities to invest in this kind of infrastructure.
The example I like to use is littering. If I lived near a high traffic area, and there was a $200 fine, $100 payable to the first successful reporter, you'd better believe I would invest in some webcams and some software to do nothing but watch for signs of littering nearby 24/7, run the last 15 seconds through AI to weed out false positives, and maybe even file the report automatically on my behalf. That's almost literally money lying on the sidewalk.
At first I would probably make thousands with a $20 webcam and some manual review. Even one true positive pays for itself 5 times over. Eventually other people on my block would start doing a similar thing. The fine can only get paid to one person, usually the person who "gets there the fastest with the mostest". So then there is competitive pressure on me to make my software faster, my webcam higher resolution, my detection methods and ability to prove non-repudiation more reliable.
If you prefer walking through trash I can understand this may dismay you. If you like clean streets, I can think of no better chilling effect to anyone who might be crossing by. You can apply this enforcement mechanism to basically any kind of crime and get similar results - even and especially organized crime, which traditional legal enforcement historically has a very hard time breaking up. Hence why it's already in use by the SEC to break up the highest level of financial crimes, via things like the False Claims Act where often the only way to prove the crime is happening in the first place is to have a man on the inside why can patiently collect evidence for years before making his move. What better way to make something worth a man's time than to pay him?
I'll take a little litter on the streets over mass surveillance and cameras everywhere identifying me everywhere I go. Because it never fucking stops at just litter. Pretty soon all that lovely data about who is where at what time gets sold, just easily tied into a little API, and the developer gets a few bucks of kick back. Gotta support the developer, right? This is just spyware for the real world shrouded in something that appears to be a good thing. Fuck off and no thanks, this is why we can't trust anything.
Besides, we don't have anything like this now, and I'm not walking through trash in the city I live in. If you have trash everywhere, you have other problems.
Not only that, but a society that deputizes its citizens to watch their neighbors’ every behavior in hopes of soaking them for fines, sounds like a pretty miserable society. I don’t want to live somewhere where my neighbor can make $100 by turning me in for having grass one inch too long.
>[P]eople might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in. This would lead us to assume that for most crimes of a personal nature, we would have about as many people losing money due to the law as making money due to it, and so the effect cancels out.
In situations where many more people make money and only a select few are losing big, well... Somehow I feel like that's usually for the best anyway. See my other comments on eg the runaway success of the False Claims Act. Or just consider the class action lawsuit and whether you think it fills a valuable role in society.
>Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.
Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you. Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.
> See my other comments on eg the runaway success of the False Claims Act
Could you link some examples of such comments because I can't find them, please?
> Or just consider the class action lawsuit and whether you think it fills a valuable role in society.
This is an odd one. They are extremely rare in the UK, but in practice I think we have better consumer protection because it's handled through ordinary politics and legislation, rather than litigation.
ref. https://www.osborneclarke.com/insights/what-status-class-act...
I also wonder how this is going to interact with politically connected people who are used to ignoring the law, such as Cuomo https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/06/16/no-mo-cuomo-scofflaw-...
I had a discussion with gametorch about this topic where I mention the case of Biogen employee Michael Bawduniak. His comments got flagged, but I think he laid his assumptions and concern for the downstream effects on US culture bare, which is commendable. I'll cite some relevant news articles since finding the exact link is proving tough.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/biogen-inc-agrees-pa... " Biogen Inc. Agrees to Pay $900 Million to Settle Allegations Related to Improper Physician Payments"
[2]: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/largest-ever-266-4-... "Largest-Ever $266.4 Million Whistleblower Award in Biogen False Claims Act Suit"
[3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-26/biogen-to... "Biogen Agrees to Pay $900 Million to Resolve Kickback Claims"
You can also find more official information on the SEC whistleblower program, which I think the False Claims Act itself is under but might just be a mirror similarity, at
[4]: https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/whistleblower-pro...
It's fascinating stuff.
> I had a discussion with gametorch about this topic where I mention the case of Biogen employee Michael Bawduniak. His comments got flagged, but I think he laid his assumptions and concern for the downstream effects on US culture bare, which is commendable. I'll cite some relevant news articles since finding the exact link is proving tough.
This is the post to which you mention Bawduniak in reply to gametorch:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349951
Algolia doesn't seem to let you search for some comments, not sure if [dead] or [flagged][dead] show up there. I found this via your comments link from your profile. I also have showdead enabled on my HN profile, which is necessary to see these comments on the comment page for a HN submission, but not to view them via a direct link iiuc.
>I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in.
In some cases, which seem like a good idea like corporate malfeasance whistleblowers or government grift whistleblowers. This is because the people paid by our tax dollars would be at a disadvantage compared to an insider in the company. In others, you could see the direction it must go.
>Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you.
Cheers!
>Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.
There might very well be laws like that. However, let me offer a non-controversial and obvious one. Speed limits. Many places have 65mph listed as a speed limit. Everyone knows you are not allowed to go faster. However very few place will pull you over for going 66mph or even 70mph. If they started pulling over everyone going 70 in a 65 there would not be "such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety" because we all know and they all knew they were breaking the law. But it isn't enforced in an authoritarian way because we have different vehicles, sometimes you need to pass, and frankly 70 and 65 just aren't that big of a problem. But almost everyone would agree that we do need a speed limit, although they might not agree on the number and a number has to be picked.
Now, I don't want to assume your political leanings, but I am getting some strong libertarian vibes. And you seem like a nice and thoughtful person, so maybe bad ideas don't even occur to you because you are honest and just don't think that way. But imagine, or go ask grok, some other ways this could work out. And while you are at it, imagine a law that did not effect all citizens the same. Now imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others. In what way could they cause affect a backlash that would quickly get a law repealed in its entirety?
Using money to incentivize any public action on behalf of the government should be a sort of last-resort situation where it makes sense and the people already being paid to do it can't for some reason. This is a very libertarian idea, in fact. A more reasonable idea, although much less libertarian, would be to pass a law that makes it where cars can not idle for more than a specified amount of time in certain situations, but that would come with its own can of worms don't you think? And I personally wouldn't be for such a law. In fact I am against the snitch on idlers law. If someone wants to pay $7 a gallon for gas to set there and idle it away, why shouldn't they be able to? How is it different than them driving the same gas away?
Many countries do enforce the speed limits like that. Try doing 110kph in a 100kph zone in Australia/NZ/CH and you'll get ~500$ fine pretty quickly and lose your licence on the 3rd try.
110 in a 100 zone in NZ would see you with a $30 fine and you would need to accrue 10 such fines in a 12 month period to lose your license.
As a result, speeding is very common here. Australia is a totally different story.
Re/ the speed limit, I'm afraid I simply don't understand. Why not just raise the speed limit to 70 instead of having everyone lie? If everyone starts then doing 75, why not raise it again? Eventually you'll hit a breakeven point. Considering that most highway accidents happen because two people disagree about the speed they should be driving at, and considering that fatalities and accident severity in such accidents scales with something crazy like the square or even the cube of the speed you're going at, this actually feels like the worst possible way to negotiate that.
Conversely, under an enforcement regime where everyone is genuinely scared to go higher than 65, the worst case scenario is... Everyone does 65. Fewer accidents, and fewer fatalities from those accidents. Best case scenario is they rapidly revise up to 70 - 75 - wherever.
Re/ "imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others", I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them, which requires they have a lot of money to reliably extract in the first place - otherwise it stops being worth the effort to target them specifically.
I guess you could imagine making lottery scratch tickets a fineable offense, and thereby target pensioners unfairly. That's the closest I got after 5 minutes of thinking about it.
Re/ using money to incentivize public action - we have clashing moral intuitions on this, I definitely don't see it as a last resort. In fact I would far prefer it to be the first resort. Money is a much more efficient, scalable, precise, and robust way of handling things than e.g. sending people to prison (which we still have to pay for, by the way, prisons aren't cheap).
Re/ the idler's law itself - You're allowed to be against it personally, that's fine. The people of New York City voted in favor of it, and they probably have good reasons for this that mostly only make sense to themselves. Personally, I've been to New York, and seen how cramped those streets are. It doesn't surprise me that some schmuck holding up half of 6th Avenue should be made to pay for it - they are likely causing thousands of dollars of cash flow loss per second because on who's late for work because of them. But even then, I don't live there. I don't actually have a good sense of this kind of thing. I defer to the wisdom of the locals here. Do as the Romans do.
I know populism is a thing but speed limits aren’t formally set for people’s preference but for safety and environmental reasons. “Most” people choosing to break the law doesn’t change that, and adjusting the law becomes a populist thing.
Accidents on the highway do not happen because people don’t agree on the speed to drive at, more than they happen because “cars exist”. They happen because drivers drive faster than their capacity to avoid danger. This capacity differs from hour to hour and day to day. Agreeing on a speed doesn’t make one less drunk or sleepy or unskilled, and so on. More accidents happen on the day after summer time switch when drivers have less sleep and it’s not like everyone just changes opinions.
You’re missing the elephant in the room. Not everyone is equally capable of buying laws or fighting the enforcement of those laws. When Musk’s datacenter was photographed polluting more than declared it wasn’t an instant fine, it’s a lawsuit that the taxpayer pays for (implicit fine on the taxpayer). He can afford it, but how much of this can taxpayers take? These are the people who can buy a law to make your life harder if you try to catch them red handed with something. They’re the ones who can see that you get fined when you say something that’s false or just inconvenient or not yet decided by a judge (like that most accidents caused by disagreement on speed, or that Musk’s DC pollutes more than declared) while they can afford to keep doing it themselves because for them everything becomes a lawsuit they can drag on forever, can afford, and costs you money too.
Making free money sounds awesome. But coming from a country which in the past “democratized” and incentivized reporting “bad” behavior, no matter how much you think this time it’s a worthy cause, it just opens the door up to abuse against the weaker members of society, and almost everyone becomes weaker as a result. You don’t see where this goes because you’ve never seen it with your eyes and don’t trust reading a book.
>Not everyone is capable of buying laws.
Actually, no one is capable of 'buying' a law. Laws are passed via the processes of the legislative system. Sure, you can try to bribe someone like a Congressman into voting for or against certain things, but this is very different from just buying a law outright, and people are constantly watching Congressmen to ensure this kind of behavior doesn't get too out of hand.
"Nobody ever catches those bribes in practice." Gee, it sounds like you have a crime detection issue there. If only there were some decentralized mechanism, trending towards a 100% success rate, by which individual actors could personally benefit by exposing with evidence a Congressman took a bribe. :)
Apropos: The SEC whistleblower program has so far distributed over $2 billion to nearly 400 corporate insiders since 2011, and shows no sign of slowing down. We aren't lacking for success stories here when it comes to stopping shady financial deals, they're actually one of the easiest cases to handle.
>When Musk’s datacenter was photographed polluting more than declared it wasn’t an instant fine, it’s a lawsuit that the taxpayer pays for (implicit fine on the taxpayer).
You sound like you have a lot of knowledge about this case. If you were to share your knowledge with someone else who was pursuing this fine, so they could get a cut out of it, you could probably get paid yourself for doing so. Maybe you could have submitted more photographs, or air quality measurements, or just conversations with people working at the datacenter (who might themselves be getting paid a cut of your cut by you).
In so doing, you would have made the case against Musk stronger, and made it more likely the fine would be levied in the first place. If the crime actually happened, of course. Those are the kinds of strategies a "fine paid to the successful reporter" approach to legal enforcement allows for. They simply have no analogue in other approaches to the law. They operate on self-interest, not fear.
This is also an much, much more powerful way by which the "weaker members of society" you are concerned with can work together at scale to take down and prosecute a much larger entity. One thing the disenfranchised do very well is information gathering. If you're unemployed or underemployed anyway, and you just have this burning passion of hating Musk or Richard Ramirez copycat killers or money launderers or child predators or whatever floats your boat, it would be very encouraging to know you might be able to eke out a living simply by investigating their crimes on your own time and getting paid for it by someone, without necessarily needing to get a JD.
>while they can afford to keep doing it themselves because for them everything becomes a lawsuit they can drag on forever, can afford, and costs you money too.
"Phase 2 of this process is incurably too slow anyway, so we might as well not even worry about optimizing Phase 1" is an engineering issue. It requires you to make a judgment call about whether Phase 1 is already 'good enough' as it is.
Considering that the lawsuit generally happens only after prosecution, the vast majority of information gathering, and back office work, what you are implying here is that you think all of that preceding work is already handled so competently that there's no reason in worrying about it. It's no longer the bottleneck of the system.
Very few people would agree with that.
>coming from a country which in the past “democratized” and incentivized reporting “bad” behavior
As far as I'm aware no democratic country has yet instituted fine-based bounties widely across its executive apparatus. So I don't actually know which country you could be referring to.
If, however, you're talking about a democratic country where this approach is employed in certain areas of legal enforcement, I would point out that, if you live in the United States, you actually still live under such a regime. See the SEC whistleblower's cases mentioned above, or the FBI's Most Wanted list.
The reason you don't hear about them very often is both due to their currently specialized nature, and because they just... Work. Quietly, in the background.
So far I haven't heard anyone complaining about the Orwellian dystopia that the False Claims Act is creating for good honest hedge fund managers who just want to maximize their portfolio earnings, although I'm sure they're out there.
>Actually, no one is capable of 'buying' a law. Laws are passed via the processes of the legislative system. Sure, you can try to bribe someone like a Congressman into voting for or against certain things, but this is very different from just buying a law outright, and people are constantly watching Congressmen to ensure this kind of behavior doesn't get too out of hand.
What unproductive pedantry. I find your comments exhausting because of their wordiness that stands in contrast to the ridiculous assumptions that your verbosity hides.
> Actually, no one is capable of 'buying' a law.
In this case I have a wonderful bridge to sell you.
Of course they can. It's called lobbying and it's literally aimed at convincing representatives to support certain policies or laws. When a lot of money is involved it's no different from buying those laws.
> As far as I'm aware no democratic country has yet instituted fine-based bounties widely across its executive apparatus. So I don't actually know which country you could be referring to.
Of course you don't. It's why I literally said you "don’t trust reading a [history] book". History isn't limited to what and where you lived. I shouldn't need to nudge you in the right direction.
> So far I haven't heard anyone
Going back to those books, you haven't heard a lot of things. You have such strong opinions despite (or maybe because) showing so little knowledge or understanding of things in the present or in history. On top of the couple of things I pointed out just by skimming your comment, you compare using the public for the apprehending people on FBI's most wanted list with people helping catch the dreaded "engine idler".
> Why not just raise the speed limit to 70 instead of having everyone lie?
What's the lie? They are just going 70 in a 65... that's not a lie.
>Re/ the speed limit, I'm afraid I simply don't understand. Why not just raise the speed limit to 70 instead of having everyone lie?
Then do you arrest all people going 71?
> I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them
Is suspect everyone can hypothesize a small group they belong to. So make up one that you belong to and imagine a group coming into power in the legislature where you live that makes that kind of law. The money itself doesn't need to be a large amount (what might be "a lot" to you and I might be different for different people) to make it oppressive and frankly a weapon for the police and government to use.
>Re/ the idler's law itself ... The people of New York City voted in favor of it
Correct. I don't agree with it but the local people do. This is the both the blessing and curse of our government and the exact situation where some people can can use this pay-for-snitching technique for good or bad. If it works for them then so be it. I don't have to like it. I don't like a lot of stuff. And some stuff I do like others don't. My original argument is that using money as an incentive to turn citizens against each other is a very slippery slope. In his case it might be great for them. I understand that you and I disagree on this point and there is likely nothing I can say or you can say to make the other suddenly change position and I respect you defending your thought process on this. But it is nice to be able to have a conversation about something controversial without it spinning into something else. Cheers!
spoken like a person who’s never had to load/unload a truck before
This is a general problem we've had iterations of in Edinburgh lately:
- traffic designers lay out road
- there is nowhere for delivery trucks to park, or extremely limited parking
- this is justified by a lengthy set of arguments about other road users
- deliveries still need to be made
- truck parks in bus lane, cycle lane, or on the pedestrian paving (cracking slabs!)
- everyone is now mad with each other, on the street or in the local newspapers
> there is nowhere for delivery trucks to park, or extremely limited parking
In most cases, there is room for them to park: the solution is simply for delivery companies to lobby for loading zones where there are currently parking spots for private cars. Drivers will never agree to this though, so here we are.
The fact that there is no truck parking is not an excuse for trucks to park in the bike lane or on the sidewalk.
If an area doesn't support trucks, then deliveries need to be made without trucks. That means parking the truck far away and using a hand truck to make the delivery on foot using the sidewalks.
The shipping companies can either eat the cost, pass it on to consumers or refuse to deliver to those areas.
ah yes. “park far away and simply walk 300 pounds of groceries to be stocked at the only corner store for miles” is a very clean and simple solution only you were smart enough to think of. There definitely aren’t hills or ruts making this impossible because everyone lives in perfectly paved suburbia and I’ve always heard tell of this obvious laziness of checks notes the men and women who actually deliver your prime packages at 4AM.
Love the app; will use.
Scared of MAGA targeting brown people with this type of social enforcement
Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law.
Not really. If perfect, ubiquitious enforcement were possible, our laws would probably look very different.
> just imagine for yourself the types of things that different states can make a crime, add a fine, then offer to give other citizens part or all of that fine if they turn in others
You mean if a red state (like Texas) potentially handing out bounties for snitching on abortions? Texas already passed that law in 2022[1]. We are already way down the slippery slope you alluded.
1. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1107741175/texas-abortion-bou...
Yeah, this is the worrying bit. US constitutional law only seems to restrict the government, so they can delegate it to private actors who can then do unconstitutional things. Something similar happened with the book-objecting laws.
You're actually better off if it's a crime because then you can force the issue to go through a court, be made public record, etc.
A lot of civil penalties carry fines in excess of what you get for a first offense for a violent but not professional criminality type crime. It's absolutely insane. NYC's idling laws are just the tip of the iceberg in this regard. And the fact that these are "civil" penalties means the due process requirements are basically nil and when they do exist (like they do for traffic infractions) they basically only exist so far as they need to to keep the racket going.
Like you'd be hard pressed to wind up with tens of thousands of of fines doing actual criminal stuff, they'd just throw you in jail. But a government official can notice (or be tipped off to) some violation then go look back at their info sources and decide unilaterally when the violation started and fine you for presumed months of violation and you often have no recourse but to sue.
One needn't imagine. Texas's strange attempt to twist civil law such that providing or facilitating an abortion is an injury to anyone who claims it is (and is thus a cause of action where the "injured" person can sue the person providing or facilitating the abortion) has taken this discussion out of the theoretical. Regardless of where you stand on whether abortion should be allowed, the idea that anyone who performs one is liable to the first person to notice that they did is an intentional perversion of civil law.
Or if you need to avoid the a-word because of the particular fruit that falls from that tree when shaken, just look at predatory towing.
I think an important wake-up call is that bounties now exist in an ecosystem where people who would normally be indifferent to wanting/knowing how to collect bounties, could be driven by techniques from the predatory-gambling-app world into becoming gamified enforcers.
We’re already sliding down the slope, to be sure, but this is an acceleration that we should expect with our eyes wide open.
Yes, and? It's a good thing to get crimes reported more often, faster, and with more and higher quality evidence. (That last statement doesn't directly follow from bounties in the short term, but it does once you start considering the competitive pressures crime detectors face in such a market.)
You can run a thought experiment to confirm this. Suppose 1/2 of all crimes committed in your area currently get reported. You are offered the option to move to two new places, identical in every way to your starting point, except New Town A has 3/4 of the crimes committed get reported*. New Town B has only 1/4 of the crimes committed get reported. Do you move? Where to?
The important thing to notice is less that New Town A seems like a pretty good deal, than that New Town B seems like a really bad one. Plenty of people would move to New Town A for the obvious additional security. Some of people would elect to stay, for reasons like New Town A isn't guaranteed to be exactly like where you currently are into the future, and home is home. But almost nobody would move to New Town B. The people who would jump for joy at moving to New Town B may even be criminals themselves trying to escape charges or just hedge their futures.
* For the sake of completeness, you can consider this property preserved across different types of crime. E.g. if 90% of homicides get reported in your current locale, 95% do in New Town A, and only 45% in New Town B do. If 20% of money laundering schemes get reported, 60% do in New Town A, and 10% in New Town B. Etc. The general idea of everything being more or less detectable is more important than the specific numbers.
Yeah, like the ADA for example. We should not have started down that slippery slope. Repeal the ADA!
Reminds me a snitchers during communist regime in our country. There was a lot of those who report to STB (state security, like KGB) all kind of misbehaving of citizens that could threat a state.
I'm curious, when there will be apps to report citizens that threat democracy. Like those who wear red hat. Or sleepong on street. Or make weird talks at home...
I wish it was was more common around the world. Not just with parking though, but everything in the context of cars.
Like letting the police install a permanent speed trap on your property or even pay for the privilege of them doing so. I'd bet that'd curb a lot of speeding in short order
There's no need for violence. In fact, the capital outlay would be inefficient.
If you want to curb speeding, the solution looks much the same: Pay reporters some portion of the fines collected from the speeder. You will very quickly see a cottage industry of Internet connected dashcams and on-board AI solutions spring up, because it's practically free money if you drive safely yourself for long enough. Pretty soon nobody will be speeding, simply because you never know who or what is watching.
This is a set of economic-legal policies I've been writing about here and there for a long time. It's great stuff.
Peasant bounty hunting really concludes the picture of a nation slowly failing under applause and cheers.
Phrased like that, it's indeed problematic. But you should keep in mind that speeding is
1. A safety hazard
2. Causes high noise pollution
3. Measurably increases air pollution
Under these circumstances I feel like a citizen driven enforcement for the law is not quite bad as you are portraying it. I would even call it apploudable, because they increase the quantity of life for everyone in their neighborhood.
The problem here is the anonymity for the tipster. Like if you can't defend your actions by putting your name to them are they actions worth taking?
The guy who reports one person for driving 100mph over the limit can and ought to sleep soundly knowing society more or less agrees with his actions.
The guy who reports 100 people for going 1mph over the limit ought to be be worried. His actions are not something society generally thinks is a good thing.
>There's no need for violence.
Then what what underpins the fines?
Uh, did someone advocate for violence?
A speed trap is a kind of violence, yes. Have you ever hit one of those things at high speed before? Ouch.
EDIT: I've been away from the States for too long. I was indeed thinking about speed bumps, not traps. Traps are cameras, and they therefore get a thumbs up from me in the beautiful bounties-on-everything-we-care-about future.
Even ignoring that misunderstanding, speed bumps can be absolutely great. They can‘t be installed everywhere since they also significantly slow down emergency services, but combine speedbumps and a crosswalk and you get a raised crosswalk, which is a great measure to increase pedestrian safety.
a speed trap is a device that measures the speed of cars that drive by it. It's usually on the sidewalk or (as I proposed here) in a property adjacent to the street. You're not supposed to hit them.
Are you talking about speed bumps?
I am! Mea maxima culpa. Yes, I agree with you.
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You have it backwards. A perfect detection rate for crime makes it much more important that we define conservatively what we even consider to be a crime in the first place, and then what kind of punishment we levy upon it.
You also have it backwards because it already reliably makes society better for you. Take the case of Biogen employee Michael Bawduniak, who spent seven years documenting covert payments that steered doctors toward Biogen’s multiple‑sclerosis drugs illegally. When the United States Department of Justice settled the case for $900 million in 2022, Bawduniak received roughly $266 million, or about 30% of the federal proceeds, under the False Claims Act. It's a very similar mechanism, and anyone you may know who suffers from multiple sclerosis has likely had their treatment options materially improved thanks to Bawduniak's actions. But those kinds of actions only happen when you have the right mechanisms in place, to reward people who do the right thing.
That is entirely different type of crime. Do you let an AI write your comments?
I think the poster does.
My point is actually that the type of crime doesn't matter. If it's good enough to break up vast financial conspiracy networks, it's probably good enough for your bog standard aggravated assault cases or what have you, where people are a lot less skilled at avoiding detection.
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Why? How do you draw the line between people who deserve to be "surveilled" (if you can even call it that in this case...) vs. people who don't?
You are entitled to your opinion of course but it just seems extremely arbitrary.
I don't have a good, rational answer.
I think the idea is vaguely that the upper-upper class statistically must've done something wrong or have the power to cause extreme harm, therefore it's okay to snitch on them but not your regular Joe.
I'm just espousing the standard American middle class views about freedom here. Not trying to argue they are sound or rational.
Well, I disagree, but I pick my battles carefully and would never risk turning someone against the False Claims Act to win such a small victory. Point conceded.
Modern people are so risk averse. Back in the day we would rob trains. These days society is the equivalent of a HOA - freedom is fast forgotten and trains go mostly unmolested except through that one bastion of liberty: Los Angeles. Society is full of tattletales and stool pigeons. A criminal society is a free society. Order is antithetical to expression.
“More Dunkin”? Is that an auto correct type for “more common”?
Oof, yes. I edited it
There always has been some kind of problem with any snitching app there was. I don't see how this will be different. I don't think it will see broad adoption, but there will be "power users", who usually pose a problem as well.
I hate people leaving cars idling, but I don't like any form of bounty app. This is the wrong kind of law enforcement.
What's the problem? Why is this the wrong kind of law enforcement?
Now in addition to hoping the police aren't corrupt, we have to hope this guy is not corrupt, and that everyone who uses his system isn't corrupt. Not great (but our starting point wasn't great, either).
What does the app have to do with it? The app doesn't give fines.
Because it loses nuance. If it was a meat truck trying to maintain temperature of the items while being stuck in a delivery paper work - now potentially being fined for keeping the meat at right temp!
If you read a headline like this and you think to yourself "this is stupid, what if..." whatever you are thinking of has been, more than likely, covered. It just doesn't fit into the headline. As another poster already remarked, this is covered.
Such considerations have been accounted for. [0]
> Exceptions include, but are not limited to, when an idling on-road medium/heavy-duty vehicle is: Stuck in traffic or otherwise required to remain motionless. Performing maintenance tasks or powering an auxiliary function or apparatus, such as a refrigeration unit or lift, requiring power from the primary motive engine.
[0] https://dec.ny.gov/environmental-protection/air-quality/cont...
As much as I hate the cops I actually trust a cop to be a more impartial arbiter of what does and doesn't fit that definition than some snooty white collar worker who just has a snitching app on their phone.
> I actually trust a cop to be a more impartial arbiter of what does and doesn't fit that definition than some snooty white collar worker who just has a snitching app on their phone
Arbitration is done by the NYC Dept of Environmental Protection. While it is unknown whether their workers are white collar, no evidence of snoot is manifested.
The meat truck likely has a separate engine for the refrigeration unit that is more efficient that idling the vehicle engine. There are provisions for those systems in place so they are exempt.
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Amazing !
Decentralizing traffic enforcement is a win-win. Bravo to NYC for opening this sort of program and OP for turning it into an "efficient free market".
Will try it out soon. Bookmarked.
Fines not linked to income means it’s legal if you’re rich. I’m all for fining polluters to disincentivize pollution, but until we have income-pinned fines i’m not reporting any car under $50k
poor people idling their engines pollute just as much - or maybe more, depending on average vehicle age, etc. - as rich ones, and poor people are much more likely to suffer the negative consequences of that pollution
That is probably true, but since the law doesn’t punish everyone equally it means that enforcing the law equally is oppression.
it's for commercial vehicles, though, so your point doesn't make sense
It does punish everyone equally, if everyone pays the same fine. Some people having more ability to pay does not make the law unjust.
I think it's important to remember that money represents debt. When someone commits a crime, they owe a debt to society. But if they have money, that means society owes a debt to them, so when they pay the fine it balances out.
The system isn't perfect but the idea is that if someone makes a big contribution to society, like by practicing medicine or creating new technology, society's debt to that person shouldn't be cancelled out by a minor offense like a parking violation. But if they aren't contributing much, then breaking the rules could make them into a net negative.
If I make $10/hour and you take $100 from me you’ve taken away 10 hours of my labour. If I make $600 an hour and you take $100 from me you’ve taken away 10min of my labour.
The $100 is equal but the impact is not. Fines are penalties, they don’t represent the cost of something - and a fixed fine is an un-equal penalty.
Your analogy makes some sense, but since wealth and contribution to society aren’t actually linked in reality - only in theory - I can’t get behind it. The wealthiest people in reality are parasites, not those who contribute the most. Owners not builders, CEOs not scientists, money managers not teachers.
> Decentralizing traffic enforcement is a win-win
Win-win for who exactly? Maybe we need to decentralize and AI-accelerate construction permit reporting too. Your backyard fence looks DIY and not up to code and your porch light looks like a fire hazard.
They're trialing something like that in France. There's a project that uses machine learning on aerial photography databases to search for objects in peoples' backyards, for enforcement,
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/30/23328442/france-ai-swimmi... ("French government uses AI to spot undeclared swimming pools — and tax them / The government used machine learning to scan aerial photos of properties")
> Win-win for who exactly?
Society at large? All the people who don't have the breathe the fumes of some garbage commercial vehicle.
> Your backyard fence looks DIY
Provided it's up for code, whether it was "done yourself" or not doesn't matter.
> your porch light looks like a fire hazard.
Absolutely this should be reported.
It's not a win-win for society.
What do you think of China, where the application of this idea is widespread?
Most cities have ways for neighbors to report things like this.
Yes, and they're almost exclusively used by the worst type of vindictive chickenshit humans imaginable. I've known people affected by this, whose evil neighbors used 311 as a weapon because they simply didn't like them, and caused them tens of thousands of dollars in forced unnecessary renovations not to mention stress, for trivial violations that are widely ignored.
We absolutely do that all the time?
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I lived in China for many many years and this is not a good example. Parking, and driving in general, is chaotic and unregulated. Yes, you have cameras everywhere that detect running on red or taking a wrong lane, but that's about makes it. Speeding, haphazard parking, everything is allowed. Scooters go anywhere. Bikes go anywhere. People go anywhere. Red, green, anything in between, it's a free for all. Like a policeman smoking under "no smoking" signs is totally normal. I'd say, you can get away with mostly anything in China, nobody would care (unless you're non-Chinese, then dutiful neighbors will report your every sneeze).
PS: Yet I do find OP's idea reminding me of China. Having a society that polices itself (just in China it's more about thought, not behavior) is definitely not a thing I would enjoy.
I’ll never understand how people believe bike and pedestrian “infractions” to be the same as that of motor vehicles.
Members of this “get off my sidewalk!” group often fail to realize this: Did you study to become a pedestrian? Did you go to a bicycle driving school to acquire a permit to operate one? Was an exam at all given in order to use public foot or bike paths?
If the answer is no, then you aren’t held to the same standards as cars, which are heavily regulated and require licenses to operate.
Obeying road signs for bicycle and pedestrians are suggestions, rarely enforced, and the worst case scenario is usually you hurt yourself. Your ability to hurt others has an upper bound that society deems acceptable.
I'm a bicycle "driver" myself. I cannot even drive a car, and don't intend to learn. But you should come to China and see how bikes behave.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3X9BGMPM8Us (electric scooters are classified same as bicycles there)
It seems the lawyers are making it difficult: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...
It used to be that as long as the vehicle was on the same block as a school or park, you only had to take a one-minute video (versus three-minute). Now there are some annoying documentation requirements if you want to submit a shorter video.
Doesn’t impact the overall usefulness of the program very much IMO — I just didn’t add special handling for school/park reports like I would’ve before they made that change.
Presumably they don't want you taking videos of people who aren't in fact breaking the law and profiting from tickets. NYC regulation requires you to not idle more than 5 minutes.
https://dec.ny.gov/environmental-protection/air-quality/cont...
Although they don't require you to actually take a 5 minute video it is overwhelmingly likely that most people don't pull out there phone every time a vehicle stops in NYC so that most 3 minute videos are liable to be of 5 minute idles.
There are obviously 2 types of problem children cheaters and dummies. It's easier for cheaters to take a 1 minute video since even those who don't intend to idle for any substantial time may pause a moment. For dummies making them actually sit there and film 3 minutes decreases the chance that they will accidentally misunderstand how much time has passed. People are heavily biased towards their own benefits and are liable to miss-perceive 4.5 minutes as 5. Less possible when he pulled out his phone at the 2+ minute mark and now has to wait 3 minutes to have enough.
New York City has different rules from New York State, and commercial vehicles have different rules from personal vehicles. The limit for commercial vehicles in NYC is three minutes, or one minute when adjacent to a park/school: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...
Thanks
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In this age of generative AI, how would a someone defend against a maliciously AI generated/altered video report?
Most of NYC has cameras. The timestamp and location data from those can be linked.
You could also have multiple references to validate via crowdscoring.
You can also find people who are bad actors to decentivize them from mass reporting.
a) They won't use AI to fact check reports submitted when those reports stand to make them money.
b) They can't/wont use the dragnet for daily petty revenue enforcement because then people will complain about it and it'll get reigned in and they won't be able to use it for that and all the other things people don't want them using it for.
>a) They won't use AI to fact check reports submitted when those reports stand to make them money.
They may not, but an outside vendor will. Most munis in the US usually have an outside party process their parking tickets
Within the last year or so, I discovered my city’s 311 app, which I’ve become addicted to. I don’t drive, so I’m always walking around the neighborhood, and got in the habit of always reporting graffiti, dumping, illegally parked cars, etc.
This had inspired me to try and make a few apps for civic use, but I discovered that many of the accessible web tools for my city have rules against bots. For example, the city maintains a list of locations and dates where parking is temporarily restricted for short term things like construction, but I can’t scrape it.
I really wish that the government (at any level) made more serviced and data available as APIs or digital formats. The government is usually bad at building/buying websites and services, and I’d have done it for free (or for $0.99 on the App Store).
> always reporting graffiti
How does your city deal with graffitis? mine is plagued with graffitis and I can't see how they can be fought. It takes too much resources to remove them in a timely manner and impossible to catch the perpetrators.
San Francisco does the sensible thing and fines the property owner. This is the just and right thing. In fact, I strongly support putting victims of drunk driving in jail: this strongly disincentivizes driving near drunk drivers.
They do that in my city too and it’s kinda insane. There was a shop that had a mural and the city considered it graffiti. So dumb.
It’s just a game of cat and mouse. I dont think there is a way to “win”, because it’s so easy to make new graffiti, and not practical to try and police and catch people in the act. I think they require private property owners to clean their own graffiti, which really sucks, but makes it more manageable for the city to focus on public areas.
The city really just has a queue of cleanup sites and priorities locations that are high visibility or important, like school yards or transit infrastructure. An elementary school nearby had its mural destroyed by graffiti, and it was cleaned up within a day.
Quickly removing the graffiti is a deterrent in itself. People are less inclined to do it if it's never left untouched for long.
And the cost is often on the small business owner
Yeah, graffiti is a real big problem compared to surveillance tech. Lol.
Have you ever even had limited conversed with the other people of your neighborhood to find out if they even agree with you? Maybe they think the cars are fine and like that the graffiti keeps the rent low.
You're addicted to being the neighborhood snitch?
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Nice. Pricing seems a bit steep for occasional use; does iOS make it easy to do micro-transactions with Apple Pay? (I get the dev may be trying to put bread on the table with this, which is also fine…)
That's a fair point. I have to see how the AI costs stack up, since heavy use can run up the bill pretty quickly with video inputs, and all subscriptions come with unlimited usage.
As a user I’d be happy to pay $5 for a bundle of credits and just top up whenever it runs out.
And as you say you don’t want to be in the position where a whale costs you $50 by submitting a crazy number of requests.
Maybe these are big-scale problems though :)
Wouldn't it make more sense to charge per report?
> Pricing seems a bit steep for occasional use;
I believe most the fines are from small group of dedicated people who actively find offenders.
I don't understand people saying it's dystopian. This kind of thing is empowering people who are otherwise suffering from a lack of law enforcement. Motor vehicle operators take huge liberties all the time. Speeding, parking, excessive noise etc. None of these are their rights. They have just been taken at the cost of the rest of society. With great power comes great responsibility. That's how it should work. Stuff like this is just resetting the imbalance, giving power now to those outside of cars to force those inside to take responsibility.
New Yorker here: Glad this exists. My sense is that most actual residents of the city feel similarly.
Using AI to improve enforcement makes sense, but I do worry a bit when reporting turns into a way to make money. If people start watching each other for profit, it feels like we could slowly lose some of that everyday trust. I wonder if there’s a better balance between efficiency and a healthy community vibe.
Since you've mentioned it, that'd be great to give some details regarding the AI mechanism you used. I really find that trend of hiding everything behind "The Divine AI" off-putting. What exactly AI does in the context of the application?
Why not use AI for actual good and make a dashcam app that generates a live map of where police are at all times
To make these even easily more malicious than it obviously already can be:
Why don’t you add another AI step that makes any parked commercial vehicle look and sound as those it is idling.
feature request: AI-based risk analysis, with a model of which types of commercial vehicles at that location are likely to be controlled by organized crime
While a deeply problematic solution which pits citizens against each other, idling is also deeply problematic and awareness of the toxicity of internal combustion engines (ICE) needs to grow. While hardly a massive feedback loop, it is at least a bit tragic to see the growth of ICE idling during heatwaves encouraged in part by global warming and also the growth of smart phone usage in cars.
Commercial vehicles? Aw, man. Back to tossing birdseed in the bed of lifted pickups for me I guess. :(
I heard that some of the newer manchild carriers are technically counted as commercial vehicles due to their excessive width. They have to have different lights on the front or something. So you might still be able to report those. Presumably you don't have to prove that it was being used for commercial purposes at the time.
Man, I wish my city would make it possible to report drivers breaking the law. My big issue is cars parking in the cycle lanes. 1830 cars got fined for that in my city in total in 2024. Aka 5 a day. As a single cyclist I see more cars parked in cycle lanes every day on my commute than all those hundred officers give tickets to in total..
What I’d like to see is hard separation of roads and bike lanes. As a cyclist, nothing but a line painted on the road makes me feel unsafe, as a driver it’s difficult to not get nervous when passing a cyclist in the lane, and culturally drivers are generally favored over cyclists which results in things like parking in bike lanes not being adequately enforced. All these things would be solved by bike lanes being fully independent from the road.
> What I’d like to see is hard separation of roads and bike lanes.
That's a great idea, as long as the hard separation goes both ways with bikes no longer being allowed in car lanes.
If you can keep up with traffic and behave like traffic on a given road then I see no reason not to let you mingle with traffic.
Yes this means you can drive a scissor lift or mobility scooter in stop and go rush hour crap. Whatever, I guess that's fine.
> If you can keep up with traffic
The biggest problem I have with cyclists on the road is that they almost always ride where they can't keep up with traffic.
Why? I don't get this "gotcha". Is there any actual rational reason for making such rules, or is it stemming from some annoyance from seeing cyclists in the road?
There already exists roads where cyclists can't be: Highways/motorways. If the problem is cyclists in the road, that solves itself by building better infrastructure. Where there's adequate cycling infrastructure, cyclists prefer to use it. Where there's lacking or none, one should of course be able to use the road. Otherwise it would be a de facto ban on cycling, which I'm sure was your point?
> Is there any actual rational reason for making such rules, or is it stemming from some annoyance from seeing cyclists in the road?
It's from a combination of getting stuck behind cyclists going really slowly and with no opportunity to pass them, and from so much blatantly illegal behavior by them like running red lights without even slowing down.
What about blatantly ignoring traffic laws by parking illegally in the cycle lanes, forcing cyclists to use the road and be an annoyance to you? I think lots of drivers have a blind spot for their own traffic violations, because all statistics I've ever seen points to drivers breaking the law more often. And when they do, the consequences are also much greater.
I think that's the base rate fallacy, and that you only see more drivers break the law because there's so many more drivers in general. My estimate would be that I see about 100 good drivers for every driver breaking the law, but only about 5 good cyclists for every cyclist breaking the law. And another part of what makes it unfair is the disparity of enforcement. I see illegally parked cars with tickets under their wipers a lot, and it's fairly common to see drivers pulled over by the police for moving violations, but literally every single cyclist I've seen breaking the law has gotten away with it.
The fallacy here is probably your confirmation bias. Due to motonormativity and you being in the in-group, you notice cyclist mistakes and ignore driver mistakes.
For instance, a Danish study showing that 14 % of cyclists violate traffic laws when there is lacking infrastructure, but only 5 % when it's present. Compared to 66 % of motorists breaking some law. (Yes, if you ever go above the speed limit you have broken the traffic law just as much as the cyclists that grinds your gears. How many drivers speed in the highway each day, I wonder)
https://electrek.co/2024/01/11/cars-or-bikes-surprising-resu...
Doable, but would probably require bike paths to be wider than they currently are and split into two lanes: one for road bikers and one for everybody else.
I'll have to hunt down a link to the piece but I swear I saw a video about a few people in NYC who muddy go around finding idling vehicles and piece together the fine bounties into full time equivalent work. This could really disrupt their industry.
I like the general idea, and I’ve been surprised this hasn’t taken off elsewhere, eg citizen videos for traffic violations like blocking intersections, it seems these should be ROI positive for the city to implement (lower enforcement costs, more ticket revenue).
I really don't understand why anyone would want this
Do you really want to live in a society where we're monitored for even the slightest infractions at all times and automatically punished regardless of any circumstances that might explain the behavior?
New York City doesn't do this for "even the slightest infractions at all times".
The idling regulations are based on real harm, and the reporting requirements include things like recording video to prove that the car you're reporting didn't start idling in the last 5 seconds, but has, in fact, been doing that for 3 minutes or longer, or 1 minute or longer adjacent to a school.
More info here: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dep/environment/idling-citizens-air...
You have to actually submit a 3:01 (or 1:01) minute video as part of the report for that to be actionable.
And, yes, I would really, really want to live in a society where unnecessary idling is not allowed. And if I was living next to a street corner where that happens regularly, I would be on that street corner recording videos any time I'd have free time, and more, if I had babies, who are especially vulnerable to air pollution, living with me.
> And, yes, I would really, really want to live in a society where unnecessary idling is not allowed
I would really, really want to live in a society where we aren't being monitored by cameras for every single minute of every day the moment we step outside our homes
You are not being monitored for every single minute of every day the moment you step outside your home, unless you idle your car regularly.
Get a grip.
In the US, anyone can take still photos or video of you at any time if you are in public. Other countries have differing laws.
In Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker showed crime can be discouraged if the expected punishment outweighs the reward. Expected punishment has not one, but two important factors: How big the punishment is, and how likely the punishment is to actually be levied.
Punishment likelihood depends on how likely the crime is to be detected in the first place. Older societies such as medieval Europe or Qing dynasty era China used the death penalty for so many seemingly minor things, and this formula was a big part of why. State authorities at that period of human history had a very low chance of actually detecting something like forgery. So in order to deter criminals they had to ratchet up just how big the potential punishment actually was if you did get caught.
Conversely, as our societies have improved their ability to detect crimes, our stomach for policies like “Forgery is punishable by death” has rightfully taken a nosedive. So, yes, the trend I've seen across the centuries suggests to me I might well prefer to live in a society where the detection rate is higher than it currently is. There's no reason to suspect we've hit upon the optimal point for human flourishing where we are now.
In China, mass and profoundly intrusive State surveillance supports your Social Score and is used by the State to enforce compliance and "desirable" behaviour.
Is maximum law enforcement a power we want any State to have?
There are multiple facets to this question. Would I want law enforcement to catch, for example, every murderer? Yes I would. On the other hand, we have in the US things like the fourth amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.
If these laws are used to sidestep prohibitions on what government is not allowed to do, i'd say they are a bad thing. If they are used to enforce bad laws, we need to get rid of the bad laws. If they are used to help enforce laws we all agree are good, that seems like a good thing.
This isn’t for chewing gum on the Subway. It’s for a specific kind of scofflaw activity that no society would tolerate were it not for the presumptive shield of goodness that surrounds drivers in this country.
Having grown up in the city and gone to a public school where over half of my peers had asthma from the heavy truck route next to our playground, I welcome any kind of financial realignment between drivers (especially commercial drivers) and their behavior.
> It’s for a specific kind of scofflaw activity
Well, history shows us that any system that grants a power to government eventually expands beyond its original use. So you will forgive me for thinking it's a bad idea to start
If you follow that train of thought to it's logical conclusion, government should have no power at all, since any government power could be used for bad.
Certainly constantly bashing down on increasing government power is the only thing that's ever defended against that.
I get your take and agree with the sentiment BUT I don't think this somehow requires "automatic punishment". Also, if the laws are there then I tend to think they should be enforced. Maybe this kind of thing will empower places to drop some of the laws most folks agree are "slightest infractions".
This sounds reasonable but I think it's a bit optimistic
I don't think "increased government ability to enforce rules and collect fines" is likely to lead to less rules
I would love to be proven wrong
I agree with you on every thing you wrote here
This isn't about constant monitoring of people, it's about cars. I'm all for constant monitoring of cars within towns. They bully and intimidate and generally ruin places for everyone else. There needs to be strong incentives for people to not drive cars right into cities, with appropriate alternatives, of course.
I want to see much better parking on the outside of town with easy and safe travel to inside like light rail and bikes. All of this is possible if we take back what's been given to cars.
The biggest problem with drivers is they don't take responsibility for what they're doing. It creates a status quo where they feel empowered to do what they like and the rest of society bends to that. We have opportunity to force them to take responsibility which will reset that balance. It doesn't take much. When you realise you'll be driving at 20mph max and yielding priority to normal people everywhere driving suddenly won't seem so attractive. None of this is new restrictions on driving, it's just what they should have been doing anyway.
How do you feel about constant monitoring of trains or aeroplanes? If a train driver crosses a red signal it's straight to prison. When your actions can have such an impact on individuals and societies then your individual right to privacy is invalid.
> This isn't about constant monitoring of people
It seems to me it is a probe.
If it is accepted for cars, then it moves on to people.
Then it is used by ICE to pay rewards for handing over people Donald has decided are illegal.
Yes, care must be taken. These kinds of measures should only be taken when an existing power imbalance is already in place. We have laws to stop these imbalances, for example you can't use your might to force and coerce people. Do you think it's wrong for someone to be able to report an assault?
Cars are currently a huge power imbalance that needs to be evened out.
But, sure, some people will want to use the same technology to create new imbalances or further existing ones. That doesn't mean the technology itself is bad.
My fear isn't that this will stop after the truck drivers, the immigrants, etc, etc, have all been harmed but before the people who peddled the policy
This is called the slippery slope fallacy. It is a fallacy for a reason.
They always somehow run out of will to continue to harm people after those who can't resist have been harmed but right before the tech bros and out of touch white women who peddled and popularized the policy that lead to the harm start being on the receiving end of it all.
I would like to live in a society where everyone is strictly following traffic regulations. Almost every rule there is written with someone's blood.
Also basics driving rules like zip merge will make traffic better.
Me too!
But I also recognize that people are human and make mistakes. I've missed turns before and had to make a decision between a slightly risky u-turn or being stuck going the wrong way for a while. I chose the u-turn after doing my best to ensure I wasn't going to put anyone else at risk
Should I be fined for that?
How about speeding? Basically everyone speeds right? Let's just auto fine everyone for that all the time.
I've done those things.
> But I also recognize that people are human and make mistakes.
But you can't make a mistake while making an illegal U-turn?
> I chose the u-turn after doing my best to ensure I wasn't going to put anyone else at risk
> Should I be fined for that?
Yes. Why do you think that you shouldn't be fined for that?
> How about speeding? Basically everyone speeds right? Let's just auto fine everyone for that all the time.
I'm all for it. What is your problem with that?
Some countries are already doing this, for example Vietnam and China.
I recall reading about it years ago because some enterprising individuals decided that the revenue from catching random violations in-the-wild wasn't enough, so they started to deliberately create dangerous situations, where breaking a traffic law (which would then be recorded and submitted for a reward) was the only safe option for the victim. Unfortunately I haven't been able to quickly find a source to back this up.
This is why optimal policy design has the fines get paid directly from the violator to the reporter. That brings its own quirks, but they're all surprisingly tractable with other market mechanisms.
There's a whole literature on this topic in economics under mechanism design. They've been a longstanding research interest of mine, I consider it almost like the land value tax of legal enforcement by this point.
>This is why optimal policy design has the fines get paid directly from the violator to the reporter.
Absolutely. And make sure to give the violator full contact details for the person(s) who reported them. Better yet, set up sites in isolated areas for the violators to "pay" the reporters.
What could go wrong?
It seems to me this is probing behaviour.
It is a low-risk, initial probe, to test the bounds of what currently is considered normal.
If it fails - it it is rejected - it was not controversial (parking fines) and so the cost is low.
If it succeeds, the boundary of normal has been moved, and then civilian reporting of crimes for money will be extended to other crimes.
Given USA now has authoritarian Government of Donald, this is obviously and incredibly bad.
An obvious thought is that it will come to be used by ICE to incentivize civilians to report on "illegal immigrants", as defined by Donald.
In Nazi Germany, Anne Frank was betrayed, revealed to the Gestapo, sent to a concentration camp and died there, because two Dutch brothers accepted the incentive provided by the Nazi party, the reward for doing so, to hand in Jews.
You do not use civilians for law enforcement because when misused it fundamentally and profoundly undermines civil society.
The State defines profoundly unjust new "crimes", and then sets everyone watching everyone, in return for pay, to accuse each other - and this in the "mass deportation", and "due process not necessary" environment now brought into being by Donald.
However, in this case, the idlers are the Nazi's killing people's lungs, and the citizens are accepting the incentive provided by the people to catch the killers?
This line of reasoning makes no sense. It's a slippery slope fallacy.
> An obvious thought is that it will come to be used by ICE to incentivize civilians to report on "illegal immigrants", as defined by Donald.
How would this program lead to that? If this didn't exist why wouldn't it be possible for ICE to make something similar for reporting "illegal immigrants"?
> In Nazi Germany, Anne Frank was betrayed, revealed to the Gestapo, sent to a concentration camp and died there, because two Dutch brothers accepted the incentive provided by the Nazi party, the reward for doing so, to hand in Jews.
Again, besides using money as a incentive what is the relevance here? Are you saying that using money as incentive is inherently bad?
> You do not use civilians for law enforcement because when misused it fundamentally and profoundly undermines civil society.
Everything can be misused. Are you saying that we shouldn't do anything about anything? Do you think that laws and rules would stop the likes of Hitler?
GCC
Milking motorists is very profitable. Stopping more problematic crime, not so much.
So we end up with anarcho-tyranny, where 'real' crime is policed poorly, if at all - but loads of resources and tech are deployed aggressively policing+punishing mostly-law-abiding people for the most minor of infractions.
That’s a false comparison. Giving out tickets is a civil law violation. Combating crime is a different matter.
You can criminally cheat civil laws as well at which point it becomes a criminal offense. But the treatment remains mostly civil instead of criminal.
If you want more policing for criminal offenses, then officers need to be solely designated for those offenses. Right now they are bogged down with civil matters.
This has nothing to do with "milking motorists", whatever that means. (The phrase generally seems to be used by people who are angry that they can't speed and run red lights with impunity).
> This has nothing to do with "milking motorists"
Forcing motorists to pay for minor infractions is the entire point of the app.
The law applies to commercial vehicles. The aggregate effect of commercial vehicles ignoring the law isn't minor. You can find out more by following the links at the top of the page.
So when actual criminals leave their stolen getaway car idling as they go and loot a store, the owner of the stolen car now gets an extra fully-automated fine with likely no way to appeal it, and the real criminals get away free.
Upvoting this because I needed the laugh.
Anarcho-Tyranny: A of government in which the good citizen lives in fear of government , while the criminals run amok without fear of repercussions.
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The comments you're talking about are getting flagged, mostly because they're off topic.
Edit: I've unflagged some of the others, but here are some examples of the kind I mean:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349249
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349183
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44348874
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44348759
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I don't want to ban you! I'd appreciate it if you'd stop posting these off-topic comments though.
Everyone goes on tilt sometimes; it happens. But please stop.
Ah yes, if everybody is scared they'll be in trouble for any kind of misbehavior, everyone will behave. Good old stasi logic.
Now we need one for police abuse.
I feel it's Orwellian, or Stalin-esq to have us being paid off to snitch on each other.
Certainly, if you have evidence of murder or something, please do report it.
But for an idling vehicle?
Note that these laws are only targeting idling while parked, rather than during normal use, such as at a traffic light. This is called "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling.
Has anybody considered how much CO2 or other greenhouse gases are actually released by "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling vehicles, either individually or in aggregate? I spent a few minutes researching it with an LLM and couldn't come up with much. Most of the information and numbers I got were for ALL idling, including during normal driving like at a traffic light. My guess based on that is that it (true idling) is a trivially small amount of CO2 compared to the overall.
But it's plenty to earn yourself a nice payoff at the expense of your hard working delivery driver!
I think the intent is less about the CO2 emissions as about the air quality that people have to breathe (hence a stricter standard in some locations).
I don’t know about measurable effects but I hate when I pass a long-idling truck and can taste it in the air.
Diesel exhaust is horrifying. Why aren't diesel engines subject to the same pollution regulations as the rest of us?
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> I feel it's Orwellian, or Stalin-esq to have us being paid off to snitch on each other.
Sure, but it's a different kind of dystopia to have commercial vehicles idling and fouling the air outside of normal driving. As described where you have to capture 3 minutes of idling (1 minute near schools) and assuming most people take a while to notice, rather than starting the timer immediately when the vehicle stops, it seems like a reasonable way to enhance compliance.
Idling while parked may not be a large contribution to total emissions, but it's harder to justify than idling in normal operation, and easier to enforce against, so there you go. Sometimes refrigerated transport more or less needs to idle to keep the contents at temperature, not sure if there's exceptions for that or if they just need to retrofit with more insulation or batteries to run the compressor or etc in order to comply.
Idling at lights probably gets reduced by auto start/stop in new vehicles as well as congestion charges reducing traffic and probably dwell time at lights. Auto start/stop isn't a universally loved thing; it makes some cars really frustrating to use, but when done well, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to reduce unneccesary emissions.
Spying on your friends, neighbors, and family? Nothing to see here, just old Soviet style repression tactics.
I understand the sentiment, but if you accept the premise that idling vehicles harm everyone, which they probably do - via air quality, foreign wars to keep oil flowing, and climate change - then why should we not fine the heck out of anybody who harms us all?
Don’t like getting reported by randos with apps? Don’t idle.
My only beef with the law itself, is that the fines need to be income-linked - otherwise it’s only illegal if you’re poor.
>Don’t like getting reported by randos with apps? Don’t idle.
a lot of friction is removed from society when we sequester surveillance/reporting/judgement/apprehension to one side of society, the criminal justice system.
a lot of friction is added to society when we bump surveillance and reporting back into the domain of the pedestrian. Social interaction becomes reduced between nodes, new cultural standards emerge, and overall communications between nodes tends to become reduced from the fear that the person you're speaking to candidly is actually a double-agent spy.
We have seen this in literally every society with rules or concepts like this. It isn't experiment psychology anymore, embedding citizen spies ruins societies, more so when they receive gifts for blabbing.
It's one thing applied to violent crimes; "see something say something", whatever -- it's another thing when a bounty-incentivized law produces rogue agents from within the populous that answer the call to become miniature 'bounty hunters' within the new rules. It makes life worse for everyone, and it spawns assholes that game the concept into a personality. The world waits with baited breath for the next 'Dog the Bounty Hunter' car-idler equivalent.
I'm not ever going to report another 'regular ole human being' for their car idling while the administrations of the world move literally hundreds of thousands of tons of metal around the world for military parades and whatever other flight of fancy and Dolly Parton or whoever the fuck is riding her coal-fired train through Tennessee on a whim -- there are so many more impressive fruit to pick from that tree than to step on bystanders that are probably having a crummy day anyway for a few bucks.
Hol’ up just a minute. You can disagree with me, but you leave dolly alone! ;)
I see what you’re saying, but I also somewhat disagree. We offload enforcement to police, which reduces friction for most but intensifies enforcement onto people deemed “suspicious” by social norms. Immigrants, black and brown people, young people, etc.
On the other side, yes if we universalize this to all laws we’d have a police state where everyone we interact with could profit off turning us in. But one of the main problems with that situation is that a ton of laws are BAD and we only are able to ignore them because for most of us they’re minimally enforced. Limit this bounty hunting business to parking enforcement and we’ve stopped the slippery slope from sliding
What makes you think that the set of people prone to snitching-for-profit don’t overlap with the set of people who would intensify enforcement on which ever group you’ve deemed people to have deemed suspicious?
Or that, at the very least, there are likely to be unintended consequences of bounty-snitching that create some other set of strained social pressures you also find unsavoury.
It’s possible that there would be unintended bad consequences. But we can try it out and course correct if that happens. Unless there is a specific bad that will definitely happen, why should we be afraid to try things?
I’ll answer my own question: we are afraid to try new things legally because gov is unresponsive. As an example, the majority of the US has supported cannabis legalization since at least 2012. If it takes a decade and counting for the law to change to follow the will of the people, trying new things risks locking in bad policy for decades / forever.
But this law’s already been passed, so if it’s bad and should be changed we’ll need proof of specific harm
Try mentally substituting a law that you don't agree with, once the app is widely used.
I get what you’re saying, but:
1. the issues lies in the bounty hunting laws not the app. Change the law, the app goes away.
2. I’d rather bad laws get struck from the books, rather than lurking mostly un-enforced in the toolbox of police to weaponize. E.g. jaywalking. A crime made up by car companies to shift the blame from cars+drivers to pedestrians, mostly un-enforced except when cops want an excuse to id/frisk/hassle a young person or visible minority.
These are people spying on commercial vehicles abusing rights of way to avoid paying their fair share of the cost to carry them in the area (parking, in particular). Why are you taking the side of the trucks?
taking the side of the trucks?
No. Taking the side of people who want to live in a place that isn't Brazil the Movie.
I love watching HN swim outside of technical depth. "Well, what if we put explosive collars on citizens at birth? That'll surely fix the crime problems.."
Well, guess what : it doesn't matter how you apply this concept, it's psychological poison. Incentivizing trivial taddling ruins the world, ruin businesses, ruins schools, it literally ruins any group of people that have to converse and deal with one another.
It's like people totally forgot that the primary methods behind groups like East Germany were to turn the populations in on each other for the sake of the state.
The truck idling problem is closer than ever to being permanently solved -- why is it that NOW we decide to create citizen spies when the problem is as least-bad as we've ever witnessed it since the advent of trucks?
I'm sure it's surely not a stepping-stone to adjust us into our future entirely-surveillance driven criminal justice system that's further bolstered by citizen-spy/tattle-tales, right?
This is like "protecting commercial interests who exploit gaps in law enforcement to save a few bucks at everyone else's expense, but leftistly".
People call in complaints all the time. They always have. It's part of city life. When they're complaining about truck drivers fucking up the streets, they're not rats; they're the good guys. Getting mad that their lives are being made easier seems super weird. But you do you! We're not going to agree.
Idling trucks are a public health hazard. Reporting actual crimes isn't spying. Certainly not when it's on public streets.
its more like reporting lung cancer, but idling isn't a criminal summons?
Orwell was right.
Not really. He thought the regime would have to use force. He didn't predict that people would line up outside Wal-Mart at zero dark thirty on Black Friday morning to grab the latest, greatest telescreen models, and then fight each other like dogs for the last ones in stock.
You mean when he said “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” or something else?
That seems like a reasonable statement by him on his politics and writing, yes, but what does it have to do with idling trucks?
He famously wrote a book about a totalitarian society, where people were encouraged to spy on their neighbors and report them.
Noticing a car is idling on a public street isn’t really spying, is it?
Noticing a vehicle idling on a street isn’t the same thing as noticing a vehicle idling on a street, taking video evidence of it, reporting it and providing a copy of the video with the expectation of getting a cut of the fine.
Is it?
Honestly, even without a financial incentive, I've thought about getting a dashcam to record the fuckheads "rolling coal" in my city and reporting them. Some behavior is so anti social that yes, it should be reported.
Why not go into the rough neighborhoods and report the people who are threatening the lives and health of people? You can even join the police force if you wish to work effectively against anti social behaviour.
I would guess the folks having their lives and property threatened are already reporting that, if they think the police will help them. If they won't, I'm not sure how me adding to the reports is going to help.
I've had so many people over the years (nearly all of them the kinds of people who looked like they never had to work a job in their lives) try to surreptitiously record my truck's plates when I was doing fire protection inspections in the city.
Don't worry though, every ticket the company got was billed right back to buildings we were working at in another form. The balance sheet always wins.
or “Stop breaking the law asshole”
I agree. See something, say something if it's "a big one" otherwise being a tattler only helps increase the paranoia we alread have against others and further damages societal cohesion. I don't want to be stasi-lite for city, state, or federal government.
You created a subscription service for power-~~users~~ snitches?
This is wild demonstration of misaligned incentive structures at every level.
Can you explain in what way the incentives are misaligned here? Or did that mis- prefix slip in there because of how you feel overall about the law?
This whole idea and, worse, the excited support for it in the comments creeps the shit out of me.
Feature request: the ability to report illegally parked police vehicles
I love that you and others are making it easier for the public to report issues and violations.
Another example in the same vein (but no financial reward for reporting!) is the Solve SF app:
https://www.solvesf.com/
Thank you!
We need something similar for tax evaders, and now we’ll be talking real money.
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/whistleblower-pro...
Put some automation in front of it
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> "You walk against red light and your face gets plastered around billboards as named criminal."
I'm unsure if you were obliquely referring to this, or if you were intending to suggest a fictional idea. But what you described is already a thing that's happening in mainland China,
> "In the southern city of Shenzhen, Chinese authorities have launched a new surveillance system loaded with facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and a big database to crack down on jaywalking as well as other crimes."
> "As a result, photographs of pedestrians caught in the act, along with their names and social identification numbers, are now instantly displayed on LED screens installed at Shenzhen road junctions."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/china-deploys-ai-came... ("Chinese authorities use facial recognition, public shaming to crack down on jaywalking, criminals")
This is incredible sarcasm. It seems like people who like this sort of control always find a narrative to sell it to the people. The US still has the Patriot act on the books, and that's been the norm for some people's entire lives.
For those who don't know, this is China today.
Facial recognition isn't enough. We need nano-drones that can grab DNA samples. Can't avoid that by wearing a mask/balaclava...
Genuinely curious, why aren't people allowed to say this is dystopian without getting flagged? What rule, specifically, does that violate?
I think this is dystopian. Paying people to rat out their fellow citizens. Nightmarish.
What if this idea was applied to the laws ICE is trying to enforce? Would you think that's dystopian?
This program specifically fines businesses with fleets of commercial vehicles (delivery trucks, buses, et cetera) for illegal idling, and escalates the fines for repeat offenders. You can't report random individuals, nor would I really want to build an app for that. The point is to get businesses to stop polluting.
Okay, that makes it a little less dystopian.
But you make money off people snitching.
And you're setting the stage for something far worse, imo.
I see where you’re coming from, but the alternatives are either that the law isn’t enforced, or the state ramps up its own surveillance, which is more dystopian to me.
I see this as in the same vein as SEC whistleblower awards, which I’ve never heard described as dystopian. Businesses just don’t have the same expectation of privacy that individuals do.
I mean, the law not being enforced is wayyyyyyyyy less dystopian than this app and the numerous other ones like it that are bound to spring up.
I'd rather live in truck fumes than a hyper-automated snitch surveillance state.
you have like 50 comments in this thread whining about the law and desperately wanting businesses (not private individuals!) to idle their trucks next to schools.
maybe take a break man. not healthy.
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Please don't try to game HN like this. We can easily turn off the flamewar detector when the topic warrants it, and users who post excessive numbers of low-quality comments can have rate-limiting turned on.
There seems to be a whole lot of drama about this project and from what I can see there are reasonable arguments for and against.
How about just respecting the merits of open debate about a topic and let other readers decide for themselves, rather than going to war on the project and on HN to try and swing things in favour of your own argument?
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pvg isn't a HN mod, for what it's worth.
I'm sorry that my project caused you this much distress. If you live in NYC and hate the idling complaint law, lobby your representatives to kill it. I didn't make the law or even the service that lets you file reports under it. I just wrote an API client.
People have filed idling complaints for years, long before this app existed. Even if your comments somehow convinced me that publishing Idle Reporter is an "evil" act (as you claim), and I decided to take it down and go become a Tibetan monk, people would still file complaints as they always have.
Don't get me wrong, I hate idling trucks too.
But I have been and will continue to be extremely vocal about how shitty it is to automate snitching.
> I went to war because the HN mods
this is an entirely ridiculous statement
> I will absolutely act in good faith and not game the system, but only as long as the mods do that too. As soon as the mods do that in a thread, all bets are off. Could not care less if I get banned for defending myself in such a situation.
it’s not working - it’s one of the highest ranking posts - and you really don’t want to go around admitting that. seriously, take a break.
Yep and I got an upvoted comment dissenting against all the authoritarian bootlickers in every single thread on this post. People agree with me. Even on the comments of mine that got flagged lol
It even pissed people off enough that one of the mods started commenting about my own personal projects that have nothing to do with this lmao
Oh and I guess it did work because now it's down to 28, almost off the front page. Much lower than where it was before
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> you are mad at not being able to poison the air of children
lol you know you're the one acting in bad faith here. hope you feel better soon
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Is it still "snitching" if the reporter, as the person breathing the unnecessarily polluted air, is a victim of the crime?
Yes.
Being about businesses only and no individuals makes all the difference in the world. Otherwise it should be seen as dystopian also the fact that you can call the police on your neighborhood because "you heard noises".
I bet that the friction in the submission process was deliberately added to avoid abuses, but maybe it's just incompetence. Depending on the reason, this app can be either good or against the spirit of the rule.
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it normalizes the process and app though, and reinforces reporting your neighbors to the government. Not something I like to see. It's one thing to report domestic abuse or a crack house; another to report someone double-parked for a couple of seconds or an idling truck via "a simple click on your phone, thank you citizen"
People are certainly allowed to say that. Your comment, for example, hasn't been flagged.
However, a lot of the comments tending in that direction have been (1) generic and (2) flamebait and/or fulminatey, which are bad for HN threads and against the site guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you went on to post many of that type of comment yourself in this thread. Please don't do that again.
You regularly spam a generic generative ai ‘art’ thing on this site so of all people it feels like you’d have a broader, less kneejerky and more charitable view of what use of the technology is ‘dystopian’
That's a fair point. It's hard to assess whether I'm being honest with myself about that.
But I know this app is truly evil in my system of morality.
AI art can be very soulless. Very dehumanizing. In certain sense.
But those two qualities are undeniably attached to surveillance states. In all senses. There is no argument against that.
It’s someone’s show hn for something that’s NYC law, designed to address a specific local problem. Calling this ‘evil’ is, at a minimum, unserious bombast which the site rules ask you to avoid, especially when discussing someone else’s work. You can critique the work without the Savonarola act. It also happens to be more effective that way so it’s in your own interest.
I really am supportive of 99.9% of Show HNs, merely for the sake of the posters actually trying to build something
This is one of the few things I feel very strongly about and I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it. His idea is actively harming what makes America a good place to live in. And his idea is what makes China a bad place to live in. I'm not just going to sit here and say nothing.
I don't care if this negative EV for my own personal interests. I felt the need to speak up and people agree with me. Hopefully his post gets taken down.
Nobody is telling you how and how strongly to feel - just not to be a yelly asshole about it.
This is a valid show hn - if you can’t comment on it reasonably just don’t comment or find a thread where the general surveillance topic is actually the topic.
You're the one bringing up my personal projects that are irrelevant to this post.
You also called me an asshole. I never called anyone names.
I don't care about you or your opinion. Ban me.
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Maybe a bunch of people just don't agree with your position. (If they're idling and I report them, I'm a snitch. If I don't, I get to breathe the pollution. Why is snitching worse than poisoning people in your city? Why should the snitch be the bad guy in that situation, rather than the polluter?)
False dichotomy. Both the snitch and the polluter are bad guys.
If you want an example of widespread application of this idea in a society, look at China. I rest my case.
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This isn't trolls - it's people getting triggered by a provocative topic. For plenty of obvious reasons, different people have different reactions to this kind of thing.
Btw, "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Anything goes. All you need is $10, a few proxies and AI promps for viral marketing. Don't forget to flag posts you don't like with your sock puppet accounts.
If you're sure about this, I'd like to see a link or two to specific cases.
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Would be great to have this for illegally parked parks as well.
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Yeah, people just up and leave those things all over the place. I'm glad someone is finally speaking up.
Kinda offtopic, but I think this is so dystopian as it's only the beginning. Technocracy at its best. Have a bad starter and don't wanna stop the car? The numbers and rules don't care, no room for benevolence.
My kids asthma wants your commercial car in a service bay, not idling outside a restaurant. I am all for not making a technocratic dystopia but this reasoning seems wrong lol
I understand! But still, I feel like mechanising these things is an issue, especially with the authoritarian people rising (especially in the US) all over the world. I'm annoyed at idling cars (especially taxis here in Germany) as well, but I feel like the pollution is very minor. Still illegal though.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni... I agree with the "slippery slope" theme. I would wish for more rules being enforced more. But not if the price is a technocratic law enforcement machine.
That’s the problem. Major polluters have convinced people it’s the small scale production to attack rather than the giant industrial polluters. We also allow incredibly inefficient engines that produce lots of pollution.
How about a pollution credit trading program then? If my efficient car produces way less pollution than your gas-guzzling truck, I should get the room to idle until I reach our agreed max.
A technological snitch program is a weird and messed up outcome when we ignore the base problems.
But, cool technical achievement. I’m scared that a similar parking snitch program is all too easy as well. Car parked 3.5 hours in a 3hr max neighbourhood? Get them fined and get a sweet bounty! Thanks I hate it.
> Major polluters have convinced people it’s the small scale production to attack rather than the giant industrial polluters
It's both. A car idling outside your window is still gonna be an issue even if the planet somehow solve the big stuff.
Maybe the commercial driver has asthma too and needs to run the AC.
Your kid's asthms would appreciate more if there were fewer cars on roads and logistics leaned more on robust public transportation rather than putting the onus on individual household to own and operate multi-tonne vehicles.
New York City has already implemented a congestion surcharge in Manhattan to destroy demand for using personal vehicles, and has a robust public transit system. The only step left would be mandating EVs, and outlawing combustion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
Right now we are in the “laws are seldom actually enforced” regime.
It seems pretty clear that laws will be enforced more in future, the obvious response is to go prune the laws to get rid of the ones that we actually aren’t OK with being enforced.
Laws will be enforced if it's safe and profitable to do so, especially if the process can be fully automated.
Meanwhile, industrial-scale shoplifting, hard drugs, sex crimes, riots. No automated enforcement possible there, let alone profitable automated enforcement.
I feel things like shoplifting should actually be automatable, it’s a question of ROI currently.
One idea I play with is “police 2.0” where you can dispatch a small fast drone to a crime scene, and follow the perp from a safe distance. A lot of crimes could be solved this way (eg car chases, illegal dirt bike gangs, petty robbery etc).
I really don’t want pervasive surveillance, but perhaps there is a middle ground where response times are fast enough that you can be purely reactive to a 911 call/app.
Feels quite slippery-slope though. I think we should expect increased debate on the social contract as these new systems become more capable and the “enforcement gap” becomes larger.
Very offtopian of you
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That's not a remotely accurate description of HN's readership!
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Maybe so, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
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We've got a brand new war in the Middle East, and a big ongoing one in Ukraine.
If we can't prevent wars between nations, there's no hope of the planet coming together to the extent required to manipulate the climate in a meaningful way.
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Hopefully more than half.
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Would you please stop posting like this? Once was fine, but half a dozen is too much. You've made your point, and that's ok, but this is not curious conversation.
Also when the posts start getting dyspeptic-meta like this, something has gone wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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This is becoming a cliche here on HN, to call laws and lawmakers stupid after reading a headline.
> I don't idle for fun, I do it to reduce wear and tear.
And this law isn't there for fun either.
> I'm also sure normies will recognise when a commercial vehicle is idling to maintain cargo cooling, to maintain hydraulics, etc...
Everybody is stupid but me!!!!! How tireing. Idling is allowed for running a piece of equipment.
> Everybody is stupid but me!!!!! How tireing. Idling is allowed for running a piece of equipment.
No. More so, along the lines of, random people should not be given financial incentives to regulate things they don't understand, especially not without a long checklist. A 2,01m video covers only the most basic thing.
> And this law isn't there for fun either.
Yeah, it's driven by the hippies who made OEMs write in manuals that you should immediately go after starting your car or bike. Scrape the cylinders real good while they're bone dry..
> random people should not be given financial incentives to regulate things they don't understand
They aren't regulating...
Yes they are. The summons part is essentially what happens when a cop issues you a ticket..
> What happens after I submit my complaint?
> Where DEP issues the summons, you will be informed of the summons number and hearing date. You may need to be available in person or by phone to testify. If the summons is upheld, the respondent must pay the penalty in order for you to receive payment for your complaint, You should submit your request for payment to OATH. If the summons is dismissed, you are not entitled to any payment.
So any random can waste your time severely at no cost to themselves, and you have to prove you were idling legally unless it's a refrigeration truck:
> If you submit a complaint regarding a refrigeration truck, you must document that the engine that moves the vehicle was on and was not being used to run the refrigeration unit.
Where I severely doubt they know which license plates belong to refrigeration trucks to begin with, so you'll likely still have to waste time.
It leads to a hearing date with you on the hook for up to 18000$ the first time and them risking nothing after investing 5 minutes to get in that joyful situation.
The more I read about it, the more it seems like a great scam, though. Film trucks, make them appear to be running for a couple of tokens and drown your competition in fines. Once a day on some trial will likely be enough even.
> Yes they are. The summons part is essentially what happens when a cop issues you a ticket..
They are reporting, not regulating. You don't get a ticket from a random person.
> The more I read about it, the more it seems like a great scam, though. Film trucks, make them appear to be running for a couple of tokens and drown your competition in fines. Once a day on some trial will likely be enough even.
This rule is in place for a long time. It isn't a scam nor is what you dreamt up happening.
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Now this is a practical use of AI, kudos!
Thank you!
This is another example geek are usually bad at politics and they often think they do.
Wish my California city had this attitude that you can report people via an app. So many offenses “run with the driver”, i.e. they will not prosecute unless a cop sees it happening and positively identifies the driver. They won’t even prosecute red light running from a video with the license plate clearly visible.
A motor vehicle cannot receive a citation. If law enforcement cannot ID the driver as a particular individual when the infraction or crime occurred, a citation should not be issued.
Why not issue it to the owner of the vehicle?
The owner of the vehicle may not be the one driving it.
So? The one driving it is someone the owner willingly gave their keys to.
Guilt by association, then? This is not how any sane legal system works.
Yes, that is the rationale, even though in the specific case I cite, said red light runner caused an accident and left their insurance info and produced a driver’s license. The police don’t care.
It doesn’t have to be like that. Why does New York not need to ID the driver to cite for idling? “The owner of the vehicle may not be the one driving it.”
Awesome. Offer tech that helps people more easily become arbitrary snitches on activity in ways that's absurdly easy to manipulate or take advantage of, all while further moving forward a culture of spying on those around you just in case yo can snatch up something worth reporting for some personal gain.
Truly, an obvious win for society....
Snitches get wishes granted
If a crime’s punishment is a fine, that means it’s legal if you’re rich.
https://upriseri.com/the-inequality-of-fines-how-monetary-pe...