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Comment by musage | Hacker News Reader

> Currently, urban infrastructure is increasingly getting more complex as we face many social challenges, such as complicated crimes and unexpected natural disasters. This situation requires that the establishment of a safe and secure society become a global concern.

Where to begin... if you're looking for social challenges, don't look further than people who can't think on an adult level being fed marketing materials by people who are just as lost, and no longer seem to even feel the need to hide it.

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I wonder if this is expressing the culture inherited from the Japanese historical experience? An island culture, homogenous, inward-centered, idolizing the emperor, crushed in WW2, and then relying on the post war rise of the corporate welfare state. This "lost" and dystopian corporate communication from Japanese companies seems typical. Certainly the one I worked for tended to be this way.

What exactly is your criticism of this?

You know, part of me just wants to mirror that, and ask "what is your actual question?", but okay.

Just in the sentence I quoted, "complicated" crimes is just padding, but of course, you can't sell "getting more complex" with the argument of "crime still exists". Then there's "unexpected" natural disasters, which is padding, too. Of course, natural disasters aren't social challenges. "This situation" -- of which there is nothing left other than "crime exists" -- always existed, and what is a "global concern"? People all over the world have been concerned with their personal safety for longer than history exists, so what changed?

Nothing changed, and if I had to guess, based on what we know about corporations and governments monitoring people who care about the environment in the least I'd say they want to peddle total control to prevent uprisings that will come when the natural disasters (we can predict to get worse, since we keep destroying our environment) get out of hand. But that's just a bonus, without that it's just marketing gibberish, and that I needed to point any of this out further eroded my faith in humanity.

>"Nothing changed"

I disagree. The most important thing that has changed and is applicable here is that technology makes it absolutely feasible to prevent "crime exists". At least the really bad ones.

The only things preventing it are: big brother scare mongering, privacy "concerns" and funding.

E.g. you could near-eliminate car accidents due to drunk driving with a tech solution. Same goes for gang violence, domestic abuse and bathroom rapes. Just stick a camera in every stall, street corner and household room. Oh and send police if the view gets obstructed or the camera damaged. A while of that and people getting caught, and they'll quickly learn to not do it. Problem solved.

I suppose this is obvious, but evidently not to everyone: There is no example of what you describe. In fact there are counterexamples of putting cameras everywhere and still having crime. Places where there is little crime don't have, and don't need cameras everywhere.

Singapour has put cameras everywhere and has a very low crime rate as a consequence. While I don't want to live in such a society the model certainly seems to work.

I'm not convinced that Singapore's cameras are the magic ingredient preventing all crime.

> Just stick a camera in every stall, street corner and household room.

At the same time paving the way to crush dissent (and in the more extreme case independent thought altogether) against the government, and providing perfect material for the blackmail of future politicians etc. (I'm sure _everyone_ has done/said things, even if perfectly legal/normal, in the privacy of their own home they'd rather not be made public).

And that's not even considering the case where a third-party gains access and uses it for economic/industrial espionage, blackmail, etc.

Hm, so what about all the places with a plethora of cameras (convenience stores, for example) that still get robbed?

You have the causality backwards. Places with a high risk of robbery tend to install security measures such as cameras. This doesn't eliminate robberies, but it does reduce them.

This is too blatantly obvious to be a Modest Proposal piece of devil's advocacy.

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