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Comment by durkie | Hacker News Reader

This was something that came up shortly after the Snowden documents were released. I don't remember who made the point (maybe Moxie Marlinspike), but they pointed out how important it is to be able to break the law. That breaking the law is an vital means of effecting change in the US: kids smoke pot illegally and grow up to be adults that push to legalize it. Gay people are more and more open and successfully push for gay marriage. Etc.

So if you take away people's means of breaking the law (such as auto speed-limited cars), it's actually striking at something really fundamental in the ability of the citizens to push for change or to protest. Almost like we want to have just the right amount of law breaking, although I can't imagine anyone associated with public policy ever adopting this stance.

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That does not work in states like the PRC or Russia. Indeed, in order to live and go on day-to-day, you must break the law. And people do. But, then when the state wants you, they will selectively enforce the law. That's how it works. Let people break the law, who cares, but when we need to arrest them, lo and behold, look, they've broken several laws!

"Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre." (If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.) [1] Attributed to Cardinal Richelieu though authenticity is disputed.

Anyway, dystopian films containing mass surveillance (such as Fahrenheit 451) also cover the very same practice.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu

Is there a word for this specific legal entrapment?

Injustice?

Future.

It's called selective enforcement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement

I am so grateful for this link! I have been searching for this term on-and-off for years!

Indeed it was Moxie: https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/

Right; it's based on the assumption (which I share) that laws aren't perfect, and that the prime way of finding out whether they are is by people breaking them.

The other requirement is the ability to change laws, otherwise this would indeed only enable selective (i.e. seemingly random) enforcement.

I believe the idea goes "law is created by man, and man is imperfect", or something like that.

Civil disobedience is a real thing, the first example that comes to mind is ignoring laws that require a front license plate, specifically because it reduces the likelihood that your vehicle tag will be caught on camera, those automated ticket system might move on to the next plate if they don't get a scan. I totally agree with you.

That’s not civil disobedience. In civil disobedience you blatantly and publicly violate an unjust law with the intention of being punished so that the public will be repulsed by the injustice of it. I don’t think anyone is going to cry for you if you get a ticket for not having a front plate. You’re doing it to avoid the consequences of a separate illegal act.

I mostly didn't want to drill holes in the bumper.

And what kind of right would breaking the speed limit push that citizens could possible want to have changed?

I am all for hardcoded speed limits. Why sell cars that can go faster than $MaxSpeedInYourCountry ???

Other than that I think you made a good point.

I'm personally for speed limits and adherence to them, but not capping speeds at the speed limits (and I'm not talking about 150 MPH caps that you find in UK/EU) has edge cases that could be argued like overtaking.

  Why sell cars that can go faster
  than $MaxSpeedInYourCountry ???

Politicians today have three choices:

(1) Set and enforce low speed limits, large numbers of drivers make low-impact complaints.

(2) Set and enforce high speed limits, small numbers of parents of dead children make high-impact complaints.

(3) Set low speed limits but don't enforce them. Anti-speed campaigners and road users are both satisfied.

In my country, politicians tend to go for (3). A switch to (1) would not be without its costs.

In response to aggressive use of traffic cameras, people in a number of cities and states have passed propositions banning their use.

A switch to (1) might have similar effects, motivating the people to force a switch to (2).

Any use of traffic cameras is seen as 'aggressive'. It inevitably results in hundreds of tickets that otherwise wouldn't be written, affecting hundreds of citizens in a way they see as intrusive and 'unfair'. For better or worse.

not disagreeing with the first part of your statement, but, for the second part, a reasonable remedy would be to simply lower the cost of each violation.

e.g. if almost everyone got speeding tickets, but they only cost $15 and didn't involve any points against the driver's record or insurance premium hikes, people would simply pay up and probably speed less often. complaints about the injustice of speeding tickets would probably remain at current levels.

But that wouldn't satisfy the "if you speed you're Literally Hitler (TM) crowd" who want punishment for minor traffic infractions to be sized for deterrence rather than the actual harm to society.

Tragically, reasonable fees for bad behavior encourage the opposite behavior: all guilt evaporates and folks feel entitled to the behavior, after all they can pay for it. Famous studies of charging parent who were late picking up children from school, everybody started doing it and gladly paying.

Ok, but, could it be that the fee charged to parents was simply too low?

Can't we just view "the right to speed" as a service offered by the government and then apply the usual price and demand logic to it?

I've had the same idea - a geometrically increasing 'fee' for road use depending on speed. Kind of like toll roads, but maybe even most roads. If you want to spend the money (and have the money, thus likely the deep pockets to compensate for damage) then go ahead!

Anarchy! I remember my first time through Chicago at 7PM years ago, merging onto an 11 lane highway with a 45mph speed limit and finding everybody, absolutely everybody, going 80.

Some enforcement has to be done or it gets out of hand ever so quickly

Yeah, Los Angeles has no speed limit at all, anywhere. It's basically "don't be a dick, or you'll get pulled over" as your cruising 70 mph next to a cop in a school zone.

Exceeding $MaxSpeedInYourCountry on an empty highway isn't where the majority of speeding related accidents occur, so a basic top speed limiter wouldn't do very much anyway. Not to mention that (at least in Europe) people are likely to take their vehicles to a neighbouring country where different speed legislation applies.

A recent example of where even breaking the speed limit is how laws (or speed limits) are changed:

Recently, our county measured the speed on an 8 mile long rural road. Their conclusion was that there was no need to bump the existing speed limit of 45 up to 55 or 60 (to match similar roads) because people weren't going faster than 45 on it.

Why weren't people going faster than 45 on an empty, rural road? Because the sheriff's department enforced that 45mph speed limit very rigorously, with an average of one speed trap and one roving vehicle.

Man thats a cool insight !! Never thought about the mechanism like that !

Gay marriage and drug abuse don't kill people. (At least other people, if we jump from weed to opioids). Car speeding does.

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