As you wish.
939 karma · joined November 12, 2021
You point out a different, and arguably way more important, problem in our politics: we have no real pathway for domain experts to become powerful representatives and provide meaningful oversight. Instead you just have corrupt lawyers vouching for other corrupt lawyers, writing corrupt laws and appointing corrupt judges, all with the active approval and participation of the two major parties. It's just evil all up and down the chain.
For what it's worth, I grew up in a polluted city, studied climate science in school, and work in renewables. It's not that I don't think air pollution is a big deal, it's that I don't think the idle car secret police are a good way to deal with air pollution.
CAFE standards? Great. Point-source air pollution tracking and fines, from factories and such? Cool. Renewables-backed electric cars? Great. Cleaner, low-carbon grid mixes? Yes. Divestment from fossil fuels? Cool. All of these are actually hugely beneficial actions, but they don't require the state to turn citizens into informers against each other for petty everyday actions.
Air pollution is your typical tragedy of the commons situation, borne of the collective actions of millions of people living in an industrialized society and just trying to live their lives. It's not the sort of thing worth putting a bounty on, IMO, at least not at the individual level. At the corporate level it's a different story, cuz that's a cost of doing business and accounting for externalities and such.
All of those are better solutions than criminalizing trivial behavior and fostering a culture of distrust, all for little to no measurable improvement in air quality, just to satiate the political agenda of a politician. It's the difference between cheap political points for low-hanging fruit, vs doing the actual useful and hard work of setting sustainable climate policies that don't regressively hurt the working class while also turning citizens against each other. It's that sort of blindness to the needs of the average person that makes this sort of thing elitist.
Should citizens police each other for eating beef? Driving older cars? Not passing smog tests? Not supporting nuclear power? Cooking with natural gas? Flying on planes?
It's not the kind of society I want to live in. It's not the kind of relationship I want to have with my neighbors. They're the kind of situations that call for carrots more than sticks, and certainly not secret police.
Edit: looks like the idling law was primarily sponsored by a city councilmember back in 2015: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/council-member-wants-to...
It wasn't like a bunch of citizens got together to tackle air pollution, and somehow came up with that as the most sensible solution (vs, say, emissions standards or the autostop/autostart systems in newer cars, or better transit and biking). It was just some bureaucrat trying to score cheap political points by having citizens snitch on delivery drivers and such who are already underpaid and just trying to get by and do their jobs. Did this measurably improve air pollution in NYC? No, it just gave rise to a cottage industry of the equivalent of ambulance chasers.
First of all, a burning building isn't an criminal act (unless it's arson). It's an accident/disaster. Second of all, you don't get paid for calling 911 on a burning building. There's no bounty to collect. Third, you are not turning in a fellow citizen for something that you wouldn't otherwise have if not for the bounty. Fourth, a fire is a life-threatening situation for all involved.
A more reasonable example is "You should not call 911 if you catch your neighbor jaywalking across the street." Or, like if you catch them leaving dog poop behind, you don't need to sic SWAT on them. Just fucking talk to them and ask nicely first, and maybe file a complaint somewhere if they're really assholes. But you don't just jump to trying to fine and imprison someone for every minor offense.
And with the abortion and guns in particular, they really are none of your business. What someone does with their body or their private property, if they're not hurting anyone else, really shouldn't be policed by their fellow citizens.
If you really want to set a bounty on things that have a measurable, tangible threat to public safety -- like actual arsonists, rapists, murderers, and similar felonies -- you know, maybe that's OK by me? But not stupid things like idling your car or regretting who you fucked last night.
In any case, it doesn't have to be an either-or situation (and arguably shouldn't be). For most of the last century we were able to juggle private needs with public works, using private talent to cooperatively tackle problems of national scale.
It was only in the last 2-3 decades that we really stopped believing in the country, and the government became increasingly dysfunctional. Then the last 5-10 years we really started circling the drain. I don't know what happened. Some of it looks to me like deliberate sabotage, a concerted effort to decrease public faith in government so that deregulation can benefit the elite. Some of it just looks like sheer incompetence.
Maybe it's just the natural end of our golden age. We've hit the limits of the sort of problems our system can reliably tackle, while the nationalists are still on the upward trajectory -- for now. China is especially scary because they've managed to invent a whole new sort of capitalism hybridized with nationalism-authoritarianism. It has the hallmarks of a free market at the lower levels, but the government has the final word on any business and can nationalize/co-opt corporations whenever they want. In that way they get the benefits of private innovation and enterprise along with the ability to essentially eminent domain entire businesses and sectors at will. It's worked scarily well for them, and they are on the verge of eclipsing our model in the next few decades. The severe cost of it, of course, is measured in lives and liberties, something that West would not (and should not) accept.
But the thing is, we have no answer to that at all. We don't really even discuss it anymore as a nation. There is no national debate about public works or long-term planning from anyone except a tiny portion of the left, while the rest of the political class argue about gender and race and toilets and guns and abortions. It's almost like all the culture wars are an intentional distraction from our failing system of government and economics, where the rich keep getting richer every year -- especially during covid -- and everyone else falls further and further down the ladder. We're so fucked without some sort of forward thinking. Wish we could see some actual leadership for once...
As a taxpayer I'd rather see some money wasted, and some progress being made, rather than nothing getting done ever.
Corruption and waste are tolerable to some degree, IMO. "Government wastefulness" is too often code for not letting the government do anything at all.
I just don't think our current societal bottlenecks are due to a budget or GDP crisis. There is so much wealth locked away, I'd rather it be spent on public works even if it means losing a few cents on the dollar to corruption along the way.
It's not like the private sector is risk free, or that the government doesn't waste money on wars and questionable foreign aid already.
There is such a backlog of infrastructure to build, whether roads and bridges or prisons and schools and climate change mitigation or renewables or nuclear... we gotta do something about that. If that means a slumlord getting rich, I guess it's a cost of doing business?
Or what's a better alternative?
Yes, Texas used citizen lawsuits as a workaround for something they couldn't themselves enforce without risking constitutional ire (for now). It's a legal sleight-of-hand that wins them bonus points with conservatives while buying time for the new Supreme Court to outlaw abortion. It's disgusting.
At the same time, it is creepy for Texas, California, New York or any government to entice citizens to act as informers and tattle on each other. The social costs of that aren't just measured in less budgeting for meter maids, but also increasing social distrust between neighbors.
These aren't mutually exclusive, just two complementary, nasty things happening in government.
In all three cases, it mobilizes private citizens to factionalize against each other to fulfill some elitist agenda, creating legal conflict with a profit motive where there wasn't before. Sure, somebody might've rolled their eyes at an idling truck or silently viewed their aborting/gun-toting neighbor with contempt, but these laws encourage active interpersonal conflict in the name of the state, turning untrained citizens with no experience in de-escalation into deputy law enforcement.
Preventing abortion may be illegal now, but probably won't be for much longer if the rigged Supreme Court gets its way. Still, that isn't a novelty. Control of abortion has been a partisan fight for decades. Idling just doesn't attract the same constitutional scrutiny (and why should it).
The bounty hunting thing is an additional layer on top of that, however, and one that's relatively novel. It's why California copied it for the gun bounty.
We tried the whole "global village" thing. It didn't work. People are too tribal and shortsighted. Back to our little cloistered in-groups... sigh.
Any time you have a massive building project you're going to get corruption. If you can't even eminent domain it through useful areas, you're just going to get developers buying land in the middle of nowhere and selling it back to the government as the only remaining viable route.
That's exactly what happened, right?
It's not that simple. If something changes within the 50 years (and it certainly will), they can pivot away and work on something else.
It's more that they have a relatively unified, authoritarian government with absolute power and no external checks and balances.
At our other extreme, we have a two-party deadlock stretching back decades, and every major policy gets turned back after 4-8 years when the other party regains power. It's impossible to plan or build for the future that way.
We used to be able to send people to the moon, develop nuclear power, build interstates and dams, win not just wars but hearts and minds, rebuild Germany and Japan... and now... we can't even evacuate Afghanistan, can't stop our citizens from being so pissed off they storm the capitol, can't do anything about climate change, can't have a sane discussion about educational curricula, can't maintain infrastructure, can't keep our people off the streets, can't deal with a pandemic...
We've become good at one thing and one thing only: allowing private actors to optimize for massive short-term profits at the expense of society and the future. That's no way to run a country. We've turned citizens into gladiators fighting over scraps.
Not saying we should emulate Chinese authoritarianism, but having a national vision lasting more than one election cycle isn't a bad thing. Being able to unite a country behind a major social project isn't a bad thing. Being able to even THINK of a country as a country, instead of warring factions, isn't a bad thing.
Encouraging citizens to bounty hunt each other... that's the novelty that the other states are copying.
These creepy "see something, say something" laws turn neighbor against neighbor, criminalizing behavior that would otherwise be considered acceptable, and turn passive observers into active enforcers for the sake of profit.
brianstoner said:
> There's no blurring happening because there's nothing to blur. There's no unique identifier or personal information being collected. It's no different from using the search engine. And there's no need for an opt-out, because there's literally nothing to opt out of.
Did you link to the wrong thread...?
But yes, it's entirely an exercise in trust. There is nothing stopping them from being nefarious with this collected information, except their brand. Someday they may sell out, or maybe they already have, who knows?
Thing is, nobody has your best interests at heart. These are all profit-driven enterprises and everyone has their price. DDG just markets itself as less evil.
You don't want to trust anyone? Then don't. Block the trackers, rotate through VPNs, always use incognito, etc. Or just accept it as a cost of searching and move on with your life... your profile is just going to be one of millions anyway, even if they do track you. At least they don't have the cross-product integration and remarketing that Google's billions can buy.
At the end of the day search is an expensive endeavor requiring constant spidering and curating and anti-spam efforts. If you get it for free, you're the product. DDG isn't magically above the economics.
Mozilla was on its downhill slide long before him anyway.
It matters less these days since Microsoft gave up and went Chromium and Apple just doesn't care about its browser. Maybe Google already won and Firefox is on its last breaths?
I think the Chromium model has them forking from a shared base, and Google adds their own Chrome bits after that...? Or am I wrong?
It really makes other US cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. seem like quaint little backwater neighborhoods. Most of those have become little more than traffic-ridden strip malls, preserving a tiny downtown district but everywhere else is mostly just a bunch of drive-up destinations with little pedestrian activity and not much liveliness. Chicago's neighborhoods are still super vibrant and full of festivals, and even in the deep snow of winter people will bustle on the sidewalks and converge on the fun pubs and music venues and such. I've never seen anything else like that in the US.
But, yes, walk a few blocks in the wrong direction and you'll soon be dead. Despite that, millions make it their home. It's an amazing place to live.
I'm angry at them because how the hell did we get here from the beauty of early Firefox and Phoenix? They've become the monster they were trying to fight.
You don't agree with my assertions, that's fine. Its marketshare speaks for itself. People don't trust Mozilla anymore, with good reason.