Right, in effect the Judge ruled that while the state _calls_ it a civil matter, they treat it basically the same as any other criminal matter and therefore it is in fact a criminal matter. As we all know, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Sure, that would be sufficient probable cause for police to ask questions. But it’s not sufficient evidence on which to write a ticket because we specifically wrote into our Constitution that the police must know and be able to prove who the guilty party is _before_ they write the ticket (or make an arrest, in the case of more serious crimes). Poland doesn’t protect its citizens to the same degree, so what is acceptable there is not acceptable here.
One interesting point is that the Judge also spent some ink criticizing the law because paying the ticket removes the ticket from your driving record. This means that habitual bad drivers can get away with the same infractions over and over again as long as they pay the fines quickly. This bypasses the State’s points system that was designed to punish repeat offenders by taking away their license.
I wonder how other state’s red–light camera laws hold up? Do they have the same flaws or are they written better?
Same flaws. It was all designed to make up for budget cuts and stayed when it made a dent. Once they got used to the money from it, they got complacent with how effective it actually was. This is Law Enforcement in America in a nut shell. They only care when they can’t make their pension plan payments. Rather than go out there and police, they have staffing shortages and rely on the private sector to provide services that allow them to “police” from afar or by an algorithm.
Coming to the part about issuing fines to the registered owner, you can nominate a different driver online here, when replying to the fine. The person nominated need to accept this as well before it is taken off the person to whom the vehicle is registered to.
There is a driver in NYC who gets almost 300 speeding tickets per year. They've paid their fines, so they're allowed to keep driving. Apparently, since the fines come from speed camera, they can't revoke their license.
New Jersey abandoned their red-light camera laws after ticket challenges involving yellow-light lengths. The length should be proportional to the posted speed limit (e.g. 5.5 seconds for 50 mph), but many lights were found to have incorrect timing (e.g. 2.5 seconds for 50 mph).
Also, I think at that time some questionable arrangements surfaced between the operators of the automated ticketing system(s) and the towns and/or counties involved.
My city seems to be fixing this by having yellow lights extend when it sees a car reasonably close to the intersection. And also helps by switching lights quickly based on car presence.
That's by design, and that's a good thing. Anything where the person actually driving the car can't be identified (i.e., tickets given by camera as opposed to in-person) shouldn't have any long term affect on anyone's personal records.
Wow, that's a huge problem with that red light camera program then. The drives that run red lights around me clearly don't care much for minor consequences. The point needs to be to identify the sociopathic drivers and get them off the road.
You mistakenly believe that these camera systems are not functioning exactly as intended: they're a revenue stream. If they ended up shutting down the offenders that revenue stream would dry up. The sociopath you've identified is called a whale instead.
No, but if you have a kid with no support system you’re going to find it really hard to add just a few more hours per week to clean diapers out every other day on top of everything else. If it was easy for you congratulations you had an easy one.
Babies are incredibly difficult even in the best case. Sleep deprivation is intense. Breastfeeding is difficult. Adding in small additional difficulties adds up. "This is a bit more difficult" becomes a huge mess when you are on three hours of sleep and there are 10 different "this is a bit more difficult" things that people are suggesting to you.
Add this on top of any sort of complex baby (illness, allergies, colic, slow weight gain, etc) and suddenly the slightly less complex disposable diaper becomes a godsend just to save a few minutes or a bit of mental load.
Babies are incredibly difficult even in the best case. Sleep deprivation is intense. Breastfeeding is difficult. Adding in small additional difficulties adds up. "This is a bit more difficult" becomes a huge mess when you are on three hours of sleep and there are 10 different "this is a bit more difficult" things that people are suggesting to you.
Add this on top of any sort of complex baby (illness, allergies, colic, slow weight gain, etc) and suddenly the slightly less complex door dashing a warm bottle of formula becomes a godsend just to save a few minutes or a bit of mental load.
I don't judge people who order out all the time or pay for a night nanny or do any of a million things that make life easier with an infant. Infants are fucking hard.
Almost. Technically an adult must create an account for any non–adult who wants to use the computer, and configure it with the appropriate age category.
Honestly it’s the dumbest thing ever. Best just not to play that game.
How is that dumb? It seems reasonable and pragmatic. If the current status quo is ID uploads and face scans, this seems like the better approach. It shifts the responsibility back to parents. All adult service operators have to do is filter requests with the underage HTTP header set.
> How about the part where children cannot legally create accounts of their own, on computers that they own?
Where is that actually stated in any law being discussed? If a parent gives a child a device with admin access, that’s their choice to do so. But it also makes sense that we, the minds behind all of this technology, also provide parents with the most basic of tools to restrict a child’s access online and hold accountable companies that knowingly serve adult content to children. That’s all the CA law does AFAIK.
Sure, my generation was raised on 4chan. But I can understand why parents today may want the tools to limit that.
Professional services firms, tech groups and manufacturing conglomerates have found once-routine visa applications face longer wait times and are more likely to be denied — leaving some employees stuck abroad — as the president tries to narrow the pathways for legal immigration.
and:
White House policies including a $100,000 fee for new applicants to the H-1B scheme for specialised workers and enhanced social media activity reviews have upended multinationals’ abilities to bring top engineers, consultants and scientists from across the globe to the US, according to more than a dozen employees, executives and recruiters who spoke to the FT.
Oh, that, lol. (With the paywall I just figured they were moaning about ICE; that’s been the more popular topic of late.)
They’re moaning about the fee because it will work. Visas are supposed to be issued to the best of the best, to entice them to come to the US to work, or to foreign workers who can fill jobs that no American can be found for. But we both know how easy that is to abuse.
The employers who hire cheap foreign labor to replace Americans at ordinary jobs won’t pay that fee; it’ll be cheaper to pay an American $120k than to pay an Indian $50k with the extra $100k application fee. That solves that problem in one easy stroke.
Meanwhile the AI company who is paying a million a year and expecting to earn a hundred million or more per employee will pay the application fee in a heartbeat. They’re after profits that are literally 1000× higher than the fee, so the fee is irrelevant. Of course they’ll grumble about government overreach while telling their HR manager to write the check, but it won’t actually slow them down.
> They’re moaning about the fee because it will work. Visas are supposed to be issued to the best of the best, to entice them to come to the US to work, or to foreign workers who can fill jobs that no American can be found for. But we both know how easy that is to abuse.
not only will it not work it is already not working. H1B is just a smokescreen against an actual problem - off-shoring. and this is a problem that no one, not even "America First (American Last)" President wants to solve.
The other crazy party we have also does not want to solve this problem even though it would be an amazing political pitch. "MAGA is telling you America First but do nothing to put Americans first, in my administration we will charge 200% tax for every off-shore employee hired, you pay someone from Bangladesh $40k, you pay America $120k." of course this will never happen, especially not with the current administration. The H1B was just smokeshow for people like you that don't read the post and think that overstaying the visa is a problem that is plaguing America (it is not in the top 100,000 of the problems but easy to rile up folk)
> They’re moaning about the fee because it will work
If by "work" you mean "the same company employs the same person just in an office in a different country"?
You do you, if so.
> Visas are supposed to be issued to the best of the best
If you want that. But then don't be surprised when such people look at you and say "nah".
> But we both know how easy that is to abuse.
No, we don't "both" know. I never tried to [ab]use it. Because I (like several of my friends who said "no" to US companies asking them to move to the US) never cared about moving to the US in the first place.
> The employers who hire cheap foreign labor to replace Americans at ordinary jobs won’t pay that fee; it’ll be cheaper to pay an American $120k than to pay an Indian $50k with the extra $100k application fee. That solves that problem in one easy stroke.
$100k is just for H-1B, which is specifically work, and was already capped in number.
The, e.g. H-2A visa has a fee of apparently $460 (not thousand, just four sixty). That's the one for "temporary agricultural work", which is very much not "the best of the best".
People often have trouble with this saying, and that trouble often boils down to the difference between intent and purpose.
The people who create a system have some intent for it. The system may or may not effectively achieve that intent, may or may not outlive the initial conditions that surrounded its creation, and may or may not have side effects.
Purpose is something humans assign. It is sometimes linked to intent. A carpenter's hammer is intended to drive and pull nails, and that is often also its purpose. The purpose of the hammer I keep in my basement is breaking open walnuts.
The phrase is stating that the purpose we should assign to systems when judging them is their outcome, and not the intent behind them.
Sometimes intent and outcomes matter, but the aphorism is simply not a good guide to understanding reality. It should be discarded.
The classic example is a hospital for treating cancer patients. Suppose that one third of the patients are successfully treated, while the other two thirds die of their cancer. Is the purpose of the hospital to kill two thirds of the patients? Clearly not, but that is the outcome.
No, that is not what the hospital does, and thus based on this heuristic, it is not its purpose. What a system does is not the same as the context-free outcome. It is the outcome compared to the outcome that could be expected without the system. You have to define your priors.
However, if the expected 5 year mortality for the cancer was 50%, and with this treatment 2/3 died, then the rule would apply. A choice to continue using that treatment could be criticized as equivalent to a choice to kill 1/6 more patients. Because despite the intention, the known outcome was more patients dying.
Good! You are thinking! In principle something like this should be the right answer. (But we can simplify it by simply saying that we expect the hospital to improve outcomes, even though it cannot cure every patient.)
But no, the truth is that this hospital was built to provide jobs for civil servants <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-5zEb1oS9A>. The purpose of a thing does not have to be related to the outcome.
I am really laughing at this one. You got me good. This is either some kind of farming game where I need to "unlock" a valuable skill... ("training" makes me think of NES Super Marios Brothers 3 with the slot machine game after each level), or a skill that I need to add to my LinkedIn profile to check if anyone is reading it. (I recall years ago two guys adding recommendations to each other's profiles with very funny and implausible notes to see if anyone was looking. Does anyone remember that?)
> NES Super Marios Brothers 3 with the slot machine game after each level
a) It's either Super Mario Brothers or Super Marios Brother
b) SMB2 (aka Super Mario USA in Japan) has the Bonus Chance slot machine after each level, SMB3 does have the Goal card at the end of each level with a match 3 mechanic, but I don't consider that to really be a slot machine.
Removing an offensive buzzer or beeper or overbright LED is far more satisfying. Plus, nobody can trivially unmute the thing.
But that said, I wouldn’t mind a microwave that could be quieted without completely muting it. They could mute the buttons but still let it beep once when a timer or cooking cycle finishes. On the other hand I have a phone that I can time things with, so I’m not really looking to replace my microwave merely for that.
Microwaves that don't beep after 1930 so that $small_child doesn't hear you dinging a bag of popcorn and get out of bed to come downstairs for some to be confronted by whatever scary-ass film you're watching once they've gone to bed.
Edit: file under "design problems you didn't know you had until you became a parent"
Your last word brought to mind the science fiction short, "Come You Nigh: Kay Shuns" by Lawrence A. Perkins, which used exactly this technique as an encryption method!
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