Darth Wong wrote:Broomstick wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:I'm not so worried about ubiquitous traffic enforcement. Human beings aren't good enough drivers to stop periodically breaking traffic laws, so the legal system has no real incentive to make it impossible to function while occasionally breaking a traffic law.
On the other hand, municipalities that make money from fines for traffic violations have great incentive to install surveillance to increase revenue. The former Mayor Daley of Chicago more or less admitted that when, after years of saying "red light" cameras increase safety and a study proved otherwise, he said he didn't care, ticket revenues were up and they more than paid for themselves.
And we're supposed to feel bad for people who run red lights, or feel that their rights were somehow violated when they were caught by a machine instead of a guy making $50,000 per year?
Aside from the increase in rear-end accidents due to people panicking and slamming on the brakes out of fear of being fined, the Chicago red-light cameras were also ticketing people going through while the light was yellow and even in one case during green lights. Several of them were ticketing people
stopped at the red light, in other words, fining those who were obeying the law. Malfunction? Tough shit, pay the ticket anyway.
If they had actually worked as advertised it wouldn't have been so bad, but they didn't and the city didn't give a fuck as long as the money was coming in. No attempt was made to correct the well-documented problems as long as Daley was in office. Why not? The interest was never safety in that case, they just wanted increased revenue. If everyone had suddenly developed perfect driving skills and stopped running red lights it would have defeated the actual, unspoken purpose of the cameras.
Broomstick wrote:Laws are effective only if they are enforced. Part of the reason folks fear the "national ID" and biometric band wagon is not because of what governments and/or corporations are doing today, but what they've done in the past and might do again in the future.
Ah yes, the fear of tyranny: something Americans always seem so concerned about. So how did the lack of a national ID protect you from the tyranny of having your right to a fair trial taken away by the PATRIOT Act? How did the lack of a national ID protect you from the tyranny of harsh drug laws which allowed the government to imprison millions of non-violent criminals, create the world's higher incarceration rate, and then use the prisoners as slave labour? How did the lack of a national ID protect you from anything?
I stated what people in the US feared, I did not make a claim as to how rational those fears are or are not.
What we really need is a secure form of ID that is near-impossible to counterfeit and not only works face-to-face but also would serve to identify oneself on the internet as well. Whether that's a national ID or a US state ID I don't care. Hell, have the UN set the program up and make it a global ID that also functions as a passport, why stop at just a national ID?
