Copper you say?
That’s like $27 per camera or so.
Wait… really?
I mean, being anti-authority is fine, but even if you achieve your stateless society, don’t you still want your stateless society to still have traffic co-ordination somehow?
Stateless =/= rule-less
Photo enforcement cameras are problematic for several reasons.
A) It has been shown that yellow lights with such cameras are very often set to a yellow duration briefer than generally accepted engineering practices to increase revenue *1
B) They discourage a rare misbehavior, actually running red lights, whilst causing another to become common. That is slamming on the brakes even when it isn’t safe to stop. Exacerbated by A. Better slam on the brakes when it flicks yellow even if you are way too close to reasonably stop whilst going only the speed limit.
People who are caught up by it are almost always those who found themselves a bit too far into the intersection to safely stop. EG those who cross the threshold right as it is changing. There is for reasons of safety a few seconds between one light turning red and another green. At 30 mph (44 feet per second) someone will fully clear a 40 foot intersection in less than a second. That is to say the only people you catch aren’t those who would have collided.
They are those
- you fucked with the shorter duration yellow oops
- people who hesitated because of 1 and slowed but ultimately decided to proceed thinking they can make it
- People with poorer brakes and or dealing with rainy conditions reducing stopping time.
C) Most of the money goes to the contractor who owns the cameras. Essentially you are letting a private company prey on your citizens as long as government gets to keep the scraps.
*1 https://ww2.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-shortening-yellow-light-times-for-profit/
I mean this in a genuine way, why in your mind those are the two options available? Total anarchy without functioning transit or cameras pointing at drivers?
There are several different ways to control traffic. If privacy is an importanr factor for a culture, they’d rank privacy respecting alternatives higher.
There is some political horseshoe theory that connects “People who cannot stand any kind of authority at all and start shrieking even when a forum mod removes their comments.”
It’s the weird far-left anarchists and far right libertarians finding common ground in wanting a society where mommy doesn’t tell them to not run with scissors. Some of the “sovereign citizens” who make for hilarious Youtube content are sincere in their their irrational hate for any kind of rules and laws.
I have had enough dealings with these folks that I have a pretty strong opinion that nobody has been able to change, that these folks just have serious authority issues and do not give a shit about a broader society and are just mad at their parents.
They are the absolute worst people you could ever have as neighbors. I sometimes think we should drive them into the sea via mobs with torches.
You think people pushing that thought further than “What’s the edgiest political personality I can use for posing online”
If only it were possible to transport humans and goods without a network of cameras invading everyone’s privacy.
If only that was the natural state of the world for more of human history until just a few years ago.
As someone else pointed out, the traffic light itself isn’t being affected, just the automated enforcement mechanism of the camera. We managed just fine without those.
Plus, they’re not safer the way the government likes to claim. People slam on their brakes when they see one, and they can only ticket, it’s not like they’re stopping accidents or saving people, can only report on what happened.
Traffic enforcement cameras are one of the worst ways I can think of to coordinate traffic.
red light ones are not great due to increased rear endings from some idiot slamming the brakes on when they should have gone through / people rushing and assuming the person in front will go through the yellow.
speed ones work great, when placed appropriately (i.e. on a street with an appropriate speed limit for the road design and in areas of higher pedestrian activity). I hate that Ontario just banned speed enforcement cameras, because that means a loss of revenue to pay for the road network maintenance, more police activity enforcing speed (which a camera does automatically all day long) which means police aren’t doing more important stuff and also it’s a waste of my tax dollars, and they will have to spend more of my tax dollars putting shittier speed reduction methods in place like speed bumps (annoying as fuck, bad for fuel economy, loud because people race from speed bump to speed bump, ineffective because people pay attention racing from speed bump to speed bump instead of to what’s going on around them, annoying for bicycles and people with towing trailers, loud when people telling trailers go over them, loud when regular cars go over them, bad for snow plows…)
now, this is just for speed enforcement, not coordinating traffic flow. although in a properly designed network, there are times that this can actually be achieved, unlike those light cycles on arterial roads that let you go through if you speed just a little bit but if you go the speed limit you hit every single red light
That can be done though street design. See: The Netherlands.
Yay! Crashes! 🥰
They would remove the camera not the traffic light. I don’t think that would cause an accident
The reason the camera is there is because of the crashes that happened when it wasn’t.
That’s not true. We have a ton of these popping up in my neighborhood in places where there haven’t been issues.
Also they are owned by private companies that pocket most of the money you pay the fine with.
Why do I need 5 of these on my way to work in the morning? That’s 5 times where if I accidentally went too fast I have to pay a private company $200. That’s up to 10 times a day I am at risk of a random fee to some company. Insane that you want that
All good but “risk of a random fee” ?🤨
Same discussions as in German; FFS people have to drive within the speedlimit. That’s the meaning of a limit. If you cannot do that reliably you will not get a fine for accidentally driving 3km/h under the limit. I do not understand how checking people for safe driving is seen as a predatory practice. Everybody getting fined is literally in the wrong.
This comment is provided to you by the “the light was really yellow” crowd
“Sir! The unfed masses are tearing down cameras to sell them for food!”
“BUT WHAT ABOUT PROPERTY VALUES? HAVE THEY NO SENSE OF COMMUNITY?!”
i mean, car crashes very much also often lead to death
i don’t think speed cameras are a good way to prevent car crashes, but straight up acting like car crashes aren’t a problem worth mitigating is extremely silly
The country’s “rugged, free individualism” is a fucking menace. It has given so many people the righteous feeling of being above the law, of being offended at the law applying to them, and especially the “social contract” a phrase that literally enrages some segment of the population on both sides of the political spectrum. I hate it here.
It’s showtime
Suppliuppliuma II accepts your proposition, in spite of wearing nothing but an over-sized bath towel.
Ea Nasir is a really interesting case study of how one piece of information can be interpreted in two completely different ways.
One interpretation, and the one most people know, is that the authors of the clay tablets complaints are legitimate.
The other is that Ea Nasir kept them as a record of people attempting to harm his reputation. So he could remember who to avoid doing business with in the future.
Also ancient Sumer had a pretty decent legal system for it’s time, it’s entirely possible Ea-Nasir was keeping the tablets for a possible court case. So the ancient equivalent of saving texts from a shit customer.
Your honor, I have 500 lbs of receipts.
“What’s a pound? Some savages measurements from the east? We use mina.”
- he was gathering evidence of an employee or delivery partner comitting fraud
So it’s like the Lemmy modlog. Maybe it’s a log of mods calling out bad users, maybe it’s a log of mods lying and power tripping.
^ this person has been horribly wronged.
Awww, thanks! ^^
I would give this merchant zero stars if I could
Awful copper
Worst trade experiemce of my life. I will not be returning
Best copper
Best trade I ever had. I will for sure return.
BEAUTIFUL COPPER
I come all time. Other customers come too! A+++++++++++5
5 stars
And flock cameras are apparently easily rooted and repurposed.
I heard the ones in school zones actually have 10lb of copper and a chocolate bar inside
Taking out speedtrap so driver can self regulate is like taking out
CDCFDA so big pharma can self regulate.These aren’t about speed anymore, they’re all turning into auto license plate readers run by private corporations for an infinite surveillance dragnet
There are a LOT of other cameras placed everywhere that collect your data, being mad at the objects that also try to get drivers to behave isn’t the best use of our desire to rebel against authority. Maybe let’s attack the corporations and not the infrastructure hardware.
Exactly.
You don’t have a speedtrap issue, you have private vulture issue. Signing the enforcement right to private company is a recipe for disaster.
Sure, yeah if they were only used to snap pictures of people speeding I wouldn’t have a problem but that’s not what they’re limited to.
Edit: For everyone downvoting me, please read my follow-up responses. I’m not advocating for surveillance, I’m advocating for privacy-preserving systems that simply send a ticket if you speed, without recording your location every single time you pass any camera, rather than a system that does, because that’s actually a surveillance network.
As much as it’s true that a lot of these cameras are just becoming other ways to engage in surveillance, it’s also true that they do a lot to manage speeding. For example, NYC had a 94% reduction in speeding in areas with the cameras. It’s also true that most existing speed cameras simply aren’t equipped to be converted into ALPR systems. Most ALPR deployments are done via the installation of brand-new hardware, which many places simply can’t justify the additional, new costs of.
This can be done with minimal surveillance capabilities, and often is in many places. (local compute board identifies license plates, calculates speeds, sends them to an isolated cloud service, and only forwards data to the police department if it was actually a speeding infraction, otherwise the data is wiped) The ALPR cameras are primarily being installed in specific areas, but aren’t always across-the-board implementations, and sometimes avoid entire cities.
For example, ALPRs are becoming popular around Washington, but the Seattle police department only has a few ALPRs solely mounted on vehicles, but zero mounted in stationary locations. (“SPD’s ALPR cameras are not fixed in location”) These aren’t even used for speeding cases, but are used for missing vehicle cases, and the speeding cameras are entirely separate.
It doesn’t make sense to eliminate all cameras, even the speeding ones, just because other cameras can be ALPRs. We should simply advocate for removing ALPRs, not speeding cameras. This is why organizations like the EFF, dedicated to protecting people’s privacy, have previously argued against these cameras broadly not because speeding cameras are also bad, but because the way those speeding camera systems were designed allowed them to also be used as ALPRs. However, I haven’t seen a single case of them arguing against cameras that are solely speeding cameras with limited capacity for surveillance, because it’s just not a very big issue.
Sorry, long rant 😅
damn that sucks bro, I’m cutting down the camera anyway because we live under the beginning fourth reich and surveillance must be fought.
Maybe police should go back to being visible on the street to control driver behavior and city road design be built around calming traffic patterns, instead of using completely undercover normal looking vehicles for traffic enforcement and then raking in millions of dollars by sitting on their ass and letting the camera do all the work?
Maybe police should go back to being visible on the street to control driver behavior
I’d rather avoid inflating police budgets if I can help it. Especially since such a system then lends itself to those same cops advocating for increased surveillance measures because it makes their job easier. They’re the people who wanted the built-in ALPR systems, after all.
city road design be built around calming traffic patterns
100% agree. Yet while I want these to be more widespread, they take money, time, and lots of urban planning. In the meantime, I see traffic cameras (specifically those NOT integrated with ALPR systems that store locations in a central database) as a good stopgap solution for areas that don’t yet/can’t build out those measures in a reasonable timeframe.
instead of using completely undercover normal looking vehicles for traffic enforcement and then raking in millions of dollars by sitting on their ass and letting the camera do all the work?
Also agreed. The pigs don’t need more money for doing less work, hence why I think the prior idea of having them be visible is still a bad idea, because they can simply sit there and… also do nothing.
And if they set quotas, then the measure becomes a goal, and it ceases to be a good measure, as cops will just pull more people over because it “seemed like they were going fast”, and everyone’s days get just a little bit worse.
Fuck your spy cameras. If speeding was really an issue they have the technology to prevent it. Every day I hear dumber and dumber ideas and thoughts and I just want to move out of this country.
If speeding was really an issue they have the technology to prevent it
Like building alternatives to cars so not every dipshit, 15 year old, and elderly person, are forced to share the road
There are obviously alternatives, I don’t deny that. But as good as infrastructure and cultural improvements can be, it doesn’t change the fact that speeding cameras have proven themselves to be immensely effective, and don’t require massive infrastructure projects, much more costly spending, and long-time cultural shifts. That’s just the unfortunate reality of the situation.
I’m a big digital rights and privacy advocate, and I don’t advocate for “spy cameras.” I advocate for privacy-preserving systems that improve society when they can exist in such a way.
A camera that only sends your plate to a police system when you speed, and automatically sends you a ticket for endangering other people is not a surveillance system. It’s a public safety measure, with justifiable, minimum data transmission requirements to operate effectively. A system that tracks every location your plate was seen is a surveillance system. That is not what non-“smart” traffic cameras are.
Speeding cameras are the first system, unless integrated with an ALPR system, in which case they become a surveillance system. I am advocating for the former, not the latter.
Or, why not just build roads that inhibit speeding? It’s safer, or doesn’t allow anyone to track people, and you’re not advocating for a surveillance state.
Whether you like it or not, the second that “Speeding Camera” goes online, it becomes a surveillance device. The only thing stopping bad actors are laws which like speeding, are constantly broken. You’re fucked if your government is the bad actor.
Advocate for designing streets that reduce speed, not adding surveillance cameras and pretending that the safety reduction is worth the invasion of your privacy.
Anybody can hack a camera, no one can hack an already built road. You’re pretending like these cameras aren’t easy as fuck to access.
You can build infrastructure that encourages reasonable people to drive slower (an example I’m thinking of - you can remove priority rules at a junction and force drivers to negotiate it on a more ad hoc basis, which requires a lower speed to see what everyone is doing). You can’t build infrastructure which does this for everyone. Joe Twatface will just speed through that junction and let everyone else slam their brakes on.
A lot of features that discourage dangerous driving also prevent emergency vehicles from going at high speed.
On faster roads, these traffic-calming measures are generally undesirable also.
So: the methods are limited and have disadvantages. Traffic cameras can fill in the gaps.
If your traffic cameras are accessible to private companies who can misuse that data, that’s a problem that needs to be addressed in legislation. If your traffic cameras are accessible to police who are fundamentally compromised as part of a proto-fascist state apparatus, it’d be good to link your protests against cameras (which exist all around the world) to their use by proto-fascists (which haven’t co-opted the government all around the world, yet). And there are probably more effective ways of disrupting them.
Or, why not just build roads that inhibit speeding
As I already stated, doing that is not quick, easy, or cheap. Mounting a camera to a pole is much more cost effective, and quick to set up in the short term, even if it’s not the ideal long-term solution.
They’ve been proven to reduce speed, injuries, and deaths, and there’s vanishingly few cases in which regular, non-“smart” traffic cameras operating under the technological standards I mentioned have ever been utilized for any form of surveillance that produced a measurable harm for any individual, that I could find. That is why I advocate for those, not for “smart” ones like Flock’s.
I don’t think it should be a permanent solution, but I’d rather have speed cameras now, with road improvements later, over zero measures to prevent speeding now, with the hope that traffic calming infrastructure will be feasible and actually get done later down the line. Infrastructure isn’t free, and cameras aren’t either, but cameras are a hell of a lot cheaper.
A camera is a camera, and there are no lightpole cameras that are SD Card read only with no access to the internet.
You know what that means right? That anybody can access them if they’re smart enough? You keep reiterating the same thing while fundamentally not understanding, or choosing not to care that a camera is a camera. Don’t give up your privacy just because it’s the cheaper option.
You clearly are fine being surveiled though so this conversation is pointless.
Fine by me. Cars suck. I have no sympathy at all for people who drive.
My house is burning! Send the fire horse post haste!
Yes, cars obviously suck. But If you don’t care about privacy for everyone, you don’t care about privacy and are therefore compliant in a surveillance state
No, I care about privacy for myself and others by extension in those areas where it affects me. For instance I also want the government to monitor all known fascists. I don’t support privacy for the enemies of democracy.
Nah I think you are just selfish, also you definitely don’t care about privacy
This is a good chance to self reflect.
EVERYONE deserves privacy. Even your enemies.
If one group of people can be labelled fascists and are therefore no longer entitled to privacy (from your example), what is stopping someone from labelling you a fascist and ending your right to privacy?
I’ll leave you with this poem, First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemöller: First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
FDA, but yeah.
Such a naive view how does a tax on speed regulate anything? You must be to poor to afford lawyers to get rid of your tickets, probably don’t even own a car that can accelerate faster than the limit.
how does a tax on speed regulate anything?
So what’s your alternative? Non-hidden speedtrap at least slow people down to desirable speed in the area while allow emergency vehicle to speed through, having no speed trap and people will just speed through the area with no friction.
You must be to poor to afford lawyers to get rid of your tickets
How many people in your country can afford to hire a lawyer for a ticket write off?
probably don’t even own a car that can accelerate faster than the limit.
Are the speed limit in front of the school or in the city in your country 90mph?
We should also state how much that is in dollar bucks.
Just about $23 per camera where I’m at
how much cameras until i can buy 1 portiom of black tar heroine?
One would get you ~2-3 bags of heroin but black tar heroines haven’t been sold since the 1860s in the US thankfully, so I couldn’t quote you a price on that.
4
Bright shiny copper is just under $4/lb where I am. It varies by location and what your recyclers will pay.
Wait until they find out about the gold-plated interconnects.
Way too much work, too much skill and chemicals and workbench required. Copper is = cut it off, bring to scrap yard, get paid cash no questions. We need meth, if we were able to profitably dissolve gold plating, we wouldn’t be meth heads, we’d be in charge of successful companies and snort coke all day.
No bamboozle?
This is brilliant.
Dangerous roads are brilliant?
The camera doesn’t make the road safer it makes it more expensive
More expensive for who?
