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DoNotPay Bot Has Beaten 160,000 Traffic Tickets -- and Counting (venturebeat.com)
Khari Johnson, writing for VentureBeat:A bot made to challenge traffic tickets has been used more than 9,000 times by New Yorkers, according to DoNotPay maker Joshua Browder. The bot was made available to New Yorkers in March. In recent years and decades, residents of The Big Apple have seen a persistent increase in traffic fines. A record $1.9 billion in traffic fines was issued by the City of New York in 2015. Since the first version of the bot was released in London last fall, 160,000 of 250,000 tickets have been successfully challenged with DoNotPay, Browder said. "I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society," said Browder. "These people aren't looking to break the law. I think they're being exploited as a revenue source by the local government." Browder, who's 19, hopes to extend DoNotPay to Seattle this fall.
What's higher than first-world problems?
Down with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie! For the dictatorship of the proletariat!
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
Open your wallet, citizen.
Shut the fuck up and give us your money.
Little difference these days between the mob and government.
my bro got nailed by a red light camera in Fremont, CA. the actual fine was two franklins plus change. Other "assorted fees" cause the entire bill to balloon to just under six franklins.
Oddly enough, if you go to the DoNotPay site and look at the reg button you will see a prove HIV disclosure??? WTF does that have to do w/ paying parking tickets? When you click the link it takes you to another form on the same site discussing the difficulties of HIV disclosures http://goo.gl/nJCjAL. Granted this might be a side project, but talk about mixed messaging.
I get a note saying "parking fine".
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Who's really surprised that NY is exploiting the poor for revenue?
Why the hell do you think Eric Garner was choked to death? BECAUSE HE WAS SELLING THINGS OUTSIDE OF THE GOVERNMENT-MANDATED "GIMMEE MOAH MONAY!!!" CHANNEL."
And his punishment was death.
I guess Eric tried to not "pay his fair share".
Why the hell do you think Uber and AirBNB are taking off? They're avoiding the overweening state.
Gotta wonder how anyone can think Uber is great and then go vote Democrat. Talk about an utter inability to FUCKING THINK...
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Right, using technology to get the upper hand in civil matters as bad bad bad. Unless the government is doing to make money off of citizens, in that case, it
ay-oh-kay!
BACK IN LINE CITIZEN! You will pay whatever fine we choose to levy against you.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Sorry to ruin your tirade but not all parking tickets are because somebody broke a traffic law. I've gotten one in my life. I parked in the spot where a cop normally parked when he was going to visit the woman he was having an affair with. I parked my legal vehicle on a street which street parking was permitted. My crime was I made him park across the street. It was in front of my own house for christ sake. Still had to go fight it all because I dared to slightly inconvenience a cop.
Restoring actual justice to the justice system seems like a hell of a lot more important than "social work" to me. It doesn't matter if you can put a roof over the head of a homeless person if he has to live in fear that some cop will try to take away the last dollar he has in his pocket for a bullshit fine. Justice in North America today seems all too much like the saying "America treats everyone the same. Both the homeless man and the richest man in the world are banned from sleeping under a bridge."
Hell, we're at the point that cities are even confiscating the houses of the (once) homeless.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-tiny-houses-seized-20160224-story.html
Fuck social work, fix or remove the damn government first, I say!
So, what planet do you live on where a huge percentage of parking tickets are handed out to people who don't deserve them, because they didn't actually break the law?
Your last three sentences are really obtuse and hinge on the false idea that they are mostly valid. Maybe, if parking tickets weren't such an easy cash grab for municipalities, they'd stop doing it, but amending laws would do nothing to change the system. Municipalities exploit the ability to hand out tickets unobserved and make contesting them quixotic at best. His app just verifies or refutes the proposition that the person parked illegally. So, then the actual law is the decider and not some meter maid.
And yes, he was being hyperbolic about vulnerability, but who cares? The argument that x is invalid, because y has it worse, doesn't withstand scrutiny. Anyone more intellectually mature than the average imgur commenter grasps that.
Moreover, where did you get the idea that anyone else gives a fuck about what bothers you.
Please stop wasting people's time with your ignorance and incoherent rantings.
When there are legitimate reasons that you shouldn't have to pay the ticket, in my experience it requires no more than a simple presentation of those reasons to city hall. where the ticket would be paid, and the penalty is always dropped entirely.
The only time I have ever seen people have to pay for parking tickets is when they actually deserved them and reasonably could have known better, but either forgetfulness or simple laziness led to the situation where they ended up getting one.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
These are taxes; pretty much any time we pay the government money, that is a tax.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
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NYC meter maids would never, ever, EVER write bogus tickets. The only reason the NYPD started using the handheld ticket machine was to try to cut down on the number of tickets that were thrown out because they were questionable or obviously bogus. It was an attempt to keep them honest (so the city would get more money). When I moved to NYC my truck was ticketed so often for being a "commercial" vehicle (despite not meeting any of the requirements) that I ended up selling it because fighting every single ticket wasn't worth the hassle. Most of the city employees are good, hard working people but there are enough corrupt ones to screw with a lot of people.
Politics in the English-speaking world is just devolving into a long winded bunch of mad rants.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you've paid any attention to Trump thus far, you'd know that he's not GOP. Why do you think both the left and right establishment are almost literally shitting their pants in fear of him being elected? Why do you think that hardline elitist Republicans are jumping ship in droves to support Hillary? Hint: he's not loyal to either party, him being a "racist" or "xenophobe" are just code-words used to discredit him because he literally scares the hell out of the oligarchy that the gravy train might be about to end for them.
Show you're intelligent, don't ensure Hillary wins by voting for a no-name candidate instead of the real anti-establishment candidate: Donald Trump. Faggot.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It doesn't just apply to physics, unfortunately.
The farther the establishment tries to shove us away from freedom and liberty, the harder the truly intelligent push back against them. Just look at the situation with the EU. Just days after the will of the people of Great Britain showed that they wish to be independent again the EU counteracts with disarming and assimilating the militaries of EU member-states. It's reminiscent of Vichy France.
It's escalating exponentially and I just hope cooler heads can prevail on both sides. No one wants the alternative.
So what is behind the question of the parking spot being to small?
If the car to big for the spot and you park in it that is your fault.
Cry me a river, bootlicker. If you honestly don't know anything about the "evil government", you're either really young or really fucking stupid. Judging by your 3M+ UID, I'd say probably a little of both.
Ah yes, the anti esablishment billionaire. Luckily, Trump has no chance, his only supporters are deluded fools like you.
Even Americans arent quite that stupid.
Local governments in the US have gotten very nasty about fining poorer people and trying to use them as profit centers. Like the shooting in thst suburb of St. Louis that lead to the riots: the Justice Department found no evidence that the shooting was not justified, but also found that the police department had been being a dick to the black population for so long with harassment and excessive fines that they were ready to explode.
John Oliver did a segment on it, he describes the issue pretty well.
So your saying automating my response to automated traffic tickets is a bad thing? I'm instead supposed to expend my resources to pay a lawyer and/or suspend my own resource generation method to attend traffic court in my own defense of said automatically generated traffic fines?
This guy found a useful and novel use of technology for citizens to defend themselves in direct response to another useful and novel use of a technology by government to extract revenue from its citizens.
It is driving commerce by the income its generating its creator, its helping helping our keepers by forcing them to do their jobs the way the people have outlined for them, and its helping citizens by providing a defense that does not cost an entire days time.
Of course this may create a group of people undeterred by UNJUST or MISHANDLED traffic fines, but that's supposed to be all of us anyway. That's the point of the whole thing to begin with. If the fine is deserving (within the bounds of the law, backed up by the eye-witness account of the COMPLETELY TRUSTWORTHY LEO, filed in triplicate ect) I'm sure it will stick, regardless of the use of the automated system this dude/dudette has created.
This is not going to make people "drive like maniacs", there are still plenty of incentives to not be an asshole, such as staying alive, keeping my expensive car pretty, not being pulled over, and the general desire to not be an asshole.
Of course there are and always will be assholes on the road though, so if you REALLY want to you can point and say SEE! SEE! the computers made em do it!! I bet you can't guess what happens after that. HINT- GOVERNMENTS HATE COMPETITION.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
If you mess with a cities income I suggest a lot of Kevlar body armor, and a food taster as well. Cities can play harder than the mafia. One way or another they will mess with you.
You seem to know a shocking amount about this situation. There's something going on with this story you're not telling us.
Trump has no chance
Yeah, that's what they said before the Brexit vote...
What is the deal with every startup or tech company or whatever trying to take the moral high ground on whatever they happen to have found some marketable niche for? "...The most vulnerable people in society"? Give me a fucking break.
Back at you. It is as they say. Our car was towed in San Francisco a couple of years ago, and it was $500 to get it out. Did you get that? $500. Imagine someone working for $18/hour (sarcasm obvious), and needing that car to get to work. Hell, the car might not be WORTH more than $500. There was a couple crying at the pound in that exact situation. That was one of the most depressing and infuriating moments of my life.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
How are you helping instead?
What a disgusting city. Great reasons to never want to ever visit nor do business with or in that multi-storey rancid, corrupt dumpster.
Ok, I read TFA, sue me. Sounds like the bot is just looking for technicalities that will void the ticket. Fair enough.Have you ever heard of a corporation that avoided some tax based on a technicality? I could think of a few.
Better yet. Ever have a cop give you a ticket based on a technicality? I have.
Technicalities are not reserved for use by only one side. They are fair game to all. Seems to me that this one is just making these technicalities available to all. Fair enough.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
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Traffic tickets are not the same as parking tickets. The terms are not interchangeable.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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How is defending against a parking ticket not working within the system?
It's worth noting that this service is for the United Kingdom. Robot lawyers or systems that give you legal advise based on questions the application asks you are illegal or fall on very shaky grounds.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I have no special hate for my government. I've carried our flag into battle myself. I just call a spade a spade, and believe in a level playing field.
I see its creator as doing us all a service, your calling him out for taking the moral high-ground, and I think his position is justified and commendable. Happy to discuss my views, but don't throw around the word "hate" willy-nilly.
What we are talking about IS working within the system. This addresses our justice system used as a revenue source instead of a system of justice directly. It does so staying completely within the bounds of the laws we have on the books. In fact, it seems to work so well, I expect the government to try and change the laws themselves. I don't see a problem with it.
I would like to see this sort of thing used when the same justice system is used as a club, or leverage, or threat.
Any perversion of what we call a justice system is wrong, and this sort of thing is the natural course of things. This is SPECIFICALLY allowing the citizen to ensure the authority itself is ALSO working within the rules of the system. Working to change laws within the system is all good and well, but unfortunately, completely useless when the system is ignoring its own rules to begin with. The tickets are being dropped like crazy because they are issued in error, issued maliciously, or issued sloppily. The courts don't care what kind of error, and it goes both ways. You screwed up the paperwork to start your new business? that's a $150.00 filing fee and you start over. We citizens accept this as the way our system has to work in order to be effective. There are a whole class of people who make a living off this very thing. We call them lawyers. This is just the shoe on the other foot.
To put it in technical terms, what do you think the margin for error is on a red light camera? I'm making this up as I go, but I bet its not 100% accurate every time. How about a speed camera? +/- 5 mph? Maybe 5% in error, no big deal right? Now how many tickets do you imagine a single camera issues in a day? Multiply that number by the amount of cross streets with traffic lights in your local suburb and the numbers become staggering.
And its getting worse, for the majority of us, taking a day off to fight an erroneous traffic infraction costs us more than just paying the damn thing, even if we decline the inevitable plea bargain and 50$ fine. The bean counters know this. Sit in on a city council meeting from time to time, pay attention to the discussion when it comes to automated systems that generate revenue, and you may find a better target for your no moral high-ground argument.
I also see this costing local government a lot of cheddar, and I am completely expecting the legal system as a club to come out next. We will hear about this again. Care for a wager?
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Oh bullshit. There's nothing "truly intelligent" about backing people like Trump or Jeremy Corbyn. It's pure gut-level reactionarism. As to the will of the people of the UK, it was mad attack against Westminster which will do nothing but damage the fortunes of Britain, likely leading to the loss of Scotland, and maybe Northern Ireland in the process. It was stupidity of the highest degree and ably demonstrates the US Founding Fathers' deep distrust of unimpeded democracy.
For fuck's sakes, within a few days over a million people, basically the margin by which Leave won, regretted their decision.
So however you try to justify these attacks on the "establishment" (by which one generally means the intricate balancing of interests and powers that allows governments and societies to actually function), "intelligent" simply is not a valid description. Pettiness, arrogance and stupidity are the words I would use to describe it; large numbers of cranky, ignorant people lashing out without understanding and totally fucking themselves up in the process.
At least in the US it looks like Trump is doomed, which ought to forever end the British view of American politics as some sort of chaotic free-for-all. The colonies really have figured out how to suppress the lunacy of the mob
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Citizens trying to defeat the Democrat programs that they elected.
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You know how I know you didn't RTFA?
I'm not sure what's more annoying:
- Listening to Trump
- Seeing every fucking internet forum and news source full of jackasses that love talking about how much they hate Trump, but in reality they're so obsessed with him that they should just go have sex with him already.
Actually no, that's easy, it's definitely the later. Why? Trump is dead simple to ignore: If you see an article that has his name in it, then you don't click on it. It's that fucking easy. (That is, unless you actually watch live television, in which case you're past your prime.) But the later category insists on always posting comments to articles and threads about shit that has nothing at all to do with Trump, making them much more annoying than Trump himself. And what's especially annoying is that they almost always use terms like "racist" to describe shit that doesn't have a damn thing to do with anything at all, making them look even more disingenuous than Trump can ever be.
If I get a petty fine for something I don't think is a big deal, it seems like quite an injustice at the time but when I step back, I usually can understand the reasoning.
You are ruining it for the rest of us.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Except it was proven that some counties actually set the red traffic light to trigger just before there is a red light to increase revenue.
"parked in the spot where a cop normally parked when he was going to visit the woman he was having an affair with"
"It was in front of my own house for christ sake"
"You seem to know a shocking amount about this situation. There's something going on with this story you're not telling us."
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"Literally"
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Don't sign your posts.
> Slashdot is nothing but homophobes
The biggest homophobes are islamofascists. See Orlando, Tehran, Saudi Arabia.
Truth to a US "liberal" is as salt to a slug. (See my sig)
I read your sig and it's stupid. You're one of those very silly people who sees world in black and white terms cheering on your "team" and having a nice 2 minutes hate for the other team. Try actually engaging your brain and thinking independently for a change.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
For fuck's sakes, within a few days over a million people, basically the margin by which Leave won, regretted their decision.
I never realized the petition was only accessible to people who voted to leave and then regretted that choice.
Silly me. I had assumed the two million were just petulant children who didn't get their way, and were crying about it in public.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
There are cops chasing cars with radar guns or laser, so that when you get a ticket you feel like you got unlucky, and people like you can take the "moral high ground". If that same cop watched traffic cams with a stopwatch or simply counted frames in the video, he could issue many more citations than having to catch speeders with radar, and there would be video evidence very hard to beat. Heck, a lot of it could be automated, take the cop out of the equation altogether. Similarly you could use toll readers, license plate readers, etc. But then, once people know they cannot beat the system actually start driving under the limit, consider all the cops, judges, clerks that would lose their jobs processing the tickets, plus all the revenue the city would lose. Roads would then get more congested in some spots, and less safe in others (even Google autonomous driving team admitted their car drives above speed limit because in some situations, driving at speed limit causes unsafe situations).
The woman across the road was his mother.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Found the liberal.
Not that it was hard, with him standing in the middle of the street in his underwears, playing with himself while watching Old Lady Chalmers through her front windows.
I would start parking it there every day.
Yeah the "most vulnerable people" part is bullshit.
But, traffic violation tickets are a scam. Over here, it usually takes weeks, sometimes a month or two, until you get the letter. Where it basically gives you the opportunity to pay or write back with a statement. That delay is either gross incompetence or intentional, because yeah, sure I know exactly what I was doing when I was driving some road I already forgot six weeks ago. I can definitely swear under oath that I was not doing over the speed limit. I definitely remember all the parking signs that were nearby and can tell you absolutely surely where exactly I was parking.
Of course I can't. So every sane person avoids the risk, pays the small fine and gets on with their lives. But you know what? Every single time where I actually could remember the details or had by pure chance taken a picture that I could use, every single time that I fought the ticket, I won.
Of course sometimes I park illegally, I live in the center of a city, when I want to park in front of my house to carry up or down something heavy, I pretty much don't have a choice. But there are some tickets where I'm not sure, because I don't have OCD and I don't take a picture of my car every time I'm parked somewhere.
Cops should have to provide photographic evidence the same way they do for speeding tickets. It's not difficult these days to give them a small camera. In fact, for many other reasons cops should anyway have a camera on them. They should prove what they claim I did. The whole "cop saw you and he counts as a witness" is a setup if due to these artificial delays and life being life you have almost no chance to counter their claims.
The whole "pay this small fine and we'll forget about it" is a protection money racket. Give proper fines without all this trickery and deceit. Why is my "we'll forget about it" money ten bucks, but if I dare to go to court you will raise the ticket price? No? Court costs, sure, that is my risk. But suddenly the parking ticket becomes more expensive because I decide to fight it? That's extortion, plain and simple.
So, end of rant - you can see why a lot of people feel that parking tickets are unfair. Not by their nature, but by the way they are handled. And that's why people love something that gives them a chance to fight the perceived injustice.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
hurr durr first world problems that persons suffering isn't as bad as this other persons suffering
Typical retard argument on the internet.
Come back when you have actually lived in society and say that again.
Yes, things COULD be worse, but it doesn't change the fact that some things can bubble up to become an absolute shitstorm in your life and even lead to suicide in some people.
One persons suffering is not equatable to anothers. One persons suffering is not better or worse than anothers.
A persons own suffering can be trivial or life-destroying and varies MASSIVELY from one person to another.
Traffic cops are known to pick on people, especially younger people because they are usually inexperienced and poorer.
They take a gamble that this is true. They usually win.
They use similar tactics to the RIAA and their kind in sending threatening letters to people over even non-copyrighted works.
Some cities are even in on it. It is scummy as fuck and needs to be known more by the general populace at large.
Yeah, this moral high ground is BS. Of the traffic tickets I got I was wrong EVERY time. Heck I have had meter maids and police turn blind eyes more then enough times to say they are not out to get you.
You will always hear from people who were victims and when you dig a little deeper you find out that they were in fact wrong (they just don't want to admit it) or often times not even the originator of the problem.
"I only parked here 5 minutes"
"I saw someone else doing it also"
"I only need to quickly..."
Don't blame the city or the cops for your lazy arse, for not paying attention and/or for thinking you could get away with it.
I read your sig and it's stupid. You're one of those very silly people who sees world in black and white terms cheering on your "team" and having a nice 2 minutes hate for the other team. Try actually engaging your brain and thinking independently for a change.
Classic liberal/progressive reply: Pure projection. Accuse those with whom they disagree of the very things they are guilty of. I believe in many cases it's at least partially due to an inability to imagine their opponents *not* engaging in the same kind of Alinsky-style tactics that they embrace.
Protip: When your central playbooks' author ("Rules For Radicals" - Saul Alinsky) dedicates his book to Satan among others, that should be setting off serious alarm bells in one's mind, even if one is an atheist.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
First the rebrexit petition was a fraud. Second, the fathers had no love of overarching federal government. Especially one based in far off lands. The only childishness was the youth of Britain, too busy with videogames to speak up
In some places traffic laws are used to prey on the poor and vulnerable. For example, by setting unreasonably short timings at traffic lights you can increase the number of red light tickets, and if the area is poor then the citizens are less able to investigate and fight back.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
>The biggest homophobes are islamofascists. See Orlando, Tehran, Saudi Arabia.
Right because Christian homophobes have been so peaceful and progressive over the centuries... oh wait, well the last decade... pay no attention to the man with the trunk full of explosives on the way to the Pride. Pay no attention to Uganda, they've never liked gays anyway... of course until a bunch of American Christian Fundamentalists went to preach there they certainly didn't KILL any gays, disliking them is bad but most of us would considering being murdered worse than merely being disliked.
The only difference between your pethate countries and the US Christians is that the first ammendment means Christians have a harder time making their wishes the law of the land. It's not nearly as hard as it OUGHT to be (in case you were wondering - that would be 'impossible to ever even be concidered and any speaker who appreciates the constitution would refuse to even allow debate on any bill that is inspired by religious views - like Paul Ryan with gun control last week - so should all speakers be to biblethumper laws') but it's still a pretty high barrier.
Where that barrier does not exist (as in Uganda) the Christians do exactly the same.
In fact, even where it is absent in Muslim nations it, quite interestingly, they are often more progressive than the USA. The USA has to fight to let people pee in the bathroom they won't get beaten-up in, in Tehran sex-change operations are available free of charge to anybody who wants one.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Actually - this could benefit everybody. There is presumably a non-zero cost in sending out these automated tickets. A high margin of error would cost money to correct (or at least improve) and if everybody just pays there is no incentive to do so.
However if there is a mean to cheaply and easily challenge bad tickets, then the cost of sending them is now lost without the guaranteed return. Maximizing revenue now starts to depend on improving the margin of error such that almost no tickets get overturned so you don't pay for tickets that generate no income.
Of course the resulting revenue will be less than it was before, but it will be more guaranteed since it will not include tickets that would be easy to challenge. Forcing law enforcement to be meticulous in who they charge, what they charge with and what evidence they collect is a nett-win for society. A bigger problem is that it is quite uncertain if automated fine systems are any good to begin with. There is significant scientific evidence that suggests they have zero impact on driver behavior.
We could debate whether improving their quality would increase that impact - there are a lot of factors and I honestly can't guess - but it certainly is an argument in favor of scrapping them altogether and rather using those resources to come up with a newer and better way of enforcing traffic laws that, you know, actually makes people obey them.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Nah, the cop was parking in front of his house to go see the woman he had an affair with... obviously the cop was fucking his wife.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Not quite - you cannot enter the intersection when the light is red (in California). The purpose of the yellow is to warn a driver approaching the intersection that the light is about to turn red, so that they can start slowing so as not to cross the limit line on red. This document:
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/traffops/engineering/ctcdc/agenda/YellowTiming.pdf
describes a lot of the issues and the complexities of "what approach speed should be used" as well as the desire to have a simple table. Do you use posted speed, 85th percentile speed, posted + 5, etc. They note that posted speed is often significantly (>5 mi/hr) less than 85th percentile speed (technically making the posted speed unenforceable under California law).
They use the formula T = t + V/d, where t is the reaction time, assumed to be 1 second; V is the approach speed in ft/sec, and d is the deceleration 10 ft/sec^2 (roughly 0.3g). that's fairly hard braking.
The report also notes a factor of 10 reduction in accidents by extending the yellow interval by 1 second.
When your central playbooks' author
What on earth are you talking about?
But keep up the hate! It suits you.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
There are also some national and local laws which govern the size of parking bays (to prevent exploiative charging by painting impossibly small spaces). If these are not observed then there is a technical defence against some charges.
There was a spot on one of the local BBC news recently about two men who were spending their retirement measuring various car parks as some local authorities had repainted the lines to squeeze in a few more places and were then issuing fines for "not parking properly" ie within the marked bays.
Although it's good to see their spirit in challenging authority, it was hard to have too much sympathy with owners of oversized vehicles who could clearly afford to spend seriously large amounts on them (both purchase and low fuel economy) yet were moaning over loss of access to low cost parking spaces.
There is an incentive problem with tickets that we constantly struggle with. Fines are a reasonable punishment for minor offenses, but when the locality gets the fines back in to the budget then there is a temptation to increase enforcement in a way that doesn't improve safety. The state legislature here had to specifically act because several municipalities were drastically changing speed limits over blind hills and catching out-of-towners for breaking the speed limit. All that money went back in to the town budget. You know the pool of money that funds the people who set speed limits on local roads, the police department, and the traffic court. Since there was no law to prevent it, after the only penalty was the town had to fork over some money for new signs.
Found the out of touch globalist scum!
If you really cared so much about vulnerable people, you would be doing social work or something along those lines.
I'd like to be a house representative. On the subject of vulnerable people, we can discuss new taxation plans which only marginally raise taxes on the rich (0.69% less income to the top 0.1%; 2% less income to someone with $10M annual salary) and the effects on the poor in a failing welfare system, as well as the stabilizing effect on all low-income families. In the long run, I want to target a maximum tax bracket of 1/3 above marginal (a United States flat income tax would be 29.97%; the top tax bracket I specify is 41%, and I want that to be no higher than 40%), rather than attempting to use the rich as some idealized Robin Hood funding source.
Is that along those lines?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Complete poem: http://www.barnasrett.no/Dikt/...
Translation in subtitles in youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(Disclaimer: Yes, he was a communist. No, I am not.)
Christianity doesn't espouse hatred or violence, though. That's the big difference. Anybody who calls themselves a Christian but hates gays is not a Christian at all. If you don't love your neighbor, you're not a Christian. Islam, however, has violence and hatred built into the religion.
The English-speaking world is just devolving into a long winded bunch of mad cunts.
Fixed that for you.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Eye for an eye?
You've fed into the rhetoric. Both religious texts have violence built into them - they're actually based from the same text.
Both say you should "pick up the sword" should you see anything "evil" (which is often not clearly defined)
yet were moaning over loss of access to low cost parking spaces.
At the same time, if everyone shrinks their parking spaces then there is nowhere to park.
If public or municipal parking spaces cannot fit every street-legal consumer vehicle, then there ought to be disclaimers or exceptions as needed.
If you're going to have a legal standard for private vehicles, you might as well employ that standard universally when it comes to traffic and parking laws.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
The original comment was politically charged and trollish.
Aside from the political jab, it offered no substantial commentary.
I agree that the parking enforcement is over the top, but I still believe that comment earned the negative moderation.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Mosiac Law was fulfilled and replaced by Christ. Thus CHRISTianity does not espouse and eye for an eye.
That's why I live here in the country, CT. I work at home and have plenty of parking on my 2 acre spread. But it sounds like a good idea.
Paul E. Bahre
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Christianity does not, but so many "Christians" do. That's the problem in a nutshell -- a large swathe of people who call themselves Christian mean it in a tribal sense and actually have no idea what their deity taught. (Religion professor Stephen Prothero proved this handily when he polled his students on their knowledge of different religious teachings, and to his surprise, found that the students in his classes calling themselves Fundamentalist Christian ironically had the poorest knowledge of Christianity and the Bible. (I've read the same is true of the ISIS leaders, most of them aren't even religious and don't know the Qu'ran well at all ...)
Just days after the will of the people of Great Britain showed that they wish to be independent again the EU counteracts with disarming and assimilating the militaries of EU member-states.
That's a very interesting claim. Care to back it up with a Citation?
What are you babbling about now? Your response seems to be in the vein of "be a huge asshole to feel superior."
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What is the deal with this dichotomy between "the evil government" and you or me? Do you have a better method for wrangling the cats of many competing viewpoints in an ordered society? And yes, using technology to gain the upper hand in civil matters can be a bad thing. If you have traffic fines to deter people from driving in a way that is inconvenient or dangerous for others, and then a few technologically savvy people figure out how to avoid those fines, all you are going to create is a group of people who are undeterred by traffic fines and drive like maniacs. Ideally there would be a process for appealing unjustified citations (which there is), but the solution is not just to circumvent the whole system unless you think the laws are fine for everyone except you.
but but but... sometimes my side loses in an election, and this is clearly tyranny and Shall Not Stand.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Sorry to ruin your tirade but not all parking tickets are because somebody broke a traffic law. I've gotten one in my life. I parked in the spot where a cop normally parked when he was going to visit the woman he was having an affair with. I parked my legal vehicle on a street which street parking was permitted. My crime was I made him park across the street. It was in front of my own house for christ sake. Still had to go fight it all because I dared to slightly inconvenience a cop.
a few decades back i got a notice of unpaid parking ticket in the mail with the extra $$$ charge. not only did I not remember getting one, but at that point in my life i didn't drive much at all, biked everywhere so i was extra skeptical rather than assuming i had missed seeing it.
tried to contest it, they demanded I provide them the details of the ticket which i was claiming i had never received.
I went to city hall to get a copy of the missing ticket. clerk pointed to a huge literal pile of tickets in the middle of the floor and told me "it's in there, somewhere, if you want to look for it".
being not as cynical then, i actually wrote to my alderman with the whole thing, and what do you know, he got them to provide me a copy of the ticket, which had my license plate number, but was at a street i had never been on, at a date and time when i knew i had been at work (to which i would have biked).
replied with this info, CCing the alderman, received a reply asking if my car was a green Pontiac. Told them it wasn't, they promised to get back to me, they never did but when i inquired, the unpaid parking ticket charge (and original ticket) had been removed from my record.
and that's why i'm against the death penalty
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The woman across the road was his mother.
the cop was his mother.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
What is the deal with every startup or tech company or whatever trying to take the moral high ground on whatever they happen to have found some marketable niche for? "...The most vulnerable people in society"? Give me a fucking break.
Back at you. It is as they say. Our car was towed in San Francisco a couple of years ago, and it was $500 to get it out. Did you get that? $500. Imagine someone working for $18/hour (sarcasm obvious), and needing that car to get to work. Hell, the car might not be WORTH more than $500. There was a couple crying at the pound in that exact situation. That was one of the most depressing and infuriating moments of my life.
once again decades ago, the local paper ran an expose of the local towing scheme; the city had a contract with one tow company who would haul the car to a yard way the hell out of town in a shady area, and demanded cash only to release the vehicle. no atm anywhere near, of course.
naturally a couple of years later, another expose of the corrupt deals the tow company was making with a lot of cops, with kickbacks, people being towed while legally parked, etc. etc. etc.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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Which Christ? All Loving Christ? Or Angry Soldier Christ?
You're still doing nothing but opening with insults, insulting respondents, and then continuing to hurl insults. Did you have a point, or were you just looking to call people idiots?
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I think you are underestimating how devastating invalid parking tickets can be. I like John Oliver's take https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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Apparently I'm the only one who has trouble believing that this app has been used successfully to challenge 160,000 tickets. It appears the reporter took the developer's word for that. Any proof at all of that rather extraordinary claim?
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The Founding Fathers had no love of power being concentrated in any one group's hands, without some competing group be able to balance it out, and check it if necessary. In their vision, the only part of the entire Federal government that was directly elected was the House of Representatives. Senators were chosen by the States, the President by the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court by the President with the approval of the Senate.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That doesn't seem relevant to anything I've said. You're prattling on angry about everything.
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Don't be so sure. We elected Obama twice.
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What does "successfully challenged" mean? It seems to mean to me that it was challenged, but does not specify whether it was won or not. The linked article says that 160,000 were beaten, but that is not a quote from the creator of the DoNotPay bot. And the donotpay bot says nothing about it on their website, but I didn't signup. So can someone provide evidence (like a link) where the person who created this software actually said that 160k tickets were beaten?
I would guess that "successfully challenged" means that the software was able to dispute the ticket, but does not mean that the ticket was dropped or thrown out by a judge.