Technically, they can't demand ID for someone on foot. They can demand to know your identity, and they can detain you for long enough to confirm it. Of course, that detention will occur downtown, and when they let you out 48 hours later they're not going to take you back to where you were before...
Which was (is?) also practiced in Miami, the day before the Orange Bowl parade - all the homeless are arrested and taken to Krome (out in the Everglades) and summarily released - by the time they can get back downtown, the event is over.
As opposed to assaulting it directly with a hammer, yeah, I guess if I had to choose, I'd choose the ambush attack from a distance. Not that I personally think either is a good idea.
Crime is (thankfully) rare - it can be very bad (murder, bombing buildings, etc.), but it is, in the greater scheme, not a leading cause of death, not nearly as financially impacting as taxes or insurance, and just not a big enough problem in the real world to require everyone to get a GPS tracking device that radios their every movement into a central database implanted at birth or entry to the country.
We could do it today, we have the technology, and it could virtually end crime as we know it - anybody caught with a defective tracking device will be immediately arrested and taken in for repairs - otherwise, if you know the time and location of a crime, you will know who did it.
The slower we move in that direction, the better (says the engineer who makes surveillance drones for a living.)
Collect this data for long enough, and you'll have a pattern of "normal behavior" - do you want a cop stopping you because you chose to take a new route home today, like the credit card companies do now when you buy something that is "out of your normal pattern"? Do you want to live in a world where the state (or anyone) knows that much about every single person that they can single out you and start asking for justification of why you chose to do something or other unusual on the night of the 17th of last month?
At least I still have the option of using cash for a small premium if I choose to (I get kickback from the CC company on every purchase.) Taking my bicycle to work isn't really an option.
the last three speakers of the Massachusetts state legislature are in jail for corruption (they are all Democrats). The current speaker is a protege of one of those three.
Does this reflect more strongly on the Democratic party, or the voters of Massachusetts?
The big problem is that driving is a "privilege not a right," mostly because it was invented after the revolution.
In the US, you are technically free to walk around in public without plastering your identity on your forehead, but because the nature of transportation has changed so drastically, those getting around on foot (without ID plates) can actually be considered suspicious just for the fact that they are walking, and summarily be stopped and their ID demanded - at least that's how it worked in Coral Gables when I lived there.
I imagine, someday, it will become like what driving around with no tag used to be like - possible, but a big hassle - every cop with nothing better to do is going to stop you and make sure you're not "up to something," then kick you loose because you're not. In the case of the IR obscuring mechanism, they just might find you interesting enough to harass you to the limits of their comfort zone for harassment, which probably exceeds your limit of comfort at being harassed.
This kind of thing would be utter hell on suspended and uninsured drivers. It could help make the roads WAY safer.
One problem there, Ace. All they are doing is tracking the cars. A car belonging to a person with a suspended license can be driven legally by someone with a valid license. Also, some insurance covers you no matter which car you drive so even though the owner may not have insurance on the car the driver may be covered. So yeah, this is really not very helpful.
Except, in Florida, if you have a vehicle registered in your name, and there is no current insurance on that vehicle, your drivers' license is automatically suspended by the computer - no questions asked, no notice given, doesn't matter if the vehicle is stored in a closed garage and hasn't seen the light of day since before the insurance lapsed. BTDT.
If a previously unreported stolen car is involved in a crime, they could go back a few days or weeks and find out where the car has been.
I cannot think of a reason to keep more than a few weeks of history.
I was hit and run'ed by a stolen car, got a good look at the driver and his passenger. Saw them again, same road, different car, a few days later, phoned them in to the Miami Police, as I started describing the scenario, the officer on duty completed the description for me - they knew all about them, and didn't care, reason the officer gave over the phone was that the courts considered car theft a "non-violent crime" and would just kick the perps back onto the streets anyway.
Those non-violent criminals were driving 70+mph on Biscayne Blvd (35mph limit, traffic rarely exceeds 45), struck my vehicle and a city bus, knocked me into a spin in rush hour traffic, and the 2nd time I saw them they had a 9 year old with them who was standing up between the front seats.
Nobody (of any importance to them) was telling them to make it a priority, so instead they detoured the police helicopter for a quick stop at the Dunkin' Donuts (ok ok, different cops, different day, but same city.)
Exactly! Florida already tracks uninsured drivers through a database, if they wanted to impound the cars, they've got the addresses, all they'd have to do is drive around and pick them up - won't happen unless prompted by some other motivation.
This kind of thing would be utter hell on suspended and uninsured drivers. It could help make the roads WAY safer.
If you truly believe that suspended and uninsured drivers are the real problem. I lived in a "segregated" neighborhood, 80% middle class, 20% waterfront (4-10x the price for real-estate on the water). The dangerous drivers in that neighborhood lived mostly on the waterfront - they could afford the tickets, they could afford whatever the insurance companies wanted to charge, and when they got in trouble, they could afford the lawyers to make it go away.
The suspended and uninsured tend to be as careful as they are capable of, and if they're incapable of keeping a low profile, they usually run deep trouble pretty quickly.
Try voting the bastards out. It's hard, but a lot less bloody.
Only to be replaced by bastards. It's a never ending cycle. A lose lose situation. Pretty sad.
Because only a bastard would devote their life to politics for the sake of power... it's a fundamental flaw in the system. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who suggested rule by conscription - but that's bad for business because it's less predictable, at least with the present system you get a chance to know the bastard before they rise to a significant level of power.
If we're going to have this level of accountability to government, they should have twice the level of accountability to us - public databases exposing their movements (30 days delayed for "safety" of the tracked), income sources and spending destinations down to the penny, voting record, meetings with other politicians (easily generated from the movement tracker), and family and friends' business profiles, all exposed on a tablet interface in the voting booth as well as the internet.
When they start holding the citizenry to a higher level of accountability than they hold themselves, they're asking for revolution.
Head on collisions are also illegal and unsafe, whereas travel by motorcycle (or bicycle) on roads with cars is legal, unsafe, and far less versatile than a flying vehicle.
That's not all. People in the valleys that get filled in have to move.
Sorry, just got a cross-flash of Arthur Dent laying down in front of a bulldozer coupled with Ford Prefect's rant about British constantly droning on about the obvious...
I would like to see what would happen to a BiPod if it was hit head on by a Suburban doing 60 miles an hour.
And.... I would like to see what happens to a Suburban when it takes a BiPod through the windshield at 200+mph.
I don't think any car-plane hybrid is intended to be a rush-hour commuter on the local freeway. Certainly, if I had one, it's road capabilities would just be to allow me to hangar it at home or wherever I am staying away from home, instead of needing to tie-down at the airport. In urban destinations, you'd probably still tie down at the airport and rent a car.
Have you ever seriously considered renting anything from Aarons? The prices they charge make it obvious that their only customers are people who don't understand basic arithmetic. To rent a washing machine for 1 week was 25% of the purchase price - to rent it for a month, you could have a brand new one delivered and installed by a (non-discount) appliance store.
In Australia the standard is either clay/concrete tiles, or colourbond steel (painted corugated zincalume) - both of which last 20+ years with minimal maintenance.
We have got an awful lot of people who make a living building these disposable houses, if we suddenly had shelter as reliable and maintenance free as caves, they'd all be out of work.
You're forgetting the health-care industry. As we cut electric power use, we burn less coal and the number and severity of asthma cases go down. This unfortunately makes our insurance rates go down, which also would be bad for the economy. RIGHT?!?
Man, it's not just asthma - all kinds of heavy metals and other things are aerosolized by the coal fired plants, they generate all kinds of interesting diseases that people are paying to research and "cure."
I spent 3 weeks bicycling around East Germany in 1990, when it was still a "backward" country, I got a couple of cuts and scrapes, but nothing came of them, my body healed them easily. When I rode back into the west, I got an abrasion on the palm of my hand that turned into blood poisoning within a few hours of arriving in a big city. The big city also had a hospital that cured me, and I'm sure they have a high rate of success with such cases, but that same injury in the "backward land" had a much higher chance of not being a problem in the first place.
Lesson one: end users should be financially responsible for carbon generating activities.
To pick a nit, nothing an end user does "generates" "carbon".
From my point of view, as a consumer, when I turn on a light switch, I am personally electing to load the generating grid which directly affects how much coal my local generating station decides to burn that day (or in the future when they take this day's load calculation into consideration...) If nobody used electricity, the plants wouldn't exist. If you're talking about the nuclear fusion reaction that makes carbon in the first place, then, yeah, we don't have much to do about that. In terms of the current debate, I'm talking about releasing carbon into the atmosphere at a rate higher than the average of the last few millennia. So, if I have absolutely no personal consequences for switching on a 60 amp load to cool the larger space, then switching on a 15 amp load to keep my office from getting too cold - I'm saying that something in that model is broken, it's the ultimate freedom - do what you like to satisfy the smallest of personal desires, but it has consequences.
highly powerful A/C units are way too cheap and easy to install - you can buy a unit for less than 45 days' energy cost. People need to be educated on the true cost of ownership of these things (and portable electric heaters, too.)
That's called freedom and you're complaining about it.
It's that kind of thinking that leads to climate change skepticism, proponents are far too quick to complain that other people have too much freedom to live however they want.
LK
If we still had the freedom to use R-12 refrigerant, I'd be complaining about that too - even though at one point in my life it was 10% the cost of any viable alternatives. In Florida they legislated away the freedom to use Arsenic as a wood preservative, I did complain about that for a few years when it happened, but five years on, I'm actually glad that particular freedom is gone. If you want models of what happens when everybody lives as they want, look at wildlife population studies - when a predator-prey pair go out of balance, it goes really good for awhile, for both sides if there's a shortage of predators - but let it run too long, and there's a miserable bust for both sides at the end of the boom.
Humans are clearly out of balance with the chemical energy resources of the planet, people born today will see the end of the cycle, I'm just hoping for a soft landing, for their sake. And, returning to the topic, painting a roof white is an insanely high ROI activity that works in a positive direction - if the owners and residents of a building with a black roof are just too lazy or preoccupied to make it happen, something is seriously messed up in that place.
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Technically, they can't demand ID for someone on foot. They can demand to know your identity, and they can detain you for long enough to confirm it. Of course, that detention will occur downtown, and when they let you out 48 hours later they're not going to take you back to where you were before...
Which was (is?) also practiced in Miami, the day before the Orange Bowl parade - all the homeless are arrested and taken to Krome (out in the Everglades) and summarily released - by the time they can get back downtown, the event is over.
As opposed to assaulting it directly with a hammer, yeah, I guess if I had to choose, I'd choose the ambush attack from a distance. Not that I personally think either is a good idea.
Crime is (thankfully) rare - it can be very bad (murder, bombing buildings, etc.), but it is, in the greater scheme, not a leading cause of death, not nearly as financially impacting as taxes or insurance, and just not a big enough problem in the real world to require everyone to get a GPS tracking device that radios their every movement into a central database implanted at birth or entry to the country.
We could do it today, we have the technology, and it could virtually end crime as we know it - anybody caught with a defective tracking device will be immediately arrested and taken in for repairs - otherwise, if you know the time and location of a crime, you will know who did it.
The slower we move in that direction, the better (says the engineer who makes surveillance drones for a living.)
just another database tracking all my movements. like at&t, apple and google.
And your credit cards.
Anything relevant to traffic planning can be collected by anonymous car count. As it has been forever.
Collect this data for long enough, and you'll have a pattern of "normal behavior" - do you want a cop stopping you because you chose to take a new route home today, like the credit card companies do now when you buy something that is "out of your normal pattern"? Do you want to live in a world where the state (or anyone) knows that much about every single person that they can single out you and start asking for justification of why you chose to do something or other unusual on the night of the 17th of last month?
At least I still have the option of using cash for a small premium if I choose to (I get kickback from the CC company on every purchase.) Taking my bicycle to work isn't really an option.
Should we fight Google driving around doing the same thing while we're at it?
Oh, come on, Google at least tries to blur the faces and license plates sometimes. They're not evil, on purpose, most of the time.
the last three speakers of the Massachusetts state legislature are in jail for corruption (they are all Democrats). The current speaker is a protege of one of those three.
Does this reflect more strongly on the Democratic party, or the voters of Massachusetts?
The big problem is that driving is a "privilege not a right," mostly because it was invented after the revolution.
In the US, you are technically free to walk around in public without plastering your identity on your forehead, but because the nature of transportation has changed so drastically, those getting around on foot (without ID plates) can actually be considered suspicious just for the fact that they are walking, and summarily be stopped and their ID demanded - at least that's how it worked in Coral Gables when I lived there.
I imagine, someday, it will become like what driving around with no tag used to be like - possible, but a big hassle - every cop with nothing better to do is going to stop you and make sure you're not "up to something," then kick you loose because you're not. In the case of the IR obscuring mechanism, they just might find you interesting enough to harass you to the limits of their comfort zone for harassment, which probably exceeds your limit of comfort at being harassed.
If you make an IR-obscured license plate that works, it will be illegal.
It may not be illegal, yet, but certainly will become so if somebody in power thinks it's a problem.
This kind of thing would be utter hell on suspended and uninsured drivers. It could help make the roads WAY safer.
One problem there, Ace. All they are doing is tracking the cars. A car belonging to a person with a suspended license can be driven legally by someone with a valid license. Also, some insurance covers you no matter which car you drive so even though the owner may not have insurance on the car the driver may be covered. So yeah, this is really not very helpful.
Except, in Florida, if you have a vehicle registered in your name, and there is no current insurance on that vehicle, your drivers' license is automatically suspended by the computer - no questions asked, no notice given, doesn't matter if the vehicle is stored in a closed garage and hasn't seen the light of day since before the insurance lapsed. BTDT.
If a previously unreported stolen car is involved in a crime, they could go back a few days or weeks and find out where the car has been.
I cannot think of a reason to keep more than a few weeks of history.
I was hit and run'ed by a stolen car, got a good look at the driver and his passenger. Saw them again, same road, different car, a few days later, phoned them in to the Miami Police, as I started describing the scenario, the officer on duty completed the description for me - they knew all about them, and didn't care, reason the officer gave over the phone was that the courts considered car theft a "non-violent crime" and would just kick the perps back onto the streets anyway.
Those non-violent criminals were driving 70+mph on Biscayne Blvd (35mph limit, traffic rarely exceeds 45), struck my vehicle and a city bus, knocked me into a spin in rush hour traffic, and the 2nd time I saw them they had a 9 year old with them who was standing up between the front seats.
Nobody (of any importance to them) was telling them to make it a priority, so instead they detoured the police helicopter for a quick stop at the Dunkin' Donuts (ok ok, different cops, different day, but same city.)
2. the police would not bother with that.
Exactly! Florida already tracks uninsured drivers through a database, if they wanted to impound the cars, they've got the addresses, all they'd have to do is drive around and pick them up - won't happen unless prompted by some other motivation.
This kind of thing would be utter hell on suspended and uninsured drivers. It could help make the roads WAY safer.
If you truly believe that suspended and uninsured drivers are the real problem. I lived in a "segregated" neighborhood, 80% middle class, 20% waterfront (4-10x the price for real-estate on the water). The dangerous drivers in that neighborhood lived mostly on the waterfront - they could afford the tickets, they could afford whatever the insurance companies wanted to charge, and when they got in trouble, they could afford the lawyers to make it go away.
The suspended and uninsured tend to be as careful as they are capable of, and if they're incapable of keeping a low profile, they usually run deep trouble pretty quickly.
Or, less violently, with a paintball gun.
Try voting the bastards out. It's hard, but a lot less bloody.
Only to be replaced by bastards. It's a never ending cycle. A lose lose situation. Pretty sad.
Because only a bastard would devote their life to politics for the sake of power... it's a fundamental flaw in the system. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who suggested rule by conscription - but that's bad for business because it's less predictable, at least with the present system you get a chance to know the bastard before they rise to a significant level of power.
If we're going to have this level of accountability to government, they should have twice the level of accountability to us - public databases exposing their movements (30 days delayed for "safety" of the tracked), income sources and spending destinations down to the penny, voting record, meetings with other politicians (easily generated from the movement tracker), and family and friends' business profiles, all exposed on a tablet interface in the voting booth as well as the internet.
When they start holding the citizenry to a higher level of accountability than they hold themselves, they're asking for revolution.
Setting a safety standard on aircraft has not yet managed to keep them all from falling out of the sky.
Head on collisions are also illegal and unsafe, whereas travel by motorcycle (or bicycle) on roads with cars is legal, unsafe, and far less versatile than a flying vehicle.
That's not all. People in the valleys that get filled in have to move.
Sorry, just got a cross-flash of Arthur Dent laying down in front of a bulldozer coupled with Ford Prefect's rant about British constantly droning on about the obvious...
I would like to see what would happen to a BiPod if it was hit head on by a Suburban doing 60 miles an hour.
And.... I would like to see what happens to a Suburban when it takes a BiPod through the windshield at 200+mph.
I don't think any car-plane hybrid is intended to be a rush-hour commuter on the local freeway. Certainly, if I had one, it's road capabilities would just be to allow me to hangar it at home or wherever I am staying away from home, instead of needing to tie-down at the airport. In urban destinations, you'd probably still tie down at the airport and rent a car.
Have you ever seriously considered renting anything from Aarons? The prices they charge make it obvious that their only customers are people who don't understand basic arithmetic. To rent a washing machine for 1 week was 25% of the purchase price - to rent it for a month, you could have a brand new one delivered and installed by a (non-discount) appliance store.
You crazy americans and your cardboard houses!
In Australia the standard is either clay/concrete tiles, or colourbond steel (painted corugated zincalume) - both of which last 20+ years with minimal maintenance.
We have got an awful lot of people who make a living building these disposable houses, if we suddenly had shelter as reliable and maintenance free as caves, they'd all be out of work.
You're forgetting the health-care industry. As we cut electric power use, we burn less coal and the number and severity of asthma cases go down. This unfortunately makes our insurance rates go down, which also would be bad for the economy. RIGHT?!?
Man, it's not just asthma - all kinds of heavy metals and other things are aerosolized by the coal fired plants, they generate all kinds of interesting diseases that people are paying to research and "cure."
I spent 3 weeks bicycling around East Germany in 1990, when it was still a "backward" country, I got a couple of cuts and scrapes, but nothing came of them, my body healed them easily. When I rode back into the west, I got an abrasion on the palm of my hand that turned into blood poisoning within a few hours of arriving in a big city. The big city also had a hospital that cured me, and I'm sure they have a high rate of success with such cases, but that same injury in the "backward land" had a much higher chance of not being a problem in the first place.
Lesson one: end users should be financially responsible for carbon generating activities.
To pick a nit, nothing an end user does "generates" "carbon".
From my point of view, as a consumer, when I turn on a light switch, I am personally electing to load the generating grid which directly affects how much coal my local generating station decides to burn that day (or in the future when they take this day's load calculation into consideration...) If nobody used electricity, the plants wouldn't exist. If you're talking about the nuclear fusion reaction that makes carbon in the first place, then, yeah, we don't have much to do about that. In terms of the current debate, I'm talking about releasing carbon into the atmosphere at a rate higher than the average of the last few millennia. So, if I have absolutely no personal consequences for switching on a 60 amp load to cool the larger space, then switching on a 15 amp load to keep my office from getting too cold - I'm saying that something in that model is broken, it's the ultimate freedom - do what you like to satisfy the smallest of personal desires, but it has consequences.
highly powerful A/C units are way too cheap and easy to install - you can buy a unit for less than 45 days' energy cost. People need to be educated on the true cost of ownership of these things (and portable electric heaters, too.)
That's called freedom and you're complaining about it.
It's that kind of thinking that leads to climate change skepticism, proponents are far too quick to complain that other people have too much freedom to live however they want.
LK
If we still had the freedom to use R-12 refrigerant, I'd be complaining about that too - even though at one point in my life it was 10% the cost of any viable alternatives. In Florida they legislated away the freedom to use Arsenic as a wood preservative, I did complain about that for a few years when it happened, but five years on, I'm actually glad that particular freedom is gone. If you want models of what happens when everybody lives as they want, look at wildlife population studies - when a predator-prey pair go out of balance, it goes really good for awhile, for both sides if there's a shortage of predators - but let it run too long, and there's a miserable bust for both sides at the end of the boom.
Humans are clearly out of balance with the chemical energy resources of the planet, people born today will see the end of the cycle, I'm just hoping for a soft landing, for their sake. And, returning to the topic, painting a roof white is an insanely high ROI activity that works in a positive direction - if the owners and residents of a building with a black roof are just too lazy or preoccupied to make it happen, something is seriously messed up in that place.