> I think everyone should bear in mind this is Slashdot - there is one correct way to think, and that is to > think the government is after you. To suggest that a local council installing CCTV to stop fights is a good > thing is flamebait and clearly not a genuine argument.
You are completely correct.
The problem is that true even-handedness, true open-mindedness, true seeking for the truth, is something very rare. Most people have beliefs and defend those beliefs. They do not *question* those beliefs. Present views or suggestions which run counter to such a held belief system results in a suppressive response.
This behaviour - which is endemic - is the real, underlying cause of the problems in our society. We do not possess, as a culture, the ability to think. We only possess the ability to react on an emotional level.
This state of affairs has come about due to television. Television is the medium through which our culture communicates with itself. Television presents a continual stream of fragmentary, disconnected, disassociated, contextless images and emotional textures. Contrast this, for example, to a book, which requires the reader to sit down for some hours at a time and consider the authors view and arguments. Television has rendered recent generations unable to think. In particular, this means that there is no longer a meaningul public discourse, and that recent generations have lacked the ability to detect crap when they come across it.
Television is our doom, because it has rendered us, as a species, unconscious. We only react emotionally; and I think this will not be enough to survive the impact we have upon our environment and upon ourselves.
She reported that he was making collections and selling them, yes.
As for the financial side - I imagine as a lowely security guard he wasn't paid very much and the supplimental income would be welcome; and I suspect the money involved might actually be more than we might think. Also, of course, there's the incentive of industry - true self-employment, where your income is your effort, is extremely enjoyable and motivating.
> Whoa! Easy there Tiger! I understand you are trying to draw a correlation between cultural differences and > racial profiling, but you are bordering flamebait.
Apologies. I wasn't trying to suggest the Southern States were particularly racist - I was trying to point out to the OP that if a culture has certain values, picking watchers-of-watchers from that culture won't help you a bit, because they will concur with the behaviour of the watchers. Anti-black racism in the Southern States was an easy way to illustrate the idea, rather than being something I particularly know about.
> 1) Make every 3+ year sentence come with mandatory castration. > 2) Watch the crime rate plummet. > 3) Profit:)
I have two comments.
First, a year or two back, a female MP in the Iranian Parliment seriously proposed executing ten prostitutes, since this would solve the problem of prostitution.
Second, if this approach was adopted, crime would in fact increase, by dint of the punishment itself, by any reasonable ethical standard, being a crime.
We do not execute people for parking offenses. When the punishment is in excess of the crime, the punishment itself is a crime.
> To say our freedom will be lost with these cameras is ignorant. We have never had too much freedom, just > the illusion that we have. Before it was others telling on us, now the government has found better ways of > doing it.
Quite an important point, I think. When we consider massive video survelliance and massive State databases, the implications for freedom and liberty and clear. But in fact, society has always executed its own mandates, and Government has become so big and powerful since the New Deal that we have in fact lost a very great deal of freedom and liberty already, without us being particularly aware of it.
> Your assumption that white people are the only racists and our darker skinned brothers and sisters are > not, is insulting. But this is typical of most people. Blacks are just as racist as whites and to believe > otherwise is naive!
I made no such assumption. I merely used the example of the Southern US States, where racism exists and within that situation, whites are socio-economically dominant and so are likely to be the watchers.
There was a report fairly recently made by a British scientist investigation the collapse of penguin populations in the Falkland Islands.
What he found was that commerical fishing was destroying the penguins food supply and so they were starving.
The local Government on the Falkland Islands basically tried to frame this guy, because they didn't want his report to get out, because of the harm it would do to the economy. He came home one day to find he felt his house had been entered - and he found a *gun* was planted in his bedroom.
> Databases will just make their work easier and they'll be able to become more effective.
What happens when a mass of people are racist (Southern USA), so that the people you have watching are racist, and the people who have watching the watchers are also racist?
There's a blogger I've been reading for some time. She wrote about coming in and finding the security guard for her building, who she knows, doing as I've described.
> Even the dimmest guard is going to know that he'd lose his job, and probably be prosecuted
Plenty of security guards steal from the premises they're working on, get spotted on camera, are fired and prosecuted. This is what people do, and it's part of why concentrating too much power in too few hands is a really bad idea.
> The other terrible mind-trap is to fall down the rabbit hole and proclaim the world is ending every time something > new happens.
What, like global warming?
Sometimes you know there really is a threat that would end our world; and it's happening now, and hasn't really happened before, because we, as a species, have through our numbers and technology vastly more influence and impact upon ourselves and our environment than we have ever had before.
> The problem is, those watchers are normal people - they're going to be stupid, irrational, selfish, bad-tempered, > uneducated, unreasonable, bigoted, sexist. They're going to be paid minimum wage for doing a really dull job. These > people are the people who are *setting and enforcing* the standards by which you will live.
And the particular problem with this, to state it explicitly, is that if you give an average person power and they're not being monitored or checked for how behave, they abuse that power. People are basically shit. I've had enough problems with getting first line technical support staff to behave decently - imagine how it would be if those people were watching you and could get you in front of a court?
(And pretty soon - another five years? = you couldn't just run away from the camera, because you'd have your mobile with you, and if you'd "committed a crime" then the law enforcement agencies would access the mobile provider's data to find out which mobile was where, and figure out who you are.)
> Well, given the use of those neat little ASBOs the Brits are so fond of (which basically allow the courts to > arbitrarily criminalize ANY "anti-social" behavior), it's safe to say that any flagrant display of disrespect can > be grounds for imprisonment (though you'd have to do twice--once for the ASBO to be issued, and once again to be > arrested as a violator of the ASBO.) It likely comes down to the whim of the camera operator as to whether or not > this happens.
Spot on.
It is often not a technology in isolated which causes problems, but the combination of that technology with other existing factors.
In the UK, the ASBO is basically a catch-all, where a court can decide something is "anti-social" and impose essentially arbitrary terms of punishment.
In other words, the legal system is now enforcing the mandates of society; and society, through surveilliance, is beginning to *literally* watch us all - all sixty million of us - all of the time; and if you do something the watcher disagrees with, you know he has the power to get you in front of a court, and that power alone, with all the hassle and effort associated with it for you - is enough, regardless of the chance and risk of conviction, to strongly influence your behaviour.
The problem is, those watchers are normal people - they're going to be stupid, irrational, selfish, bad-tempered, uneducated, unreasonable, bigoted, sexist. They're going to be paid minimum wage for doing a really dull job. These people are the people who are *setting and enforcing* the standards by which you will live.
In the US, the cops have to have guns, because everyone else does, too - which affects and I suspect limits the consequences of the decision to arm the police.
But arming the police is pretty well understood and inherently limited, in that it can only affects situations where police are present, and there aren't that many police. I'm not sure we can say the same about a combination of massive State databases and suveillance will lead us; it will mean, in effect, police everywhere, all the time.
But remember not to take your mobile phone with you, since that will be tied into your ID card and the cops will be able to see which phones were present at the right time as the smashed cameras and prosecute you.
This is part of what scares me about all this; we seem to be creating these massively effective tools for behaviour enforcement, and not giving a thought to their misuse. What happens if in ten, twenty, fifty years time, the State goes bad?
The problem isn't so much the use you describe, but the potential misuses of the system.
At the lowest level, I know of one anecdotal story where couples having a quickie in a popular spot were unaware a camera had gone up; and the security guard watching was in fact recording their sex, compiling the events into tapes, and selling them.
At the higher level, we run into a problem where a society becomes ever more effective at imposing its value system upon the members of that society. As JSM said, "society executes its own mandates". What happens when these cameras are present in a area rife with racism and the viewers themselves are racist? I can imagine blacks being harshly treated, with intolerance, and whites being let off or lightly treated for the same acts.
At a higher level yet, the issue becomes that of concern about the ways in which this new capability will interact with other new capabilities - such as massive State databases. The State has always kept information on us, but in analog systems, which are inherently so slow to use that the practical uses of that data were sharply limited. When, however, access becomes effectively immediate, what you have isn't more of the same, what you have now is *new and different*. It's is a qualitative change, not a quantative change. In this vein, mixing massive video survelliance with massive databases and police monitoring, very real concerns begin to arise - in particular, that we are finally loosing *freedom*, for we are no longer free; we MUST do what society and State expects us to do.
The terrible mind-trap here is people going "well, that only means not doing things which are bad, so what's the problem?"
The core issue here, I think, is that by and large, people learn, as they grow up, *why* they should do certain things and not do others; and then as adults, they voluntarily behave in socially acceptable ways.
The problem comes when this process fails, and so as an adult a person behaves in ways which are socially unacceptable.
The issue is how to deal with this.
Clearly, the question has to be asked how these people failed to learn as they grew up, for that is the root of it all; but once that failure has occured, these people have to be dealt with, and that is currently achieved, as you say, behaviour modification - coercion - the threat of externally imposed penalties.
The longer term and larger problem is the risk that police become so effective, with all their monitoring and survelliance, that it begins to impede the proper learning of voluntary socially acceptable behaviour. For it seems to me if you KNOW that you will be caught and punished WHENEVER you do something wrong, you no longer have the ability to *choose* not to do something wrong, and so you will be unable to learn to *voluntarily* refrain from socially unacceptable behaviour.
The question is, to quote Milton Friedman, "how can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?"
> So basically what you are saying is that this kind of technology should be ignored because of the > small percentage of parents that may be abusive? I'm sorry, but ignoring positive technology just > because of a small minority just doesn't make sense.
This may be the crux of the matter. What proportion of parents will abuse this technology? your view it'll be a small minority. I'm much more pessimistic. About half the people I know were abused - literally - by their parents. I know very few people who had really good parents. I suspect those parents who don't abuse, but aren't actually really good, will still mis-use this technology and overly and improperly restrict the freedom of their children.
I suspect freedom of choice is vital for the development of strength of character - which is to say, the ability to figure out what is right and wrong and sticking to what's right *because* it's right.
If children are *prevented* from being able to decide if they're going to do something they shouldn't do, they will never learn to be able to decide not to. As adults, when they finally escape from the cage, what self-discipline will they have? how will they have ever learned to control *themselves*, when they have always been *controlled*?
> When your child goes missing, for whatever reason, you will be singing a different tune.
Thing is, there's a lot of bad things which can happen to kids. Car accidents, illnesses, etc.
Child abuse is way, WAAAAAAAAAY down the list. It's extremely rare, both in absolute terms and relative terms.
If we're really concerned about the well-being of our kids and we wanted to reduce the chances of bad things happening to them, we should adopt rules like - you can't drive (too dangerous), cross roads as infrequently as possible, wash your hands twice a day, etc.
We don't do any of this.
It seems to me our apparent concern about child abuse is inconsistent with our actual behaviour.
> If a kid doesn't want to be tracked, he won't be. Star Trek has only covered this about 12 times by > now...if Security can simply ask the Computer where you are, take off your communicator and leave it > wherever you're "supposed" to be (like confined to quarters). A kid may do one better by removing the > battery.
Not if your parents are abusive and will beat the crap out of you for turning your phone off.
These are kids - they don't have the experience, strength of character, or economic independence necessary to resist. They're scared, frightened, beaten up, living in fear and they've never known any different. When you're in the terrible state of helplessness, you're not able to resist. And if your parents tell you to keep your phone with you at all times so they always know where you are, you'll do it. And then what do you do when you want to visit a cop, or a social worker or just someone to *tell* and get help, when you know you will be beaten black and blue when you get home, because your parents will KNOW?
The harm this technology will cause to the children with shit parents, in my mind, far outweighs the benefits it will provide to the kids with good parents.
Slashdot Mirror
Prior 9/11; two hours pre-flight, eight hours in flight, half hour at the other end : 10.5 hours.
Post 9/11; four hours pre-flight, eight hours in flight, one hour at the other end : 13 hours
Hyperdrive; four hours pre-flight, two hours in flight, one hour at the other end : 7 hours.
Pre-flight security bloatware, god-dammit. I upgrade my plane so it's four times faster and I'm still only 50% better off than I was originally!
> I think everyone should bear in mind this is Slashdot - there is one correct way to think, and that is to
> think the government is after you. To suggest that a local council installing CCTV to stop fights is a good
> thing is flamebait and clearly not a genuine argument.
You are completely correct.
The problem is that true even-handedness, true open-mindedness, true seeking for the truth, is something very rare. Most people have beliefs and defend those beliefs. They do not *question* those beliefs. Present views or suggestions which run counter to such a held belief system results in a suppressive response.
This behaviour - which is endemic - is the real, underlying cause of the problems in our society. We do not possess, as a culture, the ability to think. We only possess the ability to react on an emotional level.
This state of affairs has come about due to television. Television is the medium through which our culture communicates with itself. Television presents a continual stream of fragmentary, disconnected, disassociated, contextless images and emotional textures. Contrast this, for example, to a book, which requires the reader to sit down for some hours at a time and consider the authors view and arguments. Television has rendered recent generations unable to think. In particular, this means that there is no longer a meaningul public discourse, and that recent generations have lacked the ability to detect crap when they come across it.
Television is our doom, because it has rendered us, as a species, unconscious. We only react emotionally; and I think this will not be enough to survive the impact we have upon our environment and upon ourselves.
She reported that he was making collections and selling them, yes.
As for the financial side - I imagine as a lowely security guard he wasn't paid very much and the supplimental income would be welcome; and I suspect the money involved might actually be more than we might think. Also, of course, there's the incentive of industry - true self-employment, where your income is your effort, is extremely enjoyable and motivating.
> Whoa! Easy there Tiger! I understand you are trying to draw a correlation between cultural differences and
> racial profiling, but you are bordering flamebait.
Apologies. I wasn't trying to suggest the Southern States were particularly racist - I was trying to point out to the OP that if a culture has certain values, picking watchers-of-watchers from that culture won't help you a bit, because they will concur with the behaviour of the watchers. Anti-black racism in the Southern States was an easy way to illustrate the idea, rather than being something I particularly know about.
I presume you're being ironic?
> Want to control crime?
:)
> 1) Make every 3+ year sentence come with mandatory castration.
> 2) Watch the crime rate plummet.
> 3) Profit
I have two comments.
First, a year or two back, a female MP in the Iranian Parliment seriously proposed executing ten prostitutes, since this would solve the problem of prostitution.
Second, if this approach was adopted, crime would in fact increase, by dint of the punishment itself, by any reasonable ethical standard, being a crime.
We do not execute people for parking offenses. When the punishment is in excess of the crime, the punishment itself is a crime.
> To say our freedom will be lost with these cameras is ignorant. We have never had too much freedom, just
> the illusion that we have. Before it was others telling on us, now the government has found better ways of
> doing it.
Quite an important point, I think. When we consider massive video survelliance and massive State databases, the implications for freedom and liberty and clear. But in fact, society has always executed its own mandates, and Government has become so big and powerful since the New Deal that we have in fact lost a very great deal of freedom and liberty already, without us being particularly aware of it.
> Your assumption that white people are the only racists and our darker skinned brothers and sisters are
> not, is insulting. But this is typical of most people. Blacks are just as racist as whites and to believe
> otherwise is naive!
I made no such assumption. I merely used the example of the Southern US States, where racism exists and within that situation, whites are socio-economically dominant and so are likely to be the watchers.
The irony grows ever deeper - my post has been modded +1 Funny.
Huxley was right; we're laughing, and we've forgotton why.
There was a report fairly recently made by a British scientist investigation the collapse of penguin populations in the Falkland Islands.
What he found was that commerical fishing was destroying the penguins food supply and so they were starving.
The local Government on the Falkland Islands basically tried to frame this guy, because they didn't want his report to get out, because of the harm it would do to the economy. He came home one day to find he felt his house had been entered - and he found a *gun* was planted in his bedroom.
> Databases will just make their work easier and they'll be able to become more effective.
I'm afraid you're right.
What happens when a mass of people are racist (Southern USA), so that the people you have watching are racist, and the people who have watching the watchers are also racist?
It's not quite so anecdotal.
There's a blogger I've been reading for some time. She wrote about coming in and finding the security guard for her building, who she knows, doing as I've described.
> Even the dimmest guard is going to know that he'd lose his job, and probably be prosecuted
Plenty of security guards steal from the premises they're working on, get spotted on camera, are fired and prosecuted. This is what people do, and it's part of why concentrating too much power in too few hands is a really bad idea.
> I dunno though, I thought liberty would only die to the sound of thunderous applause.
Liberty is dying to the sound of a billion people watching TV.
(Watching - oh, the irony - watching Big Brother.)
> The other terrible mind-trap is to fall down the rabbit hole and proclaim the world is ending every time something
> new happens.
What, like global warming?
Sometimes you know there really is a threat that would end our world; and it's happening now, and hasn't really happened before, because we, as a species, have through our numbers and technology vastly more influence and impact upon ourselves and our environment than we have ever had before.
> The problem is, those watchers are normal people - they're going to be stupid, irrational, selfish, bad-tempered,
> uneducated, unreasonable, bigoted, sexist. They're going to be paid minimum wage for doing a really dull job. These
> people are the people who are *setting and enforcing* the standards by which you will live.
And the particular problem with this, to state it explicitly, is that if you give an average person power and they're not being monitored or checked for how behave, they abuse that power. People are basically shit. I've had enough problems with getting first line technical support staff to behave decently - imagine how it would be if those people were watching you and could get you in front of a court?
(And pretty soon - another five years? = you couldn't just run away from the camera, because you'd have your mobile with you, and if you'd "committed a crime" then the law enforcement agencies would access the mobile provider's data to find out which mobile was where, and figure out who you are.)
> Well, given the use of those neat little ASBOs the Brits are so fond of (which basically allow the courts to
> arbitrarily criminalize ANY "anti-social" behavior), it's safe to say that any flagrant display of disrespect can
> be grounds for imprisonment (though you'd have to do twice--once for the ASBO to be issued, and once again to be
> arrested as a violator of the ASBO.) It likely comes down to the whim of the camera operator as to whether or not
> this happens.
Spot on.
It is often not a technology in isolated which causes problems, but the combination of that technology with other existing factors.
In the UK, the ASBO is basically a catch-all, where a court can decide something is "anti-social" and impose essentially arbitrary terms of punishment.
In other words, the legal system is now enforcing the mandates of society; and society, through surveilliance, is beginning to *literally* watch us all - all sixty million of us - all of the time; and if you do something the watcher disagrees with, you know he has the power to get you in front of a court, and that power alone, with all the hassle and effort associated with it for you - is enough, regardless of the chance and risk of conviction, to strongly influence your behaviour.
The problem is, those watchers are normal people - they're going to be stupid, irrational, selfish, bad-tempered, uneducated, unreasonable, bigoted, sexist. They're going to be paid minimum wage for doing a really dull job. These people are the people who are *setting and enforcing* the standards by which you will live.
Well, in the UK, the cops don't have guns.
In the US, the cops have to have guns, because everyone else does, too - which affects and I suspect limits the consequences of the decision to arm the police.
But arming the police is pretty well understood and inherently limited, in that it can only affects situations where police are present, and there aren't that many police. I'm not sure we can say the same about a combination of massive State databases and suveillance will lead us; it will mean, in effect, police everywhere, all the time.
But remember not to take your mobile phone with you, since that will be tied into your ID card and the cops will be able to see which phones were present at the right time as the smashed cameras and prosecute you.
This is part of what scares me about all this; we seem to be creating these massively effective tools for behaviour enforcement, and not giving a thought to their misuse. What happens if in ten, twenty, fifty years time, the State goes bad?
The problem isn't so much the use you describe, but the potential misuses of the system.
At the lowest level, I know of one anecdotal story where couples having a quickie in a popular spot were unaware a camera had gone up; and the security guard watching was in fact recording their sex, compiling the events into tapes, and selling them.
At the higher level, we run into a problem where a society becomes ever more effective at imposing its value system upon the members of that society. As JSM said, "society executes its own mandates". What happens when these cameras are present in a area rife with racism and the viewers themselves are racist? I can imagine blacks being harshly treated, with intolerance, and whites being let off or lightly treated for the same acts.
At a higher level yet, the issue becomes that of concern about the ways in which this new capability will interact with other new capabilities - such as massive State databases. The State has always kept information on us, but in analog systems, which are inherently so slow to use that the practical uses of that data were sharply limited. When, however, access becomes effectively immediate, what you have isn't more of the same, what you have now is *new and different*. It's is a qualitative change, not a quantative change. In this vein, mixing massive video survelliance with massive databases and police monitoring, very real concerns begin to arise - in particular, that we are finally loosing *freedom*, for we are no longer free; we MUST do what society and State expects us to do.
The terrible mind-trap here is people going "well, that only means not doing things which are bad, so what's the problem?"
The core issue here, I think, is that by and large, people learn, as they grow up, *why* they should do certain things and not do others; and then as adults, they voluntarily behave in socially acceptable ways.
The problem comes when this process fails, and so as an adult a person behaves in ways which are socially unacceptable.
The issue is how to deal with this.
Clearly, the question has to be asked how these people failed to learn as they grew up, for that is the root of it all; but once that failure has occured, these people have to be dealt with, and that is currently achieved, as you say, behaviour modification - coercion - the threat of externally imposed penalties.
The longer term and larger problem is the risk that police become so effective, with all their monitoring and survelliance, that it begins to impede the proper learning of voluntary socially acceptable behaviour. For it seems to me if you KNOW that you will be caught and punished WHENEVER you do something wrong, you no longer have the ability to *choose* not to do something wrong, and so you will be unable to learn to *voluntarily* refrain from socially unacceptable behaviour.
The question is, to quote Milton Friedman, "how can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?"
> So basically what you are saying is that this kind of technology should be ignored because of the
> small percentage of parents that may be abusive? I'm sorry, but ignoring positive technology just
> because of a small minority just doesn't make sense.
This may be the crux of the matter. What proportion of parents will abuse this technology? your view it'll be a small minority. I'm much more pessimistic. About half the people I know were abused - literally - by their parents. I know very few people who had really good parents. I suspect those parents who don't abuse, but aren't actually really good, will still mis-use this technology and overly and improperly restrict the freedom of their children.
I suspect freedom of choice is vital for the development of strength of character - which is to say, the ability to figure out what is right and wrong and sticking to what's right *because* it's right.
If children are *prevented* from being able to decide if they're going to do something they shouldn't do, they will never learn to be able to decide not to. As adults, when they finally escape from the cage, what self-discipline will they have? how will they have ever learned to control *themselves*, when they have always been *controlled*?
> You must be new here. On this planet, I mean.
You may have made a good point, but I have no interest in your attitude.
> When your child goes missing, for whatever reason, you will be singing a different tune.
Thing is, there's a lot of bad things which can happen to kids. Car accidents, illnesses, etc.
Child abuse is way, WAAAAAAAAAY down the list. It's extremely rare, both in absolute terms and relative terms.
If we're really concerned about the well-being of our kids and we wanted to reduce the chances of bad things happening to them, we should adopt rules like - you can't drive (too dangerous), cross roads as infrequently as possible, wash your hands twice a day, etc.
We don't do any of this.
It seems to me our apparent concern about child abuse is inconsistent with our actual behaviour.
> If a kid doesn't want to be tracked, he won't be. Star Trek has only covered this about 12 times by
> now...if Security can simply ask the Computer where you are, take off your communicator and leave it
> wherever you're "supposed" to be (like confined to quarters). A kid may do one better by removing the
> battery.
Not if your parents are abusive and will beat the crap out of you for turning your phone off.
These are kids - they don't have the experience, strength of character, or economic independence necessary to resist. They're scared, frightened, beaten up, living in fear and they've never known any different. When you're in the terrible state of helplessness, you're not able to resist. And if your parents tell you to keep your phone with you at all times so they always know where you are, you'll do it. And then what do you do when you want to visit a cop, or a social worker or just someone to *tell* and get help, when you know you will be beaten black and blue when you get home, because your parents will KNOW?
The harm this technology will cause to the children with shit parents, in my mind, far outweighs the benefits it will provide to the kids with good parents.
> Yay capitalism.
Grrrr!
That isn't capitalism! that's an ABSENCE of capitalism.
The phone market in the UK and elsewhere is sane and normal - but it's broken in the States.
Stop blaming the free market for a shit situation when the situation is as it is BECAUSE there ISN'T a free market.