This is really bad for all the reasons that people have mentioned (vigilante "justice" never is a good thing) but people have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here. Flock cameras have helped solve some major crimes, and people will be glad to have this technology around if they are ever a victim.
Police states are great at solving major crimes. And when those are sufficiently solved, to justify their continued existence, they have to solve lesser crimes, repeating until you need enough surveillance to ensure no one's flushing their toilet improperly.
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
Flock cameras can be helpful in all sorts of crimes. They've been used to solve everything from kidnappings to minor property damage.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
Yes, I can see how they would be helpful in solving crimes down to minor property damage.
I do not want to live in a society where police are watching everything I do in the name of solving minor property damage. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is bullshit. I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but I do not wish to have a camera in there, even if it could solve a hypothetical crime.
Why not? Don't you want to stop all the crimes happening in bathrooms too? That would be a logical step if privacy is always an acceptable tradeoff for security (or at least the illusion thereof).
The difference is that public streets are public spaces. You necessarily have a limited expectation of privacy in public spaces. The government likewise already deploys cameras in public places to maintain a reasonable level of order on them.
If you want to put a camera in your personal toilet you absolutely can.
"Public" is not a blanket excuse for constant surveillance in a space. I do not have an expectation of being surveilled in public and it's not acceptable to normalize it.
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long & generally approv’d"
The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.
Dude my car was literally jacked up and had the catalytic convertor chopped off in a parking with flock cameras at a hotel before, def never got caught, and according to the hotel security footage they parked right next to my car, got out and did everything real fast. Plus most people using cars to commit heinous crimes are usually stolen and ditched right after anyways, people who use their own car to commit crimes usually end up being lower level crimes like organized retail theft, drugs, etc, you know stuff id rather not trade privacy for security over.
yeah surveillance doesn't mean secure. A few weeks ago there was a solid 10-15 second run of automatic weapons fire on my street in an intersection. I do a lot of shooting and i could tell from the concussion it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet from my bedroom window. My neighbors turned in all their camera footage with recordings of two cars and the gunfire to a detective. When i asked them what happens next the detective just said in an annoyed voice "well i'll ask someone to check around..". Like it was plainly obvious he had zero interest at all.
edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
I'm in Dallas as well, and I hear gun shots daily. New Years/4th July absolutely sound like a war zone. I found a slug next to my trash can after a 4th celebration a couple of years ago. Not a shell, the actual slug. I keep it on my desk as a reminder. My fur babies are not allowed outside on those nights.
curious to know where you are in Dallas if you don't mind. I'm in Oak Cliff in the Winnetka Heights neighborhood. This past New Years and July 4th were especially bad, people were double parked on I30 on the bridge to downtown, and the gunfire and fireworks were nonstop. DPD has basically given up, there's going to be a tragedy on day and everyone is going to be like "how could have this have happened!?".
I’m in far east Dallas just north of pleasant grove.
Everyone that shoots their gun like that have come to the conclusion they vastly outnumber the police and know they are very unlikely to have anything happen. The cops are just holding their breath that nobody else recognizes this too
My confusion stems from the fact that mass surveillance is already pretty normal in major cities. Your face is on a dozen cameras anytime you walk through the grocery store. Your precise location is pinged off cell towers multiple times a day. I understand specific qualms with Flock as a company and how they manage the data, but this libertarian demand for total privacy in public spaces has been long lost and the beef with Flock in particular doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Edit: And I don’t even know how to have good faith conversations about this topic in these spaces, because the hive mind has decided that anything but absolute outrage is untenable. I’m getting downvoted for sharing my opinion.
We already have mass surveillance, and yet we still have major crimes. It's not working, and I see no reason to believe that removing more freedom will lead to having safer streets. Why are we giving up liberty and getting nothing in return? That's an excellent reason to protest against adding more surveillance.
Our public surveillance is actually limited relative to other developed countries because it makes people here uncomfortable for cultural reasons. You’ll also note that our crime rates are pretty high, especially relative to the surveillance happy countries in East Asia.
Regardless, I’m happy to take a results oriented approach here. Does tracking license plates make it easier to catch criminals? Does it make it easier to track stolen vehicles? I suspect cities wouldn’t be signing these expensive contracts if they didn’t see any benefits.
And finally, surveillance of public spaces is not inherently at odds with personal freedoms. Your mobility is not restricted at all, your core rights have not been touched. And you are always welcome to go live in the woods off the grid.
I firmly believe that living in dense urban areas with millions of others requires a reasonably limited expectation of privacy in public spaces.
If you think USA has mass surveillance you haven't been to Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Etc).
I can drive down highways in most cities in the USA without my license plate being read (Flock isn't on highways). Also Flock as integrated mostly just records license plates. It's not recording video 24/7.
I actually touched on this in another comment below yours, using Asia as a specific example. Our crime rates are also much higher than those countries.
But while our surveillance is not as widespread as other developed nations, it is still quite commonplace. There are cameras everywhere and recording license plates seems like such a tiny and justifiable expansion.
People in the US also get angry at speed cameras or red light cameras, yet I personally think both are very rational things to want in busy areas!
Commonplace does not mean acceptable. Flock is new, and so it is an easier target for concentrated action. Also, Flock seems to be a centralized clearinghouse for surveillance data on a different scale than your local grocer's CCTV system.
This comment is so naive and full of banalities I don't even know what to say, open a few history and philosophy books, these topics have been at the center of many deep and interesting debates over at least two thousands years and your take isn't even high-school level comprehension of the subject. If the end goal of societies was to stop crime we'd have achieved that a long time ago
Those aren't the problem, it's any "free" mobile app in the App Store or Play Store with an advertising SDK (which is almost all of them) that uses your location to "keep your weather forecast up-to-date" but also provide data brokers with your location...
Sure, and—setting aside the issues with all the millions of smart phone users who can't properly consent to these apps and their permissions because they don't have the knowledge to know what they're actually consenting to—the great thing is that I can choose not to install these apps. And I don't!
I don't have the same choice with cameras everywhere that feed into a company with a security team run by donkeys and that provides minimal to no oversight to the government bodies using the camera data to do an end run around the fourth amendment.
Uh... it's also the cell phone companies that triangulate every powered phone at all times and provide that info to data brokers, police departments, and intelligence agencies.
my point is people are freaking out about Flock but everyone has a tracking device in their pocket at all times, and people absolutely love Ring doorbell cameras (ok maybe not you, I get it).
It seems incongruous to me that people are willing to recognize the benefits that these tools provide law enforcement at solving crimes but when it comes to Flock cameras somehow things are totally different. They're just cameras with really good software, and law enforcement likes them because it makes their jobs easier.
A phone provides the individual with tangible benefits. It only tracks the individual. The individual is always free to opt out.
A ring doorbell camera provides the individual with tangible benefits. It is installed by the individual on personal property. It does however typically capture some amount of public space which I think is problematic.
Government run centralized surveillance does not provide the individual with tangible benefits. It almost exclusively captures public spaces (that's usually the entire point of the exercise after all). It generally is not realistic to opt out short of being denied access to any surveilled public spaces. If that happens to include the majority of roads near your home then I guess you'll want to look into moving.
> Government run centralized surveillance does not provide the individual with tangible benefits
It certainly can if you're willing to see it from a different perspective.
Imagine a thief, stalker, abuser or anyone that commits a crime against you, but police normally would not be able to locate them after they run away. Having those cameras can absolutely help them locate them quickly in order to arrest them shortly after you report an incident.
I'm not trying to defend surveillance, I certainly don't want it, I'm just saying there can technically be non-obvious benefits.
Most phones have a cellular modem in it, and as long as it is on and functioning normally, even without a valid SIM, it can still be tracked by any provider or person/group/government controlling that provider, even triangulated to a more precise location, 24/7.
We want a government and law enforcement that can investigate wrongdoing, but we want that access to be checked and limited, and, most importantly, we want the government actually following the checks and limitations they're supposed to be subject to.
Which brings us back to data laundering companies like Flock.
Only if it's the government wanting the data directly from the provider. The provider itself, any malicious actor within, or any companies they might be selling your data to, can still get the subscribers' location data. And the government can still legally purchase that info from a data broker without it being labeled a "search". And that's nothing to say of governments acting illegally, there are still ways they can access that data.
My point was that not having "facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone" does nothing to stop your carrier (or anyone else they might be working with) from tracking your exact location in much worse ways than any individual app normally would.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if FB bought raw data from the providers just to see if they could aggregate it into their shadow profiles. Whatever the cost of buying that data, it wouldn't mean anything to a corp that prints money. Yes, this is pure tin foil hat level conspiracy nonsense, but it goes to show how little I think of FB
I've done this recently. It's only been six weeks so not sure if I'll keep it up, but I have felt very little pain. I put my sim back in my iPhone the other day when I needed an Uber to go to the vet after reading that recently taxis in my city have been denying people with pets even if you tell them you have one when ordering. Sim went right back in my flip phone when I got home and I actually experienced some relief as I did it.
H1-B is for speciality occupations, like software engineers. A laborer from Ireland isn't going to qualify for that. There are lots of people who come to the US on a tourist visa and overstay with the intent on living and working here. They have family or friends who get them set up with a job and place to live. They work under the table, etc. After a while they can live pretty much like a regular American, and in many states get a drivers license. Boston has lots of Irish illegal immigrants, Chicago has lots of Polish.
The way most of them normalize their immigration status is by marrying a US Citizen who can sponsor a green card.
Since the world factbook was under the public domain, it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it. It wouldn't be updated under the purview of the CIA but at least the most recent content would be easily accessible.
Sometimes I miss thinking hard, but I also don't miss thinking really hard on a problem that seems difficult only to find out it was actually trivial and I was just looking at it the wrong way or overthinking it. We've all spent hours tracking down bugs that turned out to be silly syntax errors or spelling mistakes. It seems like that might be the trade off now.
On the other hand, those situations can be valuable learning experiences, and (even if subconscious) can help you learn to see things from more angles in the future.
Unfortunately, predicting which situations are worth it and which aren't is as hard as predicting anything else...
When washing warm or machine drying, absolutely, although I'm not sure how much is attributable to the cotton itself versus how much is attributable to the denser weave that tends to come with nicer brands.
But this comment was specifically about washing cold, hence my confusion.
I have this problem with button down shirts. I buy one that fits me perfectly and then all of a sudden months later its too small in the sleeves. I wash them very carefully. Only cold water, and air dry. This helps somewhat but the problem seems to re-occur still. I'll try the delicate cycle on the washer, but it's incredibly frustrating.
Make sure they are pre-shrunk cotton. It can still shrink, but far less.
Make sure the shirt is sized so that when you extend your arm laterally, the cuff approaches your knuckle.
If your idea of a fitting shirt happens to be that the cuff just covers a wrist watch when you extend your arm, then you have no spare headroom for shrinkage.
the price of name brand soda is outrageous. I remember when it was around a dollar a bottle not long ago, now it's basically 3 dollars a bottle. I can't think of a good explanation for this. It's water and subsidized corn syrup.
They're pricing at the point of pain, not maximizing efficiency. There are few enough companies (what, like, 3?) that own the majority of the brands so they don't even need to collude to figure out that they can all hover around "as high as we can get away with" together.
I've been nursing a minor Coke Zero addiction for years but usually get the store brand which is close enough at half the cost. For whatever reason Coke Zero itself dropped in price by about 30% recently but that's apparently not nationwide.
It really kind of blows my mind how much of that people drink. I'll get a 2 liter bottle that will last days and then I read about people going through entire cases of Mountain Dew Insane Flavor Combo Super Bacinator Blast in a day and it's like my god that's like 4000 kcals of corn syrup.
More importantly it is a significant source of calories. My brother quit soda years ago when he realized he was getting 1/3 of his daily calories from sugar - a little sugar is okay but you can't meet your daily nutrient needs when that much is from sugar. If it is just liquid soda is just as others (and probably better than alcohol), but there are other considerations.
> how much sugar water people buy, cases and cases
One confounding factor here is that oftentimes the price is only reasonable in bulk. I don't know about walmart, but around me the best deal typically is "buy 2 get 3 free". I rarely buy/drink soda, but on the occasions I buy at all I'll be getting many cases at a time.
It's totally "because they can". Even if you take marketing budgets into account I can't imagine it costs that much more to make a 2l of Diet Coke vs the store brands which still sell for $1 where I live
The thing with inflation is that a product's individual components may cost the same or less over time, but the cost of everything else...like housing...doubles every couple of years. So you need to increase prices to support higher salaries, increasing minimum wage, etc. It's rides the line of becoming run away inflation since everyone needs to raise prices to support COL, then everything gets more expensive, then they need to raise prices again to support everything else getting more expensive. It's a loop that will never be closed
I buy soda syrup to make soda, but even that's gotten expensive. Funny thing is that I do it to reduce how much I was putting in recycling, but even with the extra state tax for bottles/cans, it actually costs me slightly more to make it myself.
I've had great results making my own mineral water clones though, so maybe I'll try making LabCoatz's coca cola clone syrup and see how it works with sucrolose or allulose.
If you're buying individual bottles, you're paying for the refrigerator. Otherwise you buy boxes and it's still very cheap. Spindrift is $6.49 for an eight-pack and LaCroix is cheaper. I haven't bought Coke in a long time, sorry.
Beer has done the same thing. A few years ago I could get any of a number of beers at Costco for $1 per can/bottle in a 24 pack. Now the cheapest name brand offerings are $1.33 per can and even the Kirkland brand is over $1. If I buy it at a standard grocery store, those same beers are over $2 each.
It was intentional price gouging, but prices have become to come down after shareholders pressured CEOs to lower the prices in response to tepid sales numbers.
I prefer "greed". It's the much a simpler explanation that works just as well. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the demand for soda has stayed the same or even actually declined while the supply of corn and water hasn't bottomed out or gotten proportionately more expensive for soda companies.
For me one of the real benefits has been no longer feeling "stuck" on tricky problems and losing momentum. I can work with an LLM to generate a solution to something that would previously cause me confusion, which would lead to distraction, which would cause loss of productivity, etc.
