Show HN: Report idling vehicles in NYC (and get a cut of the fines) with AI

Spying on your friends, neighbors, and family? Nothing to see here, just old Soviet style repression tactics.

Orwell was right.

or “Stop breaking the law asshole”

I understand the sentiment, but if you accept the premise that idling vehicles harm everyone, which they probably do - via air quality, foreign wars to keep oil flowing, and climate change - then why should we not fine the heck out of anybody who harms us all?

Don’t like getting reported by randos with apps? Don’t idle.

My only beef with the law itself, is that the fines need to be income-linked - otherwise it’s only illegal if you’re poor.

You mean when he said “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” or something else?

These are people spying on commercial vehicles abusing rights of way to avoid paying their fair share of the cost to carry them in the area (parking, in particular). Why are you taking the side of the trucks?

Not really. He thought the regime would have to use force. He didn't predict that people would line up outside Wal-Mart at zero dark thirty on Black Friday morning to grab the latest, greatest telescreen models, and then fight each other like dogs for the last ones in stock.

Idling trucks are a public health hazard. Reporting actual crimes isn't spying. Certainly not when it's on public streets.

I've had so many people over the years (nearly all of them the kinds of people who looked like they never had to work a job in their lives) try to surreptitiously record my truck's plates when I was doing fire protection inspections in the city.

Don't worry though, every ticket the company got was billed right back to buildings we were working at in another form. The balance sheet always wins.

Try mentally substituting a law that you don't agree with, once the app is widely used.

>Don’t like getting reported by randos with apps? Don’t idle.

a lot of friction is removed from society when we sequester surveillance/reporting/judgement/apprehension to one side of society, the criminal justice system.

a lot of friction is added to society when we bump surveillance and reporting back into the domain of the pedestrian. Social interaction becomes reduced between nodes, new cultural standards emerge, and overall communications between nodes tends to become reduced from the fear that the person you're speaking to candidly is actually a double-agent spy.

We have seen this in literally every society with rules or concepts like this. It isn't experiment psychology anymore, embedding citizen spies ruins societies, more so when they receive gifts for blabbing.

It's one thing applied to violent crimes; "see something say something", whatever -- it's another thing when a bounty-incentivized law produces rogue agents from within the populous that answer the call to become miniature 'bounty hunters' within the new rules. It makes life worse for everyone, and it spawns assholes that game the concept into a personality. The world waits with baited breath for the next 'Dog the Bounty Hunter' car-idler equivalent.

I'm not ever going to report another 'regular ole human being' for their car idling while the administrations of the world move literally hundreds of thousands of tons of metal around the world for military parades and whatever other flight of fancy and Dolly Parton or whoever the fuck is riding her coal-fired train through Tennessee on a whim -- there are so many more impressive fruit to pick from that tree than to step on bystanders that are probably having a crummy day anyway for a few bucks.

taking the side of the trucks?

No. Taking the side of people who want to live in a place that isn't Brazil the Movie.

I love watching HN swim outside of technical depth. "Well, what if we put explosive collars on citizens at birth? That'll surely fix the crime problems.."

Well, guess what : it doesn't matter how you apply this concept, it's psychological poison. Incentivizing trivial taddling ruins the world, ruin businesses, ruins schools, it literally ruins any group of people that have to converse and deal with one another.

It's like people totally forgot that the primary methods behind groups like East Germany were to turn the populations in on each other for the sake of the state.

The truck idling problem is closer than ever to being permanently solved -- why is it that NOW we decide to create citizen spies when the problem is as least-bad as we've ever witnessed it since the advent of trucks?

I'm sure it's surely not a stepping-stone to adjust us into our future entirely-surveillance driven criminal justice system that's further bolstered by citizen-spy/tattle-tales, right?

This is like "protecting commercial interests who exploit gaps in law enforcement to save a few bucks at everyone else's expense, but leftistly".

People call in complaints all the time. They always have. It's part of city life. When they're complaining about truck drivers fucking up the streets, they're not rats; they're the good guys. Getting mad that their lives are being made easier seems super weird. But you do you! We're not going to agree.

I agree. See something, say something if it's "a big one" otherwise being a tattler only helps increase the paranoia we alread have against others and further damages societal cohesion. I don't want to be stasi-lite for city, state, or federal government.

Hol’ up just a minute. You can disagree with me, but you leave dolly alone! ;)

I see what you’re saying, but I also somewhat disagree. We offload enforcement to police, which reduces friction for most but intensifies enforcement onto people deemed “suspicious” by social norms. Immigrants, black and brown people, young people, etc.

On the other side, yes if we universalize this to all laws we’d have a police state where everyone we interact with could profit off turning us in. But one of the main problems with that situation is that a ton of laws are BAD and we only are able to ignore them because for most of us they’re minimally enforced. Limit this bounty hunting business to parking enforcement and we’ve stopped the slippery slope from sliding

I get what you’re saying, but:

1. the issues lies in the bounty hunting laws not the app. Change the law, the app goes away.

2. I’d rather bad laws get struck from the books, rather than lurking mostly un-enforced in the toolbox of police to weaponize. E.g. jaywalking. A crime made up by car companies to shift the blame from cars+drivers to pedestrians, mostly un-enforced except when cops want an excuse to id/frisk/hassle a young person or visible minority.

He famously wrote a book about a totalitarian society, where people were encouraged to spy on their neighbors and report them.

Noticing a car is idling on a public street isn’t really spying, is it?

What makes you think that the set of people prone to snitching-for-profit don’t overlap with the set of people who would intensify enforcement on which ever group you’ve deemed people to have deemed suspicious?

Or that, at the very least, there are likely to be unintended consequences of bounty-snitching that create some other set of strained social pressures you also find unsavoury.

Noticing a vehicle idling on a street isn’t the same thing as noticing a vehicle idling on a street, taking video evidence of it, reporting it and providing a copy of the video with the expectation of getting a cut of the fine.

Is it?

That seems like a reasonable statement by him on his politics and writing, yes, but what does it have to do with idling trucks?

Honestly, even without a financial incentive, I've thought about getting a dashcam to record the fuckheads "rolling coal" in my city and reporting them. Some behavior is so anti social that yes, it should be reported.

It’s possible that there would be unintended bad consequences. But we can try it out and course correct if that happens. Unless there is a specific bad that will definitely happen, why should we be afraid to try things?

I’ll answer my own question: we are afraid to try new things legally because gov is unresponsive. As an example, the majority of the US has supported cannabis legalization since at least 2012. If it takes a decade and counting for the law to change to follow the will of the people, trying new things risks locking in bad policy for decades / forever.

But this law’s already been passed, so if it’s bad and should be changed we’ll need proof of specific harm

Why not go into the rough neighborhoods and report the people who are threatening the lives and health of people? You can even join the police force if you wish to work effectively against anti social behaviour.

I would guess the folks having their lives and property threatened are already reporting that, if they think the police will help them. If they won't, I'm not sure how me adding to the reports is going to help.

its more like reporting lung cancer, but idling isn't a criminal summons?