Surely widespread surveillance technology has no possible unintended consequences, certainly this can only end well
(It uses GPS. At a minimum it would lay the groundwork for location tracking of every new vehicle sold. Nevermind any consequences that are actually unforeseeable.)
I have a brand new car. It has a DCM, a digital communications module. The module has a single fuse. Did you know you can pull the fuse out, and suddenly your car is deaf, dumb, blind, and mute? Sure, no more GPS, but IDGAF. For a better, more permanent solution, you can disconnect the wires going to the DCM, and install a wiring sub-harness to completely bypass it. It can’t receive data from the car anymore–which means it’s also not able to store data that can be downloaded by a mechanic later–and the battery that powers the eSIM will die in a day or so.
Fuck big data, and fuck you for suggesting that it’s okay just because it’s existed in some form for ~50 years.
The device, known as Intelligent Speed Assistance, is a small box affixed to the dashboard that uses GPS to identify the speed limit — 25 m.p.h. or less on most local streets, and higher on highways — and caps the driver slightly above it. The driver may temporarily override the device, in certain circumstances, with the tap of a button.
“The entire economy should collapse if GPS has a temporary outage”
It’s much more efficient to just build traffic calming. It’s so nice. North America could be a biking paradise while maintaining 2 or 4 lane roads, it just isn’t. I oppose these kind of "“solution”"s aren’t as good as stuff that’s been proven to work in both traffic flow, people flow, cost, and safety.
Americans love their cars. There will be people who disable it to drive 80mph on surface streets at night and hit someone who didn’t want to add an additional half mile to go to the crosswalk.
Biking is great for cities, unless you’d have to cross most of it to reach work, hospitals, or healthy foods and bring them home. I’ve known people that did it, but I don’t think most of the country could qualify as a paradise, even if we tore down and rebuilt cities from the ground up.
Plus, it doesn’t address the needs of those that can’t bike, or maybe even not walk. The elderly, the disabled, the temporarily sick, and even kids considering the way the world has gotten populated ( bigger numbers mean the percentage of predators also returns bigger numbers of those).
And it really only works in some cities, and would require shifting all of the shipping to retail connections. You can’t get supplies from a train to a warehouse on pedal power realistically, nor from warehouse to citizen available stations like stores.
Unless you’re suggesting a total death of modern civilization. Which is cool, but not at all going to happen. Because without the supply infrastructure that gets materials from suppliers to where the goods need to be, they can’t get there. Even if we went back to horses and carriages for that, we’d still need well built roads that connect things. Doing that leaves biking in the same category it does with cars, so the only improvement is in not having to suck exhaust. Which would be great, just not sure it’s a realistic thing
Part of the way to build a nation with good bike infrastructure is to bring all those things closer together. People that bike don’t want to need to cross most of the city to reach places they want to go, so they are going to find somewhere to live where they don’t have to. Also importantly, bike infrastructure doesn’t mean no automobile infrastructure, it just means less of it, not the least because less is needed.
Buses and lorries. We transport the people on the buses and cargo on lorries, just like we do now.
This is what people mean when they talk about car brain - you’re so focused on the need for a car that you forgot that cars aren’t even used for moving your examples.
Surely you can think of some way that government installed GPS devices in someone’s cars might be worth choosing not to play along with…
The “be ungovernable” sentiment is pretty common for folks on this platform, right up until the cops could maybe stop people from doing something they dont like and then suddenly surveillance and policing are totally viable solutions that definitely couldn’t possibly backfire or have unintended side effects 😅
I’d rather stick to traffic calming road design and better pedestrian infrastructure, personally
I am sure, so do you. So you’ll certainly have no issue posting the GPS coordinates of your home and workplace here in this thread. After all, you’re already OK with strangers tracking you.
Yes, and my point is, if you say more government tracking doesn’t matter since you’re already tracked by Google, then it doesn’t matter if strangers also track you. Since government officials and Google employees are also strangers to you.
Because a wide swath of speed limits are not credible, and are deliberately set unrealistically low in contravention of traffic studies, civil engineers’ best practices and experience, and common sense simply as a revenue grab via fines and to have a convenient legal justification to pull over and harass undesirable people, i.e. minorities.
You ever drive through an all-white beach down in Nowhere, Florida or someplace and wonder why all of the sudden the speed limit on their major six lane thoroughfare is suddenly 20 MPH? You’d better believe the people who live there aren’t the targets of getting pulled over constantly.
Edit to add: This is before getting into the possibility of emergencies, fleeing disasters, getting someone to the hospital, etc.
Yeah, America would rather enforce with tickets than with good engineering and reasonable rules.
My city, medium-sized and in the US, used to post 85th percentile speeds and quartiles whenever they did speed studies. Sometimes they overrode it, rarely did they explain why, but at least they showed that they had gone out and observed that actual section of road. We have a different mayor and probably a different council at this point and I haven’t seen a speed study on the city website in some time, though they seem to be paving and doing a better job of making car friendly and bike friendly routes interact better. I am a firm believer that road design is 2/3 of how people drive and only the tiniest portion is fear of enforcement. We should keep in mind though that speed doesn’t have to be the enemy. Germany has speed too, but their 30kph neighborhood roads don’t look like wide open airport runways. That’s why I’m baffled by the freeway speed cams some states are doing. The freeway is statistically the safest place for an American to drive (except maybe on their gaming console). Suburbia and rural roads are much less safe because of higher speeds, intersections, 2 way traffic, and unprotected turns across oncoming lanes.
To your point about little towns, I’m still irritated with Wyoming State Patrol in Rawlins, WY for giving my a ticket for passing a Semi at 79 in a 70 on a clear and sunny day, safely, and carefully. It’s just the ticket lottery. Set a low enough limit and you can pull over Mother-fucking-Theresa for breaking the law.
Surely you can think of some way that government installed GPS devices in someone’s cars might be worth choosing not to play along with…
The “be ungovernable” sentiment is pretty common for folks on this platform, right up until the cops could maybe stop people from doing something they dont like and then suddenly surveillance and policing might be entirely viable solutions that definitely couldn’t possibly backfire or have unintended side effects 😅. Installing a government mandated GPS device in a car doesnt just have implications for how fast you can go. Surveillance technology always carries the risk of enabling the government to surveil, intervene in, and persocute people for things that ought to be protected activity. You never know how this kind of far reaching increase of governmental power may affect people’s rights.
I’d rather stick to traffic calming road design and better pedestrian infrastructure, personally
I live 115 miles from the nearest hospital that has critical care abilities. I live 30 miles from the nearest hospital of any kind. What’s faster, do you think? Pegging the speedometer on my car trying to get to a hospital, and meeting the ambulance on the way? Or waiting?
I happened to catch the comment before you deleted it, and I’m sorry that happened to anyone, and I’m sorry it was someone you obviously care about. Not gonna argue the point under discussion because I don’t want to cause any distress beyond what’s inevitable.
deleted by creator
Surely widespread surveillance technology has no possible unintended consequences, certainly this can only end well
(It uses GPS. At a minimum it would lay the groundwork for location tracking of every new vehicle sold. Nevermind any consequences that are actually unforeseeable.)
It’s not built into cars inherently, so at least that’s not a concern.
deleted by creator
I have a brand new car. It has a DCM, a digital communications module. The module has a single fuse. Did you know you can pull the fuse out, and suddenly your car is deaf, dumb, blind, and mute? Sure, no more GPS, but IDGAF. For a better, more permanent solution, you can disconnect the wires going to the DCM, and install a wiring sub-harness to completely bypass it. It can’t receive data from the car anymore–which means it’s also not able to store data that can be downloaded by a mechanic later–and the battery that powers the eSIM will die in a day or so.
Fuck big data, and fuck you for suggesting that it’s okay just because it’s existed in some form for ~50 years.
deleted by creator
“The entire economy should collapse if GPS has a temporary outage”
This, but unironically.
It’s much more efficient to just build traffic calming. It’s so nice. North America could be a biking paradise while maintaining 2 or 4 lane roads, it just isn’t. I oppose these kind of "“solution”"s aren’t as good as stuff that’s been proven to work in both traffic flow, people flow, cost, and safety.
Americans love their cars. There will be people who disable it to drive 80mph on surface streets at night and hit someone who didn’t want to add an additional half mile to go to the crosswalk.
There’s a limit to it though.
Biking is great for cities, unless you’d have to cross most of it to reach work, hospitals, or healthy foods and bring them home. I’ve known people that did it, but I don’t think most of the country could qualify as a paradise, even if we tore down and rebuilt cities from the ground up.
Plus, it doesn’t address the needs of those that can’t bike, or maybe even not walk. The elderly, the disabled, the temporarily sick, and even kids considering the way the world has gotten populated ( bigger numbers mean the percentage of predators also returns bigger numbers of those).
And it really only works in some cities, and would require shifting all of the shipping to retail connections. You can’t get supplies from a train to a warehouse on pedal power realistically, nor from warehouse to citizen available stations like stores.
Unless you’re suggesting a total death of modern civilization. Which is cool, but not at all going to happen. Because without the supply infrastructure that gets materials from suppliers to where the goods need to be, they can’t get there. Even if we went back to horses and carriages for that, we’d still need well built roads that connect things. Doing that leaves biking in the same category it does with cars, so the only improvement is in not having to suck exhaust. Which would be great, just not sure it’s a realistic thing
Part of the way to build a nation with good bike infrastructure is to bring all those things closer together. People that bike don’t want to need to cross most of the city to reach places they want to go, so they are going to find somewhere to live where they don’t have to. Also importantly, bike infrastructure doesn’t mean no automobile infrastructure, it just means less of it, not the least because less is needed.
Buses and lorries. We transport the people on the buses and cargo on lorries, just like we do now.
This is what people mean when they talk about car brain - you’re so focused on the need for a car that you forgot that cars aren’t even used for moving your examples.
North America isn’t getting rid of its commuter highways anytime soon.
Cars can still exist. We have so much space for it.
It’d be the first thing I bypassed in a car.
Why?
Surely you can think of some way that government installed GPS devices in someone’s cars might be worth choosing not to play along with…
The “be ungovernable” sentiment is pretty common for folks on this platform, right up until the cops could maybe stop people from doing something they dont like and then suddenly surveillance and policing are totally viable solutions that definitely couldn’t possibly backfire or have unintended side effects 😅
I’d rather stick to traffic calming road design and better pedestrian infrastructure, personally
Do you have a cell phone powered on and with you while you drive?
I am sure, so do you. So you’ll certainly have no issue posting the GPS coordinates of your home and workplace here in this thread. After all, you’re already OK with strangers tracking you.
I’m waiting…
Point is, gov can see it anyway. After like 25mph, its pretty evident you’re in a vehicle.
Yes, and my point is, if you say more government tracking doesn’t matter since you’re already tracked by Google, then it doesn’t matter if strangers also track you. Since government officials and Google employees are also strangers to you.
Correct. Those aren’t the only two entities that can track you.
I have a faraday wallet. Every so often I put my phone in the wallet so that it can’t be detected by RF emissions.
Im sure it works great when you use it.
deleted by creator
Because a wide swath of speed limits are not credible, and are deliberately set unrealistically low in contravention of traffic studies, civil engineers’ best practices and experience, and common sense simply as a revenue grab via fines and to have a convenient legal justification to pull over and harass undesirable people, i.e. minorities.
You ever drive through an all-white beach down in Nowhere, Florida or someplace and wonder why all of the sudden the speed limit on their major six lane thoroughfare is suddenly 20 MPH? You’d better believe the people who live there aren’t the targets of getting pulled over constantly.
Edit to add: This is before getting into the possibility of emergencies, fleeing disasters, getting someone to the hospital, etc.
Yeah, America would rather enforce with tickets than with good engineering and reasonable rules.
My city, medium-sized and in the US, used to post 85th percentile speeds and quartiles whenever they did speed studies. Sometimes they overrode it, rarely did they explain why, but at least they showed that they had gone out and observed that actual section of road. We have a different mayor and probably a different council at this point and I haven’t seen a speed study on the city website in some time, though they seem to be paving and doing a better job of making car friendly and bike friendly routes interact better. I am a firm believer that road design is 2/3 of how people drive and only the tiniest portion is fear of enforcement. We should keep in mind though that speed doesn’t have to be the enemy. Germany has speed too, but their 30kph neighborhood roads don’t look like wide open airport runways. That’s why I’m baffled by the freeway speed cams some states are doing. The freeway is statistically the safest place for an American to drive (except maybe on their gaming console). Suburbia and rural roads are much less safe because of higher speeds, intersections, 2 way traffic, and unprotected turns across oncoming lanes.
To your point about little towns, I’m still irritated with Wyoming State Patrol in Rawlins, WY for giving my a ticket for passing a Semi at 79 in a 70 on a clear and sunny day, safely, and carefully. It’s just the ticket lottery. Set a low enough limit and you can pull over Mother-fucking-Theresa for breaking the law.
Surely you can think of some way that government installed GPS devices in someone’s cars might be worth choosing not to play along with…
The “be ungovernable” sentiment is pretty common for folks on this platform, right up until the cops could maybe stop people from doing something they dont like and then suddenly surveillance and policing might be entirely viable solutions that definitely couldn’t possibly backfire or have unintended side effects 😅. Installing a government mandated GPS device in a car doesnt just have implications for how fast you can go. Surveillance technology always carries the risk of enabling the government to surveil, intervene in, and persocute people for things that ought to be protected activity. You never know how this kind of far reaching increase of governmental power may affect people’s rights.
I’d rather stick to traffic calming road design and better pedestrian infrastructure, personally
deleted by creator
I live 115 miles from the nearest hospital that has critical care abilities. I live 30 miles from the nearest hospital of any kind. What’s faster, do you think? Pegging the speedometer on my car trying to get to a hospital, and meeting the ambulance on the way? Or waiting?
deleted by creator
You’ve apparently never had to make it to a hospital before someone dies.
deleted by creator
I happened to catch the comment before you deleted it, and I’m sorry that happened to anyone, and I’m sorry it was someone you obviously care about. Not gonna argue the point under discussion because I don’t want to cause any distress beyond what’s inevitable.