Comment by hiAndrewQuinn
5 days ago
Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law. If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that law and perhaps tear it down. Any "law" that people put up with because it isn't enforced 9 times out of 10 is little more than a tax upon those too honest to get away with it.
As for businesses using it against one another in competition: Same deal, I think that's an excellent thing. If this idling law causes NYC businesses to shift en masse to faster loading and unloading practices because their competitors are watching them like hawks, I don't think that's a bad thing.
>Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law.
Agree. More of my thought is what happens when everyone is incentivized with money to spy on everyone else? How can you misuse this as a government? How can unscrupulous businesses misuse this?
>If switching to a fine-based bounty system like this suddenly causes an uproar over a given law, then I submit the proper thing is to look over that law and perhaps tear it down.
I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
>Any "law" that people put up with because it isn't enforced 9 times out of 10 is little more than a tax upon those too honest to get away with it.
Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.
> I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
Think bigger. If the activity were really a money-maker, then it will inevitably be scaled and industrialized. A cottage industry of snitching would spring up. If that industry got sufficiently wealthy and politically powerful, we'd see all kinds of "easy-bounty" laws getting enacted to allow these companies to further sponge up fines from the public.
If speeding fines were shared with whoever reported them, I guarantee 100% that companies would buy real estate every 10 miles along every freeway and put up speeding cameras to automate it.
(EDIT: Looks like you also already predicted the speed trap cottage industry in another comment. Oh, well, I'll leave this one up too)
This is exactly the point, yes. You can get arbitrarily close to 100% crime detection rates with any law where there is a financial incentive for private entities to invest in this kind of infrastructure.
The example I like to use is littering. If I lived near a high traffic area, and there was a $200 fine, $100 payable to the first successful reporter, you'd better believe I would invest in some webcams and some software to do nothing but watch for signs of littering nearby 24/7, run the last 15 seconds through AI to weed out false positives, and maybe even file the report automatically on my behalf. That's almost literally money lying on the sidewalk.
At first I would probably make thousands with a $20 webcam and some manual review. Even one true positive pays for itself 5 times over. Eventually other people on my block would start doing a similar thing. The fine can only get paid to one person, usually the person who "gets there the fastest with the mostest". So then there is competitive pressure on me to make my software faster, my webcam higher resolution, my detection methods and ability to prove non-repudiation more reliable.
If you prefer walking through trash I can understand this may dismay you. If you like clean streets, I can think of no better chilling effect to anyone who might be crossing by. You can apply this enforcement mechanism to basically any kind of crime and get similar results - even and especially organized crime, which traditional legal enforcement historically has a very hard time breaking up. Hence why it's already in use by the SEC to break up the highest level of financial crimes, via things like the False Claims Act where often the only way to prove the crime is happening in the first place is to have a man on the inside why can patiently collect evidence for years before making his move. What better way to make something worth a man's time than to pay him?
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>[P]eople might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.
I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in. This would lead us to assume that for most crimes of a personal nature, we would have about as many people losing money due to the law as making money due to it, and so the effect cancels out.
In situations where many more people make money and only a select few are losing big, well... Somehow I feel like that's usually for the best anyway. See my other comments on eg the runaway success of the False Claims Act. Or just consider the class action lawsuit and whether you think it fills a valuable role in society.
>Think a little harder and see if you can imagine why a law that isn't strongly enforced still might exist.
Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you. Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.
> See my other comments on eg the runaway success of the False Claims Act
Could you link some examples of such comments because I can't find them, please?
> Or just consider the class action lawsuit and whether you think it fills a valuable role in society.
This is an odd one. They are extremely rare in the UK, but in practice I think we have better consumer protection because it's handled through ordinary politics and legislation, rather than litigation.
ref. https://www.osborneclarke.com/insights/what-status-class-act...
I also wonder how this is going to interact with politically connected people who are used to ignoring the law, such as Cuomo https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/06/16/no-mo-cuomo-scofflaw-...
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>I've said elsewhere the optimal mechanism here is for that money to be paid to the snitcher, from the person who is being turned in.
In some cases, which seem like a good idea like corporate malfeasance whistleblowers or government grift whistleblowers. This is because the people paid by our tax dollars would be at a disadvantage compared to an insider in the company. In others, you could see the direction it must go.
>Thanks for letting me pick the reason, that's very thoughtful of you.
Cheers!
>Obviously it's because said law being strongly enforced would cause such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety, and thus further erode the monopoly on violence the state holds over its citizenry. Cops then have fewer en passants they can pull when they don't follow procedure, etc etc. I'm glad we're in agreement on this.
There might very well be laws like that. However, let me offer a non-controversial and obvious one. Speed limits. Many places have 65mph listed as a speed limit. Everyone knows you are not allowed to go faster. However very few place will pull you over for going 66mph or even 70mph. If they started pulling over everyone going 70 in a 65 there would not be "such a public backlash that it would quickly get repealed in its entirety" because we all know and they all knew they were breaking the law. But it isn't enforced in an authoritarian way because we have different vehicles, sometimes you need to pass, and frankly 70 and 65 just aren't that big of a problem. But almost everyone would agree that we do need a speed limit, although they might not agree on the number and a number has to be picked.
Now, I don't want to assume your political leanings, but I am getting some strong libertarian vibes. And you seem like a nice and thoughtful person, so maybe bad ideas don't even occur to you because you are honest and just don't think that way. But imagine, or go ask grok, some other ways this could work out. And while you are at it, imagine a law that did not effect all citizens the same. Now imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others. In what way could they cause affect a backlash that would quickly get a law repealed in its entirety?
Using money to incentivize any public action on behalf of the government should be a sort of last-resort situation where it makes sense and the people already being paid to do it can't for some reason. This is a very libertarian idea, in fact. A more reasonable idea, although much less libertarian, would be to pass a law that makes it where cars can not idle for more than a specified amount of time in certain situations, but that would come with its own can of worms don't you think? And I personally wouldn't be for such a law. In fact I am against the snitch on idlers law. If someone wants to pay $7 a gallon for gas to set there and idle it away, why shouldn't they be able to? How is it different than them driving the same gas away?
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spoken like a person who’s never had to load/unload a truck before
This is a general problem we've had iterations of in Edinburgh lately:
- traffic designers lay out road
- there is nowhere for delivery trucks to park, or extremely limited parking
- this is justified by a lengthy set of arguments about other road users
- deliveries still need to be made
- truck parks in bus lane, cycle lane, or on the pedestrian paving (cracking slabs!)
- everyone is now mad with each other, on the street or in the local newspapers
> there is nowhere for delivery trucks to park, or extremely limited parking
In most cases, there is room for them to park: the solution is simply for delivery companies to lobby for loading zones where there are currently parking spots for private cars. Drivers will never agree to this though, so here we are.
The fact that there is no truck parking is not an excuse for trucks to park in the bike lane or on the sidewalk.
If an area doesn't support trucks, then deliveries need to be made without trucks. That means parking the truck far away and using a hand truck to make the delivery on foot using the sidewalks.
The shipping companies can either eat the cost, pass it on to consumers or refuse to deliver to those areas.
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Love the app; will use.
Scared of MAGA targeting brown people with this type of social enforcement
Compliance with the law is a separate issue from the contents of the law.
Not really. If perfect, ubiquitious enforcement were possible, our laws would probably look very different.