It has been proven and reproven that these claims of crime requiring store shutdowns were improperly put forward, without research, by a lobby. So much so that it was covered in mainstream media.
Your argument - esp the 'blue cities' bit given that the majority of metro(polis) cities in the US could be called blue (minus Miami, Houston, Dallas)- feels slanted.
OP your post was "if you dont like face scanning don't shop there" because shops need face scanning to stop crime.
However your next comment was that cops don't help. Here's the thing. They have a pretty terrible track record of help in any city including red ones. Have you called after having a fender bender on the highway in any state? Near a city, the answer is "no public property or third party damaged? exchange info yourself". Despite this they have been well-funded in the last few election cycles and this does not depend on the party elected.
How about when an iphone gets stolen, or all the people using airtags to track their luggage? The private sector also does a so/so to shit job of helping you. Apple will let you find your phone, but its up to you to go get it, or wipe and restart.
Tracking and storing all of my info and my face does not make the cops more effective at their jobs or prioritize this shop owner you know. Tracking and storing my info and face, doesn't help the shop keeper.
It does however, seem that all this tracking of my info results in my information getting leaked time and time and again. Meaning that I've gone for a shop and somehow the probability of something being stolen from me goes up
I’m friends with the manager of my neighborhood convenience store and he is extremely angry that he has shoplifting caught on tape, trespassed people, begged and pleaded with the police but they won’t do anything. I’m not sure if you actually know anyone operating a retail store but it’s pretty grim in the blue cities
The police rarely have ever been super responsive on shoplifting and basic trespass. I worked at a big box electronics store in the 90s, and we got looted when management did stupid shit like put hard drives on a retail shelf to save labor. The police rarely cared with some specific exception.
These cases are both minor and hard to prosecute.
The difference isn’t enforcement, it’s demand. The retail model as it stands today wasn’t designed for a world where there is a global market for everything. 95% people are honest, and most dishonest people are disorganized and easy to deter.
If you were to raid a drug store in 1986, your ability to unload stolen toothpaste and hair spray was pretty limited - maybe some mafias had a network of bodegas or independent stores.
Today, you have a major corporation that prides itself at having the “world‘s largest selection”. It’s also the worlds largest fence — Amazon.
The symptoms you're describing don't seem to match the proposed treatment.
Police: "You've caught them red-handed on camera, but we're very busy and we don't care. Or perhaps this is a place where we're deliberately doing-nothing as a revenge or pressure-tactic against local politicians."
Shopkeeper: "Ah, but this time I have the camera-footage and fancy biometrics of everyone in the store!"
Police: "Oh, well why didn't you say so? That completely changes things, we're always willing to help out a fellow biometrics fan."
> Police will not arrest if the DA won't prosecute.
Why not? If the police are frustrated that the DAs aren’t doing their job, I don’t think it helps the police any to choose to also not do their job. Especially since DAs are often elected, which means it’s easier to replace them if the police can show that they (the DA) are the bottleneck. But if the police don’t do their job first, then the police are the bottleneck.
Depends on the judges. If police cannot prove the crime in front of the judge, they wasted their time. With proper evidence it's not a waste of time anymore.
Progressive prosecutors don’t care. Judges let repeat offenders out with a wrist slap. Demoralizes police - what’s the point of all the effort if they are back out on the street tomorrow?
No, that's your experience. The narrative is that everything went to shit because the left is trying to create a society where the values you hold are despised and where the good people are blamed for everything while lazy people and criminals get to do whatever they want because of a misplaced sense of justice.
What is actually happening is more mundane.
It's political systems breaking because closed primaries and Gerrymandering mean that a significant population in a lot of places effectively get no political voice because the elections are held in the primaries, and the people can't vote in the opposing party's primary. Ossification results, or the candidate who appeals to the party's more ardent voters get elected, and we essentially lose the center as a political position.
We also have a homeless situation that isn't being addressed, because no one wants to do anything effective. So what happens is that the only thing that can be done is to arrest them, and house them in jail temporarily. This is expensive and doesn't actually fix anything.
So you have a bunch of frustrated citizens who feel like they have no control over their local policy and are sick of the petty crime, along with police who are handling it by not enforcing quality of life crimes in the hope people will blame the elected officials they don't like.
Your frustration is real, but the causes you are attributing for them are wrong.
Arresting criminals and throwing them in jail, like we did until about 10 years ago, would be a fantastic start! Really not a quantum leap in policy change
You need to read what people write and engage with the substance of it. Replying with a variation of the same talking point over and over is not a discussion.
My response is simple and straight forwards, I don’t tie myself into logical knots to turn what is simple and correct into a complicated inverse of reality
Except you didn't respond to anything I wrote. A 'simple and straightforward' response that does not address the content of the post you are responding to is not how this board operates.
From the guidelines:
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
It’s just hard to engage when the comment doesn’t respond to the philosophical bedrock point: Stealing! Is! Wrong!
This is a bedrock foundational principle of Western civilization. I don’t take any quarter to any other opinion. This is the Ten Commandments. I don’t give an inch to anyone who tries to justify stealing whatsoever. While my HN persona is a bit grating my personal relationships are full of leftists, or I wouldn’t be able to be a community member in my deep blue city. I am tired of people defending theft and thieves. NO STEALING EVER PERIOD
We were talking about enforcement, not morality. I addressed enforcement completely in the comment you never bothered to read.
You are conflating different things, you are not reading or properly engaging, and you are letting emotions take over instead of thinking. Maybe you should work on these issues instead of blaming leftists.
This is happening in california. In fact there are three current situations:
1/SB9 cutting R1 lots in half
2/ ADU laws, which let you build up to 3 homes/units where there was one and further, can be combined with SB 9
3/ AB2011 which lets you turn defunct strip malls into housing
Honestly, this plus things like PermitFlow make me feel like we will be able to build enough. The issue will be making sure the housing is affordable rather than expensive and empty.
And the scale applies at every single step of the process. A citizen homebuyer is playing a oneshot game. There are few discounts to be had and every single fee is its own battle.
A corporation/PE is playing a multi-shot game. There are bulk discounts, relationships, and scale that is applied to everything from title insurance and inspections to cost segregations to filing all of the paperwork.
> There are few discounts to be had and every single fee is its own battle.
Also if you take a 10% gamble on a strategy to save 50k and it backfires and lands you with a 500k legal bill, that's just the cost of business to a big (or even not that big) company, but it'd be absolutely ruinous to private individuals.
Collectively decide and easily are carrying lots of weight here.
Americans (citizens that is) have held fairly consistent opinions on healthcare, guns, education, war and yet very little changes because all voices are in fact, not equal. We are not collectively deciding. There are massive thumbs on the scale, often in favor of private profit that keep things as they are now.
Some might even, surprise surprise, be owned by the companies investing in the companies that use this technology.
This is, as the OP noted, a gross invasion of privacy and not avoidable in a country that largely requires cars and their registration for day to day life.
> Collectively decide and easily are carrying lots of weight here.
I agree. The problem is that we do not decide collectively on issues, we decide on representatives. And while a supermajority might agree, for example, that single payer healthcare is good, they may not all prioritize it the same way amongst a number of issues they are concerned about. And in the end, they get a very limited number of candidates to choose from, none of whom are likely to 100% match their priorities and choices.
So the politicians focus on the few issues that really will get people to pull the lever for them. Abortion being an obvious one. Health care doesn't have a strong enough consensus and priority combo to make it happen.
> Americans (citizens that is) have held fairly consistent opinions on healthcare, guns, education
We have? That’s news to me on all three topics.
The bubble of Americans an individual commonly associates with might have fairly aligned opinions, but Americans as a set don’t hold a consistent/aligned opinion in these areas IME.
The claim is too absolute. Software amplifies value, but inference cost and capability still shape what’s possible. Users aren’t demanding obfuscation; they just want predictable pricing and clear ROI. Does anyone want hidden math in their pricing?
In many markets, transparency wins. Think of Carfax or banking fees or airbnb pricing for example, when regulators or competitors force clarity, buyers benefit and trust grows.In a functioning government that serves the people (regardless of party) we would see this
People believe they “need” these AI products partly because they’re saturated in both earned and paid media. In '23 there were nearly 400k articles covering AI. I think we can all safely assume its more now, and when we include financial reporting, quite inescapable.
This is like saying "instead of taking a fixable broken thing we've thrown it out" but there's no current intention to get/build a new one. In fact, the goal continuously has been for it to throw it out, often when you look a little close, by moneyed interests.
Trumps administration and the efforts behind the party has done amazing work pointing out each and every loophole politicians have, often purposefully, left in our attempt to create a governance that supports society. Its our job to close them.
A similar example would be "to be fair, our education system has always had problems" - yes. and its been a purposeful choice driven by moneyed interests to not have nationally funded egalitarian public schools cloaked in verbiage like "states rights"
It would be weirder for that blanket resume to be accompanied by posts about how much your wedding taught you about b2b saas sales with your photo, location, and a list of all the people you met through work and are willing to say you're connected to.
Ok - this obviously doesn't work everywhere but recently was flown to a city for an interview. Day long, full loop, 5 45 min interviews + 1 working session with a panel. Had dinner with the team the night before.
There's no way to cheat at that point. You either have what they need (yay btw) or its not a fit
I haven't found this to be the case as much. Posted a job, got 100 applications, at least 10 had referrals. 10 is manageable for me to sift through but not the win the applicant thought. More than that, I found a colleague had a whole google form process to farm out referrals.
Bonuses. Usually there is no penalty for failed referrals, so the more people they refer, the more likely someone gets hired and sticks around long enough for the bonus.
Its the same as "bird dogging" or wholesaling in real estate or really any series of other middlemen or wholesale business who do the hard work of finding the deal but don't necessarily have the cash or want to run the business end to end.
It has been proven and reproven that these claims of crime requiring store shutdowns were improperly put forward, without research, by a lobby. So much so that it was covered in mainstream media.
December 2023: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-ret...
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