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