>This is a phenomenal application of how fine-based bounties can be used to rapidly improve compliance with the law.
This type of thing can get out of hand quickly. Without me giving controversial examples, just imagine for yourself the types of things that different states can make a crime, add a fine, then offer to give other citizens part or all of that fine if they turn in others. After that, think of how unscrupulous businesses could use it against competition.
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)
>[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-...
>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 $7 a gallon for gas to set there and idle it away, why shouldn't they be able to? How is it different than them driving the same gas away?
Many countries do enforce the speed limits like that. Try doing 110kph in a 100kph zone in Australia/NZ/CH and you'll get ~500$ fine pretty quickly and lose your licence on the 3rd try.
Re/ the speed limit, I'm afraid I simply don't understand. Why not just raise the speed limit to 70 instead of having everyone lie? If everyone starts then doing 75, why not raise it again? Eventually you'll hit a breakeven point. Considering that most highway accidents happen because two people disagree about the speed they should be driving at, and considering that fatalities and accident severity in such accidents scales with something crazy like the square or even the cube of the speed you're going at, this actually feels like the worst possible way to negotiate that.
Conversely, under an enforcement regime where everyone is genuinely scared to go higher than 65, the worst case scenario is... Everyone does 65. Fewer accidents, and fewer fatalities from those accidents. Best case scenario is they rapidly revise up to 70 - 75 - wherever.
Re/ "imagine that a bad law could effect a relatively small group much more than others", I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them, which requires they have a lot of money to reliably extract in the first place - otherwise it stops being worth the effort to target them specifically.
I guess you could imagine making lottery scratch tickets a fineable offense, and thereby target pensioners unfairly. That's the closest I got after 5 minutes of thinking about it.
Re/ using money to incentivize public action - we have clashing moral intuitions on this, I definitely don't see it as a last resort. In fact I would far prefer it to be the first resort. Money is a much more efficient, scalable, precise, and robust way of handling things than e.g. sending people to prison (which we still have to pay for, by the way, prisons aren't cheap).
Re/ the idler's law itself - You're allowed to be against it personally, that's fine. The people of New York City voted in favor of it, and they probably have good reasons for this that mostly only make sense to themselves. Personally, I've been to New York, and seen how cramped those streets are. It doesn't surprise me that some schmuck holding up half of 6th Avenue should be made to pay for it - they are likely causing thousands of dollars of cash flow loss per second because on who's late for work because of them. But even then, I don't live there. I don't actually have a good sense of this kind of thing. I defer to the wisdom of the locals here. Do as the Romans do.
>Re/ the speed limit, I'm afraid I simply don't understand. Why not just raise the speed limit to 70 instead of having everyone lie?
Then do you arrest all people going 71?
> I think we would have to define more closely what a 'bad law' actually is to answer that first. Under this kind of fine-based regime, it would have to be something that targets a small group, unfairly, and manages to consistently extract a lot of money from them
Is suspect everyone can hypothesize a small group they belong to. So make up one that you belong to and imagine a group coming into power in the legislature where you live that makes that kind of law. The money itself doesn't need to be a large amount (what might be "a lot" to you and I might be different for different people) to make it oppressive and frankly a weapon for the police and government to use.
>Re/ the idler's law itself ... The people of New York City voted in favor of it
Correct. I don't agree with it but the local people do. This is the both the blessing and curse of our government and the exact situation where some people can can use this pay-for-snitching technique for good or bad. If it works for them then so be it. I don't have to like it. I don't like a lot of stuff. And some stuff I do like others don't. My original argument is that using money as an incentive to turn citizens against each other is a very slippery slope. In his case it might be great for them. I understand that you and I disagree on this point and there is likely nothing I can say or you can say to make the other suddenly change position and I respect you defending your thought process on this. But it is nice to be able to have a conversation about something controversial without it spinning into something else. Cheers!
I know populism is a thing but speed limits aren’t formally set for people’s preference but for safety and environmental reasons. “Most” people choosing to break the law doesn’t change that, and adjusting the law becomes a populist thing.
Accidents on the highway do not happen because people don’t agree on the speed to drive at, more than they happen because “cars exist”. They happen because drivers drive faster than their capacity to avoid danger. This capacity differs from hour to hour and day to day. Agreeing on a speed doesn’t make one less drunk or sleepy or unskilled, and so on. More accidents happen on the day after summer time switch when drivers have less sleep and it’s not like everyone just changes opinions.
You’re missing the elephant in the room. Not everyone is equally capable of buying laws or fighting the enforcement of those laws. When Musk’s datacenter was photographed polluting more than declared it wasn’t an instant fine, it’s a lawsuit that the taxpayer pays for (implicit fine on the taxpayer). He can afford it, but how much of this can taxpayers take? These are the people who can buy a law to make your life harder if you try to catch them red handed with something. They’re the ones who can see that you get fined when you say something that’s false or just inconvenient or not yet decided by a judge (like that most accidents caused by disagreement on speed, or that Musk’s DC pollutes more than declared) while they can afford to keep doing it themselves because for them everything becomes a lawsuit they can drag on forever, can afford, and costs you money too.
Making free money sounds awesome. But coming from a country which in the past “democratized” and incentivized reporting “bad” behavior, no matter how much you think this time it’s a worthy cause, it just opens the door up to abuse against the weaker members of society, and almost everyone becomes weaker as a result. You don’t see where this goes because you’ve never seen it with your eyes and don’t trust reading a book.
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
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.
> just imagine for yourself the types of things that different states can make a crime, add a fine, then offer to give other citizens part or all of that fine if they turn in others
You mean if a red state (like Texas) potentially handing out bounties for snitching on abortions? Texas already passed that law in 2022[1]. We are already way down the slippery slope you alluded.
1. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1107741175/texas-abortion-bou...
Yeah, this is the worrying bit. US constitutional law only seems to restrict the government, so they can delegate it to private actors who can then do unconstitutional things. Something similar happened with the book-objecting laws.
Reminds me a snitchers during communist regime in our country. There was a lot of those who report to STB (state security, like KGB) all kind of misbehaving of citizens that could threat a state.
I'm curious, when there will be apps to report citizens that threat democracy. Like those who wear red hat. Or sleepong on street. Or make weird talks at home...
Yeah, like the ADA for example. We should not have started down that slippery slope. Repeal the ADA!