This sounds a lot like the typical small town where they try to make up for lost tax revenue by aggressive policing. One town I'll remember to never go I guess, not that I'd probably ever go there anyways.
There was an old Rockford Files episode called Pastoria Prime Pick, where a small Calforinia town was growing economically by mixing small real and manufacturing/setting-up people with big crimes in order to either solicit bribes for lower crimes and take in huge fines.
From my personal experience, Golden Meadow in Louisiana is exactly that sort of speed trap. Those cops will absolutely pull you over for doing 1 over the speed limit even though the limit for the area is unnaturally low for the stretch of highway they police.
So is Boutte, but only between the Walmart and Dominoes on Highway 90... that'd be the blackest section of the local community, which is essentially the color of every person you'll ever see pulled over in that area, despite it being a busy part of the highway.
Yeah. Apparently it's been a thing for a very long time. I haven't been down there in forever, but apparently their plan is to raise Highway 1 and charge tolls instead.
Basically for the cost of a city attorney whose job literally rests on loose interpretations of state statutes, you can collect monies from all sorts of people outside of your official city limits.
Think safety codes and enforcement and then make the easy jump to Dollar General business licenses which are a percentage of turnover.
Policing I22 in Brookside is the tip of the iceberg
That's what it comes down to, what is the law (reguardless of any ethics/morals).
For some reason the leash laws are never enforced tho...
Seems that could add up to large fines in the same way.
Sadly the courts actually ruled the police have no duty to uphold the law, they literaly get to choose if and when they intervene. including murders, rape, home invasion, etc. and won't face repercussion for looking the other way.
I still drive 5 under through there. I still see them hunting. I go to the FIRM racetrack often and my car looks like a speed trapper’s dream. So I’m extra cautious.
The more I read and experience such things along with the healthcare scam and sudden bills from hospitals and haggling with insurance, the more I wonder why I immigrated to the US when I could have taken my software skills and education to anywhere else like Europe or Canada. This country is for hustlers and grifters and the cunning.
There’s still a significant salary spread between the US and most of Canada and Europe (Switzerland is competitive with the US, but most of the rest is not). Remote working may close some of the gap, but right now there’s a wide gap.
I don't think I care about salary so much especially when I hear that the other countries have a better social safety net. As a software engineer I am confident I can make decent pay for the area. I am not looking to send my kids to private school or avail a world class surgeon or have a beach house or make millions. I just want a good happy middle class life writing code and without a lot of hustling. And somehow the US does not seem very conducive to that.
Then move to Canada and see how much you like it. It is trivial for an American software engineer with a degree to immigrate over. There is a reason why Canadians come here rather than remain up north (hint it's not just the weather).
If you have experience and good English skills you should be able to find programming jobs in most of the bigger EU countries.
And world class surgeons are everywhere, you just don't pay world class prices everywhere. I don't need or want a famous surgeon, I want someone that makes sure I'm well and that I don't need to pay off for the rest of my life.
Anecdote: When he was three my son needed a rare emergency surgery. He had an ambulance transfer to a specialist pediatric hospital from another hospital where he was first admitted. They brought a specialist in just for that surgery. My son then stayed three weeks in the children's hospital and I slept next to him on a bed. I paid nothing for any of this except my own sandwiches, and was by his side the whole time. This was the summer holiday period and fell into our annual three weeks of summer vacation. I sent my work my medical certificate and they registered this (as required by law) as sick days and I was able to move my vacation days to right after the hospital stay, meaning I lost not even a single vacation day. Of course i also got full pay for those days with my son sleeping in the hospital, so I was neither working (except for some minimum email forwarding and answering simple queries) nor did I lose any salary, benefits, sick days, leave days, ... And I knew that there was no risk whatsoever that i wouldn't lose my job or insurance.
Honestly I would not give any of this up for twice or thrice the money. ~40-50% of everyone's gross salary goes to all these services and we pay close to 20% VAT, but this buys us comfort and security. No one dies because they can't afford treatment - even the homeless or irregular migrants can go to the ER and get care (but likely far less than we are lucky yo receive).
I just don't understand how people afford Canadian cities. Moving to Toronto or Vancouver would be completely unaffordable. I would take a massive salary cut but then housing would increase significantly alongside that.
Also, is Canadian culture really that different from the U.S.? I'm genuinely curious about that.
Until recently though the only fealty was a deceased former leader of the party (Reagan). The living fealty thing is new and disturbing.
But let's not pretend it's a US trait. I hear more criticism about democratic leaders from democrats than republicans. Less vitriol, but more criticism.
Criticizing political leaders who are (in your opinion) underperforming seems like a healthy state for a representative democracy/republic form of government.
If the leaders of your party are (or hold themselves to be) above criticism, that’s a sign that something is deeply unhealthy (as we’ve seen recently).
Oh, yes, it's healthy. I (I believe correctly) interpreted it as a criticism of US politics. It's not. It's a valid criticism of the Republican party. I was pushing back on a nebulously worded "both sides are bad" undertone.
My thoughts exactly. Look how many businesses in the US have modus operandi that boils down to "get rich at the expense of other people". E.g. TurboTax. This is toxic.
I love the US for its beauty and many parts of its culture, but I would never want to live there.
In western europe it is normal for people to go to preventive care, or hospitals and NOT fear to be bankrupt.
Its normal to have four weeks of paid vacation a year.
Its normal to have a safety net when you fall on hard times, e.g. when you lose your job or family or mind.
Its normal to think of police as a positive, not as something to be regularly scared of.
Its normal to live walking or cycling distance to work.
Its normal to study at university and not be saddled with debt.
Its normal to be fine with life as it is, without an ambition for being rich or powerful or whatever.
America seems to me always like a place for ambitious and hungry people that want to work and fight all their lives to prove themselves. But it doesn't seem like a place for people that want to be happy and live a good life.
America is a force for creativity and creation but also for the misery of many. I just can't believe how many people 'stick it out', how many people simply accept that dental pain is normal if they can't pay to fix it, or that they might die because they pay $100+ for insulin that they need to live, when in any other first world country this is free. Your employer can let you go with basically no warning or reason and you lose everything - how insane is that!
America has more prisoners than China (>4x its size). America has one of the highest child and maternal mortality rate in the world. America has an abysmal school system that fails the majority of people. America has crime and murder rates through the roof.
I just don't understand how Americans have learned to accept all that with no inkling to either leave or fight for actual change.
Oh sure. At a high level (and I'm not super well versed), infant mortality statistics are only based on live births. In the US, this includes any baby that breaths or otherwise shows any sign of life. In several other countries (including western european ones), the check for signs of life doesn't happen immediately. There's also the question of if countries mark extremely premature births (<22 weeks) as live births or miscarriages.
It's a politically charged issue, because many people consider it to be the loss of a child, and no doctor wants to tell them the child was never born. Since 2001, France has more than doubled the number of stillbirths, because of new standards that moved what were once miscarriages to the stillbirth category (some driven locally, some in response to new WHO standards based on the ability to care for premature infants.)
It's also politically charged because many groups have a vested interest in downplaying any results that make their country look bad. I'm not going to claim it's entirely a statistical artifact - the US lacks comprehensive neonatal care and that's an issue.
Population density has little to do with it. It is the city design and culture. Europeans accept that it is normal to live in apartment or terraced house in the cities.
The lie is how you can spend the money. San Francisco level shit in the streets doesn't happen by accident.
People making 6 figures were/are living out of their cars.
You have to balance cost of living, culture, politics, weather, climate, appropriate proximity to friends & family, and so on.
I always think of it in terms of CERN and people who work at the LHC. The weather and local environment isn't ideal, but they're in a high quality situation otherwise doing work that is about as meaningful as work can be.
That seems like a good model of "work" to operate with.
Exactly. I've called it the "grief economy" Whomever can suffer the most grief wins. For example when trying to cancel a service the person on the other end is making at least minimum wage to waste your time for free. They can easily suffer more grief than you and so they have little to no reason to try and solve your issue quickly or at all.
I've seen so many of these games since coming to the US. It's setup for whomever can suffer the most will get a good price, the customer service, or other kinds of "privileges" considered just normal decency in other countries.
The only solution I've found is to interact and depend as little as possible on others. They're pretty unlikely to come through for you if needed.
"Whoever can suffer the most grief wins" also seems like an apt description of what it's like to participate in a representative democracy's political process.
Often they're measured on time to complete a call/ticket and they're not allowed to hang up on the customer, so in cases when I need to get something done, I insist that I have all the time in the world. You can keep me on hold for the 3 to 6 hours this will take, I don't mind. Just keep me on hold and I'll wait patiently, Yes, I do have all day.
They'll cajole me to hang up, say that I'll get a call back, etc, but I insist that they can keep me on hold while we wait for whoever to finish their lunch break or get back from their meeting.
Often the issue gets resolved in 10 minutes this way.
And surprisingly: it stays resolved with no worse success rate than playing call back tag.
If it's actually taking a long time (which doesn't happen often), then I hang up and try a new rep or a new support channel.
There are a lot of towns like this in America. Towns where the sole source of income is traffic tickets, and often that revenue stream comes from a disproportionately black and/or poor population (this was the case with Ferguson MO. The justice report after Michael Brown was murdered pointed to this as one of the factors that led to so much contact between the minority population and police)
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releas...
----
> Ferguson has allowed its focus on revenue generation to fundamentally compromise the
role of Ferguson’s municipal court. The municipal court does not act as a neutral arbiter of the
law or a check on unlawful police conduct. Instead, the court primarily uses its judicial authority
as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the City’s financial interests.
This has led to court practices that violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal
protection requirements. The court’s practices also impose unnecessary harm, overwhelmingly
on African-American individuals, and run counter to public safety.
Most strikingly, the court issues municipal arrest warrants not on the basis of public
safety needs, but rather as a routine response to missed court appearances and required fine
payments. In 2013 alone, the court issued over 9,000 warrants on cases stemming in large part
from minor violations such as parking infractions, traffic tickets, or housing code violations. Jail
time would be considered far too harsh a penalty for the great majority of these code violations,
yet Ferguson’s municipal court routinely issues warrants for people to be arrested and
incarcerated for failing to timely pay related fines and fees. Under state law, a failure to appear
in municipal court on a traffic charge involving a moving violation also results in a license
suspension. Ferguson has made this penalty even more onerous by only allowing the suspension
to be lifted after payment of an owed fine is made in full. Further, until recently, Ferguson also
added charges, fines, and fees for each missed appearance and payment. Many pending cases
still include such charges that were imposed before the court recently eliminated them, making it
as difficult as before for people to resolve these cases.
---
The full report is with reading.
Also add asset forfeiture to the equation (usually targeted at poor and minority populations who cannot find it) and you have a toxic cycle of racism that feeds into more traffic stops of certain populations which then feeds into stats about that same population, rinse and repeat.
But asset forfeiture can cast an even wider death. The murder of millionaire Donald Scott by LA county police was motivated by the fact that they hoped to seize his ranch through asset forfeiture if they found any wrongdoing/illegal activities there (there were none)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Donald_Scott
There was a notorious road in Wilmington VT that was known for targeting out of towners in the mid to late 90s.
It was a 35 MPH road that abruptly changed to 25 MPH. I'm from MA. I was in the area camping and I saw the 35 MPH speed limit. Was driving 35 MPH. Then I saw the 25 MPH and began slowing down at a sensible rate and got immediately pulled over by a cop who was literally camping out between the 2 signs. I got a ticket for going 29 MPH in a 25 MPH zone. The only way you could have gotten down to 25 MPH was to slam on the brakes.
I could fight the ticket, but that would mean driving back to Vermont for the court date (a 3-4 hour drive and whole day away from work).
I just ended up paying it (it was over $100). Only later did I find out that stretch of road was notorious for this and the cops preyed on out of towners who had no idea they needed to slam on their brakes before the poorly indicated 25 MPH zone (locals knew to do this).
The traffic stop served absolutely no purpose other than revenue.
I had occasion to be out on the back roads in Utah with a local. At every little hamlet the speed limit dropped 20 mph in two increments over about 50 yards. As was explained to me it was for revenue. Either you'd break one or the other speed limits, or you'd do a panic slowdown & get ticketed for "reckless driving"; either way a nice fine for the town coffers.
This is such a clear conflict of interest with the potential for corruption that every state should require that municipal fines go to a general fund. Under no circumstances should a police department be a revenue center.
Interested to see what fully self-driving cars will do to these types of schemes. What happens to police departments when the cars no longer do anything ticket-able?
62 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadSo that was the most productive one? After salary, health care and operating costs, The roi does not sound all that good.
There was an old Rockford Files episode called Pastoria Prime Pick, where a small Calforinia town was growing economically by mixing small real and manufacturing/setting-up people with big crimes in order to either solicit bribes for lower crimes and take in huge fines.
So is Boutte, but only between the Walmart and Dominoes on Highway 90... that'd be the blackest section of the local community, which is essentially the color of every person you'll ever see pulled over in that area, despite it being a busy part of the highway.
https://www.annistonstar.com/the_daily_home/state-supreme-co...
Basically for the cost of a city attorney whose job literally rests on loose interpretations of state statutes, you can collect monies from all sorts of people outside of your official city limits.
Think safety codes and enforcement and then make the easy jump to Dollar General business licenses which are a percentage of turnover.
Policing I22 in Brookside is the tip of the iceberg
Sadly the courts actually ruled the police have no duty to uphold the law, they literaly get to choose if and when they intervene. including murders, rape, home invasion, etc. and won't face repercussion for looking the other way.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/os-waldo-speed-trap...
And world class surgeons are everywhere, you just don't pay world class prices everywhere. I don't need or want a famous surgeon, I want someone that makes sure I'm well and that I don't need to pay off for the rest of my life.
Anecdote: When he was three my son needed a rare emergency surgery. He had an ambulance transfer to a specialist pediatric hospital from another hospital where he was first admitted. They brought a specialist in just for that surgery. My son then stayed three weeks in the children's hospital and I slept next to him on a bed. I paid nothing for any of this except my own sandwiches, and was by his side the whole time. This was the summer holiday period and fell into our annual three weeks of summer vacation. I sent my work my medical certificate and they registered this (as required by law) as sick days and I was able to move my vacation days to right after the hospital stay, meaning I lost not even a single vacation day. Of course i also got full pay for those days with my son sleeping in the hospital, so I was neither working (except for some minimum email forwarding and answering simple queries) nor did I lose any salary, benefits, sick days, leave days, ... And I knew that there was no risk whatsoever that i wouldn't lose my job or insurance.
Honestly I would not give any of this up for twice or thrice the money. ~40-50% of everyone's gross salary goes to all these services and we pay close to 20% VAT, but this buys us comfort and security. No one dies because they can't afford treatment - even the homeless or irregular migrants can go to the ER and get care (but likely far less than we are lucky yo receive).
FTFY
Also, is Canadian culture really that different from the U.S.? I'm genuinely curious about that.
But let's not pretend it's a US trait. I hear more criticism about democratic leaders from democrats than republicans. Less vitriol, but more criticism.
If the leaders of your party are (or hold themselves to be) above criticism, that’s a sign that something is deeply unhealthy (as we’ve seen recently).
I wasn't lamenting that there wasn't more politician worship, I was saying that it is confined to the Republican party.
Arguably because the democratic establishment is closer to the republican establishment than the democratic base.
This is healthy, isn't it? Politics should be an environment where everybody can and does critique everybody, right?
And, yes, it's not just a US thing. But it's one of many bellwethers that differ between US and Canada. Despite the notional monarchy.
I love the US for its beauty and many parts of its culture, but I would never want to live there.
In western europe it is normal for people to go to preventive care, or hospitals and NOT fear to be bankrupt.
Its normal to have four weeks of paid vacation a year.
Its normal to have a safety net when you fall on hard times, e.g. when you lose your job or family or mind.
Its normal to think of police as a positive, not as something to be regularly scared of.
Its normal to live walking or cycling distance to work.
Its normal to study at university and not be saddled with debt.
Its normal to be fine with life as it is, without an ambition for being rich or powerful or whatever.
America seems to me always like a place for ambitious and hungry people that want to work and fight all their lives to prove themselves. But it doesn't seem like a place for people that want to be happy and live a good life.
America is a force for creativity and creation but also for the misery of many. I just can't believe how many people 'stick it out', how many people simply accept that dental pain is normal if they can't pay to fix it, or that they might die because they pay $100+ for insulin that they need to live, when in any other first world country this is free. Your employer can let you go with basically no warning or reason and you lose everything - how insane is that!
America has more prisoners than China (>4x its size). America has one of the highest child and maternal mortality rate in the world. America has an abysmal school system that fails the majority of people. America has crime and murder rates through the roof.
I just don't understand how Americans have learned to accept all that with no inkling to either leave or fight for actual change.
And, as to the "regular walking or cycling distance" the US simply has less population density.
That said, I think mandatory vacation and universal healthcare would be nice.
It's a politically charged issue, because many people consider it to be the loss of a child, and no doctor wants to tell them the child was never born. Since 2001, France has more than doubled the number of stillbirths, because of new standards that moved what were once miscarriages to the stillbirth category (some driven locally, some in response to new WHO standards based on the ability to care for premature infants.)
It's also politically charged because many groups have a vested interest in downplaying any results that make their country look bad. I'm not going to claim it's entirely a statistical artifact - the US lacks comprehensive neonatal care and that's an issue.
Because of population density.
People making 6 figures were/are living out of their cars.
You have to balance cost of living, culture, politics, weather, climate, appropriate proximity to friends & family, and so on.
I always think of it in terms of CERN and people who work at the LHC. The weather and local environment isn't ideal, but they're in a high quality situation otherwise doing work that is about as meaningful as work can be.
That seems like a good model of "work" to operate with.
I've seen so many of these games since coming to the US. It's setup for whomever can suffer the most will get a good price, the customer service, or other kinds of "privileges" considered just normal decency in other countries.
The only solution I've found is to interact and depend as little as possible on others. They're pretty unlikely to come through for you if needed.
They'll cajole me to hang up, say that I'll get a call back, etc, but I insist that they can keep me on hold while we wait for whoever to finish their lunch break or get back from their meeting.
Often the issue gets resolved in 10 minutes this way.
And surprisingly: it stays resolved with no worse success rate than playing call back tag.
If it's actually taking a long time (which doesn't happen often), then I hang up and try a new rep or a new support channel.
---- > Ferguson has allowed its focus on revenue generation to fundamentally compromise the role of Ferguson’s municipal court. The municipal court does not act as a neutral arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct. Instead, the court primarily uses its judicial authority as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the City’s financial interests. This has led to court practices that violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection requirements. The court’s practices also impose unnecessary harm, overwhelmingly on African-American individuals, and run counter to public safety. Most strikingly, the court issues municipal arrest warrants not on the basis of public safety needs, but rather as a routine response to missed court appearances and required fine payments. In 2013 alone, the court issued over 9,000 warrants on cases stemming in large part from minor violations such as parking infractions, traffic tickets, or housing code violations. Jail time would be considered far too harsh a penalty for the great majority of these code violations, yet Ferguson’s municipal court routinely issues warrants for people to be arrested and incarcerated for failing to timely pay related fines and fees. Under state law, a failure to appear in municipal court on a traffic charge involving a moving violation also results in a license suspension. Ferguson has made this penalty even more onerous by only allowing the suspension to be lifted after payment of an owed fine is made in full. Further, until recently, Ferguson also added charges, fines, and fees for each missed appearance and payment. Many pending cases still include such charges that were imposed before the court recently eliminated them, making it as difficult as before for people to resolve these cases. ---
The full report is with reading.
Also add asset forfeiture to the equation (usually targeted at poor and minority populations who cannot find it) and you have a toxic cycle of racism that feeds into more traffic stops of certain populations which then feeds into stats about that same population, rinse and repeat.
But asset forfeiture can cast an even wider death. The murder of millionaire Donald Scott by LA county police was motivated by the fact that they hoped to seize his ranch through asset forfeiture if they found any wrongdoing/illegal activities there (there were none) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Donald_Scott
I could fight the ticket, but that would mean driving back to Vermont for the court date (a 3-4 hour drive and whole day away from work). I just ended up paying it (it was over $100). Only later did I find out that stretch of road was notorious for this and the cops preyed on out of towners who had no idea they needed to slam on their brakes before the poorly indicated 25 MPH zone (locals knew to do this).
The traffic stop served absolutely no purpose other than revenue.