Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Had a similar experience with a relative that did some time in prison.

The conditions of parole required weekly visits to a far off parole officer visit that had no public transportation access.

So, no prospects to get a job because of (now almost universal) background checks. So, no income. And a defacto requirement to either have a car, or have money for a 15 mile Uber trip every week.

It basically means that if you are a parolee, you beg friends and family, or violate and return to prison for longer than your original sentence. The trip is a 3 hour commitment, so begging doesn't work well unless you have a really flexible friend or relative.

Oy. Guess what cycle that creates? People turning down parole just to not have that monkey on their back. Trading 5+ years of their lives because they can't satisfy an impossible ask. All for drug addict type issues... possession, shoplifting, public intox, loitering, driving with no insurance, etc. No violence, no real palpable victims other than themselves. US problem if you didn't guess already.

> possession, shoplifting, public intox, loitering, driving with no insurance, etc. No violence, no real palpable victims other than themselves

I'm with you on all but one of these -- driving with no insurance seems like a seriously bad idea, and should have consequences. Two tons of steel, even at moderate 35mph speed, is a lot of damn momentum and can do some real damage, and most certainly should be insured.

Fun fact: being poor means more than likely your credit score is low, which also means you pay more to insure a probably worse car. Because you know, your income dictates your likelihood to have an accident.

Insurance cost is not solely due to likelihood of having an accident. The thing that matters is likelihood of causing financial loss/gain for the insurance company. If low-income people are not more likely to cause financial loss, then competition for customers would make the insurance cost equal.

Some reasons why this is not so:

Bad credit and the likelihood of an accident are correlated because both are affected by risk-taking behavior.

People with high income are far less likely to make insurance claims for minor damage. They know that the deductible would prevent recovering most of the cost, and that the insurance cost would increase enough to offset what little was recovered. The claim payment is not worth the ongoing expense of higher premiums. People with low income are less likely to fund minor repairs without an insurance claim; they need the money to make repairs.

There is a fraud problem. I've seen this in person, getting advice from a heroin dealer who lived next door. I damaged my car. He said I should just report that I found it that way, parked on the street.

If you have no money, how do you pay for insurance to drive so you can get a job so you can have money?

How do you buy a car in the first place if you have no money?

If you get in an accident without liability insurance, how do you pay the other persons damages? Seems a bit selfish to me.

At first I was about to write why this is dumb and you should not be liable for not having an insurance. But while spelling it out I realized that it's perfectly reasonable for the owners of vehicles (and other licensable, high-possible-damage-dealing and really-accessible-to-almost-anyone things) to have a compulsory insurance. Just because there's reasonable probability to cause more damage than you can compensate on your own, which reasonable person should understand (that being a requirement for having a license). And if you don't then it's negligence.

Tangential, but this is the same reason mandatory health insurance makes sense. We go around living in our bodies, and they break down sometimes. It's the law in this country that emergency rooms can't turn people away without evaluating and stabilizing them, so you're always one accident away from creating huge costs for someone else if you don't plan for these costs with health insurance.

In the case of car insurance, the injured party is the driver you run into, or the property you damage. In the case of health insurance, the injured party is the hospital/doctors.

I always thought it was strange that so many states were totally on board with mandatory car insurance, but not mandatory health insurance.

Yes, but you can only choose to own a car (the logistics of this are hazy, but you still have the option of not buying one). You didn't choose to be an organism that gets sick.

It's my understanding that having a car in the US is effectively mandatory for the overwhelming majority of the working population, doesn't that effectively make it the same?

I'm not saying you don't need one, I'm saying the option technically exists. (I don't really agree with this line of logic but a lot of people seem to)

Some counterpoints:

1) The Obamacare mandate is an income tax penalty. If you don't work there is no penalty. Working is a choice.

2) Of course, working isn't a _real_ choice if you value independence. Like you hinted at, unless you live in an urban environment with solid transit neither is owning a car.

3) Also, the limits of our society's moral and legal systems are already tested by the very idea of private property. If you don't own property there's no place in this entire country where you can reliably and _legally_ simply be physically present without paying for the privilege in some manner. And because of property taxes, that's the case even if you were gifted property.

All the griping about the healthcare mandate is simply a failure of people to accept the _reality_ of our modern system, and the privileges they take for granted but refuse to accept the burden of. In any event, we can't roll back the clock. At the end of the day, as long as you're free to leave the country the only thing that has changed is that freeloading becomes more difficult. Which reminds me of another point:

4) The reasons mandatory evacuations are legally enforceable is because society recognizes that people of good will--especially first responders--will always put themselves in harms way to help people in distress. And we don't want to have a system that, to disincentive abuse, discourages help by making it too risky to help others or by making it too costly to ask for help. This is a fundamental conflict between individual liberty and social welfare. Most of the time conflict between individual liberty and social welfare can be mediated by degrees; other times we're faced with a binary choice. Much like mandatory evacuations, Obamacare simply recognizes that in the 21st century, the conflict regarding healthcare has become a binary choice. When the conflict becomes a binary choice, for a civilization it's not really any choice at all.

>Two tons of steel, even at moderate 35mph speed, is a lot of damn momentum and can do some real damage, and most certainly should be insured.

That would be fine and dandy, if being without a car was accommodated for (not just in the parole requirements, but also in other aspects of US life, having a job, city structure, etc).

Else the car+insurance is just an additional penalty for poor people.

And then they get in a wreck without insurance and both they and the other person are in a much worse situation. If you drive, be insured.

But a lot of the US is geographically set up so that you can't survive without a car.

That's true. But that still doesn't justify driving one without insurance.

> shoplifting ... no real palpable victims other than themselves.

Shoplifting is not a victimless crime. It can be a big enough cost to drive small shops out of business.

Shoplifting and shoplifting to drive a shop out of business are about as unrelated as threatening someone with a knife and stabbing them are.

You don't get how shoplifting works. One person doesn't shoplift enough to drive a shop out of business. 1000 people taking small crap they think doesn't matter drives the shop out of business. It is a cumulative thing where many small crimes build up to one crippling one.

Don't try to tell me I don't understand obvious shit.

If you're shoplifting from someone who's experiencing a shoplifting epidemic, you're doing more damage than you would by shoplifting from someone who wouldn't even notice. The severity of the crime is context-dependent. Not all shoplifting is equally bad. That's what I'm saying.

Feel free to engage in some black-and-white thinking and disagree. But don't tell me I don't "get how shoplifting works."

> If you're shoplifting from someone who's experiencing a shoplifting epidemic, you're doing more damage than you would by shoplifting from someone who wouldn't even notice.

Except when you're shoplifting, you don't know whether you're the only one who does that to this shop, or the hundredth thief this day. If you had enough knowledge to know the theft load of shops in the area, you'd pretty much by definition be orchestrating higher-level crimes, with better margins.

I didn't say shoplifting wasn't a crime. I said it is sometimes a victimless crime. It doesn't really matter if you're aware of that when you shoplift.

I also don't know why you think someone who's "smart enough to shoplift" would automatically be running some criminal syndicate if they can lookup shoplifting statistics in their area.

"I'm first going to check if this business can afford me stealing things." -- no shoplifter. Ever.

Ehh, I wouldn't say that. Obviously they're not checking the quarterly income reports, but I know shoplifters who steal from large chains but not from mom-and-pop stores.

Turn them in.

Even if I wanted - which I don't - how would I do that? It's not like they do it when I'm with them.

This. Don't bother finding out why he was stealing or look for ways to fix society. Just throw your friend under the bus.

I did it back in the day. Sleeping in my car, hungry, and I stole some candy bars from a grocery store.

Throwing me under the bus wouldn't have been terribly productive. I knew it was wrong, but hunger is a powerful motivator. I picked a big chain on purpose. Doesn't make it right, but I did try to consider to impact of my choices.

Going to jail wouldn't have made me somehow remorseful. It would have just made me bitter. I totally get the thought pattern, but living it is different than talking about it.

What kind of backwater place even allows this?

backwoods?

Backwater: a place or situation in which no development or progress is taking place. "the country remained an economic backwater"

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