You could have these hobbies!
Nothing this person is doing is magic, and to the extent that genetics or extensive background prep play a role you could still overcome that deficit enough to at least participate in the space, even if you weren't the most amazing, talented person in the world. It's not like making the world better by addressing weird problems is a particularly competitive field.
I'll make a claim that literally every single skill being shown here is something that you personally could learn, and it probably wouldn't take you more than a couple of months to a year of regularly exercising your creative muscles to get to the point where you were doing something useful.
I would not get that same enjoyment from doing what this person does, although I fully agree i could probably replicate his method. My hobbies reflect what I enjoy doing, as do those of most people. I can feel nominally "bad" that mine are so incredibly worthless comparatively but still know that I wouldn't get as much utility from doing the "better" thing?
If you know that overall the good parts of an activity wouldn't outweigh the bad parts, but you honestly believe that you have a duty to do it anyway, then you should follow your conscience and ignore trying to have a positive life. I don't think that's healthy, but some people disagree with me.
If on the other hand, you know that overall the good parts wouldn't outweigh the bad parts, and you don't think you have a duty to make yourself miserable in your free time, then what the heck do you feel bad about? If your guilt is real, you should acknowledge and take steps to address the cause. If your guilt is not real, then get a rubber band or something and snap it against your wrist every time you feel guilty about comparing yourself to other people.
You can replicate this if you think it would be worthwhile to do so. If you don't think it would be worthwhile to do so, then you shouldn't feel bad about it and it's just your stupid tribal lizard brain that's making you feel that way. And if you do think it would be worthwhile, then do it. I mean, even video games have bad parts. Having bad parts doesn't make a hobby unsatisfying or unenjoyable by default.
The third category in all of this is someone who thinks that overall the good parts of this kind of work would be incredibly satisfying, but they're so scared of the bad parts that they can't start engaging, or they're so scared of being inadequate that they never try to learn or develop their skills. My comment was addressed to that person. If you're not in that category then, I dunno. Flip your "feel better" switch.
I think I could do this, from my starting point it wouldn't take me very long to do something useful. But it looks like the meat of this project involved corresponding with a city bureaucracy and cleaning up ugly data to get basic info from it. It sounds awful.
So... if a hobby is just something optional you choose to do and don't make a living at, then yes, I could do this as a hobby. But in the sense where hobbies are things you do for recreation - reading, gaming, woodworking, gardening, etc? This would be far less pleasant than any other hobby I have, and the bureaucracy parts would be actively negative.
I'm glad this happened, and I'm glad if people enjoy doing this sort of thing! But I think when we talk about having productive hobbies, it's worth differentiating "tasks you can achieve" from "tasks you can seek out sustainably without hurting your quality of life". I have productive things in both categories, but I'd only describe the second category as hobbies.
No amount of practice is going to teach me how to see that these problems exist in the first place.
No amount of practice is going to teach me that government types might actually be willing to get rid of their revenue generators.
It takes a special type of person who sees what the actual problem is to begin with, then figures out how to get the data into a format where it all actually makes sense, and then takes the next step of contacting the appropriate authorities to get the problem fixed.
Don't get me wrong, I do understand and appreciate that some people might be able to repeat the same type of success, if only they had more training and practice. But you have to be careful about how you "encourage" that kind of thing.
Any reasonable person would make such an assumption without a second thought.
I'm still baffled that the city took any action whatsoever in response to this guy's request. How could he have known that they would just roll over and cough up $60k in lost revenue? It's seriously out-of-character for them.
Governments are of the people so long as the people maintain them as such.
When you treat a government like a business, it falls behind on it’s maintenance schedule, and begins to resemble one. There are a lot of people who wish the government was their business, and will encourage you to play along. These people work night and day to lower your expectations of what you’re capable of.
Stop falling for it!
The USA had some ingenious (and flawed) founders who set in place some rights and traditions that reserve at least a small finger hold which resembles democracy, by which the people can mobilize effectively.
But, in any nation, that fingerhold can exist when enough people come together en masse.
> Governments are of the people so long as the people maintain them as such.
"We the people" decided that government has some set of tasks to perform. Those tasks require resources, so "we the people" decided that we should steal some portion of each others' earnings, in order to provide a means that these tasks be accomplished.
The continued legitimacy of this ... arrangement ... is due to Social Contract Theory.
If, for discussion's sake, we temporarily step into the average-person's shoes and accept the Social Contract Theory at face-value, then it is most simple to conclude that what we are really doing is paying the government a lump sum in exchange for some set of services, and by garrulously quarrelling and advertising to each other we can decide who pays how much, and what is the set of services, and to a limited extent how the services ought be provided; under the limitation that if all the lump sums can't pay for all the services, then the difference will have to be made-up by printing more money and thereby reducing everyone's purchasing power (in short: further theft-from-all).
From that we can conclude that the "best" government would be the one which satisfied the majority of the desires of the majority of the people while appearing to take, in return, as little as possible. Does that not sound like the goal of a business?
> The USA had some ingenious (and flawed) founders who set in place some rights and traditions that reserve at least a small finger hold which resembles democracy, by which the people can mobilize effectively.
Correct.
Problem is, that kind of mobilization will cause enough chaos that it's not worth doing it over just a parking-ticket racket.
No, it will likely require some single, unambiguous, flagrant, overt, unapologetic and high-stakes treason against the letter of our principles and procedures ... before the 2nd Amendment's most fundamental purpose is put-to-action.
And I have no faith that the outcome of such an event, will be nontrivially better than the Articles of Confederation; it probably won't even outshine the Constitution of 1788.
But this whole discussion is going far afield enough that my betting-money says we'll soon hear from Fearless Leader Ang...
Democracy requires constant vigilance in many forms. This is one such form.
Matt, we salute you and your efforts! I hope this encourages others to get involved in improving their local government (and perhaps even creates reusable tooling for use at scale [“citizen oversight as code”]).
Remember, you're part of the government.
This is a really important idea, and I don't think I've seen it expressed so clearly before. Thank you.
Looking into this more, it sounds like, while there probably is a perverse incentive because more tickets equals a significant increase in revenue, the biggest problem is the punitive fines for minor non-traffic offenses that tend to compound for poorer residents: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/02/how-does-c.... Note the headline is a little misleading, they seem to mean "non-moving violations".
It's not difficult, just costly.
Sadly public salaries and jobs in general are low hanging fruit targeted by short-sighted political campaigns while all other gov spending tends to be a black hole with zero measurable ROI and countless professional public grant/gov money consumers well aware of the lack of measurable ROI and crony/who-you-know-in-gov nature of spending. Or worse the phony claims of adopting 'private industry' to side step accountability via public-private arrangements which feature none of the benefits of markets (true competition, state anointed monopolies, market dominance disconnected from value provided to consumers, etc).
Most of which could be blanketly solved by hiring good people (the people who dispense and use the money) and not creating quid-pro-quo incentive systems by underpaying public servants.
1. Pay for all the below by strategically cutting military spending some low-to-mid single-digit percentage.[0]
2. Eliminate public sector unions and most Civil Service classifications, both of which make it harder to fire low performers.
3. Peg government payroll for all positions to (if it exists) their private-sector counterpart, plus a healthy percentage, say 15%.[1]
4. Eliminate government pensions and match government employee 401(k) contributions up to a large percentage, e.g. 10% of salary.
5. Allow all government employees to enroll in Medicare.
[0] The military is already getting projects it doesn't want as pork, most of these cuts could be to those programs.
[1] There are legal caps to salary for the executive branch but there are already ways around those (e.g. as contractors).
I do agree that government jobs should be more competitive in the job market, just with caution.
You've identified the problem.
They really wanted me in that job, too. But then the state froze hiring and several months later the posting expired. It hasn't been re-listed since then and it's been nearly a year now.
It's "not speeding" /savedyouaclick
In the blog post he estimated it's saved $60,000 in fines. That's a drop in the bucket at the scale we're talking about (a quick Google says the proposed 2018 budget for Chicago was $10.1 billion), but still a decrease. Not only would it cost the government money to employ someone to go through this data and find hotspots like this, someone to go out and evaluate the signs, presumably several someones during the approval process to change signage, and finally people to make and install that signage, but the end result would be to purely cost them more money by decreasing revenue from fines.
I don't personally think governments are inherently evil (though some do seem to try harder than others), but even from a purely capitalistic viewpoint that's a hard sell for anyone who cares about their budget. At the very very best I could see it becoming a token effort that's mostly marketing ("look, we're using big data to make your life better!").
Governments absolutely should be looking to make profits, it's just that they don't necessarily have to make them in dollars.
So say you were able to objectively measure the value a program produced (costs are usually already known). If a program costs 10 units for every unit of value it produces, maybe it isn't a good program. If it produces modestly more value than it costs, it's making society a profit.
In this case, the dogmatic assumption that every endeavour should be financially profitable.
I was in no way implying the government was trying to make money off increased fines (quite the opposite with the last paragraph), simply that it would very likely end up costing them more than it saved the taxpayers to support such an initiative at a larger scale, and that would have a very nebulous gain.
Can you imagine being the Mayor of your department at work and proposing to your board of directors a multi-million dollar budget for next year that includes a huge carve out for evaluating all the petty fines and late fees you collected from customers because it’ll make them happier?
Goodwill is one thing, but who is ever going to approve that?
You've stumbled upon another capitalist dogma: that if you can't measure it (like, for instance in this case, the happiness of your road users), it has no value. I would argue that his numbers show that his efforts have prevented 600 fits of rage among the citizenry. That's gotta be worth something, right?
Can you imagine [spending money] because it’ll make [people] happier?
Again, government is not a business and should not be run as one. So yes, I can.
I understand what you're saying, but I think you're stretching the common understanding of "profits" and risking confusion because of it.
Absolutely, government should try to measure the impact of its actions, but expressing that in terms like profit can lead to undesirable consequences like the expectation that a successful self-promoter pretending to be a successful businessman can also be a successful president.
I’m sorry for the confusion, I thought that was blatantly self-obvious.
And we can actually estimate how much the government actually saves if it does not need to fine (that much). Let‘s first look at the costs of the status quo:
- it costs X to check rules are followed (here: no cars park where they must not); this is mostly personnel costs\* but note that we may be talking about „manhours spent that could have been spent doing more sensitive/productive things“
- it costs Y to maintain the infrastructure to process and follow up on the fines (here: the $190 million IBM contract\* )
- it costs Z to collect the fines, process the payments (personnel costs), follow up on those that do not pay, court fees (process & personnel costs), jail costs (cause it‘s ’murica), and whatnot.
Now, if there are no\* fines to prosecute, here‘s a few ways the state can gain money:
- Citizens spend less time and money with unproductive work (here: paying fines), leaving more time for work (or relaxation which again increases productivity) and money to spend (raising economic output + sales tax).
- Officers, beuracrats, and judges can spend their time dealing with more important work.
- E.g. in the case of parking fines, businesses affected by cars parking in their way can instead do their business unhampered, i.e. be productive and this increases, again, economic output.
All of that increases tax returns (or reduces tax money spent for dealing with the fines).
\* Obviously, there‘s no way fines will drop to zero, because humans. But minimizing fines allows to minimize capital and infrastructure costs and increases economical output, thus there‘s a net gain that can offset the costs to reach that goal, if not immediately then within a few years.
No, the government should be "THE people", not "for" or "by". We introduce many issues with representation of larger groups by very few individuals, that is precisely why democracy/government works best at a local scale rather than State or Nation-wide. It's not very hard to grasp why.
My suggestion: Remove the incentive by divorcing all fine (and similar things like seized goods) revenue from the government budget. Perhaps stipulate that it gets distributed to charities, or is split equally among taxpayers as a tax offset.
No, because they purposely fine you when you are a few kilometers about an arbitrary limit (let's say 55 km/h instead of 50 km/h) which is not speeding in any way and there is no data supporting any kind of increase of accidents at such levels of speeds.
On top of they they use all the dirty tricks in the books (mobile radars, radars right at the exit of a tunnel) which act like traps for anyone that is not constantly vigilant at their current speed. Let's face it, nobody is spending 100% of their attention on the speedometer while driving.
And when "normal" people around you get fined while you know for a fact they are not driving like crazy folks on the road, something is really, really wrong.
I've made an effort to work for local governments. I've even made an effort to volunteer for local governments, and do this sort of technology work directly for them instead of as a FOIA-enabled personal project.
I've never seen a flicker of interest, or found a job posting that would leave any room for this sort of work. I've only ever seen indifferent hostility to the volunteering offers, and while I understand why that could be worse - bureaucratically - than paying staff, it's still not exactly systems making an effort to serve the people.
The US Digital Service was a brilliant and wonderful project to get technologists doing exactly this. It hired a lineup of top-notch staff and got a lot of great stuff done. And, yes, it paid government salaries and appealed to civic duty to recruit. It sounds like a wonderful place to work. Outside of that one national-level pet project from Obama? I mean, I got involved with a local technology/privacy group. They're currently considering suing the town for not following its own surveillance-restricting ordinances about street-facing cameras, because the town found implementing them too hard - and isn't hiring anyone who can, and wouldn't accept volunteer labor to do the work.
It's not just that advertising pays better, it's that advertising doesn't actively avoid working with people for this sort of task.
My city has a thing called a target area. The idea being to spiff a region up, and rotate them to keep the city vital and livable overall.
They send a facillitator, who gathers interested people. Some projects get identified and everyone does their part. The people in need of city resources or people get an introduction and help navigating things.
Everyone else plays a role. Labor, outside (not city budget) fundraising, planning, feed the people, organizing, whatever.
My group used it's few years well. Traffic flow changes, a small park made from abandoned property, refurbish the school play areas and equipment.
It took a bit of time and some sweat, but not too much.
And I can drive through today and see that net good.
Some of the people I worked with did exactly what you just said, and for basic, make it better, reasons.
They could be. And having a beer or two with govt people will reveal these kinds of desires and ideas.
I have had those chats in the past. Got involved in a legislative effort and was given a sort of insiders view, tour.
What gets in the way, the number one thing, is money. Not lack of it so much as priorities and ripple effects.
Fixing the signs is a net public good. The ripple effect might be revenue targets going down, and the priority being that revenue being made from inane parking tickets all make for a bit of a mess.
The number two is people forgetting or ignoring who works for who and why. There are lots of little fiefdoms, all closely guarded. Barriers where there really should be collaboration.
And on that note, collaboration can be expensive. Sure, we can step out of your way on this, but about that school levy...