London Metro Police Deploy Facial Recognition Tech Sporting a 100% Fail Rate
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London is one the safest city I've lived in (along with Beijing). Chicago and San Francisco are the most unsafe cities I've lived in. People often don't realize this there, it's just that they have been desensitized to it.
I've seen countless accidents in the US, people getting bullied or mugged, cars getting broken in, homeless people everywhere (sometimes shooting themselves up with syringes). Walking in the streets at night can be really dangerous. Most people avoid public transport here and take uber.
On the other side you have London. You'd see single girls walking alone in the streets at 4am. Everyone takes the public transport, never seen anyone fight, almost no homeless people, everybody loves the cops. It's a different world.
…Do you live in a different London from me? You must be talking about London, Ontario, right?
There were at least three major Islamic terror attacks around my address in London in the past few years. I live just by Borough Market.
There were the three guys who drove the van into Borough Market and stabbed people, killing eight. There was the guy who drove his car into people on Westminster Bridge, killing five and injuring 50. There was also the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich, in the street in the middle of the day outside a primary school. Lee Rigby was a colleague of my best friend. My best friend and I were walking exactly where the murder was to take place a few weeks prior.
I'm also quite shocked you don't notice the homeless in London. Before I started my career in IT — when I was a broke musician — I used to eat with them every day. Hare Krishna feed the homeless most evenings in Holborn, and at the time on some nights you could get leftover Pret a Manger meals outside the Rymans on the Strand.
There's almost always people sleeping rough around London Bridge, and in many places all throughout the city. And if you enjoy the nightlife you're bound to see at least some street violence occasionally.
just lol. They were a few crimes, nothing major, and nobody in London really cared or seemed to be affected. Please stop spreading FUD.
> I'm also quite shocked you don't notice the homeless in London
Have you been to San Francisco, Chicago or LA? There is really no comparison.
And yes, I have been to SF and LA. I have walked through the tent cities and seen the people defecating in the streets. That was never the question, and your whataboutery is not constructive.
That's not because a lot of people break their neck walking up stairs, it's because how disproportionate and irrational the response to the terror scare is.
If news reported on every case of people dying a preventable death while utilizing something we have learned to build in a safer manner by now, they'd do little else.
It just isn't as flashy as people blowing up.
About 12,000 people die each year falling down stairs in the US alone.
Going by these numbers the proportionate response would be to spend at least a trillion dollars each year for a war on unsafe stairs.
A war on cancer on the other hand would eat up more than the US's GDP if it was to be in any way propotionate to the cost of lives.
Either would be more effective than the war on terror or the surveillance state at saving lives though.
ಠ_ಠ
I have lived in London, Newcastle, Sydney, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Warsaw, and Gdansk.
I have travelled the world most of my life, and I now perpetually travel, more or less living out of a suitcase. I have long-stayed in six different countries this year alone.
Refrain from sharing your opinions online unless you actually know what you're talking about. Clearly, you don't.
If your point was that San Francisco has more homeless, or that Chicago is more violent, well, I never disputed that did I?
You must have lived in the nicer parts of London, perhaps. I have a friend who has moved to London 6 months ago (her bf was already living there) and she told me that she's afraid of leaving her home all by herself after 8PM. She told me that while walking down the street she can "feel" the looks of the people whose religion I won't mention because I will probably get a ban, take that as you like.
If they're leering at her (she said she can "feel" their looks, which could mean looks of moral judgement or of objectification/lust), I can start to understand why she'd be afraid. But there is a subjective element to interpreting others' body language, and bringing religion into the complaint makes me think prejudice might be coloring that.
However, when it comes to setting public policy that trades off against individual liberty, authoritatively stating which of N cities is safest, and so on, I think the bar should be higher. Statements should be based on hard data such as numbers of violent attacks. This isn't practical for individuals (imagine: "based on extensive personal trials, I was murdered ten times as often by people who...") but is on the scale of cities/states/countries.
Since time immemorial, London has a lot of separate cultures, each doing their own thing. Sometimes people interact too, which is also nice. Walk down Bethnal Green Road one day. Observe the locals of Bangladeshi descent wearing their traditional clothing, going to their sweet shops, jewellers and butchers, speaking their language. I wouldn’t call this integration.
Not that my feelings are a good indication of anything, but comparing any European city to San Francisco and Chicago will leave you with a similar conclusion regarding personal safety.
So we took the liberty of soliciting a range of bids at different price points and as it turns out, G4S brought up a lovely little offering that they have titled 'Central Services from Terry Gilliam's Brazil'.
It is both cheap and looks the part, but most importantly, doesn't rely on anything actually working or anybody doing anything that could reasonably be described as work, especially at the top end, thus freeing up far more time for golf.
I think that a lot of British people have a set of beliefs about their country that are mostly inaccurate and increasingly divergent from reality.
One is that other countries look up to Britain and are keen to trade on terms dictated by Britain. Brexit is exposing this delusion.
A second is that Britain has a fearsome military that allows it to project its influence as a global power around the world.
A third is that Britain is the birth place of civil rights, has always fought against totalitarianism and has a legal system that since Magna Carta has always protected the primacy of the individual against the state. It's much easier to ignore the increasing number of CCTV cameras when you can just tell yourself that Britain invented Magna Carta so how could Britain's civil liberties not be the envy of the world.
With ID cards I think some of the opposition to them comes from the belief that they're the kind of thing a continental European country would do, as well as resentment against being obliged to carry something by the government. RIPA and CCTV aren't so much of a concern because they don't impose a physical obligation and so are only going to be bothersome to suspect people anyway.
I sometimes think that if/when Britain becomes a dictatorship it'll be a brutally-enforced version of Middle England, with death sentences for people who don't put their bins out properly and so on.
You just reminded me of this old bit of news -
- Half of councils use anti-terror laws to spy on 'bin crimes'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3333366/Half-of-coun...
I don't keep any ID with me. I don't see government issued ID as a means to identify me on the streets, but rather as a way of identifying myself for public and private services.
I can't really wrap my head around the fact that not all countries have ID. There must be a way to know who to tax, and who to service?
I personally don't have any problem with national ID for the reasons you state.
This is generally known as the 'nothing to hide' argument [1], for what it's worth.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/secrecy/you-may-...
A lot of my fellow citizens seems utterly delusional about their own country and its place in the world.
Often utility bills get used instead.
(I was actually part of the NO2ID campaign because we anticipated that it would be used for essentially discriminatory purposes like this, as well as the giant highly vulnerable database. It never occcured to us that they could impose ID requirements without issuing the cards!)
Additionally a driving licence isn’t considered a form of national ID (despite many people treating it like one)
fun scanFace(data: Picture): Person = nullHe's right everyone, the tests pass!
They should probably use a well-known public figure, such as the prime minister--someone whose movements can also be partially verified against public calendars--to verify that the system is working. Or just hire someone to walk a known path through camera FOVs regularly, using varying efforts to disguise appearance and at different times of day.
I always thought the weird face makeup in those dystopian sci-fi films like Johnny Mnemonic were just there to make the street hacker type characters look edgy, but in fact, even back in the '70s and '80s, the authors were on to something.