Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

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Well, the law will be two years old soon. There's one local news article about it where the county's PIO clarified the county's intention [1]. Aside from that, alllllll of these homeowners innocently working on their cars in their own garages and yards around the county and getting hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in fines have resulted in... exactly zero other local news coverage that I can find.

Every other search result about this thing is some motoring site where the internet commenters are absolutely certain that this is yet another example of draconian liberal legislative overreach and just nobody can really do anything on their own property anymore and it's all just so unfair...

Again, I'm expressly not defending the law as it's written, but if the letter of every bad law was to be applied equally to everyone in the same instant, there would not be a single free person anywhere in the country. Like all the others, this one is being applied selectively.

[1]: Warning: really obnoxious autoplay videos, because every local news site is on a headlong rush to the bottom of the pit of asshole design. https://www.abc10.com/article/entertainment/television/progr...

> Well, the law will be two years old soon. There's one local news article about it where the county's PIO clarified the county's intention [1]. Aside from that, alllllll of these homeowners innocently working on their cars in their own garages and yards around the county and getting hit with hundreds and hundreds of dollars in fines have resulted in... exactly zero other local news coverage that I can find.

Big cities with traffic problem enact this kind of laws to discourage personal car ownership. Sure, just because now it's not actively reported as enforced doesn't mean it won't be in the future, and it wouldn't be the first time where the enactment and the enforcement of a low separated in time to make the pill easier to swallow.

Exactly. If they have to clarify it in some press release, then they should be amending the ordinance so that it is clear.

Unfortunately, the system is lazy. Politicians don't bother to amend laws when these issues arises, police can use their "professional discretion" to enforce or not enforce a law (which leads to unequal enforcement), and the courts tend to "interpret" laws in ways that don't make sense (partially because of the politicians I mentioned earlier, but also a misapplication of statutory construction rules and lenity).

The idea that giving the authorities the ability to enforce selectively on whom they like is a good thing is honestly bizarre to read. It's the classic preserve of biased prosecution.

EDIT for response since I'm rate-limited. I interpreted the following section:

> Again, I'm expressly not defending the law as it's written, but if the letter of every bad law was to be applied equally to everyone in the same instant, there would not be a single free person anywhere in the country. Like all the others, this one is being applied selectively.

as something akin to "I think the law isn't great, but if any law were applied fairly, we would all be in jail. Fortunately most laws aren't applied fairly"

But I can understand if that was a misinterpretation.

Not saying this is a good or bad thing, but one way to make laws not be selective is to have mandatory enforcement and mandatory sentencing required for every law. If the law could be interpreted to apply to a situation, then it does apply to a situation in this model. Laws would be very carefully written under this and extremely well specified. With this you could be much more sure that a law is applied as written, whereas at the moment you have to continually look at the results of cases and can't see when people are let off the hook because someone in an authority position is well disposed to the person because they are friends with them or for other reasons. This can happen before a case goes to trial or during the trial.

Yeah, I disagree completely with whoever wrote that this was "a good thing". Who was that, anyway?

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