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Comment by yaakov34 | Hacker News Reader

The article tries to make it sound like this is some kind of a computer-age cyber-problem, but in fact, any face recognition technology, including the Mk. 1 human eyeball and brain, is going to have a certain false positive rate. Actually, the article says the pictures are already reviewed by humans before it's decided there is a match.

The real problem, in fact the only problem in my opinion, is the "guilty until proven innocent" approach of the state. They are sending letters which state that the license has already been revoked! If they sent a letter saying "we strongly suspect fraud, you must verify your identity in 30 days", I would not have a problem with that, as long as they have a decent match.

Instead, we get talk about how "driving is a privilege". Guess what - working for the state is also a privilege, and people who abuse the citizens who pay their salaries should lose it.

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Part of the problem is that the state controls the means of living anything resembling a normal life, and if it decides to abuse its power, its employees are seldom all that interested in your problem. Megan McArdle had a similar DMV snafu not too long ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/01/car-succ... .

Hopefully there will be some movement on increasing accountability for state workers. It is not impossible - I heard that New York City is ending its infamous "rubber rooms" in which bad teachers are paid to do nothing for years and years, because it's unrealistically difficult to get them fired.

I think in this situation, more arguements should be made that driving is not a privilege, it is an unfortunate necessity of modern life. What percentage of Americans could work without a car?

What percentage of Americans could work without a car?

Whatever percentage of Americans who could find housing within walking distance of work.

Okay, yeah, if the answer is that short, it sounds like a flippant response to a serious question. But what I mean to illustrate here is that we always have to deal with policy trade-offs. There are a whole set of policies all over the United States that zone neighborhoods of houses to be separate from places where factories or stores or other workplaces are found, and those POLICIES then make cars seem indispensable. But if cars are indispensable, it becomes all the more urgent to make sure everyone driving a car is driving safely, so it becomes more urgent to figure out how to keep unsafe drivers from driving. This is the conundrum we get into in a society that doesn't plan actively to decouple employability from owning and operating a car.

Basis for knowledge for my comment: I have lived for six years of my life, in two separate three-year stays, in a country where I never drove (even though I had a driver license there). Even during much of the time I have lived in the United States, I have commuted from home to work on foot, or by bus, or by bicycle. It can be done. What trade-offs society accepts in making it more or less easy to obtain paying work without investing in a driver license and car first depends on the political process, of course.

Don't most Americans live in cities, now? Dallas has awful public transportation, but hypothetically, you could use it to get to work - it would just turn your 30-60 minute commute into a 2.5 hour adventure.

Public transportation would be faster, more effective and comfortable then cars if more people used it.

I disagree. In Switzerland they have some of the best public transport in the world and I still tend to chose car fairly often. Public transport has the advantage that you can do something (e.g. watch movies, read books, etc.) while traveling while in a car that time is thrown in the trash.

But the problem is that public transport goes near where lots of people want to go but doesn't go where any person actually wants to go. This means further traveling time after the public transport bit is finished. And probably connections as well. This means, for me, that public transport takes about twice as long to get anywhere.

In my opinion the future is robot controlled cars. All the benefit of public transport with none of the inefficiencies, etc. Public transport is just an intermediate step.

The best thing about public transport in cities is that you don't need parking space. Hunting for parking space can easily take more time than you save by getting directly to your destination, and public parking can be quite expensive.

That said, many offices have reserved parking, which fixes this - though that real estate is valuable.

Well if my idea comes to fruition the automatic car service would only need parking for "overflow" cars when not in use. Some percentage of the system would always be in use so the cars would only not be in use when they were being repaired/upgraded/whatever.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem, for sure.

The RMV in MA is basically their own governing body, they have no attachment to the courts and can and will do as they please. Many of the decisions solely rest on whether or not the person you talk to is having a good day.

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