Comment by thrwyoilarticle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrwyoilarticle | Hacker News Reader

thrwyoilarticle

The modern Cannonball Run is a tale of the privilege certain classes of people have in encounters with law enforcement.

Most of these people share their stories on the youtube channel for Vinwiki. One of the record holders, Doug Tabbutt, has gone on record on that channel as saying he carries a PBA 'get out of jail free' card: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42780382

Reading the article, you might think they're lucky not to get pulled over. But they do get pulled over. They're lucky because they get away with it. There are multiple stories from this group of people on that youtube channel where they explain how.

Sometimes they cover the cars with pro-police political nods. Sometimes they race in cars that are deliberately made to look like foreign police cars: technically legal but the intention is clear. Sometimes, they participate in slower, legal rallies to raise money for police charities, which give away clothing that is convenient to wear for their illegal races.

The Cannonball Run is an exercise in using bias and privilege to avoid retribution for deadly crimes. These people are proud, unapologetic criminals who get away with it because they're in the right clique.

Another one of these people is Alex Roy. He works as a director for Argo AI, where they make autonomous vehicle technology.

While I don't think they should exist at all and are blatant corruption, that's wildly overstating the level of "discretion" you're likely to receive for a PBA card.

They might get you out of a minor ticket, in the state/area it's from, and that's less likely if you can't articulate why you have it/how you know the officer it was given to to distribute. (to my knowledge, they're only a particularly widespread thing in the NYC metro area, as well).

They're not likely to get you out of a ticket for the kinds of offenses Cannonball Run participants are committing, IMO.

Agreed. PBA card holders are usually given a professional courtesy but it’s at the officers discretion to honor it or not. For the offenses committed in the Cannonball Run it won’t work very well. It’s also geographically limited to mostly the NY, and NJ area.

If you buy in to intersectionalism then everything becomes an intersectional issue and everyone is a group you aren't in.

Its actually just social engineering.

> Reading the article, you might think they're lucky not to get pulled over. But they do get pulled over.

But if you get pulled over, can you still beat the current record? The recent record-breaking account that I read seemed to imply they did not get pulled over.

Yeah a pull-over, as I understand it, is a run ending event. They try their hardest not to get pulled over.

run-ending but not life or bank-account -ending

I thought this was Hacker News?

The essence of hacking is seeing the world how it is to accomplish exceptional things. Yes American police are corrupt, as has been thoroughly covered in its own right pretty much everywhere. You can still appreciate the focused result while not condoning the adjacent culture of corruption.

"Proud, unapologetic criminals who get away with it because they're in the right clique" is more appropriate to describe the corrupt police themselves. The public fallout from a Cannonball is the possibility of a car crash that seemingly hasn't happened, whereas the fallout from the police corruption is (among other things) the routine murder of innocent people. The latter is infuriating, but dumping that anger onto adjacent topics is not a way to build consensus.

> The public fallout from a Cannonball is the possibility of a car crash that hasn't happened

Do you have anything to support this? This isn't an officially monitored sport and participants aren't going to own up to getting non a participants injured or killed.

I've been spending a lot of time on highways this year and I've seen lots of near accidents caused by people driving way to fast. While some speeding doesn't automatically make you an dangerous criminal, this kind of of reckless speeding absolutely is quite dangerous, reprehensible, and should lead to criminal charges for anyone who has admitted to participating.

I later added the word "seemingly" because I agree, there is a strong disincentive to admit details that would tie a crash to a speed run.

I personally see more near accidents caused by inattentive drivers than by speeding. Someone changing lanes without checking their mirror is dangerous even with a 10mph speed differential. It is also my understanding that while Cannonball drivers are doing 120mph+ in open stretches, they slow down when they hit traffic. You're not going to make it 3000 miles weaving between lanes with a high speed differential.

I'd imagine their behavior is similar to what what I routinely see from state police, who will come up on a bunch of traffic going 110+, and then slow down / tailgate until people in the left lane pull over and let them through (there's that culture of corruption again). I also generally see much more of this than of non-police speeding, so once again it feels a bit myopic to focus on a small contingent of people flouting social norms rather than routine harmful norms.

The most dangerous driver I saw recently was a a driver who passed me on the shoulder of a divided 4 lane freeway with a 20+ mph speed differential because they couldn't be bothered to wait for a semi in the left lane to finish passing. This is exactly the sort of antics I would expect from a significant portion of drivers who are trying to set time records in crossing the country. Especially since these racers use spotters and other tech specifically to know when they can get away with driving recklessly.

> I also generally see much more of this than of non-police speeding,

Ummm... This is a laughably false claim that leads me doubt all your other observations. I have driven all over the USA and in every single place there are more non-cop speeders than cop speeders, simply because there are far more non-cops than cops.

While I do agree that there are significant problems with police corruption, that in no way excuses these cannonball racers from engaging in this activity with reckless disregard for the safety of other road users.

You seem quite happy to excuse this behavior based on nothing more than your assumptions about how cautions people trying to set competive records are without any evidence to back up those assumptions.

> driver who passed me on the shoulder ... with a 20+ mph speed differential ... is exactly the sort of antics I would expect from a significant portion of drivers who are trying to set time records in crossing the country

Your guess is as a good as mine. I would expect that for a 2800 mile journey, the priority is avoiding interruptions - eg crashes or getting pulled over because you've attracted determined police attention from other motorists calling you in. Reading about it, the whole thing seems like a game of coordinated logistics rather than extreme piloting.

> every single place there are more non-cop speeders than cop speeders, simply because there are far more non-cops than cops.

I'm sure we're defining speeding differently. On a road with average traffic of 75mph, I would only consider significantly over 80mph to be speeding in its own right. I see very few non-cops doing these speeds, whereas every moving state cop I see is cruising at 110mph+ or tailgating waiting to pass. You can tell based on how quickly they close distance from way behind you to passing you.

> You seem quite happy to excuse this behavior

It's literally the only way to have an interesting conversation about it. If cannonball run attempts become common enough where they create a statistical danger, then I'll be concerned about it. Until then, I'll stay concerned with the mundane-and-bad rather than getting worked up about the exceptional.

Indeed, nobody announces that they're setting out to do a cannonball run. This is a classical case of survivorship bias.

Well, they do. Modern cannonball as far as I understand it to be is a team sport. You have spotters, decoys (they speed past speed traps ahead of you to occupy the only cop in the area), even helpers at the fuel stops to help you fuel.

This all has to be coordinated ahead of time. I think the runs are also planned out so you don’t go through areas of high traffic. 150+ on an empty desert road is relatively safe.

Even still, if somebody dies, the whole team is legally a conspiracy. Not the kind of thing you want to talk about in public.

Yeah, the Canonball run stuff is epic. Very much in the spirit of what everyone told me hackers were.

Not sure I’d call bootlicking hacking in any sense, quite the opposite. Especially because some people aren’t capable of doing it just by the nature of how they look.

Hacking inherently involves engaging with a system, and empathizing with it more deeply than even those who believe in it. The bootlicking itself is not hacking, rather it's a step in furtherance of the hacking.

And I'm really struggling to come up with a definition of hacking that would imply everyone should be able to do the same hack? Hacking is individualistic and mutually-exclusive by its very nature. Once enough people start doing something, it's just called routine.

>Sometimes they race in cars that are deliberately made to look like foreign police cars: technically legal but the intention is clear

In California, there was a spate of people who decorated their cars to look like PLA military police. At least one of them got arrested for "impersonating an officer" and "misusing a public seal". It was somewhat novel because those laws hadn't been used to "protect" the symbols of foreign institutions before.

Interesting this aspect wasn't included in the article

I wonder how much 'privilege' the average Joe can exercise.

Bruce Springsteen (he of the mighty virtue signaling) showed how it was done last year, making a DUI vanish into thin air.

^^^ All of this is true.

Cannonball Run participants are behaving like sociopaths. It's a gross activity.

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