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Comment by Emma_Goldman | Hacker News Reader

I thought about this recently. I'm occasionally woken up by souped-up cars in the early hours of the morning. You can hear them from maybe from a mile away. They must wake up hundreds, even thousands of people on late night joyrides. It's incredible that it's legal. Why allow something which is entirely pointless to cause such mass public nuisance?

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Yes, happens frequently to me in my area of Queens. Especially on weekends. Often, it's difficult to go back to sleep. A day of productivity lost for me and probably many others for no particular reason. It's kind of a tragedy. I once commented on it in the neighborhood FB group, only to receive a cascade of "get over it" and "Karen" comments. It's amazing to me how few New Yorkers are aware of the effects of noise. And then there's the honking. Every day, on a quiet neighborhood morning, at least one person will feel the need to make their displeasure at having to briefly stop known to hundreds of people. It's the main reason I can't live in NYC full time. Not sure what it would take to get anyone to care, but it seems that it'd require such a large cultural shift as to be almost impossible to change. Even NYPD use their siren through almost every intersection for no particular reason.

I think part of the issue is that there's a wide distribution of sleeping sensitivity. I'm a very light sleeper, and I find that a bad night sleep can ruin an entire day of work. Which is partly because I write for a living, which I really can't do well when I'm groggy. But for how many people are those two things true? I don't think many. A lot of people aren't light sleepers, and a lot of light sleepers aren't fazed by a bad night of sleep.

I used to sleep under the number 3 wire on a carrier. Good luck waking me up with an exhaust.

Seems like a superpower to me. Light sleeping was probably great 50,000 years ago, when other human tribes might raid you in the night, and when big cats might be lurking in the darkness. Back then, heavy sleepers were effectively free-riders: the light sleepers would act as an alarm for the whole tribe. But, today, it's a fairly serious maladaption.

What about police helicopters, which are out every night for hours at a time.

They are very very loud and will wake you up from even a deep sleep.

I've never heard a police helicopter at night in the country where I live (UK). I rarely see or hear them at all.

Edit: After googling, it looks like there are about 2000 police helicopters in the US, but only 20 in the UK. As far as I can tell, there are the same number of police helicopters in LA as across the whole of the UK.

The US is about 40 times bigger than the UK, according to Wolfram Alpha.

"there are the same number of police helicopters in LA as across the whole of the UK"

Police helicopters tend to be heavily concentrated in cities. A better metric might be population. The US population is only about 5 times bigger than that of the UK. It therefore has 20x more police helicopters per capita.

Police helicopters are also more heavily used in poorer (and higher crime, but also more heavily policed in general, thus inflating crime statistics) areas of those cities.

They’re primarily used to hunt for escapees, and to keep eyes on someone running or involved in a chase. Poor areas don’t have the resources to buy a police helicopter, that’s why they’re sometimes loaned to other departments in these situations. I have never seen or heard of one being deployed to control poor people.

My country doesn't have different departments. One department for the whole country / state.

They make use of helicopters typically before a car arrives.

Pretty common in my country [Oceania], it stays out all night only going back for fuel so they supervise any calls they get, as it's already out.

>It's incredible that it's legal.

That depends on the jurisdiction. In NY it sounds like it's already illegal, and this new law will be stricter.

> It's incredible that it's legal. Why allow something which is entirely pointless to cause such mass public nuisance?

It’s actually already illegal. Most cities have noise ordinances that forbid sounds produced above a certain dB level. But like most cities there’s more important criminals to catch.

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