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Comment by inglor | Hacker News Reader

How is enforcing the law to not make loud noises that make everyone else's life around you worse a bad thing?

What justifies someone suffering from PTSD, with a sleeping baby in their home or just enjoying life being put through noise pollution just because someone wants to make loud noises?

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Police officers can pull those people over and issue citations for vehicles that are too loud. You could create similar justifications for using these systems for monitoring Wrongspeak in the same way by citing PTSD, the children, or people who just want to enjoy life without being put through thought pollution when someone's thoughts are contradicting the Cabinet's thoughts.

It's better to not have this technology deployed in the first place. It's very easy to have an officer pull someone over if their vehicle is too loud, issue a hefty citation in place, and then let word get around that you will get pulled over for exceeding the local decibel limit for your vehicle.

I'm not sure that adding a layer of human discretion into this is going to make it more palatable to the affected people. For something like traffic stops, being able to make a convincing argument that you're not picking and choosing who to cite for prejudiced reasons is probably useful. Whether that's a good equilibrium, I'm less sure, but I get why a government might pursue it.

Sure you could which is why your society should have strong protections for content of speech. Technology should not and will not be the limiting factor on enforcement of laws, the laws and the constraints we place on them are.

I don't trust the Party to care about protecting speech. Or to steward this technology properly. Or to be honest about what they're doing with the hardware. What the Party says publicly and what it does internally are two different things.

What are you going to do if they abuse the power? Protest and try to raise awareness? They'll just bankrupt the entire group of protestors for being too loud.

If you want your concerns to be taken seriously, I think I’d steer clear of using terms like “the Party.”

It just doesn’t seem worth it to try to have a serious conversation (and no it’s not because The Party is conspiring to dismiss you).

Do you prefer the Cabinet? Anyway if all you have are qualms about the allusions, then that’s just the same as saying you don’t like what I said because it makes you uncomfortable. It doesn’t invalidate what I said. Notice how you ignored a legitimate question to gripe over allusions and words.

I don’t know, are you talking about the Cabinet? And no, it has to do with imprecision and lack of seriousness. For example I never would’ve guessed that “the Party” was meant to refer to “the Cabinet.”

So your claim is that in the US, where there are strong protections for content of speech, the Secretary of Defense, Transportation Sec, Secretary of Interior, etc, will bankrupt protestors?

Seems like a laughable claim but I’m interested to see your evidence for it.

To argue in court that a vehicle is too loud, they'd need a meter in their cars similar to how they measure speed to be able to argue in court that you were speeding. So in effect, you'd have the exact same thing except it would be mobile.

You'd need police officers in police cruisers waiting for the sign of trouble. The officers would communicate with one another when they notice a loud vehicle pass by. Then they can use a noise gun to get a decibel reading. This is an intentional physical bottleneck placed on the surveillance apparatus so that it is limited to only identifying and pursuing those cars that are too loud. You would have the same end result if the fines are hefty enough without needing to build and deploy a surveillance dragnet that you won't be able to escape from once it exists.

A town or city would do better with a few police officers in cruisers keeping an eye on things than with these boxes deployed on every streetlight listening 24/7.

As the article said, several microphones are required to pinpoint the location of sound. Location and distance are very important to measuring sound.

I forget what city recently tried to enforce vehicle noise, but I recall reading that virtually all tickets were thrown out under argument that the distance, angle of meter, nearby materials weren't perfect enough to measure adequately.

Furthermore as far as I've seen, measurements are with a handheld meter after the vehicle is pulled over, not when the driver is wide-open-throttle and over the speed limit.

It makes much more sense to measure from a fixed location while the vehicle is in motion.

We're very much stopping "thought pollution" all the time, we're not too great at it but the equivalent to someone forcing sound on you is someone forcing thoughts on you.

We have laws and automatic tools (again, not great ones) to find propaganda and lies and try to stop them. We absolutely should let people decide what information to be exposed to better.

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