>The Domain Awareness System is the largest digital surveillance system in the world
I wonder how it compares to China and if facial recognition tech is as pervasive in America as it is in China.
You introduce the surveillance as a way of mitigating extreme, rare occurrences, like terrorism.
You gradually make it common to use when solving major crimes, like murders.
Only then do you start tracking down traffic infractions.
Doctorow calls this the 'Shitty Technology Adoption Curve' https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/
I was on a jury for a court case where: the incident was caught by a bus camera, but the police waited 6 months to ask for footage, footage is deleted after 1 month and they know this. The shop across the road captured the incident on CCTV but the cop had "tech problems" trying to transfer the video file to his laptop - even then they didn't even bother to sign a document stating what they saw in the video.
CCTV and cops (at least in and around London) are just totally useless. And the gov is useless too, "fighting" crime rather than addressing what causes crimes.
Otherwise, it's not too bad a place to live for a travelling Kiwi, great launchpad into Europe, oh wait they fucked that up with Brexit, too.
So pick another country or just fill-in the required paperwork. Wetwipe.
I've lived in several countries at this point, and no, it's not just an administrative task of completing paperwork. Immigration is hard. Do it wrong, and you might find yourself in Rwanda, for example.
And maybe don't call people 'wetwipes' on HN? If you want to hurl insults, well: All the web is yours, except HN. Attempt no landing there.
As a result the US has a higher crime rate than many other countries including China. If you don’t trust China’s numbers look at Singapore, which has a population density similar to NYC with an order of magnitude less crime. Singapore is safer at night than NYC is during the day. Why? Cameras. If you commit an offense, you will be caught, without question.
And also it’s a police state where you get sentenced to death for drug smuggling and can be punished for doing drugs in another country while on holiday if you are a citizen, for example.
To the naive, Singapore is a paradise, but once you visit for long enough you realise it’s just a super nice prison and it’s not very fun being with the other lags
In the other hand calling it “Disneyland” probably oversells how fun Singapore is. It is a fairly boring place in my experience.
Two countries can be bad. It’s not a competition.
It's not an American style of life, but I'm sure it's attractive to a lot of people who simply aren't into drugs, partying, or living the high life.
One night went up to the bar on the roof (god damn the drinks were pricey) clearly ultra wealthy peeps up there, group of very wealthy looking Africans with a magnum of champagne openly smoking weed.
But being a selfish prick is a privilege, not a right. Why do you feel entitled to do shitty things that make your city a worse place for everyone?
Drugs aren't linked to violence unless you make laws to link them.
Like I said, I would not care if druggies were decent people who just wanted to get high sometimes. However, unfortunately that is not how it works in the reality. They are the worst kind of people and I have zero sympathy for them after all the shit I've seen them do.
...are we still having to go over this?
There are no such people. Everybody does drugs, unless you adopt a definition of "drug" which is designed specifically to accommodate this assertion, rather than apply in some useful way to reality. It's difficult to even create a definition of 'drug' which convincingly excludes survival necessities like water and oxygen, but remains otherwise consistent.
There are some drugs which are, for reasons varying from racism to capriciousness to an intemperant desire for greater cartel income, prohibited to varying degrees in various jurisdictions.
You can go to Singapore and consume sugar, coffee, nicotine, alcohol, and many other drugs while enjoying the tacit endorsement of your behavior by the local state apparatus. You can also consume cocaine, opioids, and plenty of other drugs so long as you pay black market rates and do so shielded by privilege so as not to run afoul of an investigation. You can even consume cannabis, though of course it is very difficult to smuggle, so you pay a higher premium.
If so, isn't that begging the question? If a person wants to go to a place where drugs are prohibited, and "drug" is defined as a substance which is prohibited, then doesn't every jurisdiction qualify?
If a person "simply isn't into drugs", with "drugs" defined by the local state, isn't that person just in favor of the state-prescribed diet? And it really has nothing to do with drugs?
If such a person goes from a place where drug X is prohibited to one where it is not, does their preference suddenly change?
One better: if a person goes from a place where drug X is prohibited to one where it is compulsory, do they suddenly fall in love with the drug?
Of course not. Because nobody's preferences work that way. Ergo, there is no actual real human who meets the critera, "simply isn't into drugs" upon close examination.
Sure, there may be people who are pro-prohibition, but I imagine nearly all of them are in a position to financially gain from it. In terms of outcomes, it's horrible policy, especially if a target is reduction of death and disease from drug use.
So why are they not considered drugs? Is it because of literally the comment you responded to?
Oh yes, I'm sure all of the Indians crammed into the back of a caged ute on their way to building sites have income equality. Saw loads of stuff like that there.
Or the fact that being gay is still illegal, didn't stop me "breaking the law" the second day I was there.
I put Singapore into the same category as Dubai; it's all a facade and all can be conveniently ignored with a veil of money.
How many children were murdered (by guns or drugs) in school in Singapore last year?
Oh come on, your yardstick is completely ill-calibrated. Among polities that
- didn't exist as independent polities until post-WWII
- were not modernized/westernized/democratized until post-WWII (thereby excluding NZ)
you'd be hard-pressed to name one that you'd be rather born as a random citizen in. Perhaps another of the Asian tigers, like TW. Presumably you have in mind, as Gibson probably did, a country that has had a longer history of independent or democratic rule and economic development.
The third paragraph claimed it was a prison but it did not say the safety came from it being a prison.
the third paragraph and first paragraph are not in conflict.
Crime rate is a statistic for which a majority of countries provide numbers that are completely dissociated from reality.
You can, of course, take the numbers seriously, as if the statistics are being published in good faith. Unless you have some sort of independent oversight, however, that isn't beholden to or biased by the country being assessed, then taking those numbers seriously is probably a silly thing to do.
The US gets lots of independent verification and validation of crime statistics. They're frequently analyzed at local, state, and federal level by journalists, students, activists, authors, and government officials. At every level an official number is published, it gets challenged, so there are incentives keeping the politicians and bureaucrats honest. They get slammed when they get caught lying, and they get caught lying because the public and the media keep track of things and demand accountability.
Some stuff, like total officer involved shootings, dog shootings by officials, abuses of power, and things of that nature, don't get publicly disclosed much of the time, so there are gaps in what we know and what officials are required to disclose.
The US isn't perfect, but you can get pretty good numbers that actually correlate with reality. Even other western countries don't always have trustworthy reporting and accounting for government actions. The best you'll ever get is a glowing narrative.
It does not account for the 1000s of illegal small assaults that happen daily. Anyone spending time in NYC will eventually run into this.
But then you get the one person who says "I've never been mugged" or "I've never been punched" or a journalist vists for a day and says it's all fine.
Meanwhile there is a lot of stockholm syndrome of what QoL people put up with on a day to day basis.
I am guessing to you are referring to how multiple private organizations can just poll for my social security number and I cant do anything about it? Yeah...
All the bad shit, none of the good. We may as well just have a national ID, it’d be less-bad than what we have now and might provide a jumping off point for making it a lot less-bad.
What private industry surveillance is mandatory? FFS.
I live in WA and for the past 5+ years I've only ever presented my driver's license to TSA agents at the airport.
...unless getting carded at the store for buying beer counts?
Unless you’re buying everything with cash, your purchasing history will be connected to it, too. Where you drive (license plate scanning and data-sharing is widespread). Facial recognition in stores means paying cash might not even help (seen the ones that highlight your face on a monitor when you walk in the store?)
But we have to pretend we don’t have a national ID system any time it might be convenient to a person to have that.
Of course South Koreans know better than American soldiers not to commit crimes in South Korea, because prison there is so awful. Unsurprisingly they have a much lower crime rate than America.
Statistically, the Norwegian system with "holiday prisons" works well, with very low recidivism rates for most types of crime.
There's more to it than that. A sheisty will defeat a camera.
When I was in Xinjiang there were like 5-10 cameras at every intersection. Surely NYC isn't at that level?