Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

The weird thing about surveillance is it's targets. If you want an orderly society and to enforce the law, there are easy ways to do so w/ no additional resources or powers. You can just start by enforcing the law. Open air illegal drug use, retail theft and illegal encampments are issues that plague many big cities. Addressing them would greatly improve the lives of nearly everyone, but for whatever reason there is just no political will. You can even just start keeping these repeat criminals in prisons longer.

I imagine these surveillance powers won't be used to address any of these issues, like cracking the network of retail theft. Rather they'll be used to arrest people for mean tweets. Canada is not as bad as UK at the moment, but consider the scope of what's tolerable these days in a Western society. For instance UK police reportedly made ~12,000 arrests, or about 30 per day, in one year over online communications offenses.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-make-30-arrests-a-...

Those offences also include, as well as ‘hurty words’, threats to kill, bomb hoaxes and harassment matters.

The legislation covers all types of communications including phone calls and letters, and because the authors haven’t bothered to drill down into the stats it is impossible to pick out the ‘hurty word’ offences from (for example) someone threatening to rape and murder an MP on X, or engaging in a campaign of harassment against their ex-partner.

I don’t understand the outrage around the “mean tweet” arrests. The UK has freedom of expression, somewhat more restrive than that in the US with more of a focus on public order, but with limits for things like threats and harassment. If it’s not acceptable to threaten to beat someone up (or threaten to murder/rape/burn down hotel) in person, why should it be acceptable to do it online?

Open air illegal drug use, retail theft and illegal encampments are not their own root cause, and "keeping these repeat criminals in prisons longer" will only worsen the socioeconomic conditions which compel others to engage in this activities.

Wage theft by employers in Canada outpaces retail theft, costing Canadian workers an estimated $15 billion annually. In contrast, organized retail shrink and shoplifting cost the retail sector roughly $9 billion per year.

I dont see your point. Because wage theft is a thing a small minority can steal and drive up costs for everyone.

Also I never understood what wage theft really is. My experience has been the opposite. People paid to work and doing shit like reading news, social media or shopping. You'll also see spikes in shopping on Monday as people go back to "work". That's the reason it's called cyber Monday. Most companies are extremely over staffed w maybe like 20% of people in non bs roles.

Im sure you'll point me to some left leaning think tank detailing how everyone is getting screwed over but its just not my experience

If you don't know what the wage theft is, why don't you just Google it before admitting that your experience is the opposite of the well studied and defined phenomenon you say you don't understand.

I'm puzzled.

Yes, I read about it. It doesn't really ring true to me. Some places don't pay overtime, true, but usually local mom and pop shops or jobs that are under the table. It's inconceivable to me that a large multi-national corporation would think "ah yes, let's illegally screw over a few low wage workers and hope no one finds out".

The contractor thing is pretty much BS. I remember the debate when California tried to classify Uber drivers as full time employees, when in reality they were able to set their own hours, work as much or as little as they wanted to and often drove for their competitors at the same time, picking rides based on fares offered.

So yeah, I think a lot of it is BS, but thanks for telling me to google it.

Don't feed the bots

I think we have a lot of evidence that police have no clue how to address retail theft.

Encampments and drug use should just be legal.

The problems you cited are merely symptoms of structural societal problems. Treating the symptoms is pretty much the only approach we’ve tried because trying to address the systemic problems is woke communist tyranny. The US, for example, has the 5th (and also 6th if you include Guam) highest incarceration rate in the world, and also owns 10% of the top 50 cities for homicides. Making it illegal to be addicted to drugs or too poor or mentally ill to provide yourself with housing does not cure the addicts of addiction, the mentally ill of mental illness, or the poor of their poverty. There’s a reason we eliminated debtors prisons.

Any problem can have a simple solution if you ignore enough about it. If this was entirely about personal responsibility or entirely about providing government services we’d have had these problems licked decades ago.

It's just another style of anarcho-tyrrany.

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