License Plate Scans Show Where You've Been

Exactly. How can he not understand the inherent flaws with a totalitarian/authoritarian system like the one he's proposing? I'm thinking he either he flunked history/social studies/politics or he's just an elaborate troll. My guess is the latter.

I'll be the first to say that I don't think CreepyUncleGoogle is a bad guy. I just don't agree with him most (not all) of the time. I just wish he'd understand that there's a lot more corruption, ignorance, and evil in our government than he sees.
 
That's totally true and I don't at all disagree with the idea that a system can't predict everything that they'll do. That's why I think the overseer computers would just notify actual people (like I said before) and have them go like check stuff out to make sure everything is okay. Also, if someone is trying to kill themselves, we already consider them a danger to themselves if we find out and take them to people who can help them regardless of how they feel. That doesn't make them subservient or whatever even though they might feel like that's the case. No one wants to keep them in like a place that can help them forever. They're there to get better and then go back to being productive members of the collective society.

As for liberty and that idealized stuff, yeah that's exactly what the system would help make happen. By preventing crime and doing the intervention thing, it can help citizens that would otherwise be hurt by someone else not be and also help prevent self-inflicted harm. That fits perfectly with their role of protecting someone's freedom.

...

Honestly, at this point I hope you're joking. You must lead a very sheltered life where everyone you interact with is a shiny happy person. Wanting additional contact between the State - or people acting on behalf of the State - is not something that most people agree with or desire.

C. S. Lewis said it best: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/33029.html
 
Nazi Germany required everyone to get identify the Jewish population so they could annihilate them. Please read about the "Final Solution".

Once the government has an easy to access database, there isn't a lot stopping Congress, Senate, and whoever the President is at the time to pass a law that uses that information to persecute the population by the information in that database.

We've seen it time and time again that Congress/Senate/the President pass some law over time and it took years and years for the Judicial Branch to say, "oh wait, you can't do that." And often, that's far too late.

I can't fix your trust issues. If you don't like having identification cards and think that those are an indication that people are gonna get sent off have stuff happen to them that happened in Germany like a hundred years ago, then I can understand why it'd be easy for you to mistake what I'm saying as being somehow related to that, but I do think that most reasonable people don't have problems with government issued identification since you kinda need it to drive a car in the US.

Exactly. How can he not understand the inherent flaws with a totalitarian/authoritarian system like the one he's proposing? I'm thinking he either he flunked history/social studies/politics or he's just an elaborate troll. My guess is the latter.

Where in my posts did I say we need to change the system we use to elect public officials? That's not even related to what I'm talking about and I dunno how you could even get that from anything I've posted in this thread.

While I do like the idea of nobility and stuff, its more because of the whole cool romantic history of nobility (which even I know isn't how it actually was most of the time with the whole knights and princesses in castles) I don't think most democratic societies would deal with that very well or the whole bigger divide in social strata that it implies.

Anywho...no, this isn't about the type of government or changing the electoral process. I'm okay with how that works now except for the fact that party politics polarizes people and makes them argue about dumb stuff.
 
...

Honestly, at this point I hope you're joking. You must lead a very sheltered life where everyone you interact with is a shiny happy person. Wanting additional contact between the State - or people acting on behalf of the State - is not something that most people agree with or desire.

C. S. Lewis said it best: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/33029.html

How could you think I believe everyone is a good person? I think there's huge benefits in developing a system that keeps an eye on people and alerts the right agencies to get them help which clearly implies that I'm totally aware that there's not so great people out there and that we need to do stuff to deal with them.
 
I can't fix your trust issues. If you don't like having identification cards and think that those are an indication that people are gonna get sent off have stuff happen to them that happened in Germany like a hundred years ago, then I can understand why it'd be easy for you to mistake what I'm saying as being somehow related to that, but I do think that most reasonable people don't have problems with government issued identification since you kinda need it to drive a car in the US.



Where in my posts did I say we need to change the system we use to elect public officials? That's not even related to what I'm talking about and I dunno how you could even get that from anything I've posted in this thread.

While I do like the idea of nobility and stuff, its more because of the whole cool romantic history of nobility (which even I know isn't how it actually was most of the time with the whole knights and princesses in castles) I don't think most democratic societies would deal with that very well or the whole bigger divide in social strata that it implies.

Anywho...no, this isn't about the type of government or changing the electoral process. I'm okay with how that works now except for the fact that party politics polarizes people and makes them argue about dumb stuff.

He isn't referring to government ID cards and I'm not talking about democracy, I'm talking about this all omnipotent, omnipresent system you're suggesting to alert the authorities whenever someone gets in a car with a gun. :eek:
 
i.e.
I think it's also worth keeping an eye on what everyone is doing so we can see signs that they're planning to hurt someone else and stop them from that to not only prevent crime, but make a positive difference in the would-be criminal's life. Like if we could automatically disable someone's car after an image recognition system sees them getting into it while carrying a gun could prevent a lot of crazy people from doing the school shooting thing.
 
He isn't referring to government ID cards and I'm not talking about democracy, I'm talking about this all omnipotent, omnipresent system you're suggesting to alert the authorities whenever someone gets in a car with a gun. :eek:

I did say it would take into account other risk factors like the person's gender, current life circumstances, and (absolutely) it should account for past criminal activity too among other things. Besides that, this kinda system's pieces are all sorta falling into place already and it's only a matter of time before it's fully realized and happens whether a few people disagree with it or not. Partly corporations are already positioned to analyze the data they collect and partly governments have some of these systemic elements. It's looming and I think that a proactive citizen should get involved in making it work better instead if being resistant to it.
 
He isn't referring to government ID cards and I'm not talking about democracy, I'm talking about this all omnipotent, omnipresent system you're suggesting to alert the authorities whenever someone gets in a car with a gun. :eek:

The best part about the ID cards argument is that the people who want government ID cards are generally the same ones who say that they shouldn't need ID to vote.

I think there's huge benefits in developing a system that keeps an eye on people and alerts the right agencies to get them help which clearly implies that I'm totally aware that there's not so great people out there and that we need to do stuff to deal with them.

Okay - that's fine if you want that, but who decides what is right and wrong? For example, if someone in the government suddenly decides that the 'church' of Scientology is a terrorist group, where is the recourse for those people? They're criminals now and they've lost most of their rights. Last time I checked you could throw 'terrorists' into some base in Cuba that we snookered out of them 100+ years ago and didn't have to give them a trial.
 
How could you think I believe everyone is a good person? I think there's huge benefits in developing a system that keeps an eye on people and alerts the right agencies to get them help which clearly implies that I'm totally aware that there's not so great people out there and that we need to do stuff to deal with them.

"I'm totally aware that there's not so great people out there and that we need to do stuff to deal with them"

"developing a system that keeps an eye on people and alerts the right agencies"

Good lord dude. Please just stop. You can't control everyone. You can't "help" everyone. You can't make everyone behave the way you think they should - force them to bend to your will.

It pains me that you can't see this is what you are advocating. The use of an omnipresent and persistent surveillance system to capture, store, and evaluate human behavior, track activity, and respond with agents of the State - that is, people who have a monopoly on the use of force - to "remedy" or "modify" their behaviors.

History is replete with examples of how giving additional policing powers to the state ends poorly.
 
Phone bills are a civil thing and not directly criminal acts. While I think people ought to be a lot more responsible with their money, if they wanna get a stupid Android they can't afford, that's between them and the company that gave it to them. It's not enslavement for a customer to willingly enter into a service contract either so the slavery argument doesn't seem to make sense in this case.

You say that like debtors prisons were never a thing or weren't popping back up...
Or like the tv tax going to the bbc, it's a civil thing, yet it's treated as a criminal act...

I never said phone bills were related to the common man being a slave, that is just common knowledge. We still live in a caste system, just life for the peons is nicer due to the fact they are more productive that way duh :rolleyes:
 
I did say it would take into account other risk factors like the person's gender, current life circumstances, and (absolutely) it should account for past criminal activity too among other things. Besides that, this kinda system's pieces are all sorta falling into place already and it's only a matter of time before it's fully realized and happens whether a few people disagree with it or not. Partly corporations are already positioned to analyze the data they collect and partly governments have some of these systemic elements. It's looming and I think that a proactive citizen should get involved in making it work better instead if being resistant to it.

No way. By acting as future police you are basically condemning a person to actions they havent commited yet?

So now, a person going through a long patch of unemployment and money troubles, and decides to rob a store. Only on the way there, his conscience arrests him and instead of pulling the gun out to commit the crime, he calls his best friend, and spills his guts about his troubles.

In the system you are seemingly in agreement with, where the authorities are notified that an unemployed, potentially unstable man gets into a car with a gun, the man has just lost his "god-given" free will to decide what he will or wont do. You have stripped a man with little else to speak of, of his ability to be a free thinking human being. Completely unacceptable. There is not, there will not ever be any justification good enough for me to accept this terrible overreach in the name of do-gooderism.

No, just... no.
 
No way. By acting as future police you are basically condemning a person to actions they havent commited yet?

So now, a person going through a long patch of unemployment and money troubles, and decides to rob a store. Only on the way there, his conscience arrests him and instead of pulling the gun out to commit the crime, he calls his best friend, and spills his guts about his troubles.

In the system you are seemingly in agreement with, where the authorities are notified that an unemployed, potentially unstable man gets into a car with a gun, the man has just lost his "god-given" free will to decide what he will or wont do. You have stripped a man with little else to speak of, of his ability to be a free thinking human being. Completely unacceptable. There is not, there will not ever be any justification good enough for me to accept this terrible overreach in the name of do-gooderism.

No, just... no.

Yep, full on Minority Report right here.

The only reasonable use for a system like this is to identify individuals who already have a warrant or bolo issued for them.
Get into a vehicle with a warrant out for your arrest, the doors lock and the car self drives you to prison.
Unfortunately that is a bit much control to give over IMO
 
Hi All

It appears that the government read George Orwell's novel 1984 & decided to use it as a blueprint to model society going forward. Also folk agreeing to theses practices want a oppressive government present in their lives. This is the exact opposite of what America was founded on as well as what America is suppose to represent.
 
It's only gonna get worse.

Least a reasonably bright person can still turn this sort of thing around and use it as an advantage, like cell phone tracking. It's lucky for LEO's that most criminals are pretty dumb.
 
Okay - that's fine if you want that, but who decides what is right and wrong? For example, if someone in the government suddenly decides that the 'church' of Scientology is a terrorist group, where is the recourse for those people? They're criminals now and they've lost most of their rights. Last time I checked you could throw 'terrorists' into some base in Cuba that we snookered out of them 100+ years ago and didn't have to give them a trial.

That's a really good question and I don't really have an answer for that. I mean, I guess we have an existing group in place that's supposed to collectively do that across various government organizations, but a lot of people aren't really happy with how it works. Then there's societal norms, but who decides which peoples' norms are the ones that are worthy of using to define what's right and wrong? I don't think any one person is the right one to decide that and I think that what we have today, a system that's constantly playing catch up with all of the different voices in society, is working, but not as well as it could. Even though it's not perfect, I guess we'd have to rely on what we've been doing so far, electing people to make laws and then relying on a balancing act thing of other groups of people to revise, edit, or throw out those laws.

"I'm totally aware that there's not so great people out there and that we need to do stuff to deal with them"

"developing a system that keeps an eye on people and alerts the right agencies"

Good lord dude. Please just stop. You can't control everyone. You can't "help" everyone. You can't make everyone behave the way you think they should - force them to bend to your will.

It pains me that you can't see this is what you are advocating. The use of an omnipresent and persistent surveillance system to capture, store, and evaluate human behavior, track activity, and respond with agents of the State - that is, people who have a monopoly on the use of force - to "remedy" or "modify" their behaviors.

History is replete with examples of how giving additional policing powers to the state ends poorly.

Well, lots of corporations are already doing that whole omnipresent thing using phones, e-mail, ads, web browsers, persistent cookies, and other analytics to model behavior for advertising. It's not a big-giant leap to feed those analytical systems some background information about a person's money, employment, where they've lived, marital status, criminal record, medical history, and whatever else to start to perform predictive analytics of their behaviors and then combine it with facial recognition and broadly deployed activity monitoring systems to get an even bigger window into their thoughts. In fact, it's only a matter of time before that happens and it'll be really cool at helping people even if they don't think they need it. The people who don't want help and are in denial about their problems are the ones who need intervention and assistance the most so I think that reaching out to them is the most important regardless of whether or not they want it. We can make them into functional people who don't do drugs or rob stores.

You say that like debtors prisons were never a thing or weren't popping back up...
Or like the tv tax going to the bbc, it's a civil thing, yet it's treated as a criminal act...

I never said phone bills were related to the common man being a slave, that is just common knowledge. We still live in a caste system, just life for the peons is nicer due to the fact they are more productive that way duh :rolleyes:

Okay, well I think that prison isn't really a thing for the average person who doesn't pay their debt. They just do the bankruptcy thing, ruin their credit history, and move on to do it again later. Also, I love the BBC! They make great drama stuff so I don't see a problem with them being funded by taxes.

No way. By acting as future police you are basically condemning a person to actions they havent commited yet?

So now, a person going through a long patch of unemployment and money troubles, and decides to rob a store. Only on the way there, his conscience arrests him and instead of pulling the gun out to commit the crime, he calls his best friend, and spills his guts about his troubles.

In the system you are seemingly in agreement with, where the authorities are notified that an unemployed, potentially unstable man gets into a car with a gun, the man has just lost his "god-given" free will to decide what he will or wont do. You have stripped a man with little else to speak of, of his ability to be a free thinking human being. Completely unacceptable. There is not, there will not ever be any justification good enough for me to accept this terrible overreach in the name of do-gooderism.

No, just... no.

No one is condemning anyone. We're just taking existing predictive analysis stuff, feeding it more data, giving it a persistent, wide-spread presence across the nation and then letting it send up alerts when a person crosses warning thresholds as a way to help both them and society get more awesome and run smoother.

Besides that, I'm not getting into a religious debate. I will say that no one has any right to have rights of any sort. They don't happen naturally so it's up to humans to build a world in which humans have the ability to do none, some, or all of the things they want to do. That person with restrained actions (which all of us are because none of us can do anything and everything without suffering from legal consequences) can think whatever, but like everyone else, they can't do all of the things they think about. There's nothing do-goody about it. That's reality presently. All I'm proposing is that we take existing technologies, improve them, and put them to use for the general welfare of the average lower class person who lacks a lot of the important things they need to care for themselves like reasoning or good decision making skills.
 
Croaker didn't respond.

I suppose he really was under investigation and they just got his admission of guilt :p
 
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm thinking that a system that's smart enough to oversee people's actions would be able to prevent bad things from happening. The person being stopped is not at all a criminal then and can get help while still being able to productively contribute to society. I think that we can all pretty much agree that preventing murders is lots better than letting them happen and then arresting someone after the fact.

Creepy, I didn't just fall off the [H]-Truck, your not going to sucker me into this like you did those other guys.

One package of Little Debbie's is all your getting from me :p
 
Pathetic.

Treading into some mighty deep waters as to what exactly rights are and if anyone really has them. Plenty interesting topic but most times folks can't agree on anything. I think that's why they write those long fancy papers dictating what flavor of the basic idea a given country is going to go by. Even at that their still manages to be a hell of a lot left open to interpretation.

I suspect a lot of discussion popping up in a mature-ish society (as opposed to one just forming) about a persons rights is a bad sign. When things are healthy and you aren't hurting anyone, a person ought to be able to do about what they want and keep their head down and be fine.
 
Information like this is a gold mine for thieves and crooks. Find out your routines and where your going to be at at a certain time of the day. The whole idea of scanning plates could quickly turn rotten if its used the wrong way.
 
That's a really good question and I don't really have an answer for that. I mean, I guess we have an existing group in place that's supposed to collectively do that across various government organizations, but a lot of people aren't really happy with how it works. Then there's societal norms, but who decides which peoples' norms are the ones that are worthy of using to define what's right and wrong? I don't think any one person is the right one to decide that and I think that what we have today, a system that's constantly playing catch up with all of the different voices in society, is working, but not as well as it could. Even though it's not perfect, I guess we'd have to rely on what we've been doing so far, electing people to make laws and then relying on a balancing act thing of other groups of people to revise, edit, or throw out those laws.

Corporations do not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

I get it, you think corporations are large. Big bad businesses! Let me put this in context for you - the largest corporation in the US by revenue is Wal-Mart, at $476 Billion USD. They employ 2.2 million people.

The US Federal government had revenues of $2.8 TRILLION USD. When you add in States and Localities, you're looking at a total of $5.6 TRILLION dollars in revenue.

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fed_revenue_2013US

Now, does Wal-Mart have a standing army? No, no they do not. The Federal government does though - about 1.4 million on active duty with about 850,000 in the reserves. This does not count the 800,000 civilian empoyees of the DoD, or the 2.1 million people who work directly for the federal government. This doesn't include contractors either, which number in the hundreds of thousands.

This also doesn't count the total number of state, municipal, and local government employees ranging from teacher and firefighters to librarians to cops and jailers, which number around 14 million.

http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk

The government is much different than a corporation. A corporation can use your info to sell things to you - or sell space for advertisements to you.

A government can use that same info to fine, coerce, arrest, detain, imprison, or kill you.
 
Creepy, I didn't just fall off the [H]-Truck, your not going to sucker me into this like you did those other guys.

One package of Little Debbie's is all your getting from me :p

You do have kinda an unfair advantage though. :D Oh, what kind of Little Debbie's are we talking about? I really love those swiss roll things. They're so bad for you but they're like the best things in the world. I refuse to buy them though because I'll keep going back to the box to grab a package and that totally messes with trying to stay thin.

Corporations do not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

I get it, you think corporations are large. Big bad businesses! Let me put this in context for you - the largest corporation in the US by revenue is Wal-Mart, at $476 Billion USD. They employ 2.2 million people.

The US Federal government had revenues of $2.8 TRILLION USD. When you add in States and Localities, you're looking at a total of $5.6 TRILLION dollars in revenue.

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fed_revenue_2013US

Now, does Wal-Mart have a standing army? No, no they do not. The Federal government does though - about 1.4 million on active duty with about 850,000 in the reserves. This does not count the 800,000 civilian empoyees of the DoD, or the 2.1 million people who work directly for the federal government. This doesn't include contractors either, which number in the hundreds of thousands.

This also doesn't count the total number of state, municipal, and local government employees ranging from teacher and firefighters to librarians to cops and jailers, which number around 14 million.

http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk

The government is much different than a corporation. A corporation can use your info to sell things to you - or sell space for advertisements to you.

A government can use that same info to fine, coerce, arrest, detain, imprison, or kill you.

Yes, I agree that's some of what governments are asked to do by the populations that organize them. I'm not seeing the point you're getting at with pointing out the difference in a company and a government though.
 
I can't fix your trust issues. If you don't like having identification cards and think that those are an indication that people are gonna get sent off have stuff happen to them that happened in Germany like a hundred years ago, then I can understand why it'd be easy for you to mistake what I'm saying as being somehow related to that, but I do think that most reasonable people don't have problems with government issued identification since you kinda need it to drive a car in the US.


.



Those that refuse to learn from history are bound to repeat it. LOL at your "like a 100 years ago". That was 70 years ago and there are people in my family and my GF family that were touched by the whole thing. I think your trolling or you never talked to anyone over the age of 80 before.
 
Those that refuse to learn from history are bound to repeat it. LOL at your "like a 100 years ago". That was 70 years ago and there are people in my family and my GF family that were touched by the whole thing. I think your trolling or you never talked to anyone over the age of 80 before.

I rounded to the nearest hundred. :( It's not like forum discussions about something need to be very exact. No one really knows anything about anything and just wants to vent whatever's on their minds so doing a bunch of math just so someone doesn't nitpick about rounding seems like a total waste of calc.exe time.
 
I rounded to the nearest hundred. :( It's not like forum discussions about something need to be very exact. No one really knows anything about anything and just wants to vent whatever's on their minds so doing a bunch of math just so someone doesn't nitpick about rounding seems like a total waste of calc.exe time.

That's a great response and all but it's a lifetime and 100 years implies that that happened so long ago no one alive remembers it and that is very much NOT the case.
 
That's a great response and all but it's a lifetime and 100 years implies that that happened so long ago no one alive remembers it and that is very much NOT the case.

I don't think whether or not people that are alive today to remember something should really matter when considering the importance or significance of any particular historic event. While those people are probably worth talking to and interacting with on the basis of their personal experience, them having a pulse or not shouldn't be taken in as a factor when evaluating the meaning of a thing that previously happened. In fact, your incorporating that into an argument is a distraction tactic that attempts to make a roundabout attack on credibility based on a detail that has no relevance. Doing so demonstrates the water-tight awesomeness of my idea because the opposition lacks a basis to form an argument coherent enough to undertake the actual matter being discussed. *head pats* It was totally a good attempt though and I like that you're trying at least. :D
 
I don't think whether or not people that are alive today to remember something should really matter when considering the importance or significance of any particular historic event. While those people are probably worth talking to and interacting with on the basis of their personal experience, them having a pulse or not shouldn't be taken in as a factor when evaluating the meaning of a thing that previously happened. In fact, your incorporating that into an argument is a distraction tactic that attempts to make a roundabout attack on credibility based on a detail that has no relevance. Doing so demonstrates the water-tight awesomeness of my idea because the opposition lacks a basis to form an argument coherent enough to undertake the actual matter being discussed. *head pats* It was totally a good attempt though and I like that you're trying at least. :D

Trolling trolling trolling keep those trolls a trolling trolling trolling trolling rawhide! ;)
 
Anyone who thinks there is such a thing as privacy in this century is vastly outdated in their understand. Privacy is an extinct concept that only existed in the time before the 21st century
 
Anyone who thinks there is such a thing as privacy in this century is vastly outdated in their understand. Privacy is an extinct concept that only existed in the time before the 21st century

If privacy doesn't exist (at all) anymore then why do most billion dollar companies make their empployees sign Non-Disclosure Agreements and why do companies have their customers acknowledge and accept Privacy Policies?

Just wondering because in my reality they're trying to make it what you think it already is, but, it's not. .
 
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