Sure, when the cameras start turning into a source of revenue then the city has an incentive to adjust the timing of the lights to maximize revenue and not minimize harm. This has happened (notably, the city of Chicago reduced the time of yellows and it led to more tickets and more accidents).
The other thing to remember is that governments don't operate red light cameras. They hire contracting businesses to install and operate them, and normally instead of paying a fixed rental/maintenance rate for the cameras those companies typically get paid a fraction of the fines. That means the designer/operator of the camera doesn't have much incentive to make the camera accurate or maximize safety, but to maximize how many cars it can issue tickets to (whether or not they're actually breaking the law or not).
When you take that to the extreme, the red light camera companies will even lobby local politicians to install more of them, and advertise them not as a tool for safety but for revenue. In some cases they've straight up bribed mayors and city officials with kickbacks from the ticket revenue.
All told, red light cameras are pretty shitty at making roads safer. What we really need are narrower roads with fewer lanes and smaller cars, but that's systemic. If we want to make specific intersections safer you can park a traffic enforcement officer at the intersection which will do more than any camera will.
The goal of a red light camera is ostensibly to make an intersection safer, but the fact that the city gets money when people get tickets incentivizes them to actually keep the intersection difficult to navigate correctly. They lose money if they adjust timings to be more appropriate for the situation or if they make the lights more visible or if they replace the light with a roundabout.
It also penalizes driving behaviors that are objectively not very dangerous far more harshly than a human police officer would—a lot of the profit from a red light camera comes from rolling right turns on red, which is very often a perfectly safe behavior that actually helps traffic move more smoothly (for example, when you technically have a red but there's a left turn crossing in the opposite direction providing complete cover for your move).
From what I recall, the real reason was that Lockheed owned and operated the cameras, took a cut of revenue, and was found to be changing the settings to issue more tickets.
I have perhaps unpopular additional suggestion. If you break any traffic laws your tesla should automatically report u to the police. Shouldn’t a car w AI capabilities be committed to responsible, ethical, safe, law abiding behavior ? I’m tired of bay area Teslas not signaling, cutting me off, and near killing me while I’m walking or on my bike.
Folks agreeing with this take should take a hard look at their attention spans and ability to focus and comprehend - it’s honestly really shocking to see how many people can’t handle sitting still and reading for 10 minutes (or fewer!) straight!
I should say I’ve struggled with this too, I have to be super mindful otherwise I’ll flip and skim and find myself distracted. But it is interesting there’s an embracing of this by many - “I always ask ChatGPT to summarize xyz.”
This is a long winded “permission slip” to avoid any personal responsibility for our actions. The fact is whether it’s eating beef or writing code for Raytheon you actually do have free will. The HN and tech crowd is also far more educated and empowered (individually and collectively) than the author would have us believe.
It’s to say we stress so much about avoiding actions to try to push for a society what we actually want, we don’t actually end up making any nudges towards that society.
HN is much more happy with the status quo because they on measure earn enough money to be comfortable at a much higher rate than the rest of society.
"Why it is okay to enjoy every single benefit capitalism brings, although I am opposing capitalism", is one of the oldest tropes of anti-capitalist literature.
It would be so easy to admit that you are doing it because your own personal satisfaction outweighs some ultimately vague political position, but of course admitting that to yourself can be hard.
Why don’t we preemptively put anyone who works in finance in the hall of shame. Unpopular w the hn crew I’m sure, but the field does disproportionately more harm than good.
I have loved watching space x launches for years. And here I am, scrolling around on my phone and I can’t for the life of me find a stream that opens- this is just so sad
“CRISPR-based genome editing tools developed by MIT professor and McGovern investigator Feng Zhang, Abudayyeh, Gootenberg, and others have changed the way scientists modify DNA, accelerating research and enabling the development of many experimental gene therapies.”
“Others” being Nobel laureates Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpatier - MIT and the Broad have long sought to minimize the work of these two women in the media for their own gain. Here again, a small but glaring example of their pettiness.
Biochemist Dr. Jennifer Doudna, from the University of California, Berkeley, submitted her patent application for the core CRISPR technology back in May 2012 after creating the tech along with Emmanuelle Charpentier.
But then biologist Feng Zhang from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT submitted a similar patent application in 2013--but he requested a fast-track process and received the official patent in April 2014. Zhang has since been awarded additional patents on the technology.
CRISPR’s Nobel Prize winners defeated in key patent claim for genome editor
According to a ruling by an appeal board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a different group, led by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, made the “actual reduction to practice” of CRISPR’s ability to edit eukaryotic cells, including humans. This means companies developing CRISPR-based medicines must now negotiate with Broad and its partners, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for the use of the editor.
I think it goes something like this:
Doudna, et. al. were the first to discover and describe CRISPR in nature.
Zhang, et. al. were the first to successfully develop ways to edit genomes with it.
Mojica is generally considered the "discoverer of CRISPR". Douda and Charpentier took that knowledge and made a specific genome editing system based on bacterial enzymes (Cas9) and demonstrated it working in bacteria. Zhang is generally considered the person who made it work in eukaryotes.
They are not. The article and title are for pointing specifically Greece.
Greece and the rest of Mediterranean have seen such temperatures before. There is no record to break because we have already exceeded it that much more.
The emphasis should be on averages and overall variance increasing and not on specific samples.
17 years old driving recklessly a sport car with foreign license plates, running away from the police. The situation strongly points he is linked to drug dealing, financial scam, car thievery, or all of them. What measures are expected in such situation, what was he expecting to happen?
Few weeks ago a Polish man was choked to death by 10 Dutch police officers [1] for...running away on a bicycle, and no on bat an eye. I guess this is the new normal?
Death may not be justified, but neither were his actions. He put himself in a position where this could be an outcome. I'm not saying it was justified, but it did start with him, not the police. The mere act of skydiving doesn't justify death, but it is a possible outcome nonetheless.
>> The mere act of skydiving doesn't justify death, but it is a possible outcome nonetheless.
Similarly, the mere act of driving with a broken tail-light doesn't justify death, but it is a possible outcome. Now...if someone comes and shoots you and kills you, that doesn't make it right.
Similarly, if someone comes and shoots a sky-diver and kills them, that is also not right, even if there was a possibility of death.
We don't know what happened and an investigation in on-going.
If police draw their weapon and you try to run them over, IMHO suddenly things do not look exactly like "police brutality", for instance, so let's wait and see.
