112 replies
1d3h
Paxton is a crook, but in this case he's fighting the good fight. Texas collected a $1.4B settlement from Meta for its facial-recognition scanning, and in this case the monetary damages to the victims are far worse in terms of higher insurance premiums.
https://boingboing.net/2024/07/31/meta-to-pay-1-4bn-for-unau...
He should then go after the insurance companies who used this data next, and force them to disgorge the excess profits they made from the illegal use of data, preferably with triple penalties.
In an efficient market insurance premiums are essentially zero sum. The more that one person pays to offset their own risk, the less everyone else pays.
Safe drivers subsidize unsafe drivers and this subsidy can and should be reduced when possible with better predictive information.
Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function.
Secondly, you seem to be implying that only aggressive drivers are getting flagged by the data. But the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it. Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges.
Finally, this kind of surveillance changes behavior in ways that may make things less safe. If you're driving down a street and a ball bounces out from behind a parked car do you slam on your brakes out of fear that there is a child chasing after it, or do you think that hitting the brakes might make your premiums go up so you just hope that there isn't a child coming.
Preface: I'm not strongly for these hyper monitoring systems of driving patterns for insurance.
Often being in a situation where you have to slam on your brakes means even if you're a good driver you're in a lot more riskier environments than a driver who doesn't often have to. A good driver that is rarely in a situation where he has to slam on his brakes probably gets into fewer collisions than the same driver in an environment where he needs to do it often. Often having to brake hard is still potentially an indicator of higher claim likliehood.
Yeah but if you really optimize it to ad absurdum, everybody will pay according to damages they will cause, negating whole point of 'socialized' spread-across-variable-population insurance.
End users shouldn't generally want insurance to run over-optimally, that benefits just shareholders of given insurance and not population overall. That I consider myself above-average driver changes absolutely nothing in this. And those stupid enough who think similarly and think they should therefore pay less can and will be easily hit from unexpected angles and end up same or worse (age, old injuries/mental diagnoses, family history and gazillion other params which are/should be mostly illegal to optimize against, and you have little to no control of).
Hot take: maybe that is actually desirable? If insurance has a plethora of good actuarial information and risk modeling, and one's insurance costs are high, that's the market telling that person that they probably shouldn't be driving. If high insurance costs promote alternate means of transportation for highly risky drivers, that's a net win for everyone on the road.
the point of insurance is to make sure if you get into a crash with somebody else and they are at fault, that they even have the means to pay you in the first place. if forced to, people make the decision to drive uninsured because it is nigh impossible to travel around this country otherwise, and then it's worse when they do get into an accident and cannot pay the other driver's costs. you can't squeeze blood from a stone.
this is also partially the reasoning behind ACA requiring health insurance; hospitals were struggling because they could not collect from people with no money that were winding up in the ER.
Sounds like we need better enforcement of insurance requirements. Driving a car uninsured should have some extremely stiff penalties. Once again, maybe if the penalties are high enough and the costs expensive enough for more people, there'd actually be more of a push to re-think overly car dependent life.
It will optimize society overall to have risky, uninsurable drivers not driving.
It's not like healthcare. There will always be healthcare costs. We don't have to have everyone drive all the time, we choose to.
Realistically, the other person ends up in jail and then you still can’t get compensated for car repairs. It’s not super clear why that would be better than the pooling of risk that happens today that results in compensation.
American society has chosen to create a built environment that is inhospitable to anything else except driving, so I don’t think this is actually a real choice. The people who are getting into crashes all the time are not the ones pushing for that built environment.
I'm saying they should face such extreme penalties it's not worth it anymore and have it policed so those people aren't on the roads in the first place to get in a collision. Right now you're pretty much not going to have anything happen driving without insurance unless you get into an accident that you can't escape from. If it was highly likely for someone to face judgement every time they went out you'd probably have significantly fewer uninsured drivers out there.
Then you basically just have a roving class of jobless people stuck at home.
We’re not talking about the currently uninsured. We’re talking about a “hot-take” proposal to significantly increase the amount of uninsured people today, people who today can get insurance.
Or we get a stronger political will to no longer force car dependency on everyone when people actually start to understand the real costs of car-centric design.
When the stores and restaurants where rich people shop can't get anyone to work there anymore without paying people the full costs of actually driving far away maybe there will be a will to change things.
Lots of people around the world can go to work without needing a car.
How do we un-car centric design the ~60million people who live in rural USA? Should we move everyone to urban environments for public transit?
How do you figure someone like me traverse the 40 miles from my 800 population rural town to my work place?
Being frank, you shouldn't be making the 40+mile commute in a car if you can't afford all the ramifications of it. It's a failure of societal design to force people to drive 40 miles on a vehicle they can't responsibly afford to operate just to survive.
In the end, they shouldn't live 40mi from where they work. It's not a good thing to force such a lifestyle.
Honestly it's depressing you're suggesting we should continue to force people to spend so much of their productive lives commuting to dead-end jobs that will never lift them out of the poverty of their situation. It's sad you're continuing to argue people should live an hour+ away from where they work, and that should just be the norm and the basis for our designs.
If you want to live 40+mi from your work and can afford all that involves and are willing to live with the tradeoffs, sure go ahead. Pay the tolls for the highways. Pay the congestion fees. Choose to spend more time with the insides of your car than you do spending time with your family on an average weekday. Pay the higher insurance compared to those who live close or take the train. Just quit asking for handouts and subsidies to pave over other people's homes, force bullshit parking minimums which lead to seas of empty pavement, demand other people pay for the roads you drive, etc.
yeah and do you realise what you are suggesting?
your proposed change will take decades to rework cities to move away from car-centric city design, to introduce public transportation, to rework current districts, to move shopping malls/restaurants closer to living districts etc.
all of this just because you wanted to make stricter insurance just to make it more (by how much?) efficient for insurers, so that they would make more profit.
No, I'm suggesting it because I don't want to pay for Bob to smash several cars a year. I'm saying it because there's lots of people who have no business being out on the road. Having Bob drive when he's a bad driver makes everyone around less safe.
But I guess you'd have society pay for all the cars Bob ends up destroying. We'll subsidize him crashing cars over and over and hurting Alice but we just can't seem to find the money to add another bus line!
Using our justice system to meter out extreme punishment would mostly impact poor people, and it is not as if the US has historically been very good at listening to the suffering of poor people.
The Bay Area can barely keep service workers in housing and its taken several decades of this problem to get even the slightest bit of progress.
I want to agree with you, but wonder if you have ever been poor? When you need the car to get to work so you can feed your kids, but you can't afford all of
- feed kids - rent - insurance
because you got hit by a surprise medical bill (kid got sick, maybe?)
I'm strongly in favor of your end goal (less car-dependent life), I'm just cautious about using punishment as a way to get there.
Unless we made the fine proportional to income?
Let's expand that. Let's name your hypothetical person, Bob. He's living on the edge financially, and decides to go without insurance.
Let's bring in another person, Alice. Alice is also not in great financial shape. But Alice is able to pay for insurance and follows all the rules. Alice has a small amount of savings, go Alice!
One day, Bob hits Alice. It causes medical issues for Alice. Alice might have insurance, but it's potentially still expensive for Alice. Because of her injuries she can't work for a few weeks. She works hourly, so now loses wages. Luckily with FMLA she won't necessarily lose her job, but she needed every paycheck. But it doesn't really matter, because her car is now gone. She can't drive to work anymore. She can't drive to groceries. She can't afford a car, as a huge chunk her savings went to cover those medical bills and missed paychecks. She's pretty SOL huh.
Sounds like we need to let Bob off the hook for inflicting all this on Alice. After all, he needed to drive without insurance.
No. We should just make it possible so Bob didn't need to drive in the first place instead of excusing his choice to still drive when he couldn't really afford it. We should structure the incentives so Bob doesn't want to drive if he can't afford it.
People driving without insurance ruin lives like Alice's all the time.
That scenario is completely missing the point. Bob has to drive because of the lack of good public transportation and the fact that he can't afford a house near his work. Not to mention if he can't afford a car with insurance it's because his job simply doesn't pay enough.
It's much more likely that external factors put him in that situation, rather than himself. Yet you propose we should punish him personally and paint only Alice as a victim. That's naive. Both are victims.
These are systemic problems and trying to solve them with individual punishments is only going to hurt individuals while not fixing the underlying issues that really matter.
I'm fully aware Bob is the victim. That's why I'm saying the solution is to make it so Bob didn't get in a car. He is a victim of car dependency. Subsidizing insurance to make sure Bob could always afford it isn't solving that. Ensuring he can always afford insurance just furthers his victimhood.
I see your point now. Yeah, I agree.
But the only question that really matters in the end is: is that profitable?
If we really cared about safety many people would not be allowed to drive in the first place. Tests would be much more strict and rightly so. But it's way more profitable to let those people spend money on cars (and eventually kill people) than it is to provide good public transportation.
Especially with the auto industry, they have basically won the lobbying game. Most people can't even imagine a world where cars aren't in the center of it, so we keep moving the goalpost...
Rather than subsidize the poor person being poor via insurance, we can subsidize them by say, building public housing nearby their place of work, or direct payments.
I'm not generally for hyper analyzed metrics gathering in this case (I don't like the privacy implications), but I'm generally for riskier drivers paying significantly more. Individuals should feel the costs of their driving more in the US IMO. I don't like heavily subsidizing people who drive so recklessly.
Maybe then they'd realize overly building car dependent cities isn't that great in the end.
Convincing risky drivers to pick an option other than driving seems great to me. I'd be happy if a huge chunk of drivers couldn't drive anymore. It would make everyone safer and save a ton of lives.
This is the US. WHAT option?
Some optimization yes, but this has been already achieved decades ago by simply using driving/accident history that insurances shared among themselves probably since they went digital. All the consistently bad drivers will easily fall into this.
What I talk about is anticipation/prediction, possibly wrong conclusions from data (since we all know data can be pretty bad or incorrectly analyzed), also no way to correct any incorrectly derived bad rating.
There are no consumers winning in this scenario, even if it may feel intuitively as such if you are a stellar safe driver. Also there are many second-order effects, ie poor risky people pushed out of insurances, still driving since in US you can't do anything without a car in rural places, still causing accidents but no way in hell to pay back, ever. So we move the losses from private corporations to random citizens caught in some bad luck.
I'd say keep the risk at those corporations, they anyhow still manage to earn billions annually, no need to make their life even easier.
That just makes people drive without insurance. And yeah, you can fine them and take their license away. Then they drive without a license.
Except spread out over time, which is still a net-benefit.
Ultra efficient premiums should include the time domain by charging premiums in winter vs. summer based on risks.
Keep getting better and a ‘perfect’ system would bump the premiums pre accident to cover the full costs of that accident immediately before your accident. Making insurance a pure dead loss for consumers which means insurance must be inefficient to be useful.
Also, the surveillance is bad because of the inherent breach of privacy.
I think these systems are bad and I think vehicle manufacturers piping data directly to insurance companies should be illegal whether you consent or not. That being said, "but privacy" has always struck me as a weird argument.
There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when a vehicle with a particular license plate is at a particular intersection or on a particular public street. Some jurisdictions extend some privacy rights to whether or not a particular person is driving it but many don't.
So when it's in public, the location of your car is not "private" information. How is acceleration, braking, or other engine telemetry data private?
The right to privacy is not boolean. There is a spectrum of reasonable expectations of privacy. Also, the right to privacy in public is not necessarily zero. The varying degree of rights to privacy in public are less than in private settings, but often greater than zero.
While your insurer may, by happenstance, see your license plate while you are driving around, they certainly are not following you 100% of the time. The degree to which your location is tracked when your license plate is plainly visible, is different than degree of privacy expectation when that location is being automatically recorded.
It's just not that simple. It would be nice and convenient if "private" was a boolean value. But it is very much a float type:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
I don’t follow the argument being made here.
The state of modern surveillance is different from what is described. People are consenting to precise monitoring for slightly lower insurance premiums. The question is: should it be illegal (should we fight against monitoring) for some moral/philosophical reason, or are we accepting it because that’s the way things are.
There is not necessarily informed consent with the type of informatics data collection described in these suits.
This isn’t a lawsuit about a “progressive snapshot” type of device.
It has been described by many that these vehicles had been opted in at the dealer with little to no notification, and the data subsequently sold to brokers, who then sold the data to insurers.
If I personally attach a GPS tracker to your car or follow you everywhere with a camera, I will get charged and thrown in prison despite it all being in public. This behaviour will be considered stalking and threatening.
People on here argue about laws as if they are universal, but if you actually try to do the exact same thing as these companies do, you will find out the difference very quickly.
Insurance is a business, where the insured pays an insurer to pay for costs for damages that the insured cannot afford to pay. The insurer's job is to calculate the amount of premium necessary to ensure they can afford to pay for the damages, but they also have to sell the insurance at competitive prices, so they probably have to calculate premiums based on the risks that each insured represents.
The goal is not to label drivers as aggressive or not aggressive. The goal is to tease out the factors that lead to claims. With a sufficiently large dataset, it should be possible to tease out whether or not characteristics such as stop and go traffic is an indication of higher likelihood of claims. If an insurer does not calculate this property, then a competing insurer probably will and hence be able to offer lower premiums to less risky customers.
If a single event of slamming brakes is causing premiums to go up, I doubt that insurer is pricing premiums accurately. However, if the insurer experiences greater losses in neighborhoods where people are slamming their brakes more often, then obviously the risks are higher in that neighborhood and premiums need to reflect that.
The higher premiums themselves would tell people in the neighborhood that either they are driving too fast, or they are not looking after the children. And if people are choosing to risk plowing into a child for the sake of their premiums, then that is more of a moral quandary than a problem with insurance pricing.
If the goal is to subsidize a specific population, then that should be a government function via taxes.
As I understand, all 50 states require insurers to write high risk drivers policies through assigned risk plans. I guess you could shuffle the money through the state as well, but it seems like an inefficient way to accomplish the same.
But really, car insurance and their respective mandates exist to protect the innocent, not drivers themselves. e.g. No state requires that you insure your property.
Mandatory car insurance is a thing in most of the us, except for New Hampshire and Virginia.
It is mandatory in VA too as of last month.
But yeah, that’s kind of my point. No state (except NH) wants people to be able to run others over, default on any damages, and leave the innocent person screwed. That’s why liability insurance is mandatory, and it’s why (mostly) first-party insurance is not. It is a social safety net.
The goal is to label the drivers as more or less likely to lead to claims, and "aggression" is considered a factor.
I think that definition is incomplete: Insurance is to spread risk equitably.
That means accounting for disparate probabilities and disparate impacts. For example, consider "house burns down" insurance, where premiums depend on whether the house is/isn't near a wooded area, and whether it is a cheap/expensive house... And yes, also whether or not the homeowner has a passion for homemade fireworks.
While I agree that various dystopic outcomes are possible, the problem is not better knowledge about risks itself. Improved information about the dangers we're trying to avoid or fix is--all else being equal--always a good thing.
The real problems stem from those other no-so-equal factors like:
1. Imbalanced power relationships. (Strongly implicated in the rest of the list.)
2. Opaque decision-making that cannot be reviewed or appealed.
3. Information not being fairly discovered/shared. (Customer hides known higher risk, insurer hides lower-than-expected risks to squeeze out more profit, etc.)
4. Bad contracts which pull the rug out from under people because of how they handle changes in knowledge even when risks haven't actually changed. Imagine health-insurance which covers Giant Monsterification, but later a test reveals patient has Godzilla genes, and now the customer is dropped... Even though the originally-covered probability itself hasn't changed, only our knowledge about it.
Everyone defines equitably according to their whims. Does it mean the riskier pay more? Those can afford it pay more? The unsympathetic pay more? Et cetera
I think that the real purpose of government is to negotiate these meanings.
That it is difficult does not mean that we should not attempt it. And then you see the other factors mentioned up-comment…
If the government does not work out this ambiguity, it gets worked out other ways - which is why we are having this discussion.
While it's true that Solutions Are Hard, that doesn't change the fact insurance is absolutely not meant to spread risk blindly.
Even early proto-insurance of seagoing merchants mutually carrying one-another's trade-goods on their various ships (in case one sank) still cared about how some cargoes were more valuable and some ships were more seaworthy.
They didn't just roll dice to do it.
This might be definitionally correct, but that doesn't mean it's right.
There's no reason you shouldn't rewarded for being a better-than-average driver (or conversely, punished for being worse).
You don't think we have the technical ability to determine this, to some degree? We have self driving cars for crying out loud.
What a reach.
You hit the brakes, because if there is a child, and you hit them, your premiums will be even higher.
Depends on how granular the data is. If it’s second by second telemetry, you could tell this. If it’s an aggregate report for a month, you can’t.
I actually work on self-driving cars, so I have some experience on this. Trying to predict safety performance based on more easily measured metrics like hard stops is hard. AV companies spend a lot of time thinking about it. I don't think they get it perfect either.
Then we need to break whatever that social function is away from the umbrella of "insurance." Mandatory car insurance is predicated on the fact that you can pay enough on average to cover your damages to others but might not be able to do so in the worst case. If we're in a world where somebody's driving exceeds the external damage bounds they can afford _even on average_, subsidizing those people is no longer the job of insurance.
Mandatory car insurance is essentially a welfare benefit. The benefit is just administered by insurance companies, because they are believed to be more efficient than the government. (This is pretty common for all kinds of benefits around the world.) Mandatory insurance is not a private contract two parties have reached at their own initiative, and the usual business considerations don't apply. If an insurance company wants to provide mandatory car insurance, they must follow government policies, not their own policies.
If someone drives recklessly and causes excessive damage, the government has other tools beyond insurance premiums. They can, for example, revoke the license and confiscate the car. Or issue a fine or put the driver in prison.
Does this have any meaning at all? I think you are too busy thinking about cars and not people.
If a pedestrian is hit and crippled for life, the damages are more than you can afford for majority of the population.
Many accidents are random chance, caused by factors that cannot be controlled (weather, random technical failure, etc) and lethal accidents do not tend to repeat.
I would contend that this doesn't matter in terms of risk. It doesn't matter if the risk is caused by the person being a bad driver or if the risk is caused by the commute route that you take at a certain time of day.
In either case, there's risk that is shown by the data. If you are driving a route that is stressful and risky, it doesn't matter if you're a good driver or a bad driver - you're doing something that is risky.
In days of old this was done by looking at the commute distance and likely route (the insurance company has home address and work address).
Somebody this there is risk in the data. Big difference.
In any case, you can buy insurance that does this, they install telematics box and sends them data -it’s available, and not popular. So the market has spoken
Insurance spreads risk over outcomes. The social function of spreading risk over people (subsidizing risky behavior) is both incidental, accidental, and a clear moral hazard. Insurance would still be extremely useful even if we knew with perfect certainty the probability that you would have a car accident in the next 5 years.
Seems dangerous when the "risky behavior" is outside the control of the person being insured. Or if what you infer as risky behavior isn't actually risky. Is being born with a heart defect risky behavior? We have regulations to avoid discriminating over pre-existing conditions for a reason, and I could easily see these methods leading to similar bias. Doubly dangerous when insurance across multiple industries are essentially or literally required.
It'd be easy if we had a magic ball that could pinpoint risky immoral behavior, but I don't think we're anywhere near there yet. I barely trust the sensors in these cars to not report bad data, let alone trust the company to not extrapolate cynical conclusions that help their bottom line at the expense of people's wellbeing.
Not necessarily! If you’re a physician, you have liability insurance against malpractice claims. If the insurer can correctly determine that you are a particularly incompetent physician and your premiums should be so high that you’re effectively just pre-paying the future settlements for your inevitable future malpractice cases, you will not be able to afford those premiums and will be forced to stop practicing medicine. In this scenario, the insurance market has satisfied its social function.
In principle, incompetent and unsafe drivers could similarly be identified and priced out of being able to drive, and the act of doing so would serve a purpose of making the roads safer for everyone else.
Perhaps the market should not strive for optimal efficiency then.
Why? You'd probably have better outcomes for everyone with more information. Unsafe drivers might start reigning in their bad habits because it is costing them money every month, and safe drivers will save money. Seems like a win-win. I'd love it if my dash cam could do ALPR and send a video to the registered insurance agency when I see some absolutely ludicrous driving.
In this model, what incentivizes safe drivers to have insurance?
And then when a "safe driver" wipes out in a freak snow storm and racks up a million dollars in damages that they can't afford to pay, where's the win-win?
The same thing that incentivizes them right now, legal requirements to maintain a certain minimum amount of auto liability insurance in order to be able to legally drive. Which, by the way, is currently far less than a million dollars in every jurisdiction I know.
https://www.autoinsurance.org/car-insurance-requirements/
may i introduce you to the jurisdiction of germany? 7.5m for personal injury, 1.3m for property damage and 50k for ?financial loss? (ger:reiner vermögensschaden) [1][2]. granted that's in euro so exchange rates are to be considered
[1] https://www.bussgeldkatalog.org/deckungssumme-kfz-haftpflich... [2] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/pflvg/anlage.html
edit: as a point of comparison, i can't find it at moment but i think i remember my last car insurance was covering 100m for personal insuries
That’s amazing, the US plays around in $10k to $50k ranges.
If the market is efficient, why do you need the force of state violence to maintain it?
It smooths the costs out over time, ie. you regularly pay a fixed amount instead of having random huge bills you may not be able to cover.
The incentive would be being able to pay very little to get coverage which insures you even for the circumstances where a safe driver would crash.
Wouldn't a safe driver who was considering unwisely dropping coverage be more likely to drop coverage if coverage was expensive(because they are subsidizing unsafe drivers), as opposed to if it was cheap?
If I can't have any privacy I'll shoot myself, which is a worse outcome for me
As Eric Schmidt of Google noted long ago, your privacy is already dead. License plate readers are all over the place. Please don't shoot yourself, and good luck to you.
I'm not justifying the specifics of your own car ratting you out behind your back, merely the idea of having more data would let insurance companies segment users based on driving habits.
Because of the obvious privacy implications, as well as the negative impact it has on the perception of driving. When you enable very precise insurance billing you get all sorts of weird behaviors like “I don’t want to drive through there because I’ll take a hit on my rate” or “slowing down to stop in a way people expect me to is consider a mark against me by the insurance provider, so I will do something surprising”. I think Tesla has (or used to have?) a “driving score” and it often incentivized bad driving that was locally “good” but bad in the context of everyone else on the road.
Their modeling will penalize safe drivers who have to deal with non ideal scenarios. The OBD2 accelerometer modules are a bad idea when you live in an area where traffic and road design requires bursts of acceleration to make turns. You're going to be lumped in with the bad drivers when the data is not comprehensive enough to separate good from bad. Nor will they put in the effort to ensure fair driver ratings with thorough analysis of the data they do have.
This already happens (probably more accurately) via other metrics. If you live in an area with poorly designed roads that cause more claims, you will be charged more because of your zip code.
That should also be illegal.
Restricting insurers from using relevant data to calculate risk premiums is not the way to subsidize people who live in an area where traffic and road design are subpar.
If there is an unfair situation that needs to be rectified with a subsidy, it is best for the subsidy to transparent to prevent corruption.
For example, the knowledge of this subsidy can help propel political change to remedy road design so that some people are not driving in unsafe road designs.
In an efficient market safe drivers wouldn't be compelled to subsidize unsafe drivers.
I pay for insurance to avoid the chance of catastrophic loss. No matter how safe I operate, an innocent accident (instigated by myself or another) could still lead to financial ruin.
Okay, that's an interesting perspective, let's explore. A policy that can be unilaterally cancelled at any time, and forces you to put cameras in your car, could be the most efficient insurance ever. As long they manage to predict that you'll be in an accident in time to electronically cancel your policy, they'll never need to pay out more than refunding your premium.
Car insurance companies are already generally legally required to give notice in writing 30 days before cancelling your policy, even for material changes in risk.
Let’s try to stick to the real world.
Insurance premiums also fund salaries, bonuses, massive ad campaigns, high end office leases, and more.
If we just had a simple common slush fund (like amongst a large family self-insuring), our insurance would be far cheaper. The data harvesting boosts profitability but does not necessarily equal lower premiums.
Like a mutual insurance company?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance
This binary classification into safe and unsafe does not match the signal, which is incredibly noisy.
They can learn about my safety per mile from my odometer and my spotless driving record, not my real time location
I can't really see how enriching the state of Texas to the tune of 1.4 billion US dollars is "the good fight". Meta does something that negatively effects individuals & the outcome is the state collects a paycheck? No thanks.
Banning books and squashing rights doesn't pay for itself! /s
said as a Texan that vehemently disagrees with the gov't in charge
I don't see how comments saying that are accepted here. Everyone knows that no books are being banned anywhere in the country. You can go to a bookstore or web site and buy whatever books you want. They can be bought in public or delivered to your home. Publishers can publish whatever they want. The First Amendment protects authors, publishers, and readers.
Meanwhile, in the UK, if you share a message consisting entirely of a couple of emojis on Facebook, you can be sentenced to 2 months in jail, being convicted and sentenced in merely 3 days.
Yet people here continue to make accusations of "banning books." I hope that the Internet enables humanity to eventually "graduate" out of this state in which we have infinite access to information yet consume enormous amounts of propaganda.
Forcibly removing books (about very specific topics related to oppressed cultural minorities) from public school libraries is not the same thing as enacting a national ban on printing or trading those books, no.
But it's a lot closer to a total ban than it is to not banning books. (And I stand by "forcibly," if you've seen any of the adults screaming at school board hearings or issuing threats over these books)
What oppressed cultural minorities? Nearly the entirety of the media landscape outright celebrates LGBTQ, if that's what you're talking about. I'd be hard-pressed to think of a more exaggerated use of the word "oppression".
Does the fact that you view this group as oppressed make a difference on whether such a ban is more or less valid?
Off the top of my head: LGBTQ people are significantly more likely to be assaulted or murdered than the average population: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2022/07/11/violentvictimiz...
Also, Ken Paxton, the Texas AG, has publicly stated he would be in favor of Texas banning being gay again
How fortunate for you, and how exhausting for the rest of us, that you live in such a world.
You're telling me you haven't even heard of the drag bans popping up all over the country? That's queer culture, if you couldn't tell. (It's also, since you probably won't notice this right away, a veiled instrument for criminalizing trans people.)
Well yes, because you won't ever see a ISD try to ban a book because it contains a heterosexual couple.
We can play dumb all day long, and sometimes that can be fun. But after a certain point we have to wade through the bullshit.
It's not about sexuality, it's not about protecting children, it's not about inappropriate content. When 100% of proposed book bans "conveniently" target books which, either tangentially or directly, address LGBT topics then clearly THAT is the reason they are being banned.
Of course, nobody is going to tell you that. Because saying "we want this book gone because gays" isn't very nice and doesn't sound very good. However, as human beings, we have been given the power of logic and deductive reasoning. We can look at patterns, locations, history of regions etc. and come to the conclusion that is what they're doing.
What’s really funny is that these books are usually so obscene that just reading from them at a school board meeting is a good way to get “forcibly” removed. A few stories:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/florida-school-board-remove...
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/texas-schoo...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/parent-reading-sexual-content-sch...
I frankly find it impossible to believe that anyone actually believes that literally any book should be allowed in a public school library. We can disagree about where to draw the line but I don’t think anybody wants copies of The Turner Diaries in a public school library.
It’s particularly hard to take these complaints seriously when they come from the same people who hold congressional hearings to attack a private business for selling certain books to grown adults: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/09/1035559330/democrats-slam-ama...
Here’s a comprehensive list of books banned in Texa, school district by school district: https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/list-of-texas-banned-boo... . On there you will find obscene books like “the Handmaid’s tale” and “the hobbit”
This is not the case because literally hundreds of books have been, or are, on the chopping blocks.
Keep in mind the word "obscene" here is doing a lot of work. These types of people consider any display of homosexuality obscene. Their purpose is to mix in REAL obscene books into the pot to confuse you and get you to think "wow they're doing the lord's work!"
It's a common, but effective, strategy. You say a few reasonable things and then you mix in some absolutely crazy bullshit and it goes under the radar. Meaning, you ban actually absurd books and then you sneak in "The Handmaid's Tale" or "To Kill a Mockingbird" and hopefully nobody notices.
Books are absolutely being banned from public libraries and schools in the US. There may not be laws preventing the private circulation of such books (yet...some are arguing bringing back the Comstock act for these works) but they certainly are being banned from certain settings.
“Inside the two-year fight to bring charges against school librarians in Granbury, Texas” : https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna161444
That’s librarians at a school subjected to a two year criminal investigation, complete with search warrants and interrogations, because of the books that were on their shelves
because they are true. "The district then banned 14 titles (bringing its total since 2021 to 30), including popular books by Dr. Seuss and Judy Blume"[0] i don't see how comments like yours are even made here, but at least they are not accepted.
[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/11/texas-library-book-b...
The Texas Attorney General is an entire office of people. It's always nice to know that while you want to judge the book by it's cover you're willing to put that aside.
It is always odd to me that people feel the need to announce this.
Paxton is a crook though, abuses the power of his office, and generally would prefer to act in ways that hurt his political opponents rather than ways that server the public. He works against the public interest and should be called out for it. So, it's genuinely shocking for the TAG under his direction to be protecting consumers from these kinds of abuses.
It's an elected position in Texas. I understand that most of the people who frequent Hacker News wouldn't share his politics, but it's pretty undemocratic to "call him out" incessantly, even when it adds nothing to the situation being discussed, and in particular when he's been elected by a vote.
It's mindless preaching to the choir to show that, yes, you are on the "proper" side of the false political divide. It's tiring. So, _I_ call _this_ out.
The attitude, to me, boils down to, "I refuse to acknowledge anything good without reminding myself of everything bad." What value does this have? Maybe I just don't "get it."
I'm literally trying to get him voted out because he gets rich harming people I care about.
If you think an elected official working against the interests of the constituency is just going to naturally get voted out of office, I don't have the energy for the depth this conversation requires.
Regardless of what you think that's exactly how democracy works. If enough of his constituency thinks he is working against their interests they will vote him out. Conversely, if enough of his constituency thinks he is working for their interests he will get (re)elected.
Democracy means sometimes people you don't like are elected to positions you'd rather they not be in, but that's the rub.
As I said, I can't continue this conversation. Our understandings are too far apart.
Assertions of opinion as if they were fact is part of what makes me bristle. To do this and then act surprised that I might not exactly share your view and that it would take extreme energy on your part to continue is a bit churlish, don't you think?
I do think that. If it's not happening in your mind, then I'd have to ask, what means are you using to judge the "interests of the constituency?" In particular, outside of polling, how can you be confident your measure truly represents a majority?
It's not that I begrudge you your position, it's just that I openly wonder if this is the best place and means to put forth these opinions. Again, if you are worried that votes will not be effective, then broadcasting this message where the majority already likely holds this view seems, to me, misguided.
How is that an opinion? I stated what's happening as plainly as I could. I didn't say "him bad" - I said his work does harm to people I care about, which it does; and that he gets rich doing it, which he does. Those aren't opinions, they're facts. You can dispute that they're true facts, but calling them opinions does not make sense.
Ok, well, that's unfortunate.
I don't understand this sentiment. Using your freedom of speech to criticize a politician doesn't feel undemocratic to me. If anything, the implication that critic should be reserved feels undemocratic. You can vote and speak, and without critic we don't have a true democracy because voters aren't educated. Democracy requires not just voting, but informed voting.
The common belief is that Texas === Republican (it doesn't), and folks here need to virtue signal that they're definitely not one to be or support any Republican in any way ever under any circumstances. This is clearly one of the single-digit number of aberrations where a Republican has done something that isn't objectively evil, right?
I don't know why we can't just say a good thing is a good thing and leave it at that. Every politician has done good things. Every politician has done bad things. Every politician (or very close) has probably done something you'd consider downright evil.
Why is the insurance companies' use of this data illegal? Unless you can show discrimination against protected groups, not sure how this is illegal.
Why would you be allowed to use illegal data? Especially if you have the means to know if it's illegal or not.
Not even Ebay/Craigslist has managed to keep itself immune from liability of vendors selling stolen items.
Insurance is regulated so maybe it's different, but plenty of companies rely on illegally obtained data. Websites like haveibeenpwned.com and identity theft protection services couldn't exist without hacked/stolen information. I guess the distinction is that they didn't commission it.
Also, newspapers regularly publish information that was obtained illegally. e.g. someone breaking an NDA.
Do insurance regulations prohibit it?
Stolen property is a little bit different, there are laws that explicitly prohibit possession or dealing in property known to be stolen.
It's illegal because GM sending this data to insurance companies without explicitly user consent violates Texas law.
Protected class has nothing to do with it.
When you say "Paxton is a crook", do you mean you believe he steals, or do you mean he was convicted, or that he should be convicted?
Was Paxton convicted of a crime? Was Paxton accused of a crime you believe he is guilty of?
He's a well known crook.. he's been repeatedly indicted for serious financial crimes but due to his position in government, the charges either were dropped for nonsense reasons or just never prosecuted for over 9 years...
https://apnews.com/article/paxton-indictment-texas-d5e57fc6c...
Then afterwards nearly a dozen of his staffers whistleblew to the FBI about his relationship with an Austin-based real estate developer who was committing serious crimes with Paxton's blessing and likely with kickbacks --
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/07/ken-paxton-impeachme...
That developer was indicted on a number of serious Federal charges where it came out that he renovated Paxton's home for free and covered up Paxton's affair with one of his other staffers: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/08/nate-paul-indictment...
Which ultimately resulted in an impeachment trial where the Texas GOP compeletly beclowned itself to acquit an obvious crook because they agree with him politically.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/16/ken-paxton-acquitted...
You mean he's faced multiple trumped up and politically motivated persecutions that have all failed.