HN user

salvar

473 karma
Posts1
Comments301
View on HN

Just because something is revenue doesn't mean that the purpose is entirely to increase revenue. That is the claim you made. I have presented a counter-example to that, where revenue increase is clearly not the only reason for monetary fines. We have the stated purpose of the legislation -- you can call that PR or whatever you'd like but the stated purpose is not revenue increase -- and you have the fact that these revenues do not benefit any police departments or anyone directly. Instead they make up an absolutely tiny fraction of the total revenues of the state.

Just for fun, I calculated this fraction for a given year. The revenue from all traffic violation fines accounted for a whopping 0.1% of the total state revenue.

So apparently the only purpose of these traffic fines are to raise the state revenue by 0.1%, despite the explicit stated purpose of the legislation and any evidence to the contrary. Does that make sense to you?

Is this one of those things where you just know you're right because you feel it in your gut and nothing can ever convince you otherwise?

Yes, I really do. Why don't more computers come with Linux pre-installed? If Linux is such a great replacement for Windows, why has it made very little gains in replacing Windows? Is it all somebody else's fault and has nothing to do with the usability of Linux?

Anecdote of my own: In my country, monetary fines in traffic infringements are explicitly not for revenue. They mix into the total state revenue and form a minuscule fraction of it. The police sees none of it.

This distinction is made very clear, for example in a parliament answer by the justice minister: "...it is clear that the purpose of fines is not to increase the revenue of police departments but first and foremost to deter traffic violations and increase traffic safety."

I guess... but that still leaves pretty much all news aggregators. Google News doesn't let you do much other than read news from all over the internet. It's functionally exactly the same, only with a different aggregating algorithm.

This seems weird enough to be an error of some kind. Not that Apple is likely to fix it, but enforcing this rule would exclude:

- All Reddit apps

- All HN apps

- Twitter

- Facebook

- Google News

- Any link or news aggregator

I guess even a browser wouldn't fly, since it "displays full articles from multiple news sources."

Have you done any research into how likely it is that a visitor from your demographic understands what "federated" means in this context? I ask because it's part of the tagline, so if you don't understand a key word in the product description you're probably less likely to show interest in it.

Counterpoint to your ridiculous hyperbole: Why isn't the murder rate near zero in states with the death penalty?

Submitting to the (future) status quo is very different from saying "I support whatever the outcome is" though.

Unless you mean "support" as in "I will respect whatever happens", in which case I agree. But that applies to voters as well, and pretty much everyone.

Some people say that if you voted or not is public record. Yes it is public but there is a difference between 1 click and jumping through some bureaucracy to find that information.

Would you call that bureaucracy an important feature then?

And as soon as any of these individuals came in to vote and saw that someone had already voted fraudulently on their behalf, an investigation would start. And you'd get maybe what, three or four votes in exchange for the very real possibility of facing severe punishment?

Why aren't more instances of voters realizing that someone has already voted on their behalf if this is so easy and smart?

If it's a company safe? Well of course that's the employer's decision.

A better example would be a safe deposit box or storage unit with a combination. Where you are accessing your account so to speak. There you can pick the combination yourself in most cases.

Also improves conversion rate since there's no risk the user gives up signing up because he can't be bothered to think about or generate a password.

Sure, but there's considerable risk of the user giving up signing up because they can't be bothered with memorizing a random password and want to set their own like every other service allows them.

Your hotel example is pretty absurd, because there's no friction involved in carrying around a hotel room key.

There is significant friction involved in memorizing a long password. So no, it's not "how most of the world already works".