No it won't. (Source: got legislation for this, pretty good bead on who the stakeholders are).
This is all Internet logic. It's fun to talk about destroying cameras as a vector for public policy, ergo, by the First Law of Message Boards, that must be a viable strategy. Reader, it is not. Nobody's going to blink at these costs, but residents who supported or were on the fence about the cameras are now negatively polarized against doing anything about them.
The cringe-ier thing here is the clear message being sent by many commentators, incl. the author of this post, that nobody's ever thought of breaking surveillance cameras before. Y'all, this is literally a meme.
Sure, keep calling me a cosplayer. I must be! It's a message board, and I disagree with you. What other explanation could there be? It's definitely not as if I've been talking incessantly about this since long before "deflock" was a thing.
I don't believe you knew any what I just posted, or you wouldn't have used "cosplayer" as your epithet. And why would I keep talking to you after that? You made it clear that wasn't productive, and that's fine: you and I simply never need to discuss this issue. We'll both be OK.
The funny part of this is that you didn't even bother to hit the search bar; if you had, your "municipality still uses Flock" thing wouldn't have made any sense.
That's why planes should be flown using direct democracy. Passengers (correctly) feel like they have little power over the maneuvers planes make and affect them moment to moment.
Representational democracy is far superior. Decisions need to be weighed against both their popularity and their effect with input from experts and other affected parties.
The problem with representative democracy arises when it stops being representative. Alas, at least in the US, Congress nearly always votes according to moneyed interests over the desires of its constituent voters.
That isn't to say we should use something other than representative democracy. I believe the best option is to fix the system rather than replace it. However, it does explain why people currently feel they have very little power of the laws that affect them.
I think increasing the size of the House would make representatives more responsive to their constituents. I also don't think it'll ever happen for exactly that reason.
As an European, the biggest issue with US politics I see is that you only have 2 parties. It makes no sense. As a voter, you can only express a binary choice and whatever you choose for the issue you care about most effectively decides what you vote for regarding all other issues.
I'd like to see more separation. If we are to keep indirect democracy, at least have separate representation for criminal law, economic decisions (taxes, healthcare, ...), social decisions (abortions, marriage, ...), etc. But even where to draw the lines is difficult. I think that too should be in some ways decided by voters.
Of course, in a country which can't get rid of FPTP/plurality, despite being objectively the worst voting system[0-3], that's never gonna happen. If you need to explain math to people to convince them, you've already lost, because people are not smart enough and definitely not educated enough.
I'd love to get rid of FPTP and the two party system. I feel like small enclaves of alternative voting systems are happening but I feel pretty hopeless about it being wider spread. In general I feel pretty hopeless about all of it after Citizens United. My interests aren't aligned with big money, therefore I have no speech.
The vile thing is that people work for a company and make it a lot more money than they end up receiving and then the owners of the company go and use the remaining money against the people's interest.
It depends a lot on the country. Pretty sure most/all have more than 2 viable parties. Still sucks because usually you can only vote for one party so it still leads to strategic voting. And ou might be able to prefer certain candidates from the party, in which case it might or might not be broken in other ways.
Oh and Switzerland has 7 presidents (effectively). No kings, no dictators.
In US not only parties themselves don't vote but the people don't elect parties either. For example, we just had the most money spent in history on a primary (this is an election among multiple candidates in the same party), where some interest groups spent 25M+ to unseat a popular GOP representative in favor of another GOP candidate. If the choice was just between two parties nobody would have spent a dime to change one GOP rep for another GOP rep.
See, with a plane, you get to choose which one you board.
And the pilot is not a random guy from the street with no education or at best a completely unrelated degree. And he's probably not 90 years old. And he's the engineer, mechanic, ATC, pilot, stewerd, advertiser, accountant and TSA in one person.
Direct democracy shouldn't be the only change, obviously. As you correctly point out the issue is when uninformed, uneducated and not sufficiently intelligent people make decisions for everyone.
The issue with direct democracy is that you're describing a highly dimensional vector (your opinion) by picking one of a small set of predefined points (the political parties). Some countries only have 2. That's obviously stupid.
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For example we should weight votes by how informed they are. How to determine that? That's a difficult question. But shooting down the idea does move us closer to a solution.
Making voting indirect only has the effect that all nuance is lost. You still get dumb people voting for populists, fascists, narcissists, rapists, etc.
We need better democracy, where opportunities for corruption are minimized and proper representation is possible.
Campaign finance reform would be the foundation for this, otherwise we will continue with legalized bribery.
The other need is for daylight and accountability. As much as I loath the Web3 cryptocrowd, having some sort of public ledger of government operations would be incredibly valuable. Anything and everything related to government actions should be public record with the small exception of sensitive information (which itself should have oversight on not being abused).
This is an easy problem to solve (on a technical level), but the established political base will always fight against it they like things the way they are.
I agree and we need to talk about specific things if we have any chance of turning ideas into change. The issue is these are complex topics not suited for a discussion platform where most activity on a post ceases within a day (and if it continues longer in rare cases, nobody sees it). But there are no really good platforms for this so everything is simplified into short statements which lose nuance.
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It's impossible for every person to have a well-researched opinion on everything. Opponents of direct democracy use this to shoot it down. But it applies to indirect democracy too.
The real issue we need to solve is how to make sure people (whether all citizens or representatives) only vote on what they actually understand.
I think votes weighted based on the score of a knowledge test would be a good start if the test is well-designed. But we need to figure out how to decide what the questions are (what is relevant, what is enough in-depth, what is too specific, etc.) and what the correct answers are (some topics are still a matter of debate even among experts). And that's hard.
It's hard in a cooperative environment (e.g. engineers deciding which factors are relevant to their proposed solution) and it's even harder in an adversarial environment like politics.
You think the secretary at one of the Flock offices feels personal disrespect hearing about a camera 2,000 miles away getting spray painted? Someone writing code for the web app? The guy wiring up the solar panel?
No, I think for 95% of the people who work at Flock it's just a job and they could care less about the "safety" of their cameras, and I'm willing to bet the rest are so well compensated they don't really care. Or they're complete psychopaths incapable of feeling emotion at all, like the CEO who called deflock a "terrorist organization."
Oops! The Flock decision makers were supposed to be those who make decisions on installations in the communities they were elected to serve.
Thanks for your reply, sorry about that. Restated-
Community decisionmakers on local Flock installs will get their knickers bunched by vandalism, not unlike how they close bathrooms after repeated spraypaintings (or worse, ew!).
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RE: Deflock - wow! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZGrDz7PU) Starts by shouting out ACLU & EFF, maybe that Deflock Discord had some naughty people on it. “Terroristic” gooooodness
People do nothing because they believe others are doing nothing and it's a suppressive feedback loop that's exploited. Repeating that people know and do nothing reinforces it and falls into the broad category of criticism for the the sake of social flagging and not towards actual growth.
It will be easier to negotiate for legislation as well if the economic risk of installation increases because of vandalism.