I've been driving roundabouts for decades, and think they're great - they really help with traffic flow. I've never found them confusing.
I had to drive this specific Kirkland roundabout the other day, and ended up missing my offramp and going in completely the wrong direction. It's the most confusing roundabout I've ever seen.
People (including me) are getting flat tires. There's an obstruction jutting out into the road in going west on 85th to South on 405. It's a few inches high, very sharp, and right into the pathway. We've filed a complaint but it's still there.
I live moments away from this roundabout. It's confusing. Single-lane roundabouts are really straightforward. You're either clear to enter, or you're not.
Adding lanes makes it far more confusing. I consider myself, you know, pretty smart. Not stupid, at least.
But I almost sideswiped someone in this roundabout the other day. Years of driving experience gave me an intuition that the middle lane would not cross over the outer lane. E.x. a car in the inner lane would not pass through the outer lane (except at the very end). So when I saw an oncoming car in the inner lane I thoguht I was safe to enter the outer lane. Not so. The inner lane car was actually lane-changing to the outer lane (at the exact point I was about to enter the roundabout) in order to exit.
The lanes are quite narrow, and the outer curb is deceptive - there’s a 1” edge with a curved curb behind it making it look wider than it actually is. Scraping along that edge will push cars into the center of the road. There will be a lot of minor accidents here due to the road design.
One other second order effect - people are getting used to roundabouts here now, but nearby are ‘traffic circles’ that are roundabouts with stop signs on some entrances. People are now ignoring those stop signs (because it’s a roundabout!). I almost hit 3 cars in 2 intersections as people ignored their stop sign.
It's more complex than that. I live in Seattle near a street that has these traffic circles. The design is:
* There is a round obstruction in the middle of the intersection like a roundabout.
* The street going north-south through the intersection does not have a stop sign.
* The street going east-west has stop signs on both sides.
* But the north-south street which doesn't have to stop also has speed humps on it to slow drivers down.
On its face, this seems like a totally bananas design. The street that should be efficient by not having to stop has traffic calming speed humps on it anyway, negating the efficiency. The cross streets get none of the efficiency of a roundabout because they have to stop anyway. And the combination of roundabout and stop signs is very confusing to drivers.
It makes no sense... if you assume the intersection is designed entirely for cars.
But it isn't, it's a "neighborhood greenway"[1]. The north-south street is designed to improve bicycle traffic. The speed humps don't slow cyclists down. The roundabout middle and stop signs on the cross streets make it safer for cyclists to cruise through the intersection without stopping.
If you ever bike commute, you quickly learn how lethal a lot of stopping and going is for cycling. The effort and efficiency really only make sense if you can go a fairly steady speed for much of your commute. Accelerating a bike is a lot of work.
Once you factor in bikes, the design of these intersections makes more sense. At least in theory. In practice, though people are consistently confused by "roundabout + stop signs" and I see drivers blow through those stop signs more than I've ever seen any other traffic violation by a large margin. Because of that, cyclists and drivers going north-south still have to be paranoid going into the intersection. Even though they have the right of way, there's about a 25% chance the other driver won't stop anyway.
It was a good idea, and maybe the execution will work out once people get more educated. But right now it's a mess. I walk along that street often and I spend a lot of time gesticulating wildly at drivers when they blow through those stop signs.
I live by a bunch of these, but worse IMO is the "four way intersection with no signs or circle or anything" where you just kind of hope no one comes fast and hits you (I imagine on a bike where you wouldn't stop if there was a sign this is even more dangerous). Seattle is weird. Traffic circle with stop signs is fine by me, they don't really function well as roundabouts for most cars, anyways, some of them are too cramped to actually go all the way around smoothly.
> worse IMO is the "four way intersection with no signs or circle or anything" where you just kind of hope no one comes fast and hits you
Agreed, totally. That's what this street used to be before they converted it. I hated driving it because I had to crawl through each intersection because you never knew if someone was going to just blow through it or not. It was even slower than a four-way stop.
Hah! Yeah I also live on a neighborhood greenway street with a traffic circle in Seattle and the odd stop sign layout. It confused me for a year until I learned about the greenway program.
Seattle has plenty of traffic circles just laying around that predate the greenway program though.
I almost never see Seattle drivers blow through stop signs though, maybe people in my neighborhood are just more chill? :D
Mine was converted to a greenway pretty recently, so it may be that drivers just have old habits from before when those intersections didn't have any stop signs.
Good to hear they are adding more green ways! I love the program and I feel they are safer (and a lot more affordable) than "bike lanes" on arterial streets that are often just a painted line.
Seems reasonable. Of course there are really good (true) roundabout designs that are great of cycling (and walking), but without understanding the space it's hard to know if they would fit / work well.
What they're talking about is basically a small concrete circle (sometimes it's not a circle, but a round-ish shape vaguely near the center) plopped down in a standard residential intersection (sometimes with a lot of stuff in it that blocks the view in case you were worried about knowing if someone is crossing the street on the other side). Better designs likely wouldn't fit without raising the cost a huge amount.
> Single-lane roundabouts are really straightforward
Like the Arc de Triomphe roundabout? :)
If it had lane marking there would apparently be 10 tracks around the circle.
What makes it seem crazy is cars entering have right of way.
The reason it works seems to be French attitude. Cars entering do their thing, and cars already going around do their thing (and just have to avoid anyone on their right).
> What makes it seem crazy is cars entering have right of way.
The thing that’s bananas is that this is a City of Paris rule. In the rest of France, traffic entering a roundabout must yield. Not inside Paris. Better make sure you know this!
And even more crazy, the Periphérique, the controlled-access ring road around Paris which tends to move at 40-50mph, is a city street and so traffic entering that highway-like “street” also has right-of-way.
The top of the Arc is open space. Standing up there watching the traffic is amusing. I once saw two buses, side-by-side, exit the roundabout, while the motorbike sandwiched between them attempted to continue further around the circle. Luckily, everything happened at fairly slow speeds, so collision was avoided.
> What makes it seem crazy is cars entering have right of way.
I saw that on either Top Gear or The Grand Tour and was convinced they were just making fun of the French. It's really odd to not have changed it when everyone else learned that lesson already.
Not hitting anyone is a skill some people seem to lack. Sometimes the rules say one thing, but you have to do another, mostly give way even if you're not supposed to yield.
I'm waiting until my kids are out of the house (just a couple of years now) to repurchase the 3-volume set. The first purchase didn't survive my kids' childhood - which, yes, I think Watterson would have approved.
I'd be more likely to assume that it's a really great one, where folks like and trust each other enough that they can give each other crap like this and everyone understands and appreciates it, like good friends trash-talking each other on the basketball court. I've thought for years that the way you can tell acquaintances have become friends is if they start insulting each other.
Or, as you say, it could be a really horrible environment - but I don't think you can tell from one anecdote.
Considering how many people love telling this story, both within and outside of Costco, I think it's more the former than the latter. One way you can tell is that the COO, who was cursed at in this story, later succeeded Sinegal as the CEO and, in fact, has gone on record defending that hot dog price many times.
They manufactured their own hot dog manufacturing plant:
> "What we figured out we could do is build our own hot dog-manufacturing plant (in Los Angeles) and make our own Kirkland Signature hot dogs. Now we are doing so much hot dog business that we’ve opened up another plant in Chicago. By having the discipline to say, ‘You are not going to be able to raise your price. You have to figure it out,’ we took it over and started manufacturing our hot dogs. We keep it at $1.50 and make enough money to get a fair return."
Consider yourself lucky. He's a beyond-sleazy, probably criminal online influencer, important in what's called the "manosphere". He's made a lot of money exploiting and abusing women and encouraging other people to do so. If the online clips of him bragging about how to manipulate women into doing pornography don't make you want to throw up, you're pretty far gone. Unfortunately, lots of folks are, in fact, pretty far gone.
If I were in charge of, say, the Mossad, I would have as a significant part of my budget purchasing every single bluetooth device on the market, and set a bunch of underemployed Israeli CS grads to work at finding these vulnerabilities, and then putting them into an easily deployed toolkit. You want an asset with access to, say, an Iranian government office, to be able to walk through the building with a phone and take control of as many machines as possible.
Now that I think about it, I think you have to assume that they probably DO do this...
This is kind of backwards. There aren't as many CS grads in Israel in the first place, because they already put their top talent through 8200. It's essentially a fully socialized Masters of computer engineering, and as a SIGINT shop they are learning this sort of thing. Once their 2-3 years of service is over (which doesn't result in student loans), the government makes a lot of seed funding available for startups and the TLV ecosystem is like a mini Bay Area.
Living with your parents is more socially acceptable, so they have a huge chunk of people in their 20s with no debt, low monthly expenses, strong technology expertise from their military service, in a founder hot spot, and access to capital. The result is a lot of unicorns, particular around cyber security (https://www.techaviv.com/unicorns).
Compare to the United States, where you have to dedicate 4 years to an undergrad program, go massively in debt, pay rent, and then struggle to find seed funding. The mental model of "oh, I guess we could apply some of the detritus of our failed system" misses the idea of having a successful system in the first place.
..and all that human capital is used to taint humanity itself, propagating inter generational trauma and conducting the second genocide of the last century, all justified by some religious texts.
An exercise like this sounds like it would be a rounding error in any country's national security or intelligence budgets. And now with AI you could probably automate the initial screening of devices for promising candidates for further manual exploration.
I would be kind of surprised if this wasn't standard practice, unless it's not nearly as productive as one might imagine it to be, and thus maybe not worth the effort. But cases like this show it could be pretty fruitful, but I suppose that depends on how it compares to whatever other methods intelligence agencies have that we may not know about.
Good point. The pager attack on Hezbollah was risky because it involved physically changing the pagers enough to put explosives in them. Quite a lot easier just to ship devices with some subtly insecure code.
Pretty sure that's what NSO Group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSO_Group) is. Israeli intelligence could also just insert vulnerabilities in cheap garbage (or even more expensive garbage like this) for NSO or NSO-like Israeli orgs to take advantage of. We know they sell pagers.
> The camera can have different ways of seeing encoded in it, including kinds of gazes that enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”
The phrase "kinds of gazes" strikes me as the sort of thing that's only going to make sense to people trained in a very particular and idiosyncratic flavor of ethical critique. What a normal person sees here is, "These cameras can detect if people are acting bizarre and dangerous," which is probably something most people would appreciate. In Seattle, the problem, of course, is that the streets are full of people acting bizarre and dangerous, it doesn't take a camera network to find them, and the police seem to be under strict orders not to do anything about it.
[[Surveillance cameras normalize/denormalize behavior in a way that is easily biased and undemocratic.]]
It might e.g. direct the full force of law against a drunk urinating on a tree (easy to spot/classify), while tolerating vicious verbal attacks disguised by somewhat subdued body language (missing data/difficult to detect).
Letting automated surveillance systems judge people will inevitably influence our own collective judgement.
The threshold for a surveillance system to affect societal norms is not necessarily "legal event", and potentially even lower than any observable reaction (from self-censorship).
Just consider how algorithmic moderation can shape language (=> people using weird constructs like "to unalive", or weird metaphors in chinese), even in contexts where it would technically be unnecessary.
A close US equivalent is the "cant google that, I'll end up on a list" notion. This is all quite undesirable from my point of view.
Perhaps, depending on specific intent, credibility, and the nature of harm threatened.
But since this is about surveillance, I hope that detection of verbal threats is not a goal of government surveillance because it's difficult to imagine how that could be accomplished without significant loss of privacy or other liberties.
I can see it in court now. Our AI monitoring system did indeed know about the threat to the building where 800 people died on Sunday.
It says: "
Agent: Voice to text detected: I have everything ready - all the XXX chemicals are ready in the van and I'm going to park in the 900 S Crap St now"
Agent: Thread Level HIGH.
Agent: Looking up local codes.
Agent: Mayor signed SB-1238 in 2026 - no surveillance devices may be used for audio threat determination.
Agent: Threat silenced, but logged.
Judge: Oh, that makes sense. Make sure to bag and tag and bill the families for the bags.
City Employee: We also know who parked the van, should we arrest them.
Judge: No it looks like SB-1238 would forbid us from using this data for the purposes of arrest. I guess send them a thank you letter for testing our laws.
Oh, only 800? Maybe you can pick a larger imaginary number to make me feel really guilty about not wanting to give up my rights to live free of surveillance.
They wrote a 600 page report about it and it included a ton of recommendations. Not many people remember at this point, but for months and even a few years after, the entire country was on edge about it happening again, in different means (trains, car wrecks on purpose, shootings). There is a reason they have called this a post-911 world ever since. That hasn't ended.
Appreciate the pushback, saltyoldman. Yes, we want to respond to credible threats. And, as always, courts and law enforcement can invade privacy when there's reason to believe someone is worth surveilling. But we're talking here about widespread, extremely cheap, technically easy surveillance of potentially everyone at all times. That's the endgame that some commercial and government interests have in mind.
Would you agree that sometimes an uptick in theoretical safety is not worth a downtick of definite lost liberties?
I used to be that way. However more recently I have come to prefer security over privacy, at least where I live. I do want to make sure human, drug and weapon traffickers are not exiting off my freeway ramp. I do get the issues with what you're saying, but let's think of ways to have both. The existence of a surveillance net with safegards. In other words yes let's have the conversation to make our country secure and also prosecute sherrifs spying on their girlfriends, make sure no API hole exists and some company isn't selling billions worth of data to China.
There is no way to have both. Surveillance is power and it corrupts in the same way as any other form of power. It's not just about patching some individual holes. You can't have too much of it for the same reason why you can't have a cop stationed at every single building in your city. For sure, doing that would make some people feel safer, but it would also make anyone doing something legal but disfavored by their government terrified, increase prosecutions for frivolous infractions and open the door for a future government to swoop in and make great use of all that free power lying around.
Besides, even if it was possible to do both (it's not), do you think this would ever actually happen? When it comes to surveillance, they only take and take and take and never give anything back, further encouraged by a terrified populace that wants more safety in a safer-than-ever world. It's a ratchet that only goes one way because it greatly benefits anyone vying for power in governments and businesses alike. Once you let them have it, you're not getting anything back.
I'm in Seattle and everyone knows exactly where human trafficking is happening and the police are doing nothing about it. Teenagers are being pimped out all along Aurora and literally nothing is happening despite literally years of public outcry.
The pimps get arrested again and again and then released without charges being filed.
The interesting thing is how I was making a very contained point pertaining to cameras, and how cameras, which we were talking about in this thread, seeing a verbal confrontation, could not and should not make a call, because a verbal confrontation is not a legal event. You then took this into a totally different case involving ... what? hypothetical recording of a conversation between two hypothetical terrorists? To prove ... what? My point is that it is not a shortcoming of the camera that it is not making a judgement call on the thing OP was originally talking about. A verbal altercation between two people. I was not talking about a hypothetical bombing. I was not citing a specific law, I was not advocating that there should be a law, I was not advocating anything about whether or not we should ban collection of existing evidence. I was not making any of these moves. I was saying simply: a camera looking at two people in a verbal argument from far enough away that it cannot hear the conversation is not a failure of the technology. Not every negative interaction between two human beings is criminalizable.
You received a straw man and decided to engage it. You fell for the trap, and have already been put into a losing position. How are you supposed to recover from engaging this straw man.
alternatively, it turns out the voice to text ended up picking up on dialog from a movie the suspect was watching, and he opens the door to a SWAT team thinking that's his pizza being delivered.
I don't think you're advocating to have our personal conversations continuously monitored whenever outside, but in the context of this thread, that's what it sounds like.
No, in the context of the thread it sounds like they're illustrating myrmidon's point about how the selective enforcement of crimes that are easy to catch on camera means that the police have less time (and less inclination, training, norms) for addressing more serious crimes, like interpersonal violence.
More broadly, they're not saying that we should make the cameras better to catch more crime, they're saying that when you make cameras the main way you catch crime, you shift the social definition of what crime is to "what cameras can catch".
"we" didn't pass them --- i don't think changing the severity of law enforcement alone can achieve what i wish for in society, but the existence of many laws (and severity of their punishment) i disagree with and thus do not want enforced
I think it's clear what it means but indeed it's formulated in a critical theory framework (see also "male gaze" in feminist theory) that makes it seem more complicated.
Yes, they take camera images and videos and there is value judgment regarding the behaviors.
Reading between the lines, the authors criticize the approach of law enforcement around drug use and dealing, living on the street in tents etc.
But the language makes it sound like special academic expert language and hence automatically right and high prestige.
Until we have robot police officers, there will always be a human in the loop. But right now, there's a whole category of "drunk and disorderly" / "breach of the peace" kinds of laws that are ~100% up to the discretion of a police officer to enforce. I won't say you CAN'T have it any other way, because I can imagine alternatives like "don't have those laws", but I will say that you don't WANT to have it any other way.
there was a recent case of a lady who spent at least a month in jail because an ai said it was her. She had physical evidence indicating she wasn't and hadn't been to the state at all during the crime. There was a human in that loop too and she still sat in jail and had her life ruined.
The entire city of Seattle seems to have been bought and paid for by basically 2 - 4 companies. Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, ...Starbucks in year's past maybe?
Why would they? None of the major tech companies have offices in the international district, it doesn't directly impact them. They are however at least partially responsible for the rapid gentrification and cost of living crisis in Seattle and have displaced and priced out local residents causing and continuing to worsen the problem.
They could at least address that the man and woman on the street would easily identify as people who need to be put in a paddy wagon. Leave the unsure cases alone. Get the obvious ones.
What came to mind is a camera pointed at the cash register tells a very different story than the camera pointed at the ATM, or pointing from the ATM for that matter. Placement and the stories behind them offer interesting perspectives on what the observers are trying to catch or deter.
You are asking me why I can't write plainly, but I believe you're confusing me for the author, but I'll answer you anyways. "Plain" language removes nuance. Example: "She sat on the chair". The number of ways that action can be described are as innumerable as the ways it can be done, and then some - as different people may describe an act in different ways. Communication in all forms is lossy, but you can convey more than just direct ideas by adding subtext or using language that draws the reader to make comparisons new comparisons. Perhaps the author used gaze to anthropomorphize the camera to add on the layer of judgement or shame that the camera conveys, perhaps to an employee that is not trusted to manage a till.
I asked about your comment that I replied to. The "stories" you see in the camera positioning would need elaboration. To me the concept sounds quite mundane. It's pointed at something they want to see. Cash register: see if someone steals, possibly an employee. ATM: See if it gets robbed. Camera built into the atm: capture photo of robber. Not sure what deeper story or insight lies in it and you gave no example.
The "stories" I reference are the wide ranges of events, decisions, and conversations that went into the camera's placement. Are the cameras just for show? Have they recently modernized? Were there discussions and arguments around employee or patron privacy? Are the videos watched incessantly or left to molder? Cameras are rarely mundane, they are a very visible representation of controls related to trust and privacy.
Agreed. I have a read a lot of social/political theory and I am sick of this language. These are academic/philosophical tropes presented as if they were scientific findings. Even when the ideas are interesting, the Theoretical baggage gets in the way and the result is at best clumsy and at worst insufferably pompous.
I try to make a habit of gently reminding academics I know how badly this gets in the way of communication with non-academic people and ends up hindering the transmission of their ideas. To be honest, I think quite a lot of academics wind up communicating this way because they're subconsciously looking for positive feedback from their colleagues and so slip into the abstruse language of the classroom without realizing it.
Usually, I'd say this sort of comment is not really contributing much to the conversation, but in this case I agree with the sentiment. With a lot of these posts about the surveillance tech that's becoming increasingly prominent everywhere in the public, there are a lot of commenters here that seem to be of the opinion that "this is fine, as long as you have nothing to hide, there's nothing lost" - or worse in this case, that perhaps that there's something to be gained by taking the "bizarre and dangerous" off the street. Admittedly, I do not live in one of the cities that have issues with a large homeless population, so the experience is a bit lost on me, but I am surprised to see, especially on this forum, people embrace any form of surveillance state. We evidently have learned nothing by both the performative and actual surveillance adds since the Patriot Act. Perhaps the general populous is in fact on board with this and those of us who aren't are the minority.
> I do not live in one of the cities that have issues with a large homeless population, so the experience is a bit lost on me
That's the key experience you're missing. If you've never lived in a high-homeless/drug abuse area, you don't really understand how thoroughly draining it is on every aspect of civic life.
I recognize that I'm missing that part of the context, but it still surprises me that the answer to that is relatively global surveillance. In the current state of things, homelessness is perfectly public and observable, right? And so at any point now, the proposed "enforcement" could take place without the need for cameras? I think that part is unclear to me as well, the problem that exists that this solves.
Well, there are two ways to reduce homelessness: enforce vagrancy laws directly or wait for homeless people to commit a second crime and arrest them for that.
Some American cities have the state capacity necessary to do the former option, but the rest are stuck with the latter. And the latter only works if you can get evidence for low-level crimes when they happen.
Yes. It solves the "surveillance tech company needs to make quarterly goals" problem, and the "politician needs to look like they are doing something about crime" problem.
I live in DC and do not wish for human rights violations against these people because they bother me. I understand how draining it is but IMO forcing us all into a surveillance state because of "undesirables" is the laziest way to solve this problem.
So the answer to a problem the police and authorities already know about is a surveillance state for everyone? How are ever more cameras going to fix the drug abuse/homlessness problem?
Except you don't fix homelessness by charging all the homeless people with felonies for engaging in their hobbies (weed smoking) - you do it by working out why the housing economy is so dogshit that so many people can't get one.
Full agree. It certainly feels like people are afraid of imagined threats, there just is no way there's so much rampant crime that people's living space is broken into so often, that surveiling everything all the time is a valid solution.
Like, I live in Detroit, and we don't have enough crime to justify it.
I honestly think this is going to be a big part of what remains when AI is doing everything we currently think of as our work. Legally or morally, some things need a human in the loop.
Am I the only one who is mystified by this whole idea? People aren't CPU's. Good luck getting them to follow the code that you thought you were using to define their roles. On the contrary, what makes any complex system work is flexibility. And yes, if that calls into question the whole regulatory regime some companies (believe they) live under ... well, yes.
Also, would you even want it to? I've worked for companies with very rigorous compliance before. They are dead companies walking in most cases. As soon and their business model required/requires any significant change, they are toast. This is because these types of rules can't possibly cover all cases, just the ones the managers know about. Innovation requires flexibility and creativity and rules based systems are the opposite of that. By their very nature, they introduce the exact situations the rules can't cover.
I had to drive this specific Kirkland roundabout the other day, and ended up missing my offramp and going in completely the wrong direction. It's the most confusing roundabout I've ever seen.
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